About The Author
Lt. Colonel Wray R. Johnson (left) and teammate, Master Sergeant Ed Lewis, undergoing special weapons training in preparation for foreign internal defense operations in Latin America and the Middle East. Col. Johnson is an award winning author, lecturer, and special operations officer currently serving as Professor of Military History at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, an elite institution dedicated to educating future airpower strategists in the U. S. Air Force. A long-time student of small wars, Colonel Johnson completed his Ph.D. in American History at Florida State University, concentrating on the American military experience in limited and unconventional warfare. He has served in numerous positions throughout his military career, including Senior Defense Advisor to the Director of the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. From 1991 to 1995, Colonel Johnson was instrumental in the design, creation, and operations of the first-ever U.S. Air Force squadron dedicated to foreign internal defense: the 6th Special Operations Squadron. He continues to lecture widely on subjects ranging from insurgency and counterinsurgency to terrorism and cultural factors in low intensity conflict and special operations. He is widely regarded as the U.S. Air Force expert on cultural factors in psychological operations.
About The Book
Vietnam and American Doctrine for Small Wars is the first comprehensive treatment of the evolution of U.S. military doctrine for countering guerillas and other irregular forces in small wars. Since its inception, the United States has been engaged in small wars, or low intensity conflict, and has contested irregular opponents in each. The end of World War II ushered in what has since become known as the "counterinsurgency era," its genesis arguably the containment strategy of the Truman Doctrine of 1947, upon which policy-makers and military planners constructed rudimentary counterinsurgency doctrine for combatting communist guerrillas in Greece. Yet Vietnam was the real test for counter-insurgency doctrine, and the war in Vietnam has remained the touchstone for American involvement in small wars ever since. With the end of the Vietnam War, small wars doctrine has risen or fallen according to the perceived threat to the national security interests of the United States, concurrent with. the success or failure of scholars and military professionals in persuading the national security bureaucracy to make qualitative changes in doctrine and force structure. In that light, this study examines the roots of American military doctrine for small wars and its subsequent evolution from "counterinsurgency" in the 1960s to "stability and suppor operations" in the 1990s, and concludes with an analysis of the legacy of Vietnam and the implications for emergent military doctrine in the post-Cold War era.
Introduction
In a groundbreaking and highly controversial article written in the summer of 1993, "The Clash of Civilizations?", the acclaimed political scientist Samuel Huntington argued that the fundamental source of conflict in the post-Cold War era would no longer be ideological or economic. Instead, he wrote, "The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." In 1994, capitalizing largely on Huntington's postulation of worldwide cultural crisis, Major Ralph Peters, a U.S. Army officer evaluating "emerging threats" while assigned to the Pentagon, wrote an equally controversial article, "The New Warrior Class." In this widely acclaimed piece, Major Peters boldly asserted, "The soldiers of the United States Army are brilliantly prepared to defeat other soldiers. Unfortunately, the enemies we are likely to face through the rest of this decade and beyond will not be 'soldiers,' with the disciplined modernity that term conveys in Euro-America, but 'warriors' erratic primitives of shifting allegiance, habituated to violence, with no stake in the civil order. The point is acute, for U.S. military doctrine is evolving to meet "emerg-ing threats" in the twenty-first century, however ill-defined at the moment, and doctrine provides the intellectual conceptualization regarding the na-ture of war, as well as the theory for military victory. Moreover, doctrine not only outlines how the military fights but also forms the framework by which senior military leaders advise civilian national leaders regarding na-tional security policy formulation and implementation. General Curtis LeMay, former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, stressed, "At the very heart of war lies doctrine. It represents the central beliefs for waging war in order to achieve victory. Doctrine is of the mind, a network of faith and knowl-edge reinforced by experience which lays the pattern for the utilization of men, equipment, and tactics. It is fundamental to sound judgement."3 One can readily find any number of definitions of doctrine that often differ merely according to the source, and although not yet elevated to the level of "holy writ," doctrine extant at the beginning of a conflict has a powerful influence over the conduct of military operations during the con-flict. As General LeMay implies, doctrine is generally defined as the pro-duct of historical experience, interpreted and adapted to present require-ments, but with an eye on the future. Although doctrine can be reshaped by the introduction of new technology and emergent theory, and can in fact be largely dispensed with according to the exigencies of the moment, doc-trine represents the basic precepts that drive decisions regarding how the armed forces are organized, trained, and equipped. In that light, doctrine significantly influences how institutional and budgetary resources are allo-cated. Consequently, a major shift in doctrine can result in a dramatic realignment of roles and missions assigned to different military services, and can prompt determined resistance from those with a vested interest in maintaining the bureaucratic and institutional status quo. At its root, doctrine provides a framework to guide military actions. Without doctrine, policy-makers and commanders function according to their own frames of reference, which quite often lack common reference points.
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