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Summary: Vietnam Post Mortem
This scholarly comparison of Britain's source of success in the Malayan insurgency and America's source of failure in Vietnam is justifiably regarded as a textbook for a new military facing new worldwide challenges. Much of the book is given over to index and reference and the writing style is complex, consisting of sometimes confusing compound sentences. However, the lessons to be learned and the shocking revelations of the inability of the U.S. Army's leadership to adjust to the realities and challenges of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam make for some chilling reading. Strongly recommended to students of modern military history and tactics.
Summary: Vietnam, Malaya and Iraq
While I enjoyed the erudite writing and the definite research in this book, I was disappointed because the case study was weak in finding similarities between Vietnam and Malaya, the outcome seemed predestined, and, more importantly, ignored the geopolitical and strategic outcomes of Malaya and Vietnam.
While as with all insurgencies, there are similarities between Vietnam and Malaya, the differences seperate these two historical conflicts.
1) The British in Malaya never faced the form of cohesive, coherent and constant conventional threat that the RVN, the US and their allies faced in Vietnam. Vietnam was a rather unique combination of conventional war, between the RVN, US and their allies and DRV and the VC Main Force, and guerilla war, within South Vietnam, between the RVN and the VC. If, following COL Nagl's examples, we had initiated a purely counter-insurgent strategy and operational plan, the war would have ended in 1968 with the highly successful NVA/VC offensive during Tet demolishing the last of the dispersed RVN and US forces. From 1963 to 1972, the NVA and VC were able, when they were willing to sustain the massive casualties, to concentrate conventional forces against isolated RVN, US and allied posts and detachments. Has we adopted the preferred anti-insurgency strategy of the "ink spot", we would have dispersed our forces and have been defeated in detail by the NVA and VC conventional forces. The facts are that in order to address the insurgency, the conventional war had to be won. We had to neutralize the NVA and VC Main Force units, such that we could then disperse into the country side and began constricting the VC and securing the villages.
2) The British never faced a situation where the insurgents enjoyed "sanctuaries" in which to recover and gather their strength and sally forth. The Malayan Communists were pinned into a constrained geographic area which became untenable when the British were able to commit sufficient forces. The NVA and VC operating in South Vietnam, however, could withdraw into Cambodia or Laos and reconstitute and regenerate their forces despite intensive bombing.
3) The Communist insurgency in Malaya never enjoyed the level of logistical support afforded the NVA and VC forces in South Vietnam. While early in the conflict, the VC were living off French and Japanese leftovers, the USSR and PRC stepped in and began supplying sufficnet quantities of arms and supplies through a distribution system that was never completely interdicted. The result was that in 1964-65, ARVN forces armed with M1 Garands and M1 carbines found themselves facing NVA, and even VC Main Force, troops armed with AK-47s. The Malayan insurgency was supplied from Indonesia and never reached the level of support the NVA and VC received, even before 1968. Their lines of communication were easily interdicted by the RN and very little came over the borders of neighboring Thailand and Burma, both antipathic to the Communist insurgency.
4) The centers of gravity for Malaya, the Malayan people, the British government and people and the insurgent leadership were within reach and control of the British. As the insurgents were isolated from the people, their leadership was neutralized. In Vietnam, the centers of gravity were the RVN and the people of South Vietnam, the government and people of the US and the leadership and people of North Vietnam. While the RVN, the US and their allies could control or effectively impact the first two, the third center of gravity was beyond their control. The North Vietnamese leadership was committed to unitying Vietnam under a Communist regime. They had the full free or coerced support of their people. Every move away from this overarching objective was a temporary tactic, paving the way towards victory. The RVN, US and their allies could gain and maintain the support of their people and governments, willingly or otherwise, but real victory, establishment of a peaceful coexistence of South and North Vietnam was impossible without the complete removal of the North Vietnamese leadership and the society that fostered it.
