Facing the Facts: The Failure of Nation Assistance

摘要

Counterinsurgency attracted renewed interest in the early 1980s as part of a broader effort to reverse the deterioration of our strategic position. Although the strategic situation was new, the counterinsurgency policy and strategy we followed was not. In fact, they were identical to those that formed the backdrop to our initial involvement in Vietnam. Terms such as 'nation building' connoted in the early 1980s what they had 20 years before: underdevelopment causes conflict and this cause must be treated or the counteriusurgency effort will not succeed. Now termed 'nation assistance,' this idea persists as an integral part of our doctrine for counterinsurgency and has even become, through mistaking a part for the whole, integral to our general doctrine for low-intensity conflict (or 'operations other than war,' the term now used in joint and Army doctrine). This is a misfortune. However designated, this idea is a bad one, and should be expunged from policy, doctrine, and practice. To understand why, we must go back to the moment before it became an article of faith, when its assumptions were still visible.