CONFRONTING THE UNCONVENTIONAL:

INNOVATION AND TRANSFORMATION 

IN MILITARY AFFAIRS

David Tucker

October 2006

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iii

FOREWORD

The Department of Defense (DoD) is committed to transforming 

its conventional warfare capabilities. At the same time, DoD must 

increase its emphasis on irregular warfare. This ambitious agenda 

raises some questions. Are there limits to military transformation? 

Or, if it seems obvious that there must be limits to transformation, 

what are they exactly, why do they arise, and how can we identify 

them so that we may better accomplish the transformation that 

the U.S. military is capable of? If limits to military change and 

transformation exist, what are the broader implications for national 

policy and strategy?

Professor David Tucker offers some answers to these questions 

in this Letort Paper by analyzing the efforts of the French, British, 

and Americans to deal with irregular threats after World War II. 

He concludes that there are limits to transformation and offers an 

analysis of the effects of these limits on policy and strategy for the 

war on terrorism. 

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

DAVID TUCKER is Associate Professor in the Department of Defense 

Analysis and Co-Director of the Center on Terrorism and Irregular 

Warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School. Prior to the Postgraduate 

School, he worked in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense 

for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict and overseas 

in Africa and Europe. Professor Tucker’s publications include 

U.S. Special Operations Forces, with Christopher Lamb (Columbia 

University Press, forthcoming, 2006); Skirmishes at the Edge of Empire: 

The United States and International Terrorism (Praeger, 1997); “The 

War on Terrorism and the Western Way of Warfare,” in Bradley C. S. 

Watson, ed., The West at War (Lexington Books, forthcoming, 2006); 

and “The Unconventional Threat to Homeland Security,” Homeland 

Security, Paul Stockton, ed. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 

2007). 
v

SUMMARY

As the Quadrennial Defense Review Report for 2006 makes clear, 

the Department of Defense (DoD) is committed to transforming 

itself. In the years to come, it will continue to transform its regular or 

conventional warfare capabilities, that is, its capabilities to operate 

against the military forces of other states. But the Report also makes 

clear that DoD must give “greater emphasis to the war on terror and 

irregular warfare activities, including long-duration unconventional 

warfare, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and military support 

for stabilization and reconstruction efforts.” 

This ambitious agenda raises some questions. Are there limits 

to military transformation? Are there some changes that militaries 

cannot or should not make? Or, if it seems too obvious that there 

must be limits to transformation, what are they exactly, why do they 

arise, and how can we identify them so that we may better accomplish 

the transformation that the U.S. military is capable of? For example, 

can militaries transform themselves to deal with irregular threats? 

Should they? Will efforts to transform at the same time both regular 

and irregular warfare capabilities conflict? Will one transformation 

frustrate the other? If limits to military change and transformation 

exist, what are the broader implications for national policy and 

strategy? If transformation of both regular and irregular capabilities 

is not possible, which should we choose? And, again, to what extent 

is that choice in our power?

The following case studies of three militaries (the French, British, 

and American) that confronted irregular or unconventional threats 

in the midst of significant conventional threats offer some answers to 

these questions. In each case, the issue or important point is not that 

militaries are static or find it hard to change, as is often said. In all 

three cases, the militaries did, in fact, change or transform themselves. 

The important issue is which changes were possible, which proved 

superficial and faded, which endured and why. Answering these 

questions is important not just for defense planning and strategy. 

Answering them will affect national strategy as well, since DoD is 

part of a broader national effort to deal with the regular and irregular 
vi

threats we face. If we understand DoD’s limitations, then we should 

be in a better position to devise an effective national approach.

As the case studies show, the three militaries responded to 

irregular threats, but did so differently and with different degrees of 

success. How do we explain these different responses? In the cases 

examined, external threats engaged the institutional interests and 

professional concerns of military officers and led to innovations. 

At the same time, military professionalism also led the militaries to 

see those threats through the conventions of the military profession. 

Political institutions and historical circumstances shape these 

conventions and help explain variations in the responses of the three 

militaries studied. But these variations take place within, and affect 

a larger convention common to all three that focuses on directly 

engaging and killing the enemy as the principal task of a military. 

Since this approach is not effective in irregular or unconventional 

warfare, to the degree that the militaries were limited to innovating 

within it, they failed. They were able to innovate but not to transform 

themselves to deal with irregular conflict.

Since the limitations that the militaries faced derived in part from 

historical circumstances, the conclusion of this monograph considers 

whether likely changes in these circumstances will improve the 

ability of the U.S. military to deal with irregular threats. The analysis 

considers the interconnected effects of four such circumstances or 

threats: increased irregular warfare; terrorist acquisition of chemical, 

biological, or radiological weapons; significant success for the Jihadist 

insurgency we now face; and the long-term rise of a great power rival. 

The analysis concludes that the best way to deal with both long- and 

short-term irregular threats is to establish two new organizations, 

a new kind of interagency organization devoted to unconventional 

warfare and an unconventional warfare organization within DoD. 

