Donald W. Hamilton - The Art of Insurgency: American Military Policy and the Failure of Strategy in Southeast Asia

Cover

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The Art of Insurgency

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American Military Policy and the Failure of Strategy in Southeast Asia

DONALD W.HAMILTON

Foreword by Cecil B.Currey

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hamilton, Donald W., 1959
The art of insurgency : American military policy and the failure
of strategy in Southeast Asia/Donald W.Hamilton; foreword by
Cecil B.Currey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-275-95734-9 (alk. paper)
1. Counterinsurgency. 2. United StatesMilitary policy.
3. VietnamHistory19451975. 4. Philippines
History19461986. 5. MalayaHistoryMalayan Emergency,
19481960. I. Title.
U241.H36 1998
355.0218dc20 9644178

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright 1998 by Donald W.Hamilton

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-44178

ISBN: 0-275-95734-9

First published in 1998
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.481984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Copyright Acknowledgments
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material:
Excerpts from Douglas Pike, Viet Cong (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966). Courtesy of M.I.T.
Press.
Excerpts from Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency (New York: Frederick A.Praeger,
1966). Courtesy of Isabel Oliphant.

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For
Stephanie Ruth, Joshua Lawrence, and Brian Alexander

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Writing about Vietnam has been around since the earliest days of American involvement there, a veritable cottage industry. There are literally thousands of books that discuss one aspect or another of that conflict. While many of them are both interesting and illuminating, most are not particularly helpful in deriving knowledge of why the American enterprise there failed so badly.

The concentrated analysis and study of the conflict is not as old and has had a much thinner production. There were, of course, the writings of theoreticians/practitioners of the art of Peoples Wars of National Liberationold-line revolutionaries such as Regis Debray, Mao Tsetung, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Truong Chinh, Vo Nguyen Giap, and others. Despite the fact that it was once popular to own copies of their works, few of those in authority actually ever read them, and even fewer understood them.

There were other books, few and far between, that made their way into print that actually tried to pinpoint the problems that were causing such an upheaval in our armed forces as they struggled in Southeast Asia. My own list of the most essential of those writings includes:

Robert E.Osgood, Limited War (1957). One of the earliest studies that tried to understand the nature of conflicts that did not involve massed armies and divisional movements to contact with an enemy. Osgood pointed out the necessity for a different approach to such warfare.

Robert Taber, The War of the Flea: A Study of Guerrilla Warfare, Theory, and Practice (1965). An insightful author, Taber wrote that the

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specifically modern aspect of guerrilla warfare is in its use as a tool of political revolutionthe single sure method by which an unarmed population can overcome mechanized armies, or, failing to overcome them, can stalemate them and make them irrelevant (pp. 13132).

J.A.Pustay, Counterinsurgency Warfare