Counterinsurgency: Always a Day Away
Lawrence Kaplan, who I typically disagree with, raises an important point:
Finally, it's a bit late in the day to rediscover tactics that the administration and the Army should have been experimenting with from the outset. If it was true that, by 1972, America was winning the war in Vietnam, it was also true that America had already lost the war here at home. Just as it did in Vietnam, an effective counterinsurgency strategy requires time and patience. And just as they did in Vietnam, Americans have run out of both. Rather than devise a strategy that tackles this problem head on, Bush's speech today finds its answer in the assumption that what worked, or ought to have worked, in the past will work again. Senior military officers, too, have fallen into the same trap--having ignored the topic for 30 years, they all are busy reading standard texts on counterinsurgency in Vietnam like Lewis Sorley's A Better War and Andrew Krepinevich's The Army and Vietnam. Yesterday, we had people like Maxwell Taylor and Henry Kissinger thinking about these things. They got nowhere. Today, we have leaders that get surprised by problems and then go read a book or two to resurrect some dubious answer from the past. Does anyone honestly think they'll get any further?
Completely apart from Iraq, this is a longstanding and, to me, weird issue. The U.S. Army is perpetually on the verge of discovering counterinsurgency warfare and stabilization operations, but then never seems to do it. Or starts doing it, but only after the opportunity to do it has slipped below the horizon. Then everything is put on the shelf and forgotten until the next time around even though the books and policy papers and broad theoretical outlines are all pretty well-known to begin with.
I had a professor once who explained this in roughly public choice terms. There are companies out there that make non-trivial sums of money selling stuff to the military and consequently dedicate a lot of money and energy to influencing the political process. They've succeeded in building a bias toward an emphasis on capital intensive forms of warfare not only into the appropriations process but into the broader military culture by making it the case that capital intensive specialties are the best path to promotion, while labor intensive specialties damage your career. Since counterinsurgency and post-conflict stabilization are both basically labor intensive, they wind up getting neglected even though they're pretty well-understood among people who try to understand them.
To be totally honest, I have no idea whether or not that's true and never really looked into it seriously, but it at least sounds plausible to me. Relatedly, Lorelei Kelley writes:
The fact that DoD has accepted Stability Operations as a full-fledged DoD wide competence (not just the Army) and a core military mission is a BIG DEAL. We need to support this directive and praise it as an important blueprint for our post-9/11 grand strategy. Without realigning our spending priorities, however, it will be like that Army strategy paper in January 2003.But spending priorities probably won't be realigned because they'll continue to be geared toward the priorities of people who make expensive military equipment, etc., etc., etc.
Wow! Great observation Matt. Do you know of any other scholars or think tanks that are covering this of the relationship between the defense industry complex and our ability to engage in small scale warfighting?
December 1, 2005 9:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
William Lind has been on this soap box for years it seems. A number of his comments along these same lines can be found here.
Perhaps the most representative from this past August - Getting Swept
December 1, 2005 9:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
"I had a professor once who explained this in roughly public choice terms. There are companies out there that make non-trivial sums of money selling stuff to the military and consequently dedicate a lot of money and energy to influencing the political process. They've succeeded in building a bias toward an emphasis on capital intensive forms of warfare not only into the appropriations process but into the broader military culture by making it the case that capital intensive specialties are the best path to promotion, while labor intensive specialties damage your career. Since counterinsurgency and post-conflict stabilization are both basically labor intensive, they wind up getting neglected even though they're pretty well-understood among people who try to understand them."
Well, that's a rather delicate way of putting it! The simpler way of puting it is just to say that the purpose of the military industrial complex is to buy weapons systems. Period.
Policies both within the Pentagon bureaucracy, Congress and the defense department are set to encourage the development of weapons systems and to funnel public money into the purchase of those systems so that public companies can profit.
Whether they are necessary, make sense given our overall budget, foreign policy and defense posture, etc., etc. is irrelevant, even an impedement to understanding what's going on.
Star-Wars is a perfect example. Despite endless disappointments and failures and studies that indicate that there are fundamental technical reasons why it will cannot ever work, the funding imperative keeps it alive to the tune of billions of dollars every year.
