Mentre infuria la guerra in Irak, l’esercito riesamina le lezioni del Vietnam

[N.d.R: USA: i militari riesaminano la sconfitta del
Vietnam alla luce delle difficoltà in Irak, e abbandonano la dottrina
Weinberger-Powell della "forza preponderante" per le situazioni di guerriglia:
evitare l’uso eccessivo della forza, perché si ritorce contro.

evitare l’uso eccessivo della forza,
cercare l’appoggio della
popolazione locale

• Dopo la sconfitta del Vietnam, la dottrina militare
  prevalente fu influenzata dal libro del col. in pensione Harry Summer:”On
  Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War” secondo il quale la
  guerriglia Viet Cong serviva solo a sviare l’attenzione dall’esercito regolare
  del Nord Vietnam, e la guerra fu persa perché i civili impedirono ai militari
  di lanciare un attacco convenzionale contro il Nord Vietnam.
• La vittoria nella Guerra del Golfo del 2001 sembrò
  confermare questa teoria, e la teoria derivata della “forza preponderante”,
  fatta propria negli anni ’80 dal Segr. alla Difesa C. Weinberger e dal
  CSM Colin Powell.
• Nel 1986 il maggiore Andrew Krepinevich pubblicò “The
  Army and Vietnam”: combattendo una guerra convenzionale in Vietnam al posto
  di una classica guerra di guerriglia, USA si erano alienati i potenziali
  alleati vietnamiti. Il libro venne stroncato dai vertici militari.
• Negli ultimi anni tuttavia sono stati scritti, quasi tutti
  da militari, diversi libri che riprendono questa tesi: libri che dopo i primi
  fallimenti in Irak sono stati consigliati dai capi militari.
• Quello che ha avuto più fortuna è "Learning to Eat
  Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam,"
  del Col. John Nagl (donato dai vertici militari in Irak a Rumsfeld
  durante la sua visita natalizia): egli prende come modello la lotta
  anti-guerriglia degli inglesi in Malesia negli anni ’50: dopo il fallimento dei
  metodi della guerra convenzionale, i britannici impararono a combattere la
  guerriglia e vinsero. Esercito USA accusato di non essere stato capace di
  imparare rapidamente le lezioni. Quando cominciava ad imparare (dal 1969) a
  cercare l’appoggio delle popolazioni locali era ormai troppo tardi,
  perché era crollato il fronte interno.
• Tesi che contro la guerriglia i militari devono autolimitare
  l’uso della forza per non alienarsi la popolazione locale. Su questa tesi
  si è sviluppata una nuova dottrina militare antiguerriglia, con studi
  coordinati dallo storico dell’accademia militare Conrad Crane.
• “Maggiore è la forza usata contro i resistenti, minore è
  l’efficacia”; necessità di costruire forze locali capaci di azione indipendente
  (esercito del Sud Vietnam, lasciato solo, crollò rapidamente).
• Costruire governo che sia visto come legittimo. “Le azioni
  militari condotte senza un’analisi della loro efficacia politica saranno nel
  caso migliore inefficaci e nel peggiore aiuteranno il nemico” (tesi della bozza
  della nuova dottrina).
• Nagl: l’insegnamento della Guerra del Golfo non fu quello
  della forza preponderante, ma: “Non combattere gli USA con guerra
  convenzionale… usare la guerriglia onde esaurire la volontà USA.
• Gen. Peter Schoomaker, capo esercito USA, ha
  raccomandato il libro di Nagl a tutti i generali a quattro stelle in Irak. Lo
  scorso inverno il capo delle truppe in Irak, Gen. Casey, ha aperto una scuola
  per i comandanti USA in Irak centrata sulla necessità di adattarsi ad una
  guerriglia in cui il nemico si nasconde tra la popolazione e cerca di provocare
  una reazione sproporzionata.

[Vedi anche altri libri e tesi nel testo]
Recent Books Pan Doctrine

Of Overwhelming Power

When Fighting Guerrillas

A Gift for Donald Rumsfeld

By GREG JAFFE

March 20, 2006; Page A1
The last time Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld visited Baghdad, back in December, the top U.S. military commander
there gave him an unusual gift.
Gen. George Casey passed him a copy of "Learning
to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam,"
written by Lt. Col. John Nagl. Initially published in 2002, the book
is brutal in its criticism of the Vietnam-era Army as an organization that
failed to learn from its mistakes and tried vainly to fight guerrilla
insurgents the same way it fought World War II.
In the book, Col. Nagl, who served a year in
Iraq, contrasts the U.S. Army’s failure with the British experience in
Malaya in the 1950s. The difference: The British, who eventually prevailed,
quickly saw the folly of using massive force to annihilate a shadowy communist
enemy.

