Jungle of Snakes: A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare from the Philippines to Iraq

271 Pages·2010·1.9 MB·English

by  James R. Arnold

JUNGLE OF SNAKES
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Crisis in the Snows: Russia Confronts Napoleon:
The Eylau Campaign 1806–1807
Marengo and Hohenlinden: Napoleon’s Rise to Power
Jeff Davis’s Own: Cavalry, Comanches, and the
Battle for the Texas Frontier
Grant Wins the War: Decision at Vicksburg
The Armies of U. S. Grant
Napoleon Conquers Austria: The 1809 Campaign for Vienna
Presidents Under Fire: Commanders in Chief in Victory and Defeat
The First Domino: Eisenhower, the Military,
and America’s Intervention in Vietnam
Crisis on the Danube: Napoleon’s Austrian Campaign of 1809
JUNGLE OF
SNAKES

A CENTURY OF COUNTERINSURGENCY
WARFARE FROM THE PHILIPPINES TO IRAQ
JAMES R. ARNOLD
Copyright © 2009 by James R. Arnold
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information
address Bloomsbury Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York
All papers used by Bloomsbury Press are natural, recyclable products made from
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS
BEEN APPLIED FOR.
Arnold, James R.
Jungle of snakes : a century of counterinsurgency warfare from the Philippines
to Iraq / James R. Arnold.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-1-60819-180-2
1. Counterinsurgency—History—20th century. 2. Military history, Modern—
20th century. 3. Counterinsurgency—United States—History—20th century.
4. Counterinsurgency—Great Britain—History—20th century.
5. Counterinsurgency—France—History—20th century. 6. United States—
History, Military—20th century. 7. Great Britain—History, Military—20th
century. 8. France—History, Military—20th century. I. Title.
U241.A765 2009
355.02'180904—dc22
2008054018
First U.S. Edition 2009
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Westchester Book Group
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
To the American soldier
Contents

Introduction
Part One: The Philippine Insurrection
1. An American Victory Yields a Guerrilla War
2. Chastising the Insurrectos
3. The War Is Won Again
4. The Policy of Destruction
5. Why the Americans Won
Part Two: The War in Algeria
6. Terror on All Saints’ Day
7. Terror Without Limits
8. The Question of Morality
9. The Enclosed Hunting Preserve
10. The Sense of Betrayal
Part Three: The Malayan Emergency
11. Crisis in Malaya
12. Personality and Vision
13. A Modern Cromwell
14. Victory in Malaya
Part Four: The Vietnam War
15. In Search of a New Enemy
16. Pacification, Marine Corps Style
17. Progress and Setback
18. The Army’s Other War
19. Lessons from a Lost War
Conclusion: Reflections on a War Without End
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Maps
Capture of Manila, August 13, 1898
Philippines
Luzon Military Departments
Philippines Showing Batangas and Balangiga
Algeria Showing Aurès Massif and Kabylie
Algeria Showing Philippeville
The Challe Offensive, 1959–1960
The Federation of Malaya, 1948
South Vietnam Showing the Central Highlands
South Vietnam Showing Corps Boundaries
South Vietnam Showing Hau Nghia
Introduction

THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL IN 1989 and subsequent collapse of
the Soviet Union signaled the end of the Cold War. A new dawn gave promise
that a more peaceful era was at hand. Citizens of the United States anticipated
that for them at least, the scourge of war was no more. The emergence of a fresh
set of conflicts dashed this promise. In the words of a former director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, James Woolsey, “It is as if we were struggling with
a large dragon for 45 years, killed it, and then found ourselves in a jungle full of
poisonous snakes.”1 The snakes he referred to are insurgents, guerrillas, and
terrorists.
Insurgents are people who forcibly strive to overthrow constituted authority.
One’s view of them depends on where one’s loyalties lie. America proudly
celebrates its patriots of 1776. By any definition, from George Washington down
to the humblest Continental private shivering in his camp at Valley Forge, they
were insurgents. They rebelled against established British authority and
unlawfully formed fighting units to violently resist British government controls.
The British were, conversely, the counterinsurgents, fighting to restore order.
While some of the fighting in the War of In dependence was a formal clash of
armies on recognizable battlefields, the American rebels were opposing the full
might of a great empire and often avoided conventional warfare. It was what
would today be called an “asymmetric conflict,” where the weaker force resorts
to whatever tactics work, including many that appall the counterinsurgents.
American leaders included men such as Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, whose
guerrilla approach to war helped defeat the British invasion of the southern
colonies. And the American rebels freely employed terror—whether the tarring
and feathering of a British tax collector or the hanging of a backwoods loyalist
leader—to advance their cause. In the end, because their victory gave birth to
our nation, they are remembered as Founding Fathers rather than treasonous
insurgents.
While insurgents and counterinsurgents look at the same set of facts
differently, there is general agreement that today, as in the past, Woolsey’s
“jungle full of poisonous snakes” can present a lethal threat to established order.
September 11, 2001, brought that threat into shocking public view.
The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon caused American
political leaders to commit the nation’s armed forces to a global war on terror.
Pursuing terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States invaded, displaced
the existing regimes, and took on the job of stabilizing the newly occupied
territory. What had begun as a hunt for small bands of violent, ruthless men
became a counterinsurgency, seeking to impose order in places most U.S.
citizens had never heard of. Concerned citizens learned a new vocabulary. In
place of intercontinental ballistic missiles, mutually assured destruction, and the
Fulda Gap, they heard about roadside bombs, jihad, and a Baghdad slum called
Sadr City.
Like the American public, the U.S. military had to learn, or in some cases
relearn, what appeared to be a new way of war. When deliberating about how to
defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, insurgents in Iraq, or a seemingly omnipresent
Al Qaeda wherever it can be found, some military thinkers returned to the
lessons of history. From the campaigns of Spanish insurgents against Napoleon
—the era that gave the world the term guerrilla, or “small war”—to the
Communist insurgencies in Vietnam and the triumph of Afghan rebels against
the Soviets, they found numerous well-known examples of skillfully waged
insurgencies. These conflicts along with a host of less well-remembered episodes
demonstrate that insurgents, guerrillas, and terrorists enjoy many advantages in
their struggles to overthrow a government or evict foreign occupiers. However,
they are not predestined to win.
A successful counterinsurgency requires a deft blend of military and political
policies. Formulating this blend is a supremely daunting challenge. Both the
insurgents and the counterinsurgents compete for the support of the civilian
population. Mao Tsetung’s classic formulation, that to survive guerrillas must be
like fish swimming in a sheltering sea of popular support, appropriately focuses
attention on the salient importance of this competition. Likewise, the classic
counterinsurgency formulation describes this competition as the battle for
“hearts and minds.”
History shows that if insurgents build, maintain, and eventually expand a
network of support within the general population, they will triumph. For a
counterinsurgency to win, it must also gain civilian support. Such support is
critical in order to obtain timely intelligence that allows the counterinsurgency
power to separate the insurgents from the general population. It may seem
simplistic to say that government forces cannot defeat guerrillas unless they can
find them, except that history records that this task is painfully difficult.
Given that civilian support is critical to ultimate victory, insurgents work to
prevent civilians from assisting the government by employing intimidation
tactics ranging from threats and extortion to kidnappings and assassinations.