Establishing these new organizations would acknowledge that 

irregular warfare has become a potent force but would not imply 

necessarily that the age of the nation-state and its distinctive style of 

warfare is over. It would imply only that nonstate forces are a serious 

threat; this is far less difficult to grasp since September 11, 2001, that 

nonstate forces pose a serious threat that deserves a transformative 

response different from, but as serious as the response DoD is 

making to the apparent revolution in military affairs in conventional 

warfare.
CONFRONTING THE UNCONVENTIONAL:

INNOVATION AND TRANSFORMATION 

IN MILITARY AFFAIRS

INTRODUCTION

As the Quadrennial Defense Review Report for 2006 makes clear, 

the Department of Defense (DoD) is committed to transforming 

itself. In the years to come, it will continue to transform its regular or 

conventional warfare capabilities, that is, its capabilities to operate 

against the military forces of other states. But the Report also makes 

clear that DoD must give “greater emphasis to the war on terror and 

irregular warfare activities, including long-duration unconventional 

warfare, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and military support 

for stabilization and reconstruction efforts.”1

This ambitious agenda raises some questions. Are there limits 

to military transformation? Are there some changes that militaries 

cannot or should not make? Or, if it seems too obvious that there must 

be limits to transformation, what are they exactly, why do they arise, 

and how can we identify them so that we may better accomplish the 

transformation the U.S. military can or should execute? For example, 

can militaries transform themselves to deal with irregular threats? 

Should they? Will efforts to transform at the same time both regular 

and irregular warfare capabilities conflict? Will one transformation 

frustrate the other? If limits to military change and transformation 

exist, what are the broader implications for national policy and 

strategy? If transformation of both regular and irregular capabilities 

is not possible, which should we choose? And, again, to what extent 

is that choice in our power?

The following case studies of three militaries (French, British, 

and American) that confronted irregular or unconventional threats 

in the midst of significant conventional threats offer some answers 

to these questions. In each case, the issue is not that militaries are 

static or find it hard to change, as is often said. In all three cases, the 

militaries did, in fact, change or transform themselves. The important 

issues are which changes were possible, which proved superficial 
and transient, which endured and why. Answering these questions 

is important not just for defense planning and strategy. Answers will 

affect even national strategy, since DoD is part of a broader national 

effort to deal with the regular and irregular threats we face. If we 

understand DoD’s limitations, then we should be in a better position 

to devise an effective national approach.

To orient the reader as we set out, we may summarize what 

follows. The case studies examine how the French, British, and 

Americans dealt with irregular or unconventional conflict primarily in the 2 decades following World War II. These military 

establishments had varied success in thinking anew and in acting 

anew to meet the threat posed by irregular forces. In two of these 

cases (the French confrontation with revolutionary warfare and 

the American effort to combat insurgency), the challenge posed by 

irregular forces was understood to be, as the QDR Report says of 

our current conflict, “markedly different from wars of the past.”2

In both cases, some French and American defense officials, civilian 

and military, called for and encouraged innovations to meet the 

revolutionary threat their countries faced. In neither case were the 

innovations successful or enduring. The British, on the other hand, 

who understood post-World War II insurgencies to be different from 

conventional warfare but not unprecedented, did manage to innovate 

to counter this threat. The following sections present information 

about why these militaries did and did not innovate successfully in the 

face of unconventional threats, and why some innovations endured 

while others disappeared like fads. In these pages, we will encounter 

many of the same factors (e.g., external threats, bureaucratic interests, 

interservice rivalry) and actors (e.g., crusading civilians, military 

professionals and mavericks, immovable traditionalists) commonly 

found in discussions of military innovation. After assessing such 

factors and characters, the author draws some conclusions about the 

limits of military transformation and their implications for current 

U.S. efforts. 

Military innovation has received a lot of attention over the past 

15 years, but little of this work has examined innovation to meet 

unconventional threats.3 This monograph attempts in some measure 

to redress this imbalance by looking at the development of psycholog-
ical warfare and counterinsurgency (or revolutionary warfare, as the 

French called it). Psychological warfare, psychological operations, 

political warfare, and covert operations, on one hand (all these terms 

were used immediately after World War II to refer to a similar set 

of activities), and counterinsurgency, on the other, are of course 

separate activities. This paper treats them together for two reasons. 

First, for historical reasons discussed below, the French, who first 

encountered what they felt was a new kind of warfare in Indochina, 

combined within their response to it the two forms that the British 

and Americans viewed as separate and distinct forms: psychological 

warfare and counterinsurgency. For this reason, a comparison 

between the French, British, and Americans should include both 

psychological operations and counterinsurgency.

Second, psychological warfare and counterinsurgency have 

an intimate connection. Insurgents work within and through a 

population to attack the government because they are not strong 

enough to attack the government and its military forces directly. 

In response, the government must work within and through the 

population to get at the insurgents, specifically, to get the intelligence 

it needs to kill or capture them and to cut off the resources and recruits 

they need to carry on the fight. Because they work through civilian 

populations, insurgency and counterinsurgency are more political 

than military struggles. True, force is not absent. Both sides use it to 

intimidate and build support. But it plays a less decisive role than in 

conventional military conflicts.

In keeping with their predominantly political character, 

insurgency and counterinsurgency require political organization, 

legitimacy, and persuasion more than does a conventional military 

struggle. For this reason, psychological operations or political warfare 

are more important in this kind of conflict than in conventional war. 

