Winning the war of the flea: lessons from guerrilla warfare

Military Review, Sept-Oct, 2004 by Robert M. Cassidy

Pershing also comprehended the need to have U.S. forces involved at the grassroots level. He understood the sociopolitical aspects, and he realized military goals sometimes had to be subordinated to them. Boot says, "He scattered small detachments of soldiers throughout the interior, to guarantee peaceful existence of those tribes that wanted to raise hemp, produce timber, or farm." (10) During Pershing's first tour in the Philippines as a captain, he was allowed inside the Forbidden Kingdom, and the Moros made him a Moro Datu, an honor not granted to any other white man. (11)

Latin America and the Caribbean

While the Army has had to relearn how to fight every new insurgency, the U.S. Marine Corps captured its guerrilla warfare experiences and distilled them in its 1940 Small Wars Manual. (12) The lessons Marines learned leading Nicaragua Guardia Nacional patrols against Augusto "Cesar" Sandino's guerrillas might well have served as the foundation for the Marines' counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam.

From experience in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua during the first part of the 20th century, the Marines learned that, unlike conventional war, a small war presents no defined or linear battle area or theater of operations. The manual maintains that delay in the use of force might be interpreted as weakness, but the brutal use of force is not appropriate either: "In small wars, tolerance, sympathy, and kindness should be the keynote to our relationship with the mass of the population." (13)

The manual urges U.S. forces to employ as many indigenous troops as practical early on to restore law and order and stresses the importance of focusing on the social, economic, and political development of the people more than on material destruction. The manual also underscores the importance of aggressive patrolling, population security, and denial of sanctuary to the insurgents. An overarching principle, though, is not to fight small wars with big-war methods. The goal is to gain results with the least application of force and minimum loss of civilian (noncombatant) life.

Lessons from Vietnam

When most Americans reflect on Vietnam, they probably think of General William C. Westmoreland, the Americanization of the war, large-scale search-and-destroy missions, and battles of attrition. There was another war, however, a war of counterinsurgency and pacification in which many Special Forces (SF), Marines, and other advisers employed small-war methods with some degree of success.

When General Creighton Abrams became the commander of U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) in 1968, he put an end to the two-war approach by adopting a one-war focus on pacification, although it was too late by then to recover the political support for the war squandered during the Westmoreland years. Still, Abrams' unified strategy to clear and hold the countryside by pacifying and securing the population met with much success. Abrams based his approach on A Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam, a study prepared by the Army staff in 1966. (14) The Special Forces' experiences in organizing Civilian irregular Defense Groups (CIDG), the Combined Action Program (CAP), and Abrams' expansion of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary (later Rural) Development and Support (CORDS) pacification effort offer valuable lessons for current and future counterinsurgency operations.