On Fighting Against an Insurgency

ON INSURGENCY AND COUNTER-INSURGENCY:
Lessons from U.S. history

By Chris Daly


It has been said that when the U.S. got involved in Vietnam, we had the challenge of “discovering” a new mode of warfare – known as “counter-insurgency.” The suggestion is that we Americans had never faced such a military problem before and that we had to invent the tactics and weapons necessary to defeat an insurgency. (Never mind that other countries might have done so and that we could study their histories. No, if it hadn’t happened to Americans, it hadn’t happened.)
But that was not quite true. The U.S. did in fact have experience with insurgency. Indeed, it could be argued that the decades of Reconstruction in the defeated Confederacy were an example of counter-insurgency. Certainly, it counts as an example of occupying a conquered territory with a suspicious or hostile population. Or, we could look at our occupation of the Philippines.
But there is also a much more obvious episode in U.S. history that policy-makers in Vietnam could have looked at, just as policy-makers considering what to do in Iraq today might want to examine. That is, the Indian Wars fought by white Americans to suppress the hostile uprisings of the native peoples of North America.
That was a struggle that was bipartisan, total, and ruthless. We used all the tactics we could think of and some we borrowed, as well as some that we didn’t even realize we were using (like germ warfare). We involved almost the entire white population in the effort, and we settled the land we took.
I think that one reason we white Americans fought so hard, so long and so successfully was that there was no alternative. That may be what it takes to defeat an insurgency. You have to be absolutely determined, you have to have a political consensus in favor of it (there was virtually no dissent among white Americans that I can think of), you have to be ruthless in your tactics. And you have to be willing to stay at it. In the case of the “long war” against the native peoples, we were at it for about 250 years.
Does anybody really want to approach Iraq this way?
When we embark on foreign adventures like Bush’s optional choice to invade Iraq, we ought to stop and think if we really know what we are getting into.