This was true in individual insurgencies but also, according to the 

leaders of France, Britain, and the United States, in the Cold War 

as a whole, which was why they all attributed to psychological or 

political warfare after World War II an importance that it had not 

previously enjoyed in their defense plans and strategies.

Two terminological issues remain. To this point, we have spoken 

of both sets of oppositional pairs—regular or irregular, and conventional or unconventional—in categorizing threats and forces. At the 
risk of confusion with the modern term “unconventional warfare,” 

we shall use the terms “conventional” and “unconventional” threats 

and forces. These terms highlight the hold that established ways 

of thinking (conventions) have on our minds, reminding us of the 

part such ways of thinking may play in limiting transformation. As 

far as military and security affairs are concerned, conventions are 

established in two ways. First, nations and their militaries compete, 

with the nations and militaries that win setting a standard that 

others try to meet. The Prussians, for example, followed the example 

of Napoleon after he had defeated them; in the post-Civil War years, 

the U.S. Army looked to the Prussian Army as the standard-setter 

in view of its victories over the Danish, Austrians, and French. This 

view of how conventions are established rests on the assumption that 

militaries, like the individuals who compose them and the nationstates they serve, are rational actors who marshal available resources 

to achieve specified goals, such as national survival and prosperity.

This account is true as far as it goes, but not exhaustive since 

sometimes the weaker do not emulate the stronger, and at other 

times emulation, though attempted, remains merely formal.4 The 

explanation for these varied results, at least in part, is that culture 

or ideas influence the actions of individuals, organizations, and 

nations. Thus culture becomes still another explanation of how 

conventions are established; established ways of thinking produce 

conventional actions. In the United States and Great Britain, for 

example, the interplay between conceptions of political liberty and 

distinctive forms of government has led to a certain understanding, 

not identical in each country, of the proper distribution of authority 

between civilian and military officials. As the discussion below will 

make clear, this understanding affected how the American and 

British militaries responded to the threat from insurgency. With 

regard to organizations, culture means “the set of basic assumptions, 

values, norms, beliefs, and formal knowledge that shape collective 

understandings.”5

Competition and culture together, then, establish conventions, 

which are powerful facts of individual, institutional, and national 

life. In the case that concerns us, what we might call the warfare 

convention defines warfare as violence by the uniformed agents of 
states who in principle do not target noncombatants. Unconventional 

conflict, by way of contrast, takes place in the midst of civilians 

and includes violence by actors, who may or may not be agents 

of a state, against noncombatants. Insurgency is a species of such 

unconventional conflict. 

The second terminological issue arises in explaining why the U.S. 

military has had difficulty dealing with unconventional conflict.6 Part 

of the explanation, we argue, is the professionalism of the American 

military, which makes it attentive to external threats but also inclined 

to understand them in a particular way. By professionalism, we mean 

self-regulation by practitioners who understand themselves and are 

understood by others to possess specific knowledge and skills that 

set them apart from others. Professionals regulate their activity in 

part by sharing certain ideas and principles of behavior, the mutual 

recognition and encouragement of which are what, to a large extent, 

defines a profession. 

THE FRENCH

Revolutionary Warfare.

Almost immediately following the end of Word War II, the French 

began fighting the Vietminh for control of Indochina. The war lasted 

from 1946 to 1954. The French had technological superiority (armor 

and aircraft) and gained some initial success against Vietminh 

forces. However, as the French continued to seek out and engage 

their enemy, the Vietminh dispersed their forces, denying the French 

the decisive battles they sought. When it was to their advantage, the 

Vietminh engaged the French, operating in battalions, regiments, and 

divisions as expedient. Their commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, 

explicitly followed a strategy of prolonging the war, in expectation 

that the French would not be able to sustain their effort. To ensure 

their own endurance, the Vietminh undertook intense organizing of 

the Vietnamese people. During the course of the war, French Union 

forces (French and colonial forces) suffered 92,000 dead, 114,000 

casualties, and 28,000 captured. Many of the dead, injured, and 

captured were from France’s colonies, but the steady grind of the 
war without apparent progress wore down public opinion in France. 

Support for the war by the French populace dropped from 52 percent 

in 1947 to only 7 percent in early 1954. When the fortress of Dien 

Bien Phu fell in May 1954 to a well-planned conventional assault, 

with several thousand more French casualties and many more taken 

prisoner, the French were forced to give up their Indochina colony.7

The defeat at Dien Bien Phu had a significantly adverse effect 

on French confidence. Coupled with the Suez disaster of 1956, it 

marked the contraction of French power and exposed the fractious 

ineptitude of the government of the Fourth Republic. Insufficiently 

funded and supported by its political masters, the French Army felt 

betrayed, setting in motion events that would help bring about the 

end of the Fourth Republic in 1958 and an attempted putsch against 

Charles De Gaulle in 1961, following his decision to grant Algerian 

independence. 

The defeat also sent the French Army, or at least some of its 

officers, in search of an explanation. How could a small, backward 

colony have defeated its metropolitan master? The answer to this 

question began to emerge in meetings and training sessions even 

before the war in Indochina had ended. It appeared in the pages 

of professional military journals shortly after Dien Bien Phu, as the 

French began another war, this time for control of Algeria, an integral 

part of France.8 The explanation for their defeat was that the French 

had encountered a new kind of warfare—revolutionary warfare. 

