Ted Serong: The Life of an Australian Counter-insurgency Expert (review)

This is not required reading for students of counterinsurgency unless one has a very strong interest in Serong. Having described the most important segment of Serong's career in There to the Bitter End: Ted Serong in Vietnam (2001), Blair now provides more material on Serong before and after Vietnam, notably on his role in Burma, which brought him to the attention of the CIA. Francis Philip (Ted) Serong was an Australian Army officer from World War II until his retirement in 1968. As distance grew between him and the Australian Army, he found the CIA and U.S. think tanks a more congenial environment, especially after he lost his patron, Lieutenant General R. G. Pollard. Indeed, while Serong was very much a soldier in many respects, he seems to have been better suited for an analyst/adviser role than for a continued rise in a military hierarchy. Assessing the impact of advisers and consultants on decision-making is always difficult, and the larger the scale of decision-making and the more advisers involved, the more difficult is the task. At least at times, Serong unquestionably had access to many prominent Americans, Australians, and Vietnamese, but more often than not they either rejected or simply ignored his recommendations. Most of his strongest American military and civilian supporters, moreover, seem to have been counterinsurgency specialists rather than major decision makers. To her credit, Blair does not ignore the criticisms leveled at her often controversial subject, but, ultimately, she accepts much of Serong's less than modest view of his accomplishments. One seemingly incredible episode involved the head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Walter Cawthorn, telling Serong in 1964 "Get me ten years! Get me ten years, Ted" (p. 107). The implication was that Vietnam was to be a holding action while the other Southeast Asian countries were to be strengthened to withstand anticipated communist attacks. Blair makes quite a bit of this "order" in both Ted Serong and There to the Bitter End, but she neither explains how an adviser could carry out such an assignment nor examines the strengthening of those countries. The book provides some interesting sidelights on the development of counterinsurgency thinking in Australia and the United States, but a more systematic discussion of Serong's writings and lectures should have been included. It is difficult to agree with her characterization of Serong as a "major figure of the Cold War" (p. 3). Her description of him as an "intellectual soldier" (p. 2) is more accurate, but that observation only heightens my disappointment over the lack of a chapter summarizing and analyzing his teachings. Serong appears to have been very much in the British and Commonwealth tradition of "aid to the civil" authority, thereby interpreting counterinsurgency in good part as police work ("imperial policing"). Unfortunately, Blair does not place Serong in the history of counterinsurgency theory and does not discuss the applicability of a "policing" approach to the Vietnam situation, thus limiting the usefulness of her study.