"The British Army was a learning
institution, and the U.S. Army was not," Col.
Nagl writes.
Col. Nagl’s book is one of a half dozen
Vietnam histories — most of them highly critical of the U.S. military in
Vietnam — that are changing the military’s views on how to fight guerrilla
wars. Two other books that have also become must-reading among senior Army
officers are retired Col. Lewis Sorley’s "A Better War," which
chronicles the last years of the Vietnam War, and Col. H.R. McMaster’s "Dereliction
of Duty," which focuses on the early years.
The embrace of these Vietnam histories
reflects an emerging consensus in the Army that in order to move forward in
Iraq, it must better understand the mistakes of Vietnam.

In the past, it was commonly held in
military circles that the Army failed in Vietnam because civilian leaders
forced it to fight a limited war instead of the all-out assault it longed to
wage. That belief helped shape the doctrine espoused in the 1980s by Defense
Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Colin
Powell. They argued that the military should fight
only wars in which it could apply quick, overwhelming force to destroy
the enemy.
The newer analyses of Vietnam are now
supplanting that theory — and changing the way the Army fights. The argument
that the military must exercise restraint is a central point of the
Army’s new counterinsurgency doctrine. The doctrine, which runs about 120
pages and is still in draft form, is a handbook on how to wage guerrilla wars.
It offers Army and Marine Corps officers
advice on everything from strategy development to intelligence gathering. Col.
Nagl is among the four primary authors of the doctrine. Conrad Crane, a
historian at the U.S. Army War College, is overseeing the effort.
One of the doctrine’s primary goals is to
shatter the conventional wisdom that defined the post-Vietnam Army. "We
are at a turning point in the Army’s institutional history," Col. Nagl and
his co-authors write in a forthcoming essay in "Military Review,"
an Army journal.

The doctrine’s biggest emphasis is on the
need to curb the military’s use of firepower, which created thousands of
refugees and horrific collateral damage in Vietnam. "The more force you
use when battling insurgents, the less effective you are," the draft
states.
The Army is also using its Vietnam experience
to highlight the importance and difficulty of building local security forces
that can carry on independently after U.S. forces go home. For most of the
Vietnam War, the U.S. gave spotty attention to South Vietnamese forces. Without
U.S. air support and artillery they quickly crumbled.
Drawing on its frustrating struggle to prop
up a corrupt government in Saigon, the Army in its new blueprint counsels soldiers
that anti-guerrilla operations must be focused on building a government that
is seen as legitimate in the eyes of the locals. "Military actions
conducted without analysis of their
political effectiveness will be at best ineffective and at worst help the enemy," the draft doctrine states.

Within the Bush administration, there’s broad
support for the Army’s new direction. It matches President Bush’s own shift
away from a pre-9/11 aversion to nation-building and guerrilla wars. The
current national-security strategy seeks to spread freedom and democracy —
even if it means committing troops to guerrilla fights in places like Iraq and
Afghanistan.

For most of the 1980s and 1990s the Army’s
understanding of what went wrong in Vietnam was dominated by retired Col.
Harry Summers‘s history "On Strategy: A
Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War." That account argued Viet
Cong guerrillas were used by the communist regime to distract the U.S. from the
real threat — the conventional North Vietnamese Army. The U.S. didn’t lose
because it fought a guerrilla war badly, Col. Summers asserted, but rather because
it was prohibited by the civilian leadership from launching a conventional
attack on North Vietnam.

His book, commissioned by the Army and
published in 1981, gave Army officers reason to ignore guerrilla warfare for
the two decades that followed. It quickly became part of the curriculum at
the Army’s war colleges and remained on reading lists until a few years
ago. "The timing was perfect," says George Herring, a Vietnam scholar
at the University of Kentucky who also taught at the United States Military
Academy at West Point. "Summers was selling a message a lot of top
people in the army wanted to hear."

