Vic Socotra

02 April 2008

Advisors

Mauritanian Officers and Advisors, 2007

I woke up early, unrested and agitated. The middle of the week contains the hardest night, energy reserves squandered on the rocks of Monday and Tuesday, and still so much to accomplish to avoid disaster. Robert Mugubwe must be feeling the same way, since he is so much older, and may be leaving the seat of power in Harari, the former Salsbury of olden times in Rhodesia.

With our little troubles now, imagine the crushing weight of inflation that runs at 100,000% I wish the people well, and hope for the best, though I know that there is a long road back from the abyss, even if it begins today.

It did not have to be that way, of course. I remember a segment on the 60 Minutes years ago, in which the relations between the former rulers and the ruled was depicted as harmonious, and the transition successful. It might have worked out, with a little good counsel.

There is not substitute to good advise at the right time. Good advise unheeded is useless, of course, and the road to hell is paved with the wreckage of all sorts of helpful tips.

“Live within your means,” is one of them. “Don’t run with scissors,” is another. “Don’t participate in land wars on other continents if you can avoid them.”

It is the exception that proves the rule, of course, and in regard to the last of the above, there was the major exception of the unpleasantness of 1939-45. There were all sorts of erroneous lessons to be learned. For the Western Powers, it was useful that two of the belligerents were willing to slaughter tens of millions in the struggle between two rigid collectivist ideologies.

Even then it was a near-run thing for the West; the empires of Britain and France were finished, and the Americans might be forgiven for looking a bit self-satisfied when it was all over.

That complacency lasted only for a few years. The Nationalist allies in China were downcast, and a new Emperor ascended to the throne of the Middle Kingdom clad in olive drab. A Soviet satrap gambled for the unification of his people at the point of a bayonet in Korea.

The consequences of that bloody encounter dramatically changed the calculus of power. Japan and Germany, the erstwhile enemies, were deemed to be the lesser of the world’s evils, and the Occupations changed swiftly to something else. Germany became the front line of opposing and implacable spheres of influence, and Japan to the workshop of Asia.

Viewed through George Kennan’s hi-jacked theory of Containment, the dominos seemed poised to fall, if the right leverage was applied. There were certainly those eager to do so, even as the French attempted to reassert themselves in the Indo-Chinese realm they had once ruled.

Think for a moment about a less rainy season in 1954, when American airpower might have altered the balance of power on the field, and the French might not have been marched into captivity. Suppose the clouds rain had not brought the sanctuary of the night to the hills around Dien Bien Phu, or that better advise had been employed in the decision to fortify the camp at the junction of the roads that made the place a regional hub.

Or perhaps someone who understood the minds that made up the Vietminh could have been asked to predict the future.

A serving Army officer named John Nagl offered some good advise in the pages of the New York Times this morning. He runs one of the training battalions for the joint-service Advisors effort at Fort Riley, Kansas. Since 2006, all such training has been consolidated there for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. The graduates are taught language and culture and tactics, and dispatched in small units that resemble the old “A Teams” of John F. Kennedy’s Special Forces.

Nagle has thought about this deeply, and is a scholar as well as a soldier. His book “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam” is a distillation of the lessons learned in the previous editions of the Long Wars.

He argues persuasively for some basic principles.

To defeat insurgents you must understand them. It would be useful to speak a bit of their language, and understand the context of their cultures. You must be able to access the weight of military power that is our part of the asymmetric equation of insurgency. You should never become part of a fortified island, as the French did in their valley on the Laotian border.

It is a sad thing that Colonel Nagl’s wisdom has come at such a cost, since it has been learned before.

There was a gathering last month of some friends of mine. They were young Naval Officers assigned to places on the rivers of the Mekong Delta in the great offensive to interdict the supply lines and capabilities of the insurgents. In that effort they were largely successful, though at great cost. After nearly forty years, they were finally asked to provide their lessons-learned, and what they said contained many of the things that are being taught at Fort Riley today.

They were asked to provide their end-of-tour reports when they came out, though there is little evidence that the information was ever collected for comprehensive study. Certainly it was not available for Colonel Nagle, and this re-union of old warriors was the first time they had seen one another since Vietnamization of the war, and then the withdrawal that permitted defeat, in Nixon’s phrase, with honor.

They largely succeeded in reducing the effectiveness of the Viet Cong and NVA in the Mekong Delta though a variety of innovative programs, each tailored to the particular operating areas in which they were located. The names are strange to the ear, but all made up critical components of the SEALORDS (Southeast Asia Lake, Ocean, River, and Delta Strategy) campaign.

FIRE FLY was one of them, as was DUFFEL BAG and BLACK BEARD.

Imagine for a moment that you have been ordered to interdict night movement by the VC along Blood Alley, near Duc Hao. You operate a Heavy Helicopter Hunter-Killer team with a co-axial mounted Zeon Searchlight to illuminate the night. Like a tracer round, the point of origin of the light is readily apparent to those on the ground, and the noise of the helicopters is profound. Later augmented with a human ammonia detector, and tandem rocket-firing mini-gun toting comrades, this was a way to contest the night.

Imagine yourself as the DUFFEL BAG project officer, planting unattended ground sensors (acoustic, magnetic, infrared and seismic) along infiltration routes in places where it was appropriate to be, and in places where it was not. The DUFFEL BAG sensors vastly extended the defensive perimeter, and with pre-registration for artillery, brought the lethality of the night to new levels of precision.

The BLACK BEARD program officer ran agent networks across the Cambodian border, and armed the Khmer’s against the Vietnamese who had transited their territory with impunity. His experience was directly analogous to the lessons that have been hard-won in al Anbar Province, and had anyone asked, he might have been able to provide some insight.

Another old warrior was asked to help with a curious operational evaluation. It involved a sailplane, and a near-silent motor that permitted observers to silently watch activity unobserved on the ground, identify targets with low-light sensors, and rain down the fires of hell up them. There was a code name for the effort, but I’ll have to get to that tomorrow.

Pity there is so little time. If we could slow down a little, and listen to the advise of the past, we might learn something. But we are always in a hurry. I suppose it is to be expected. It had been a long war, after all.

Close Window