Real armies don’t do counterinsurgency
Different institutional responses to 1962 and Sri Lanka 1987.
From the NYT Sunday Book Review of The Fourth Star – Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army:
As an institution, the United States Army has much more in common with, say, a giant corporation like General Motors than with a professional sports team like the New York Giants. You can’t cut players who don’t perform, and it’s hard to fire your head coach. Like General Motors, the Army changes very slowly, and once it does, it’s hard to turn it around again.
The book begins with Vietnam. The Army was defeated in a guerrilla war there that upended many of the core principles on which it had lived and thrived. Yet its response to the Vietnam debacle was not to rethink those principles, but to erase the bad memories and pretend that the war had never happened. Instead of planning how to fight the next insurgency, the Army went right back to preparing for what it loved to do: fight big battles against big, uniformed armies just like itself. Training in guerrilla war, as Cloud and Jaffe show, was banished from the Army’s curriculum.[NYT]
One wonders if the Indian Army’s response to Operation Pawan debacle in Sri Lanka was any different to the US army after Vietnam — of denial, a nightmare best forgotten. However, the Indian army had responded to the military disaster of 1962 in a dramatically different manner. Similar disasters, different responses. Why?
It was because the Indian Army wasn’t perhaps convinced then that undertaking counterinsurgency operations was as much a part of its charter as waging regular warfare. Operation Pawan may have dented the pride a bit, but it certainly didn’t hurt as a professional failure for the institutional army as badly as 1962 did.
While other valid reasons may have existed, the creation of Rashtriya Rifles as a specialist counterinsurgency force of the Indian army in the 1990s seemed to validate that separation of roles. Although a large number of regular army units still continue to be deployed in counterinsurgency duties, it seems somehow the belief that real armies don’t do counterinsurgency still prevails. Something like real men don’t cry…
The problem of using real armies is more of a Public-Relations problem that cannot be resolved. On this very blog, PragE pointed out that armies and civilians operate under different guidelines which trains them very differently. Using an army that must ruthlessly take out external invaders to do internal ops in which the “enemy” is one of their own will only confuse the Army people and their overall mode of operation.
I think the Indian approach of raising specific COIN-oriented groups like Rashtriya Rifles is in fact the optimal approach. Any such group must only have a lifetime of the specific internal conflict that is was raised to resolve in the govt.’s favour.
The groups that are being raised to fight the maoists should probably have the same status legally as the COIN-related groups in J&K.
Best Regards
Also University specials to do Kent State and JNU work pl.