What happens to officers who don't help grease the wheels of this profit-making system? They get demoted, transferred, fired.
Take the example of Col. David Hackworth, related in his NYT best-seller About Face. He personally field tested the early models of the AR-15 assault rifle in Vietnam, later to become the M-16. He found that "it just wasn't rugged enough. . . It wasn't GI proof. The thing required almost surgical cleanliness. . ." The reports were corroborated at every level and the recommendation went up the chain of command that the army NOT purchase the AR-15.
Two years later, the M-16 was the standard army rifle. "Troopers picked up Soviet AK-47s off the battlefield, lugged heavier M-14s. . . anything to avoid the M-16, which still wasn't GI proof and still jammed more than it fired." When Hackworth bitched to the senior procurement officers despite their agreement on the issue of the M-16's reliability, they told him, "don't fight it - just buy Colt industries."
Hackworth was simply ignorant of the basic fact that the basic purpose of the military has become to funnel money to industry, with programs designed and selected by lobbying both inside and outside the military and congress, and only incidentally to fight or win wars in the most effective manner.
That's why Star-Wars and the next generation fighters never lack for funding, but the Pentagon scrimps on body-armor for the troops.
December 1, 2005 10:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
New weapons systems are always sexy. Nice shiny new toys that more effectively and powerfully blow things and people up. If there is a conventional war they will be a big asset.
Unfortunately for the makers of these systems the days of large military conflicts between standing armies will probably be a thing of the past. Our enemies now and in the future will not be in the form of tank and infantry battalions. Our enemies will be groups of like-minded people who wear no uniform and their best weapon will be ideology. And no amount of muntions can defeat an ideology...
December 1, 2005 10:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
From what I've read, the problem the military has in embracing counterinsurgency has much more to do with military culture than anything else. Put simply, the jobs with the most prestige in all the services are the most traditional. In the Army or Marines, that means leading a combat division or regiment. In the Navy, it's commanding a ship or a battle group. In the Air Force, it's commanding a fighter wing. These are the routes to the really big jobs - chief of staff, regional commands etc.
As a result, that's where the best talent goes and that's where the budgets go. In the Army and Navy, the whole structure is set up to fight a WWII, attrition-style battle involving large numbers of troops in formation and using large amounts of equipment. As much as Rumsfeld has blathered on about military transformation, the fact is that at its core, the military hasn't changed all that much.
So Matt is confusing cause and effect. Army strategic doctrine drives procurement, not the other way around.
December 1, 2005 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know that the bias it's necessarily the fault of the military-industrial complex. Yes, being an MP General is not the quickest way to four stars. But those choices can be undone if the civilian leaders step up and say "look at our operations over the last twenty years. We do a lot of peacekeeping, and we don't do enough thinking about it. Let's think about it more."
I was under the impression that the U.S. had learned how to execute a counter-insurgency operation, and that the problem was that the civilian leaders and to a lesser extent the top generals didn't really care much about post-war stabilization. Al Franken has been harping on this point for a few weeks now -- that in the beginning of the war, the stabilization generals were called "the B team". Once you've reached the level of general, there's simply not much further up the ladder to go, so this is really just about who allocated the generals properly. If Rumsfeld and/or Bush had said "think hard about worst-case scenarios after we are finished invading", the Joint Chiefs would have allocated more of the "A-team" to thinking about post-conflict stabilization.
Another part of the problem is political, which is that American politicians are incredibly averse to losing lives (more so than the top generals, and even more so than the American public). So, even in the Balkans, when the US was pretty effective at peacekeeping operations, US troops still move around in clumsy force protection schemes, while British troops just have two-man patrols.
A third problem is the relative lack of experience with low-level conflicts. The UK was constantly involved in hearts-and-minds campaigns in various territories and ex-territories: The Falklands, Oman, Malaysia, Borneo, etc. Because of "Vietnam syndrom", the US didn't get much experience in such operations until the mid-90s.
December 1, 2005 10:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
December 1, 2005 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
This way of thinking about counterinsurgency problems seems to me to almost willfully miss the point.