Army histories that challenged Col. Summers’s
narrative were rebuked. In 1986, Andrew Krepinevich, then an Army major,
published "The Army and Vietnam," an alternative account of
the Army’s failings in the war. Instead of fighting a classic guerrilla war,
the Army fought a large-scale conventional war and alienated potential allies
in Vietnam, Mr. Krepinevich wrote. One four-star general blasted the
book in a review as "a long rambling, one-sided discourse." It
wasn’t widely read.
By the 1990s Army officers interested in
successful careers didn’t study counterinsurgency. A few, however, were drawn
to it. One of those officers was Col. Nagl, who graduated from West
Point and went on to study international relations at Oxford University as a
Rhodes Scholar. After the first Gulf War, where he served as a platoon leader,
Col. Nagl went back to Oxford to get his doctorate.The first Gulf War seemed to vindicate the
Army’s big-war approach. The Army had finally been
allowed to fight the conventional, firepower-intensive war it wanted to mount
in Vietnam. It prevailed quickly and with few casualties. "By God,
we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all," the President George
H.W. Bush gushed in 1991.To Col. Nagl, the Army’s quick, low-casualty
win wasn’t necessarily a good news story. "The lesson of the Gulf War
was: Don’t fight the U.S. conventionally," Col. Nagl says. "The way
to defeat the U.S. Army is to use guerrilla warfare and exhaust the will of the
U.S. At least you have a chance to win."Col. Nagl reread Mr. Krepinevich’s account
of the Army in Vietnam, which he says had a big influence on his doctoral
thesis. "I stole from it shamelessly," he
says today, although he fully credited the work in his own. He also immersed
himself in the papers of Sir Gerald Templer, who led British
counterinsurgency efforts in Malaya in the 1950s. "I wanted to figure out
why the British Army was able to learn how to defeat an insurgency after
starting out badly and why the American Army was not able to learn as well in
Vietnam," Col. Nagl says.He concluded that the Army did learn in
Vietnam, but far too slowly. By 1969 the military had shifted away from
large-scale search-and-destroy missions and was putting a far greater emphasis
on building indigenous security forces, safeguarding villagers and developing
the local economy. However, "at that point the American people had
already lost their faith," he says.Col. Nagl’s book was released in October of
2002 by Praeger Publishers, on the eve of the Iraq invasion. (It was later
published in paperback by the University of Chicago Press.) He took the
"Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" title from a famous aphorism of T.E.
Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia: "To make war upon
rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife."A few months later, Col. Nagl was
dispatched to Iraq to serve as the third-highest-ranking officer in a
700-soldier battalion based outside Fallujah. "I thought I knew something
about counterinsurgency until I tried to do it," he says today. He
quickly discovered the challenge to be even more difficult than he’d expected. His
unit took heavy casualties and his battalion’s efforts to build an Iraqi police
and Army force sputtered in the face of insurgent attacks, poor equipment and a
lack of funds.While Col. Nagl was in Iraq, Gen. Peter
Schoomaker, the Army’s top officer, picked up his book and was taken by its
argument that the Army’s big-war culture in Vietnam often overpowered
innovative ideas from inside the service and out.The general ordered his fellow four-star
generals to read it. Before he went to Iraq to take over as the top
commander, Gen. Casey read Col. Nagl’s book as well. "The thesis
that the U.S. military was too prone to [big offensive strikes] to be good at
counterinsurgency was something I noted to watch for when I got here,"
says Gen. Casey in an email from Baghdad.The tome has already had an influence on the
ground in Iraq. Last winter, Gen. Casey opened a school for U.S. commanders
in Iraq to help officers adjust to the demands of a guerrilla-style conflict in
which the enemy hides among the people and tries to provoke an overreaction.
The idea for the training center, says Gen. Casey, came in part from Col.
Nagl’s book, which chronicles how the British in Malaya used a similar school
to educate British officers coming into the country."Pretty much everyone on Gen. Casey’s
staff had read Nagl’s book," says Lt. Col. Nathan Freier, who spent a year
in Iraq as a strategist. A British brigadier general says that "Gen. Casey
carried the book with him everywhere." Both Col. Nagl’s and Mr.
Krepinevich’s books are included on a recommended counterinsurgency reading
list included in the draft doctrine.Other Vietnam histories have also drawn the
interest of senior Army officers. Lt. Gen. John Vines, who was until recently the
No. 2 commander in Iraq, recommended his staff read Col. McMaster’s
"Dereliction of Duty." The book portrays the military’s senior
Vietnam-era generals as a feckless lot, unwilling to confront President Lyndon
Johnson over what they believed to be a bankrupt strategy. Its message:
Military commanders must always speak the truth to their civilian bosses.Similarly, Mr. Sorley’s "A Better War"
in recent months has become popular among senior Iraq and Afghanistan
strategists. Mr. Sorley’s book argues that the military, in the latter years
of the war under the leadership of Gen. Creighton Abrams, radically
shifted its approach. Instead of just hunting North Vietnamese soldiers and
Viet Cong guerrillas in the jungle, commanders in 1969 began focusing far more
on providing security to Vietnamese villagers, a strategy dubbed
"clear and hold."

Mr. Sorley posits that in the early 1970s,
Gen. Abrams’s "clear and hold" approach was winning the war.
Congress’s precipitous withdrawal of support for the South Vietnam government
and a fickle American public turned that victory into defeat, he writes. Most historians consider Mr. Sorley’s account to be far
too sanguine on the war’s latter years. (Of late, the Bush administration has
adopted Gen. Abrams’s language. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has
described the American strategy in Iraq as "clear, hold and build.")

Going forward, the big question is whether
the Army’s newly popular Vietnam views survive after the war in Iraq. If things
go badly, there is likely to be intense pressure from within the Army to blame
the political leadership for not sending enough troops, the news media for
negative coverage, or the American public for its unwillingness to stick it
out. None of those analyses, however, recognize the Army’s own failings —
particularly in the first years of the war, say experts.

"The problem with blaming a fickle American
public or the political leadership is that it gives you no tools to do better
the next time," says Sarah Sewall, a former Clinton administration defense
official who now oversees Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights. "That is
what happened after Vietnam."