Kissinger on Guerilla Warfare
Writing in the Jan 1969 issue of Foreign Affairs, Henry Kissinger had the following to say of General Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition in Vietnam. I bring it up because it has large implications to the very types of conflicts we find ourselves in today with groups like Al Qaeda, the Taliban and various other insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerilla war; the guerilla wins if he does not lose; the conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their forces the way a bullfighter uses its cape – to keep us lunging into areas of marginal political importance.”
We would be wise to keep these words in mind as we seek a sound strategy in stabilizing Afghanistan. It seems the new leadership under General Stanley McChrystal understands that traditional bump and shoot warfare will not work against an enemy that has time on its hands while we only have watches.
At the same time the idea that Iraq’s surge strategy can be directly applied to a completely different country, people group, economic/political situation, terrain, etc. must be used with caution. COIN strategy is great, but it has to be dynamic, able to flow with each new situation.
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2 comments
“the guerilla wins if he does not lose; the conventional army loses if it does not win.”
What a great line! I just don’t know where the middle ground is there. It’s zero-sum or all-out loss.
America won a war using Guerilla Warfare. Just a little war called the Revolutionary War. The British found it hard to compete with men shooting at them from behind rocks and trees when they were used to fighting a different way. Their style was to form a line and shoot at their opponents who lined up facing them. A Gentlemen’s War. The British had their own “rules of engagement” that we Americans had no intentions of following. It is interesting to compare that to what is happening now in Afghanistan.
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