While military thinkers of course have to think about 'counterinsurgency' as such and to devise strategies and training to fight 'fourth-generation wars,' the fundmental issue is that an insurgency occurs in a particular context. Even the counterinsurgency specialists all acknowledge that any counterinsurgency campaign is primarily a political one.
When you don't know anything about a population, don't really care about the people, and are mainly pursuing stated or unstated political goals that either have nothing to do with them or are inimical to their concerns, you are bound to lose unless the insurgency is very weak or confined to some minority group.
Our tactics and strategies in Vietnam were all wrapped up with a bunch of badly thought-out global great-power theories -- falling dominoes in the Cold War. Any concerns we developed along the way for the Vietnamese and their desires and needs were peripheral, short-lived, and easily sacrificed or forgotten in short order. And the Vietnamese insurgents represented a real force in the country. We were bound to lose, we deserved to lose, and we did lose.
Unlike Vietnam, the U.S. has real strategic interests in Iraq (oil, Middle East stability, etc.). Of course we pursued them in a very stupid way, in addition to being disingenuous and delusionary, but they are real interests. However, we never gave a damn or had any understanding of Iraqis' interests, and our strategies, tactics, and goals have had little to do with their interests.
So, we have lost this war, as we were bound to do once a wide-spread insurgency developed. Strategically, Iran and al Qaida have won. We are reduced to trying to take sides and act as a go-between in a developing civil war that we unleashed but don't understand.
The counterinsurgency war is over, and continuing to think about our actions there in terms of such a war will merely exacerbate the long term damage to Iraq and to our interests.
The best we could do at this point would be to minimize the intensity and damage caused by the Iraqi civil war, including its spread through the region. I'm not sure we could have much positive effect in that direction even if we tried. I am sure that mucking around with counterinsurgency theory will not help.
December 1, 2005 10:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
I came up with a related, but slightly different, view of this a couple of days ago. You have to distinguish between "enemies" and "opponents": for the Army, the "opponent" is whoever we're shooting at; but the much more dangerous threat is from the "enemies" in the Navy, Marines, and Air Force who are competing for funding. That is the really crucial struggle which determines success of failure for a top military leader - especially when you're the unchallenged superpower and losing on the battlefield is hard to imagine.
To keep this competition somewhat under control, the services agreed on the doctrine of Air-Land Combat, which ensures that no major operation takes place without all being involved - and thus that they each get a healthy slice of the funding pie. As a side benefit, it turns out to be a great way of winning conventional battles, e.g. against massed tank formations. And that's how an Air Force guy with no experience in land operations came to be in command of the disastrous Tora Bora "Operation Anaconda".
Now occasionally somebody tries to break this truce - Wesley Clark did it with the air-power-only campaign in Kosovo - and that makes them very unpopular, because they're upsetting a delicate balance of power. Even though it happened to work just fine.
All experience with counter-insurgency suggests that air-power, the navy, and high-tech weapons generally are not much help. You need people on the ground; and furthermore, people with good language and culture skills. Now the US *could* do that - we have 600K Arabic-speakers who are potential recruits. But it's simpler to just pretend that this is a conventional war and use the usual Air-Land tactics. Which any idiot could tell you is just about the worst way to fight an insurgency - because every time you drop a bomb, you kill a bunch of civilians, and their friends and family members become instant insurgents. And since you reckon on needing 10x more troops than the insurgents, for each new insurgent you need another 10 new troops. In Iraq it seems the Army calls this "progress", but "escalation" would be more accurate.
December 1, 2005 11:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps the reason is that there isn't actually any way of "doing counter-insurgency". What does the term mean anyway? It typically seems to be a self-justifying gloss applied to fundamentally un-winnable and poorly conceived adventures which are themselves a primary cause of the "insurgencies" in the first place. For one thing, people just don't take well to the presence of foreign troops, whatever the stated rationale for their presence.
December 1, 2005 11:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm surprised everyone seems to have failed to note that ex-officers hope to be paid beaucoup bucks by defense contractors...
That is not a good process in terms of incentive structures, but necessary, so long as one doesn't (as I advocate) nationalize the industry: I mean, do you want contracting firms to be ignorant of their clients? of course not. But so long as they are hiring people whom they used to be "adversarial toward" in procurement and management of contracts... those processes will suck, and officers will seek roles that put them in position for pricey jobs.