The British did succeeded in Malaya and the US did not in Vietnam but not because the British learned faster. The British learned anything in Malaya they didn't already know from 100 years of "policing" an Empire. Not only was there a "corporate" knowledge of counter-insurgency warfare, there was a personal and institutional knowledge going back a generation. The older officers and NCOs would have had direct experience in such warfare based on service in Palestine, Iraq, the Sudan, Somalia, Oman, the North-West Frontier, India, Burma, Cyprus and Greece from the mid'30s and on. The British merely required the application of this knowledge to the particular situation that faced them in Malaya. The US, especially the Army, had not faced a full blown insurgency since the Philippine Insurrection, 1898-1907. While some officers were exposed to insurgency warfare in Greece in 1946-48 and Korea in 1950-53 or as advisors in SEA, there was no 'corporate" or institutional body of knowledge to fall back on. The US Army had to learn on the job, while also conducting conventional warfare against the NVA and VC Main Force. It is neither elucidating nor fair to draw conclusions from a comparison of the two situations.
Finally, there is the geopolitical and strategic aspects. As Clausewitz (and Summers) has pointed out "War is the continuation of policy by other means". In other words a means to an end. Success on this level is judged by how well the tactical and operational outcome supports the strategic. And what was the strategic result of Malaya? The British fought in Malaya to protect and maintain British civil control through the system of Empire. Within a generation of their tactical and operational victory, they pulled their troops out of Malaya and granted independence, in other words the negative outcome they fought to avoid. The costs of victory had become to much to sustain. Malaya became another step, like Palestine, India and Burma before, and Kenya, Cyprus and Yemen after, in the long, painful withdrawal from the dream of Empire. For the US, tactical and operational success on the level of what the British achieved in Malaya would not have brought strategic victory. The North Vietnamese leadership would retain the ability to continue the fight sometime in the future and success in Vietnam would not have ensured success in Laos and Cambodia. The costs of strategic failure were bad enough, the costs of the means to achieve strategic success, ie. the complete neutralization of North Vietnam and a status quo in SEA, might have been even greater and led to the American people and government rejecting such commitments in the future.
As far as Iraq, the model of Malaya may have application, but we have already fallen behind. The four simple, if generalized, steps to success in counter-insurgency warfare are 1) isolate the insurgents from external support, 2) isolate the insurgents from internal support, 3) immobilize and seperate them from the populace and 4) neutralize their leadership. Thanks to our lack of resources at the end of the initial conventional campaign that achieved regime change, we haven't even completed step 1.
Summary: A New Paradigm for Counterinsurgency Fighters
Lt. Col. Nagl, a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar, provides a comparison of counterinsurgency experiences in Malaya (Britain) and Vietnam (U.S.). Gen. William Westmoreland, U.S. commander in Vietnam, when asked his solution to the Vietcong, replied with one word: ''firepower.'' As an example of more accurate thinking Nagl also quotes Marine Gen. Victor Krulak: ''You cannot win militarily. You have to win totally, or you are not winning at all.'' Conversely, the British in Malaya worked to limit damage to the populace's hearts and minds.
Nagl's first conclusion is that creating widespread collateral damage while killing insurgents is not going to succeed - you have to select the right amount of power for the situation. It might take longer, but a positive outcome is more likely. Thus, the ideal killing weapon is a knife, the worst is an airplane, and the next worst is artillery.
Nagl's second major conclusion is that organizational culture determines whether it succeeds - the British Army better was able to learn and change than the Americans in Vietnam.
The book's title comes from Lawrence of Arabia (T.E. Lawrence) - the British officer who successfully united crudely-armed Arabs on camels to oppose the Turks - long before Vietnam, Malaya, or Iraq. "War upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife," he wrote in his "Seven Pillars of Wisdom."
I never saw the sense in burning villages in Vietnam, nor angering Iraqi's with midnight searches and unexplained arrests. Now, after reading Nagl's book, I realize there never was any.
The "good news" is that Nagl's book is now receiving wide-spread readership among Army leaders - a copy was even recently given to Secretary Rumsfeld. Hopefully the Americans will learn better this time than in Vietnam.
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