Unlike classical warfare, in which one military force sought to defeat 

another in order to gain control of territory, revolutionary warfare 

sought to control a territory by controlling its population. That was 

the point of Vietminh efforts to organize the Vietnamese people. 

The decisive fighting of the war took place not on the battlefield 

where the French had the advantage, but in the hearts and minds of 

the French and Vietnamese populations, where the Vietminh built 

an advantage through inducements and coercion. The Vietminh 

avoided pitched battles, hoping to exhaust not just the French Army, 

but the French people, while organizing the Vietnamese population 

so it could withstand a long struggle. 

The organizing effort had two components. One was political 

warfare. The Vietminh infiltrated all sections and levels of society 

through a system of committees. These committees paralleled 
the official political organizations at every level (hamlet, village, 

province, etc.) and included a series of social committees (of the 

young, the old, women, etc.). The result was a system that, as 

explained by Charles Lacheroy, one of the most famous of the 

French students of revolutionary warfare, allowed the Vietminh to 

take physical possession of people. But this component—political 

warfare—was not sufficient. The second required component of 

revolutionary warfare was psychological warfare. The Vietminh 

aimed to take control of people’s hopes and fears, loves and hates—

to take control of people’s souls. To do this, they used a variety of 

measures ranging from propaganda to brain-washing, supported 

by physical punishment. The French referred to these measures as 

psychological warfare. Political warfare and psychological warfare 

together made revolutionary warfare. Revolutionary warfare had 

allowed the Vietminh to beat a force that by conventional measures 

was far superior. Thus revolutionary warfare was itself a revolution 

in warfare.9

Having diagnosed the problem, French officers knew the remedy. 

The French military had to transform itself by adopting the techniques 

that had defeated them. In adopting these techniques, “The Army,” 

explained a French officer, “was thinking only of turning against an 

enemy the arms that he used. What could be more normal in war?” 

Otherwise, he argued, the Army would simply fail to adapt itself to 

the kinds of struggles it would face in what he called the “era of the 

masses.”10

The French decision to imitate the Vietminh provides a good 

example of the process by which conventions are established. In 

this case, of course, the convention at issue was one that challenged 

conventional warfare as it had developed over several 100s of years 

of European history; but the process was the same as that which 

made the German Army the standard of excellence in the late 19th 

century European world: imitating the stronger. The conventionestablishing impulse pushing the French to take psychological 

warfare seriously in the early 1950s had been foreshadowed by the 

success the Americans and British had had with it during World 

War II. This success was all the more striking to the French because, 

prior to World War II, neither the British nor the French had any 

real psychological warfare nor even military information capability. 
French efforts during the war had trailed behind the larger and more 

sophisticated efforts of the British and Americans, but following 

World War II, the French were eager to develop an information 

and propaganda capability.11 Hence the French produced films to 

reeducate the German population in the French zone of control and, 

in 1946–47, established French army offices to provide information 

to the public on the Army’s activities and to look after its morale. 

These were modeled on similar offices in the U.S. Army. 

An important event in the developing French interest in the 

psychological aspect of warfare was the struggle over French 

involvement in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). 

The French Communist Party, a powerful player in French politics, 

opposed French entry into the North Atlantic Treaty. The French 

government came to believe it necessary not merely to react to 

communist propaganda hostile to the treaty, but to sell the treaty 

proactively to the French people and to deflect the subversive effects 

of the propaganda on the people and the Army. To accomplish this, 

the French government used what it called “psychological action.” 

Psychological action consisted of measures taken to influence 

friends; psychological warfare was measures taken to influence or 

intimidate enemies. In February 1950, for example, the Minister of 

Defense ordered the chiefs of the three military services to counter 

actions by the Communist Party that were contrary to the national 

defense. A few months later, the French government published a 

decree that gave to the Ministry of Defense the responsibility for 

assisting the government with psychological action as it pertained to 

issues of national defense. This was the first time that a psychological 

function had been assigned to the Ministry. In 1952 the government 

set up an interministerial committee that was supposed to develop a 

doctrine for psychological action. Since this task appeared to mean, 

at least to some involved, establishing the principles upon which 

public support for national defense would rest, it was set aside as too 

political. The committee worked on other issues instead. A further 

step in the institutionalization of psychological action was taken 

in November 1952 when the Minister of Defense set up a separate 

office of psychological action and information. For the first time, 

the military now had personnel designated as “psychological action 

officers.”12
The Rise to Preeminence of Revolutionary Warfare.

The military took much of the initiative in conceptualizing and 

institutionalizing psychological action, psychological warfare, 

and the broader concept of revolutionary warfare. It established 

a psychological warfare course at the École de Guerre in 1954 to 

train French officers to work on psychological operations at Allied 

headquarters. This was followed by the establishment in 1955 of 

psychological action sections at Army headquarters to replace an 

office of morale and information. A month later, the military established psychological action offices at various levels of command 

in the 10th military region (Algeria). In 1956, the military set up 

a psychological warfare training center in Paris, and introduced 

psychological warfare doctrine into its educational system to prepare 

its officers for the new mode of warfare and its use in Algeria. In the 

same year, it also organized four loudspeaker and leaflet companies, 

dispatching three of them to Algeria, and arranged for officers 

who had survived the Vietminh prison camps to travel throughout 

Algeria, teaching the principles of psychological warfare.13

As this activity on the part of the military continued, a new 

government came into office in January 1956. The Defense Minister 

was Maurice Bourgés-Maunoury. Sympathetic to the doctrines of 

revolutionary warfare and psychological operations, he endorsed 

and made official the initiatives the French military already had 

taken. On January 23, 1956, Bourgés-Maunoury set up a psychological 

action and warfare committee within the Army Chief of Staff’s office. 

The same day, Charles Lacheroy was attached to the headquarters 

staff as the officer in charge of psychological operations. A month 

later, when the committee met for the first time with General Ely, the 

new Chief of Staff, as its chairman, Lacheroy assumed responsibility 

for the committee. In April, Bourgés-Maunoury created an 

information and psychological action office, with Lacheroy as its 

head, attached directly to the office of the Minister of Defense. In 

May 1956, Lacheroy’s committee considered and approved the idea 

of creating military staff organizations in Algeria to be responsible 

for psychological warfare, the soon-to-be-famous “5eme bureaux.” 

These offices were, in principle, equivalent in authority to the other 
10

Bureaus of the French Army, such as those for operations (3eme 

Bureau) or logistics (4eme Bureau). Establishing a 5eme bureau in 

Algeria gave psychological warfare a stronger institutional basis. For 

example, once the office was set up, it took charge of the Center for 

Training and Preparation in Counter-Guerrilla Warfare in Algeria, 

previously under the control of the 3eme bureau, which had been on 

the verge of closing the Center.14

The official sanctioning of revolutionary and psychological 

warfare is clear in remarks that Bourgés-Maunoury published in 

the Revue militaire d’information in July 1956. The Minister began by 

acknowledging that France was undertaking a policy of reform in 

Algeria, but that these reforms should not be seen as concessions to 

the terrorists. They were not a sign of weakness but of the strength 

of France’s longstanding commitment to Algeria, a commitment that 

made failure there unthinkable, according to the Minister. Before 

turning to the role of the Army in the conflict, he acknowledged 

the sacrifices that “the great national effort” required of France and 

her citizens. He described France’s Army in Algeria as an Army 

of pacification. The Army thus had a new role, according to the 

Minister, a role marked by the evolution of the military art over the 

preceding 20 years. This new role was necessary because the rebels 

in Algeria were practicing psychological and revolutionary warfare. 

France’s Army was adapting itself to these new modes of warfare, 

the minister contended, new modes he was sure would appear in 

other conflicts. The result was that France no longer had an Army 

only of soldiers, but one of builders, doctors, and pioneers as well, an 

Army of propaganda and an Army in contact with the population.15

Bourgés-Maunoury’s article in the Revue militaire shows the 

degree to which he had accepted both the diagnosis and the remedy 

that theorists of revolutionary warfare offered: the struggle in Algeria 

was over the loyalty of the Algerian people; the key to victory was 

not defeating an enemy force or seizing territory, but winning that 

loyalty. Further evidence of both the importance of revolutionary 

and psychological warfare and its penetration of the French defense 

establishment emerged in 1957. In July 1957, Chief of Staff Ely 

approved and Bourgés-Maunoury, now Prime Minister, signed a 

directive on psychological action. The directive aimed to define the 
11

general principles of “the psychological arm,” specify responsibilities 

with regard to psychological warfare, and review the tools that this 

new kind of warfare provided commanders. In November 1957, 

the Commander of the Army Corps in Algeria presented the new 

doctrine to France’s allies at a meeting at Supreme Headquarters 

Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). By the end of 1957, psychological 

warfare staff offices were in place in the headquarters of the French 

Army, in all the military regions, and in French forces in Germany.16

The existence of 5eme bureaux gave psychological warfare a status 

comparable to that of the traditional organizations and activities of 

French military life. 

The publication of the “Directive on the Psychological Arm” 

and its presentation to SHAPE represent for the French military the 

fullest acceptance achieved by the doctrine of revolutionary warfare 

and its accompanying understanding of psychological warfare. In 

different ways, both the Directive and the presentation show clear 

debts to the writings of the revolutionary warfare theorists; one of 

the most prominent of these, Jacques Hogard, was an author of the 

Directive. The Directive discussed the geopolitical situation only in 

general terms. It acknowledged that atomic weapons had changed 

both warfare, by making it almost unthinkable, and politics, by 

increasing the burden of fear that the average citizen had to support. 

It asserted that France was on the side of those struggling for 

freedom in the world. It used the notion of revolutionary warfare 

(which it, like the revolutionary warfare theorists, characterized as 

“permanent, universal, and total”) as the framework for discussing 

psychological action and psychological warfare. It distinguished 

these two, as we have noted, according to their targets, the former 

used against friends, the latter against enemies. Both were needed to 

counter revolutionary warfare. To prevail, the government and the 

military had to win hearts and souls in France and overseas. 

The Directive then discussed at length the tactics, techniques, 

and procedures of psychological action and psychological warfare, 

carefully distinguishing the two and what was permitted in each. 

The presentation to SHAPE gave a more detailed analysis of the 

geopolitical situation, dwelling on the struggle between communism 

and freedom in the world, the advance of communism toward world 
12

domination, and the betrayal of France by some of its allies (the United 

States and Great Britain), who recently had sent arms to Tunisia, 

arms that the French were certain would end up in Algeria. The 

advance of communism, the presentation argued, was occurring by 

an indirect route made necessary, in part, by the presence of nuclear 

weapons on both sides, which made traditional large-scale warfare 

too risky. The presentation avoided detailed discussion of tactics and 

techniques. Like the Directive and the revolutionary war theorists, 

however, it saw revolutionary warfare as the key threat to freedom 

in the world and argued that the objective of this kind of warfare 

was not control of territory, as was the case in classic warfare, but 

control of populations. It thus saw psychological warfare as central 

to the defense of freedom and the West.17

What accounts for the rapid rise to prominence in France of 

revolutionary and psychological warfare? Most discussions of 

innovation assume that institutions generally resist change. The 

military often is thought to be particularly resistant to change, yet in 

this case much of the impetus for change came from within the ranks 

of the French Army. Moreover, the proponents of revolutionary 

warfare were telling their colleagues in the French military that it 

had to change root and branch. Bourgés-Maunoury’s description of 

the French Army in Algeria as one of builders, doctors, and pioneers 

makes clear the extent of the transformation required. Rather than 

destroying enemy forces, the French military would be building 

schools and improving public health. 

Analysts and historians have suggested a number of explanations 

for the rapid acceptance of revolutionary and psychological warfare. 

For example, one argues that these theories received wide support 

because they allowed France to explain why it should keep its empire 

and its mission civilatrice after World War II, when the dominant 

opinion among its allies was that such colonial posturing should 

be abandoned. He also argues that revolutionary warfare allowed 

the French to regard themselves as important despite their recent 

defeats and lack of nuclear weapons. Unlike the nuclear-armed 

British and Americans, the French had faced and now understood 

the new warfare. Finally, he argues that revolutionary warfare 

theory gave to the French Army a privileged position in the French 
13

defense establishment vis-á-vis the Air Force and the Navy, and to its 

exponents a privileged position in the Army.18 The emphasis in this 

analysis is not on the intrinsic merits or demerits of the new doctrine, 

but on the way it served to protect vested interests, either France’s 

or the French Army’s. According to this view, the new doctrine 

called for innovation and transformation, but in doing so, protected 

established interests and therefore was accepted widely within the 

Army, contrary to our expectations about military establishments 

and innovations. 

Of these interest-based arguments for the adoption of 

revolutionary warfare doctrine, the most plausible is the notion that 

the new doctrine transformed what really was just colonial warfare, 

something France’s allies would not support, into a new mode of 

warfare critical to the survival of the West, which France’s allies 

presumably would be eager to support. Yet, even this argument 

seems suspect, since the partisans of revolutionary warfare continued 

to adhere to the doctrine, even after the Allies refused to accept 

what the commander of the Algerian Army Corps, General Allard, 

presented to them at SHAPE. What purpose did the new doctrine 

serve once it had failed to win Allied support? One possible selfinterested purpose was to give the Army a special position in the 

French military establishment, to compensate it for the presumed 

Naval and Air Force monopoly over nuclear weapons. The advent of 

nuclear weapons did contribute to the development and acceptance 

of revolutionary warfare theory. Its partisans argued, as General 

Allard did, that the new weapons meant that traditional wars could 

no longer be fought, and aggression would now take the indirect route 

of revolutionary warfare. We today may as well take this argument at 

face value. It has come to be generally accepted; historical experience 

over the past 50 years or so supports it. It was not simply a ruse to 

maintain relevance for the Army or some Army personnel as nuclear 

weapons developed.

It is true that interest in revolutionary warfare doctrine developed 

at the same time as, though more quickly than, the interest in nuclear 

weapons. This might suggest that the development of revolutionary 

warfare theory was the Army’s response to this internal or interservice 

threat to its resources and prestige. The French, however, were 
14

rearming at the same time as they developed nuclear weapons, so 

the interest in nuclear weapons did not necessarily disadvantage the 

Army in the fight for resources. In addition, many of those who were 

prominent supporters of revolutionary warfare were from technical 

fields in the military or from the Air Force. If preferment was what 

they wanted, then support for nuclear weapons or other modern 

technologies would have provided it. Yet, they chose to support 

revolutionary warfare. 

Moreover, if compensation for lack of a nuclear role explains 

support for revolutionary warfare among certain officers, how do 

we explain support for this doctrine among civilians? Clearly, the 

position of political figures was not threatened by the development 

of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, if the French Army had wanted 