December 1, 2005 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
The US military was not designed or developed for peacekeeping operations or any kind of occupation. There are many reasons for this, one of them clearly being that it is much easier and more fun to design military hardware than to come up with meaningful strategies to avoid getting killed while standing around in unpleasant places where you don't understand the language, history, religion, or culture. Given the fact that our military, that we have been pumping vast national resources into for the last fifty years, has basically been brought to its' knees in Iraq, of all places, is a damning indictment of the fact that the necessary adjustments to the post-cold-war world have not even been attempted. Whether or not they are even possible, I don't know, but I think that any peacekeeping occupation force is more likely to be successful under the UN aegis than unilaterally, or as a coalition of the whatevers. Additionally, if a major, major component of any occupation/peacekeeping effort is not a real infusion of humanitarian assistance and community-building, then there is simply no point in going in. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the initial humanitarian assistance was nowhere near adequate and we are seeing the intractable difficulties in playing catch-up against a population that has largely turned against us. There is clearly no reason to expect anything but arrogance and incompetence from the Bush administration, but we may be able to take some lessons from them because they have done everything so badly that it shows that real change in foreign policy is necessary. The most important change is that US foreign policy should be based on peace and the projection of health, education, human rights, and prosperity instead of on economic imperialism and the projection of military power. We need to face facts here, there is nothing Rumsfeld and Cheney want more than an arms race with China. They are doing everything they can to set this in motion in such way that it can never be stopped. Even though we are currently caught up in exposing the incompetence of the administration in Iraq and Afghanistan and are trying to find a way out of the morass (believe me, I don't have time for much else), if we are not careful we will come out of Iraq, only to find that the neocons have created an even newer world order where we are playing chicken with Chinese nukes. You think we don't understand the Muslim world, and maybe have some racial issues? There may be a lot of Asian Americans, but how much do the whites and blacks know about China and its' people? The answer, my friends, is nothing. That is what I call a recipe for disaster.
peace,
jim
December 1, 2005 11:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
It is a bit strange that we live in a world more suited for the Marines, they afterall have a manual for fighting small wars, but we keep giving command to the Army. One of the problems in Vietnam was not that LBJ kept running things but Westmoreland kept wanting to refight WWII and the North Vietnamese would not accomodate him.
One thing that Kaplan has exactly right is about Americans. We have very little patience especially with losing. Bush, Cheney etal promised this country and easy victory. They were probably doomed from that moment.
December 1, 2005 11:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
The issue for counterinsurgency operations in Iraq is not what the Army/Bush/Rumsfeld or the defense industry thinks or plans. Rather counterinsurgency should be driven from the field. The insurgency is not monolithic so there is no one size fits all.
Give responsiblity and authority to field commanders to make the decisions and carry them out. Make those in centralized positions respond to field needs.
Give military commanders in the field (not Baghdad and the Green Zone) the objective to create order and improved conditions in a particular geographic territory. (Leveling a place does not constitute viable order or improvement.) Let them decide what and how to make their region work. From what I read and hear there are examples of success where this has been done
One example (heard on NPR couple weeks ago) was a special forces commander in some western Iraqi town that worked very closely with Iraqi civilians to make politics, security and the local economy work. It was hands on, talking, some military threats and almost no use of guns. Another example was the unit assigned to make the highway to the airport resonably safe.
In US towns and cities good politicans and community organizers know success means providing basic servies (e.g., secure streets, garbage and snow removal, etc), listening and responding to needs, cajoling people, and some threats.
I agree the contractors have undue influence on Army HQ and procurements but it is indefensible let them influence operational strategy in the field in this particular conflict.
December 1, 2005 12:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Much truth and wisdom here. Two things: Another--very sound--reason why the American people are never going to love counterinsurgency (besides its being long and labor-intensive) is that it is often nasty, brutal, and bloody, entailing lots of death in the streets on all sides. Even when it works. And I agree that there are all kinds of indicators in the Iraq case that point to failure. The other, larger thing: Preventing civil war should be our ONLY priority in Iraq at this point, as matters are generally so out of control. Counterinsurgency objectives only tempt us to intercede in intercommunal strife or to conceptualize contending Iraqi factions as primarily antagonists of the US forces. This is wrongheaded, short-sighted, self-destructive, and as stupid as so much else about this insane adventure.
December 1, 2005 1:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
When you don't know anything about a population, don't really care about the people, and are mainly pursuing stated or unstated political goals that either have nothing to do with them or are inimical to their concerns, you are bound to lose unless the insurgency is very weak or confined to some minority group.
The insurgency in Iraq IS largely confined to a minority group, the Sunnis, who are only 20% of the population. If the whole country was united against us there's no way we could hold on with the troop level we have now. And the death rate would be much higher than the 2000+ we are at now. And the insurgency IS weak, as it is largely confined to terror bombings
December 1, 2005 2:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
I seem to remember something called "The Powell Doctrine," seemingly well-accepted wisdom that managed to keep our military out of these open-ended, counter-insurgency situations in the first place.
Say, whatever happened to that guy?
December 1, 2005 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Counter insurgency already exists as a strong potentiality without the assistance of the American military, or other US Government agencies engaged in this war. The condition is whether US or Iran will ultimately fuel counter insurgency. In the middle is Chalabi: gettin' convicted, indicted, and burned in effagy in various parts of the world. A quadrupal agent, Chalabi is known for screwing himself over for fun. Several times a day. Will it be through a "well meaning" mofo on the very whisp of a bonafide social compact? The same man who's gettin his mojo up with torture rooms as we dither with Murtha ammendments, if ya' wanna know? Or True Believers inherit a toxic waste dump of a country. You know, depleted uranium and three eyed goats. And the children of it. Won't be much to make of if we flip'em the bird, but then I always thought Viet Nam deserves war compensation. I'm not sure if the US is morally capable of responding to it's own horrors.
You gotta look at this gangsta' style: Hooz kinguhda hood? And do you expect a people who had a taste of a better life, the looser Sunnis, are just gunna lay down and take it? Would you?
All in all, Zaqari is useful, now. But doesn't his existence in Sunni areas destabilize American efforts away from a political center, and towards an embassy roof? And Bush could do a couple of Dutch Rolls in a Raptor, with full NACAR multiview?
Oh, and who does the video tape while who does the IEDs? Who mortars Americans and who blows up weddings?
And what will most of US heat Our homes with this winter and then next? The burbs are spending.
Total withdrawal...not?
And our children's children will live to see more oil wars. We need a plan.
December 1, 2005 6:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think one of the reasons our military keeps forgetting its counterinsurgency lessons is that counterinsurgency warefare doesn't fit with our values and self-image as a democratic nation. Counterinsurgency is too much like suppressing a colonial revolt. You are not fighting a modern nation with a real military, but a bunch of poor guerrilla fighters who are, as Mao put it, swimming in the ocean of the people.
And in fact in many cases, such as the U.S in the Philappines, that is exactly what we were doing. Even in cases like Iraq where the insurgents are a bunch of thugs, there will be lots of people in this country who claim they are authentic freedom fighters and the US is being brutally imperialistic.
All this is very distastful to the American public, so every new president promises the public he will never get the country entangled in fighting an insurgency, and the military, which is similarly anti-imperialist, follows along and pretends it will never have to do it again.
The problem, as Thomas Barnett makes clear, is that we are going to be fighting more wars like this in the future, so we better get good at it.
December 1, 2005 8:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Unlike Vietnam, the U.S. has real strategic interests in Iraq (oil, Middle East stability, etc.)
Interesting point of view. Lets see - falling dominoes - after Vietnam fell so did Cambodia and so did Laos. Luckily they stopped there, but there were three dominoes. So much for a badly thought out theory that proved to be true.
Vietnamese desires and needs. Well as you point out we had fewer real strategic interests there than we do in Iraq, which really means we supported their desires and needs not to be a Communist nation, which several hundred thousand of them were willing to die for, though in vain. And that several hundred thousand of them were willing to flee the country for (remember boat people?) rather than put up with. Sounds as though we were really being much more idealistic there than now. And we deserved to lose?
Vietnamese insurgents represented a real force in the country? Wow, if they were such a force why couldn't they win? The insurgents (Viet Cong) were pretty much destroyed as a military force in the Tet Offensive in 1968. After that the fighting was done by NVA regular units infiltrated south. The war wasn't won by an insurgency - NVA regular units with tanks and air support invaded South Vietnam over the DMV and conquered it in a conventional war. The insurgency in South Vietnam failed.
It's astonishing to read the cockeyed views of history spouted here.
s
December 1, 2005 8:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting point of view. Lets see - falling dominoes - after Vietnam fell so did Cambodia and so did Laos. Luckily they stopped there, but there were three dominoes. So much for a badly thought out theory that proved to be true.
They weren't really dominoes though, were they? They were part of the same conflict, and fell at virtually the same time.
Eisnhower is credited with the first elaboration of the Domino Theory in a speech in March 1954
"Then with respect to more people passing under this domination, Asia, after all, has already lost some 450 million of its peoples to the Communist dictatorship, and we simply can't afford greater losses.
But when we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people.
Finally, the geographical position achieved thereby does many things. It turns the so-called island defensive chain of Japan, Formosa, of the Philippines and to the southward; it moves in to threaten Australia and New Zealand."
None of those who espoused the theory were fretting about Cambodia or Laos, and none of their dire predictions came about after the North Vietnamese and their proxies in the two small states that became entangled in their war won.
You're not in a position to call anybody's view of history cock-eyed.
December 1, 2005 11:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Unfortunately for the makers of these systems the days of large military conflicts between standing armies will probably be a thing of the past."
I'm not completely sure this is true. What is true is that there are few, if any, people who will try to engage the US in a traditional military conflict between their standing army and ours. But this is true because our army is so ridiculously good at fighting those kind of wars.
So, it's not true to say that all the fancy equipment we've bought is wasted money. IUt's money that is spent that, at the time, guaranteed Western Europe against invasion, guarantees South Korea against invasion, ditto for Taiwan. It also allowed us to eject Saddam from Kuwait. So, while I agree a change in priorities is probably needed on the part of DoD acquisitions, unless you're willing to remove that traditional mission of defending allies and maintaining their security, you're going to need a fairly large, tech-heavy force like we have now.
Actually, what's notable is that, to the extent you take the name "Department of Defense" seriously, our armed forces are really great. They are fantastic at fighting defensive wars, since trying to conquer a hostile nation requires a large conventional assault, and if you're defending a country, the locals will be supporting you rather than bombing you.
We get into trouble when we stop trying to fight defensively, and instead become aggressors and invade countires where we don't have popular support, or intervene in civil wars. Because these are the types of conflict where broad based insurgencies are possible.
December 2, 2005 6:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
For that matter, were the Khmer Rouge really North Vietnamese proxies? I don't recall that, and it's hard to believe considering the subsequent history.
And of course, we expanded the war into Cambodia, so knoocking down that domino is on us.
December 2, 2005 10:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Proxies" was shorthand. The story is a little complicated because the Kampuchean Communist Party went from being largely being subsumed in an Indochinese Party more or less subordinated to the Vietnamese Party in the 1950s to being led by the late 60s by virulently anti-Vietnamese revanchists, who, if I have read the historian David Chandler correctly, only openly broke with the Vietnamese after they took power in Cambodia in April 1975.
You do make the salient point, though, that US policy probably helped topple the domino, rather than prop it up.
December 2, 2005 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Vietnamese insurgents represented a real force in the country? Wow, if they were such a force why couldn't they win?
Did the U.S. Army represent a real force in the country? Did it win?
Idiot.
December 2, 2005 11:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Idiot.
Are you being deliberately obtuse or do you just not understand.
Ammonite says we deserved to lose in Vietnam because we didn't understand how to fight the powerful insurgency there and we are apparently doing the same thing now in Iraq.
I merely pointed out the facts that the insurgency (Viet Cong) were virtually destroyed as a military force in 1968 and that South Vietnam was never conquered by an insurgency but by a conventional military invasion from the north.
I guess if you are incapable of refuting facts or using logic you are reduced to calling people names.
December 2, 2005 7:55 PM | Reply | Permalink