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Overview
Specific definitionsThe U.S. Army published a Special Forces manual titled Counter-Insurgency Operations in 1960. The term was used by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and since the Autumn of 2004 has been used by them to describe ongoing operations in Iraq. As used by the U.S. Army, counter-insurgency operations include psychological warfare and information warfare aspects of such operations, which include direct interference in a country's politics and media or the spread of disinformation (the civilian equivalent of military deception) to maintain control of a population. The U.S. military and allied South Vietnamese security forces conducted counter-insurgency operations against National Liberation Front guerrillas during the Vietnam War, including the notorious Phoenix Program which resulted in the killing of thousands of civilians accused of being NLF sympathisers or relatives of sympathisers.
Trinquier, the immensly influential French counter-insurgency expert, suggests three simple principles:
This requires an extremely capable intelligence infrastructure endowed with human sources and deep cultural knowledge. This contributes to the difficulty that foreign, as opposed to indigenous, powers have in counter-insurgent operations. For Trinquier, intelligence was one of several crucial enablers for defeating an insurgent. Others included a secure area to operate from, sources in the general population and government, maintaining the initiative, and careful management of propaganda. [2] Some means and methods are historically ineffective. Routine patrols, isolated ambushes, large-scale sweeps, and even outposts tend to be wasted activities. Legal and ethical challengesWilliam B. Caldwell wrote:
TacticsPopulation ControlWith regard to tactics, the terms "drain the water" or "drain the swamp" are euphemistic for ethnic cleansing as based on political differences, and generally make little distinction based on civilian status. It often involves the relocation of the population ("water") to expose the guerrillas or insurgents ("fish"). In other words, relocation deprives the aforementioned of the support, cover, and resources of the local population. The name is taken from Mao Zedong's advice to his guerrillas to "move through the people like a fish moves through water". British forces were able to employ the relocation method with considerable success during the Malayan Emergency. The Briggs Plan, implemented fully in 1950, relocated Chinese squatters into protected "New Villages", designated by British forces. By the end of 1951, some 400,000 Chinese had moved into the fortifications. Of this population, the British forces were able to form a "Home Guard", armed for resistance against the Malay Communist Party, an implementation mirrored by the Strategic Hamlet Program later used by U.S. forces in South Vietnam. Somewhat similar strategy was used extensively by U.S. forces in South Vietnam, initially by forcing the rural population into fenced camps, referred to as Strategic Hamlets, and later by bombing them with B-52s to remove the rest from their villages and farms. Widespread use was made of chemical herbicides, sprayed from airplanes, to destroy crops that might possibly have provided resources for NLF fighters and their human support base. However, the majority of counter-insurgency efforts by major Western powers in the last century have been spectacularly unsuccessful. This may be attributed to a number of causes. First, as Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart pointed out in the Insurgency addendum to the second version of his book Strategy: The Indirect Approach, a popular insurgency has an inherent advantage over any occupying force. He showed as a prime example the French occupation of Spain during the Napoleonic wars. Whenever Spanish forces managed to constitute themselves into a regular fighting force, the superior French forces beat them every time. However, once dispersed and decentralized, the irregular nature of the guerrilla campaigns proved a decisive counter to French superiority on the battle field. Napoleon's army had no means of effectively combating the guerilleros and in the end their strength and morale were so sapped that when Wellington finally was able to challenge French forces in the field, the French had almost no choice but to abandon the situation. Liddell Hart also points to the experiences of T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt during World War I as another example of the power of the guerrilla/insurgent. Though the Ottomans often had advantages in manpower of upwards of 100-1, the Arabs ability to materialize out of the desert, strike, and disappear again often left the Turks reeling and paralyzed, creating an opportunity for regular British forces to sweep in and finish the Turkish forces off. In both the preceding cases, the insurgents and guerilla fighters were working in conjunction with or in a manner complimentary to regular forces. Such was also the case with the French Resistance during World War II and the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. The strategy in these cases is for the irregular combatant to weaken and destabilize the enemy to such a degree that victory is easy or assured for the regular forces. However, in many modern insurgencies, one does not see guerrilla fighters working in conjunction with regular forces. Rather, they are home-grown militias or imported fighters who have no unified goals or objectives save to expel the occupier. Their actions cannot be consummated by an organized force and therefore often their "victories" are of limited scope and strategic significance. In these cases, such as the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, which ended in 2000, and the current U.S.-led Occupation of Iraq, the goal of the insurgent is not to defeat the occupying military force; that is almost always a physically impossible task. Rather, they seek to demoralize and aggravate the morale of the troops and the citizens of the occupying nation to such a degree that the deployed forces are withdrawn. It is a simple strategy of repeated pin-pricks and bleedings that, though small in proportion to the total force strength, sap the will of the occupier to continue the fight. According to Liddell Hart, there are few effective counter-measures to this strategy. So long as the insurgency maintains popular support, it will retain all of its strategic advantages of mobility, invisibility, and legitimacy in its own eyes and the eyes of the people. So long as this is the situation, an insurgency essentially cannot be defeated by regular forces. Mao Zedong attempted to neutralize this advantage by simply taking away the civilian population that shielded the insurgents; however, this had the foreseeable effect of alienating the populace and laying the seeds of later conflict. In the current operations against insurgents in the "War on Terror", such ruthless tactics are not available to commanders, even if they were effective. Another option in combating an insurgency would be to make the presence of troops so pervasive that there is simply no place left for insurgents to hide, as demonstrated in Franco's conquest of Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War or the Union occupation of Confederate States with Federal troops following the American Civil War. In each of these cases, enormous amounts of man-power were needed for an extended period of time to quell resistance over almost every square mile of territory. In an age of ever shrinking and increasingly computerized armed forces, this option too is precluded from a modern commanders options. Essentially then, only one viable option remains. The key to a successful counter-insurgency is the winning-over of the occupied territory's population. If that can be achieved, then the guerrilla fighter will be deprived of its supplies, shelter, and, more importantly, its moral legitimacy. Unless the hearts and minds of the public can be separated from the insurgency, the occupation is doomed to fail. In a modern democracy, in the face of perceived heavy losses, no conflict will be tolerated by the masses without significant show of tangible gains. It should be noted that though the United States and its ARVN allies won every single major tactical engagement with North Vietnamese forces and the communists suffered staggering losses (1 million+ casualties), the cost of victory was so high in the American psyche (50,000+ American casualties) that the US public came to see any further possible gains as not worth the expenditure in blood. As long as the popular support is there, an insurgency can hold out indefinitely, consolidating its shadowy control and replenishing its ranks, until the occupiers simply give up. Oil SpotThe oil spot approach is a descriptive term for the concentration of counter-insurgent forces into an expanding, secured zone. The oil spot approach was one of the justifications given in the Pentagon Papers[4] for the Strategic Hamlet Program. While appealing in principle, the oil spot approach is problematic because it does not take enemy strengths into account. COIN AircraftSince the 1960s, a specialized form of close air support has been developed for counter-insurgency operations. This covers a wide range of operations, from ground attack and observation to light transport and casualty evacuation. An aircraft used for counter-insurgency should ideally be able to perform all these roles. Such an aircraft should have low loitering speed, long endurance, simplicity in maintenance, and the capability to make short take-offs and landings from rough frontline airstrips. At first (particularly during the Vietnam War) counter-insurgency missions were flown by existing airplanes and helicopters hastily adapted for the role, notably the Douglas A-1 Skyraider. Later, more specialized counter-insurgency (or COIN) aircraft began to appear, such as:
TrainingCounter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School (CIJWS) is located in the north-eastern town of the Mizoram state in India is well-known for the Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare training which outweighs the gallantry of the Indian Army. Armies from the countries like - US, Britain, France, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Vietnam are benefited by the advantages of this school.[5] Established in 1970, the school is considered one of the world's most prestigious anti-terrorist institutions. Soldiers from India and the United States participating at a long exercise in guerrilla warfare in Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School at Vairengte in Mizoram. Reference [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] See also
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