Counterinsurgency Paradigms

Counterinsurgency Paradigms Review: Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy by D. Michael Shafer Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, 331 pp. Judgments about the U.S. approach to counterinsurgency have major policy implications at a time when several of America’s allies are threatened by insurgents.’ Yet little agreement exists concerning not only the efficacy, but the actual details of past U.S. counterinsurgency efforts. Two of the most influential analyses of the failure of the American military effort in Vietnam, for example, start from divergent assessments of U.S. counterinsurgency policy. Harry Summers has argued that the military failed because it devoted too much effort to counterinsurgency operations. Conversely, Andrew Krepinevich maintains that counterinsurgency efforts never got off the ground because Army officers generally preferred to conduct conventional military operations.2 The fact that the fundamental questions raised by these analyses remain unresolved makes the prospect of large-scale American involvement in some future counterinsurgency operation extremely sobering, regardless of one’s political or ideological predisposition. Compared to the sustained attention given to nuclear strategy and largescale conventional wars, academic interest in counterinsurgency has been sporadic, even though low-intensity conflict has been common throughout the postwar era. Over time, however, scholars have at least divided the I would like to thank Douglas Macdonald and Edward Rhodes for their comments on earlier drafts of this review. James1.Wirtz is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Government, Franklin and Marshall College. 1. Although they do not currently dominate headlines, guerrilla movements in El Salvador and the Philippines could present the U.S. with difficult choices at any moment. See James Chace, “Inescapable Entanglements,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Winter 1988/89), pp. 26-44. 2. Hany G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982); and Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). International Security, Summer 1989 (Vol. 14, No. 1) 0 1989 by the President and Fellows of Haward College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 184 CounterinsurgencyParadigms I185 problem of counterinsurgency into its component parts. Initially, they focused on the factors that motivated particular insurgencies, and the political strategies and tactics adopted by these movements, in an effort to devise an effectivere~ponse.~ Following a proliferation of proposed counterinsurgency strategies, they turned their attention to the problem of policy implementation and c~ordination.~ Recently, scholars have even investigated the relationship between political reform-how to force client governments to end abuses that are fueling an insurgency-and traditional counterinsurgency operation^.^ Lacking a unifying theme, these efforts have produced a catalog of counterinsurgency strategies and an equally long list of problems that would greatly limit the chances of ever conducting a successful campaign against an insurgent movement. D. Michael Shafer's Deadly Paradigms is an ambitious attempt to develop an explanation of the Western approach to counterinsurgency in a way that would unify the pessimistic conclusions about this type of endeavor that have emerged in the aftermath of the American defeat in Vietnam.'jThe idea that an insurgency is both a complex and a unique phenomenon is a theme that pervades his analysis: the causes of insurgency are scenario-specific, making any effort to generalize about the topic a hazardous enterprise. Because of the idiosyncratic nature of these movements, "generic" counterinsurgency policies simply fail to address the causes of individual insurgencies . By relying on a counterinsurgency "paradigm," according to Shafer, American policies contributed little to the positive outcome of the Greek Civil War or the Philippine government's suppression of the Huk rebellion. When applied in Vietnam, the paradigm produced disastrous results. Shafer's description of this paradigm is intended not only to illustrate its shallowness, but also the speciousness of the social science tradition which ~ ~~ ~ ~~ 3. For examples of this type of scholarship see Douglas Pike, Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966);Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972);and Robert L. Sansom, The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam...