> What in fact happened in Vietnam is that there were soon two large
> opposing camps, both of them representing a side of official wisdom: the
> side that thought all we needed was more conventional force; and the side
> that thought we needed to develop an unconventional kind of warfare that
> was totally new. (As well, of course, as a mushy center who thought
> these two views were exaggerated and not that different from each other.)
>
> These two views have basically both been present in military circles since
> the 50s, and this debate can be counted on to emerge into the open once
> any campaign starts running into trouble. Both are official views and
> both have the ear of power. The actual strategy used in Vietnam was
> largely the result of trying to do both at once, which most people agree
> was a failure. The second view -- that you have to fight insurgency with
> counterinsurgency -- thereafter became the dominant *theoretical* view in
> military circles for exactly that reason. (The view that all we need is
> more conventional force -- i.e., drop some 2000lb bombs, that'll scare 'em
> -- is no longer so much a theoretical view as a view embedded in our
> conventional training practices. But since that's what forms most
> people's convictions in most professions, it's always one to be reckoned
> with).
>
> And (to go back to Dwayne's original question), in the counter-insurgency
> camp in Vietnam, there was widespread conviction that the experience of
> the British in Malaysia represented the one known case of complete success
> against Mao-style communist guerrilla war. And that the French experience
> in Algeria, which was in itself an adaptive response to their own failure
> in Indochina, was also germane. (There were many in military circles who
> believed the French campaign in Algeria was a military success and a
> political failure -- that the guerrillas only triumphed because of their
> success at the UN and on the homefront. There are in fact several
> prominent liberals and leftists who believe that even today.) So experts
> in those conflicts were brought in as instructors, and they designed much
> of the Vietnam program. The whole strategic hamlet program, for example.
> One minor point to note: there is a difference between jungle fighting
> tactics (such as the Australians were familiar with, and such as the US
> used in the Phillipines) and a (reputedly) successful counterinsurgency
> strategy, which is what gave the British and French advisors such
> prestige.
>
> And like I said, there was nothing hidden about this. In the security
> journals of the 70s and 80s, "counterinsurgency" was even more of a
> buzzword than "deterrence" and everybody cited Malaysia.
Now you've got me on a hobby horse :-) And without wishing to glamourise the subject....
I think a broader historical perspective is needed. Different national armies have different strengths/dominant modus operandi at different times. And the classic distinction among and between ground forces is between "heavy" and "light" infantry, _not_ insurgency v. pitched battle, desert v. jungle, conventional v. elite/special forces etc. (I should point out here that the light infantry role explicitly excludes specialist assault/shock troops like the US Marines and the 75th Rangers.)
I don't think there can be any doubt that the most successful model of light infantry over the last century has been the small, independent, inserted reconnaissance/raiding force, which I would call the SAS-type (although these units also generally have other roles including an urban "antiterrorist" function). Units like the Israeli Sayeret Matkal were explicitly modelled on the British SAS. And part of the reason why the success of these units is overlooked is their policy of being secretive and publicity-shy.
Whatever the imperial powers had learnt about counterinsurgency from the annexation of the Philippines, the Boer War (which gave us the Afrikaner word "kommando", albeit originally in respect of light cavalry rather than infantry) etc., were soon forgotten. This was largely the result of harsh lessons learnt regarding the effects of machine guns, in the Europe during 1914-18. Clearly, the dominant mode in ground forces by the beginning of WW2 was heavy infantry.
Soviet and German experimentation with a new kind of _large_scale_ light infantry strategy, namely paratroopers, led the other major powers to follow suit. However, the disastrous casualties experienced by such forces in WW2 (e.g. Crete and Arnhem) led to the abandonment of this _mass_ light infantry model in its original form (although names like the 82nd & the 101st apparently had too much of an aura to be discarded totally).
By comparison, the British, Australian, N.Zealand, southern African and other Allied forces in N.Africa -- often conflated by historians as "British" -- learnt and developed the long range, independent _small_force_ role, especially the original SAS, the LRDG (et al), , largely out of the need to compensate for Rommel's superiority in armour.
By the end of the war the SAS was operating in mainland Europe and the former had grown to include several battalions, including two Free French and one Belgian. Later in the war the US-Canadian "Devil's Brigade" was a roughly similar kind of force, on the Mediterranean front. The OSS was also developing some of these kinds of forces for use in northern Europe when the war ended.
Simultaneously, the Australian army from 1942 onwards, specialised in the light infantry role, which was learnt the hard way --- by fighting numerically superior and (initially) much better equipped Japanese forces in the jungles of Malaya, New Guinea and Indonesia. Clearly this was also driven by other necessities: i.e. poor preparation and the desperation of facing an enemy on the doorstep of Australia itself.
This general pattern was mostly true of the Burma front, exemplified by Orde Wingate's (multinational) Chindits and the US's Merrill's Marauders.
The many neo-imperial conflicts faced by the British following WW2 were ideal theatres for the skills learnt in N.Africa and S.E.Asia in 1941-45. In particular these skills were merged, exchanged and refined by the British, Australian, New Zealand, Gurkha, Rhodesian and other Commonwealth forces in Malaya (1948-60) and the often-overlooked Confrontation/Konfrontasi with Indonesia in 1963-66, among many others, both before and during the Australian and N.Zealand SASs official deployment in Vietnam.
It would appear, however, that the hiatus in US light infantry operations between WW2 and Vietnam led to a deterioration in that kind of skill/experience, nothwithstanding the existence of CIA cadres and over-hyped units like the Green Berets. It wasn't until quite late in the Cold War that the US Army addressed its drift toward deficiencies in specialised light infantry, leading to the formation of Delta Force, explicitly an SAS-type outfit.
Regards,
Grant.