to assure its significance alongside the Navy and Air Force, it could 

have emphasized its importance in the defense of Europe and of 

metropolitan France. These were traditional roles, unlike the efforts 

revolutionary warfare seemed to call for, which tended to turn the 

Army into a kind of peace corps, as Bourgés-Maunoury’s description 

of the Army in Algeria makes clear. The traditional role in Europe was, 

in fact, one that many in the Army chose and supported throughout 

the days of revolutionary warfare. For example, a prominent Army 

general resigned in 1956 over the decision by Bourgés-Maunoury to 

break up mechanized units in Germany in order to send them to 

Algeria. Finally, if it is true that junior officers supported revolutionary 

warfare doctrine because they thought it would enhance their 

position in the Army, how do we explain the young officers who did 

not support it? Presumably, they hoped for advantage in promotion 

just as did those who supported revolutionary warfare, so this motive 

alone does not account for support of the new doctrine.19

Generally speaking, there appear to be no simply self-interested 

motives sufficient to explain the rise and spread of revolutionary 

warfare doctrine among the French military. While it is no doubt 

true that some officers were attracted to revolutionary warfare 

doctrine because it appeared to preserve the human element in 

warfare in a “push-button” age, the new doctrine did not appeal 

only to nontechnicians who wished to prevent a loss of status to the 

technicians of a modern Army. The most important although not 
15

sole prompter of support for the new doctrine appears to have been 

the experience of engaging in revolutionary warfare, particularly 

in Indochina. The war in Indochina had a profound effect on those 

who fought in it. Among other things, it caused younger officers to 

question the accepted ways of doing things in the French military, 

particularly the unsuitability of its methods for the war in Indochina. 

It created in the younger generation a tendency to question the 

Army’s habits and traditions, including, ultimately, its traditional 

subservience to civil authority. But before that extreme had been 

reached, it created a disposition to accept new doctrine and a desire 

among many of the best officers for innovation in and renovation of 

the military. Concerned with the defense of France and its interests, 

soldiers turned to revolutionary and psychological warfare doctrine 

in response to a serious threat. In other words, they responded 

as professionals, as individuals with a sense of themselves as an 

independent self-regulating group dedicated to something beside 

their self-interest. That “something” was the defense of France. An 

event so unexpected as the French defeat in Indochina by an inferior 

force cried out for an explanation, particularly as the same problem 

seemed to be developing in Algeria. Revolutionary warfare theory 

supplied that explanation.20

We gain another perspective on the acceptance of revolutionary 

warfare theory by considering why it might have appealed to those 

who had not participated in the Indochina War (only about 40 

percent of French officers did). Antoine Argoud, for example, one 

of the leading exponents of the new doctrine, did not fight there. In 

these cases, the success the new doctrine achieved appears due to its 

plausibility as a diagnosis of what had gone wrong in Indochina and, 

in the early stages, what was going wrong in Algeria. Acceptance 

was facilitated, in part, because it was possible to see the emphasis on 

working with the population, so prominent in revolutionary warfare 

doctrine, as similar to the methods of French colonial warfare in the 

19th and early 20th centuries pioneered by Lyautey and Gallieni. 

According to these two colonial soldiers, attacks on rebels or bandits 

were supposed to be followed by constructive work in the colony 

that would tie the local population to France. Such a combined 

approach resembled revolutionary warfare doctrine. Although the 
16

Army’s instinct in Algeria may have been to attack and destroy the 

rebels, some civilian and military leaders came to see the need for a 

more constructive approach. This environment favored the growing 

acceptance of revolutionary warfare theory.21 As we have noted, 

Defense Minister Bourgés-Maunoury represented France’s reform 

efforts in Algeria as a mere continuation of France’s historic mission 

there (the reforms “vont dans le sens de l’histoire”). This patina of 

tradition may have helped France’s military professionals accept 

revolutionary warfare as essential to the defense of France.

Two other factors appear to have worked in favor of the adoption 

of the new doctrine. First, the United States pressured the French 

to do something about communist influence in France, particularly 

as to the communist opposition to NATO. French politicians were 

themselves concerned with the communists and sought a way to 

counter them. This opened the way for doctrines of psychological 

action. Indeed, influencing French opinion and attitudes was 

part of the program of revolutionary warfare proponents. If the 

Vietminh won because they organized or politicized Vietnamese 

society, then, as some revolutionary warfare theorists contended, 

the French government or the military had to organize or politicize 

French society. Such thinking was part of the background that made 

acceptable to some military officers the direct involvement of the 

military in French politics, leading to the attempted putsch against 

de Gaulle. As noted earlier, in 1952 the interministerial committee 

had thought producing a doctrine on psychological operations was 

“too political” and abandoned the effort. But only 9 years later, the 

military tried to overthrow the government.

Second, the new understanding of the importance of unconventional warfare developed because some politicians, preeminently 

Bourgés-Maunoury, saw revolutionary and psychological warfare 

theories as cures for the problem of Algeria. Unlike the traditional 

methods of repression that the Army first employed, the new 

doctrines offered at least hope that some way could be found to deal 

with the problem of Algeria in an acceptable way. One analyst has 

argued that the politicians did not have confidence in France’s general 

officers because they did not think the old guard military understood 

the new doctrine. Another analyst says of “the military elite” that 
17

it “proved itself, once again, too lethargic and unimaginative to 

understand changing modes of warfare,” perhaps because it had too 

much invested in established ways.22 Senior civilian decisionmakers 

looked to younger officers, therefore, who were proponents of 

revolutionary warfare doctrine. These civilians supported the 

doctrine and its proponents with money and favored positions in 

France’s military and defense institutions. As the movement grew 

from below, nurtured by politicians, some general officers became 

converts to the cause, with their support helping to further embed 

revolutionary warfare in the French defense establishment.23

The Fall of Revolutionary Warfare.

