If Wars Are Still Thinkable

The new term in warfare is “low-intensity conflict.” Both the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency are currently working on a strategy for the United States to fight overseas in such wars.

Completion of these secret studies later this year will mark a fundamental rethinking of America’s war-fighting capabilities. The consequences will be important; America will have plans in place to intervene, unilaterally, in operations akin to the invasion of Grenada or actions of a longer duration.

Low-intensity conflict is a growing form of international geopolitics. Last year there were 43 such wars involving 45 of the world’s 164 nations. These conflicts have killed more than five million people.

Just as the arrival of the tank saw the elimination of the cavalry as an effective weapon of war, so nuclear weapons have changed the options available to military and political strategists for prosecuting modern warfare.

Yet non-nuclear wars continue among those nations that do not possess nuclear weapons (Iran and Iraq for example), but are increasingly unlikely between those powers that have nuclear arsenals, particularly the United States and the Soviet Union.

The dangers of stepping over the nuclear trip wire are recognized by both superpowers. In every crisis since World War II that could have escalated to a confrontation between the superpowers, both sides have taken positive steps to reduce tension and avoid conflict. Still, under the Reagan Administration, there has been a massive increase in defense spending across the board, not only for major weaponry but for an unprecedented buildup of those forces specifically designed to fight low-intensity wars--thinking big about small conflicts.

In 1982 the budget for special operations forces such as the Rangers and the Green Berets was $7.5 million for 4,300 men. By 1986, that figure had increased to $45 million for 9,200 men and by 1990 will peak at $500 million for 11,200 men. At the same time, new command structures have been authorized by Congress, establishing the Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. A new Assistant Secretary of Defense for Low-Intensity Conflict has been authorized but not yet appointed.

Plans already exist for committing these Special Operations Forces in support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or in joint operations outside the NATO area. What has been lacking until now is a strategy for unilateral action, something that, since Vietnam, has been anathema to many politicians and members of the military.

In the operations that have taken place during the Reagan Administration the United States has displayed little understanding of the political and military requirements of unconventional warfare.

Although substantial numbers of U.S. troops have not yet been employed, the two key tests of U.S. capability have been El Salvador and Nicaragua. In both, regardless of political differences, the U.S. military has performed poorly.

In El Salvador, 55 Green Berets plus up to 150 CIA counterinsurgency specialists have been training the Salvadoran military to fight left-wing guerrillas for more than five years. The Reagan Administration argues that those guerrillas are armed and supported by neighboring Nicaragua. In the first stages of deployment, U.S. Mobile Training Teams attempted to train the 25,000-strong Salvadoran Army to fight a conventional war. Using the classic American prescription for all combat, they decided to meet force with greater force, with massive artillery barrages and air bombings.

The Army was rapidly increased in size although morale remained poor. Many of the troops were unwilling to leave the security of their barracks unless ordered out on a massive combined arms sweep through an area thought to be occupied by guerrillas. Such sweeps achieved little other than to alienate the local population whose crops and villages were often destroyed by the government forces. One Green Beret involved in the training likened the strategy to “putting your fist into a bucket of water: You put your fist in, twirl it around and when you’d withdrawn it there was no evidence that you’d ever been there.”

The Green Berets then changed their training method and that, combined with the election of a democratic government in El Salvador, helped place the guerrillas on the defensive. Temporary military success, however, was not matched on the political front; President Jose Napoleon Duarte has not been able to deliver on promised land and military reforms. This has undermined the gains made by more sophisticated counterinsurgency policy; political failures continue to provide both useful propaganda and recruits for the guerrillas.

In Nicaragua, the United States sponsored its own guerrilla movement, the contras , whose official assignment is to pressure the leftist Nicaraguan government for reform but whose real aims are to overthrow the government. There, too, the results show a clear misunderstanding of how to wage a guerrilla campaign.

With the help of their U.S. advisers, the contras have trained to fight a war more reminiscent of the commandos in World War II than a guerrilla war advocated by Mao Tse-tung. The Mao method required guerrillas to live in their area of operations, gaining popular support and gradually undermining the influence and the will of the existing government. The contras , by hit-and-run, chose to fight a remote war.

Retired Army Gen. Paul F. Gorman, the former head of the U.S. Southern Command and the man responsible for the war in Central America, told Congress earlier this year that the contras “are largely a cross-border raiding force, not an unconventional warfare force,” and that they are incapable of winning: “You are not going to knock off the Sandinistas with a conventional force and that is what the contras are.”

Politically, too, the United States has consistently demonstrated a clear lack of firm resolve for fighting unconventional warfare. In both El Salvador and Nicaragua, Congress has drawn back from the kind of commitment requested by the Administration. Money has been reduced or cut off and the policy has been widely criticized. Irresolution has marked U.S. operations, ranging from the support of Ukrainians fighting Soviet control to Vietnam.

When Britain was fighting communist guerrillas in Malaya in the 1950s, a strategy called the Oil Spot theory was devised by Sir Robert Thompson. A small force of specially trained troops moved into an area, secured a village and trained the local people to defend themselves. Once a village was secured the unit spread out--like a widening oil spot on water--securing an ever-larger area but always working in close cooperation with the local people who were armed, trained and made responsible for their own welfare. Gradually, the guerrillas would lose their sources of food, intelligence and money.

Military action was combined with a clear demonstration of political will, at its core a credible commitment to a long-term campaign that might last 10 years or more.

The U.S. Congress has never announced such a commitment, partly because there has been no clear strategy for committing U.S. forces abroad. The DIA and the CIA are to provide that strategy, perhaps having learned their lessons from history.