Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (review)

John Nagl takes a fresh look at the differences in the organizational culture of the British and U.S. armies, how this difference affected their respective approaches to Malaya and Vietnam, and how it contributed to victory for one and failure for the other. The volume is strongly recommended for students of counterinsurgency, as it is well crafted, draws on extensive primary sources and secondary research, and is lucidly written. The lessons could not be more poignant. The United States has a long and illustrious history of fighting small wars pretty successfully. The U.S. Marine Corps, for instance, between 1800 and 1934 executed 180 landings abroad. The other services contributed a few themselves. The lessons from these experiences are catalogued in the U.S. Marine Corps Small Wars Manual. The British, as overseers of a far-flung empire, experienced serial conflicts in establishing their dominion, primarily during the reign of Queen Victoria. The lessons from the English experience are similarly catalogued in Colonel C. E. Callwell's Small Wars: Their Principles & Practice and Sir Charles Gwynn's Imperial Policing. Following World War II, the British Army was involved in no less than a dozen insurgencies, Malaya being only one. Their theater doctrines for Malaya (The Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya) and Kenya (A Handbook of Anti-Mau Mau Operations) are classics. Although every insurgency is unique in its peculiarities, clearly there was a widely circulated body of documented solutions to this type of warfare. While the U.S. Army worked assiduously on doctrine following World War II, there was a loss of constituent thinking on counterinsurgency, and it became viewed as a subset of conventional war with little thought to protecting the population, the primary target of any guerrilla force, and other tenets of this genre. While it entered the Vietnam conflict with a flawed view of counterinsurgency, even the most uninitiated would wonder why it was so determined to forge ahead with a solution that clearly did not fit the problem. John Nagl in his contrast between the British and U.S. Army approaches ably addresses this question.

The situation in Malaya was very different from that in Vietnam, so the comparison is not exact. In Malaya the guerrillas were ethnic Chinese and preyed on the Chinese portion of the population, which represented about 15 percent. These people lived largely along the jungle fringes where they worked the rubber plantations. The guerrillas established sanctuary in the jungles and would pressure the vulnerable population for food, supplies, recruits, and funding. The solution arrived at was to remove the vulnerable Chinese population to a secure area away from the jungle and thereby isolate the guerrillas. Protecting the population from intimidation in this way was followed by the development of a military force trained specifically to hunt the guerrillas in their jungle environment. As all guerrilla wars are political at heart, the British defused the political anxieties of the population by promising independence for Malaya following the destruction of the guerrillas. While the war was a long twelve years (1948-60), Malaya did become an independent and democratic country following the war.

In contrast, Vietnam was a single ethno-linguistic people. North Vietnam, a communist-aligned dictatorship, had the nationalist political goal of absorbing South Vietnam and becoming a single country. South Vietnam was run by a corrupt oligarchy and, while it afforded more personal freedom, offered little opportunity for the peasant population. In short, there were adequate grievances for the guerrillas to exploit. The North began with a classic guerrilla infiltration of the South following the French withdrawal. As this developed into crisis proportions over time, it was perceived in Washington that the President of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, had lost...