quote:

Originally posted by 5708528:
I wonder if a lot of analysts of 4GW might have
forgotten that in Vietnam we and ARVN rarely fought
guerrillas. The real war was fought against North
Vietnamese regulars (PAVN) who were committed to
"exterminate" ARVN more than a year before the
deployment of US troops. Whatever battlefield
techniques they used to win, it was not guerrilla
warfare that led to victory. As PAVN historians keep
pointing out, the Viet Cong was a mere "annoyance" to
Saigon. Before the end came, soon after Tet 1968, the
infamous VC Infrastructure was uprooted by essentially
police actions.

This raises the question of the training of local
armies in 4GW scenes of conflict, instead of national
police forces, so that US Troops could withdraw. It is
hard to imagine American military that are local intel
blind, language deaf and culture dumb training a
national constabulary that does not rely on
concentrated firepower but on law and order.

In Central Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle
East we have found ourselves disturbing delicate
tribal relations. In doing so, we inflamed
lineage-oriented revenge blood debts. These will
always undermine any made abroad national order we try
to create so that we may leave. This is what the
Russians realized when they decided to leave
Afghanistan and why the well supplied national army
they left behind failed to defend the state order.

As I recall, the essence of Britain's Malay success
was an emphasis on constabulary forces. In the end,
while eliminating Communist operations, they also
imposed central authority on local ties, submitting
the periphery to the center by imposing a clear and
understandable legal code.

All this raises the question of whether we should
remove our military forces so that in future 4GW wars
they would not be big lumbering targets whose fire
power is always responsive rather than initiative.
Under such conditions, a trickling loss of soldiers
has a multiplied political effect at home and causes
debate as to whether the military effort is worth it.
Retribution, on the other hand, only fuels the blood
debt obligation of local relatives.

All the successes of Col Be's Revolutionary
Development Cadres and police forces, in Vietnam for
example, proved of little relevance, given Hanoi's
total commitment of its "hard hat" units to regular
combat in South Vietnam and Cambodia. In current 4GW
conflict, there are no such military forces to
confront. But there is tremendous chaos resulting from
criminal and militia conflict for turf as well as
collateral civilian damage from US military
intervention. Caught in the middle, the US is wasting
inordinate amounts of life and resources to kill
individuals who are easily replaceable.

The question comes whether a Malaya like constabulary
force can be trained outside of 4GW hot spots and
their families held safe there while they proceed
through police work, not military combat, to bring law
and order where there had only been extensive
collateral damage, depleting resources and losing the
limited volunteer manpower we have so expensively
trained.

Daniel E. Teodoru