Recalling the rise of revolutionary and psychological warfare 

theories makes clear that although these theories gained wide 

support, neither won universal acceptance in the French officer 

corps or among civilians. As noted, the majority of French officers 

had not served in Indochina. Many of them, therefore, did not have 

the personal interest in or commitment to the new doctrine that the 

Indochina veterans had. This explains perhaps why the doctrine 

experienced a fall as rapid as its rise, once its political implications 

became apparent. Revolutionary warfare in Algeria led to the use 

of torture and other techniques (e.g., “brainwashing”) that created 

political problems for the Army in France. The association of so many 

of the leading theorists with the political involvement of the Army in 

1958 and 1961 also discredited theory within the military. When de 

Gaulle, who had never been a supporter of revolutionary warfare, 

came to power, he extracted France from Algeria and won the Army’s 

support for a more conventional military role.24 Revolutionary and 

psychological warfare theories lost their place in French military 

life. 

The political problems outside the Army generated by the new 

doctrine were not the only reason it failed to maintain its position 

in French military life. The new doctrine generated problems within 

the military as well. To the new doctrine’s partisans, its broad scope 

meant that psychological action and warfare became not adjuncts 

to national defense but its leading element. The “Directive on the 
18

Psychological Arm” issued in 1957 all but made this argument 

explicitly. It stated that “the final end of military operations was 

of a psychological order” and that “man, in his heart and spirit, is 

the essential objective of war and of psychological action.” If it is 

man’s heart and spirit that are the essential objectives of war, and 

if these are the domain of psychological action and warfare, then 

it would follow that the psychological arm is the heart and soul 

of warfare. The Directive even argued that nuclear warfare was a 

psychological arm because it could produce disarray in the souls of 

men. Comments in a similar vein, that “war in the common sense 

of the term [is] . . . an episode of psychological warfare,” were 

heard in training and education sessions at French military schools. 

These theoretical implications were matched by practical ambitions. 

Lacheroy came to his new responsibilities with a plan to undertake 

“a great national reorganization.” In Algeria, the “5eme Bureaux” 

acquired “responsibilities that were far removed from their original 

mission.”25

The presumptions of the new doctrine and its growing influence 

bred resentment, opposition, and efforts to curtail it. In March 

1957, for example, the Chief of Staff’s office informed Lacheroy’s 

committee that it could not disseminate lessons learned unless they 

were approved by the Chief’s office. In Algeria, too, the 10th Military 

District resisted efforts by the psychological warriors in Paris to issue 

instructions in response to events. Psychological action was seen 

as a fad and was criticized for some of its ineffective experimental 

techniques. A military officer writing in 1960 remarked that certain 

officers believed they could win battles with loudspeakers and 

schools. By the beginning of 1960 in Algeria, one analyst reports, 

“senior officers as well as units in the field . . . were showing 

considerable hostility toward the staffs of the 5es Bureaux.”26

Some of this resistance was no doubt the typical way in which 

bureaucracies tend to resist change. That ministers were constantly 

encouraging the chiefs of the military staff to take seriously and 

promote the tenets of psychological warfare shows that such resistance continued to exist. As late as 1958, communiqués suggest that 

the tenets of the new doctrine had not penetrated everywhere 

or deeply in the Army. As its military supporters tried to put the 
19

new doctrine into practice, one analyst noted that they found 

themselves free of control by politicians from above but blocked 

by the military bureaucracy below. The effectiveness of the new 

doctrine, he remarked, would have been enhanced had the situation 

been reversed. In addition to these typical problems, adoption of the 

new doctrine was impeded by a lack of resources, which rendered 

premature the rush to put the doctrine into practice. The result was 

that psychological warfare was declared the true warfare without 

sufficient resources to make good the claim. For example, the Office 

of Information and Psychological Action that Bourgés-Maunoury 

established in April 1956 was at the center of power, attached directly 

to the office of the Minister of Defense. But for lack of personnel, it 

had to act through civilian or military offices over which it had no 

control. Worse, haste produced insufficiently trained practitioners, 

whose ineptitude discredited the newly proclaimed queen of 

battle.27

While the support of politicians was a major cause of the 

institutionalization of revolutionary warfare doctrine, the political 

disarray of the Fourth Republic was also one of the reasons this 

innovation failed. The new doctrine needed a firmer guiding hand 

and more support than the Fourth Republic’s politicians were able to 

muster. It often was the political figures in the defense establishment 

who were best positioned among the civilian and military supporters 

of revolutionary warfare to promote the new doctrine, but they 

changed frequently. The Fourth Republic had 21 changes of Prime 

Minister in 12 years. The organization of the defense establishment 

suffered from a similar lack of stability. From 1945 to 1962, according 

to one count, there were at least 25 reforms of French defense 

structures, averaging one every 8 months. By another count, there 

were 15 reorganizations between 1946 and 1958.28

Within the military, the problem the new doctrine had to 

overcome was, in a sense, less complicated but more difficult. 

Revolutionary and psychological warfare were not just innovations. 

They represented, according to their proponents, a revolution in 

warfare to which France and the West had to adapt, or they would 

perish. This amounted, of course, to the claim that the French military 

had to change in fundamental ways. The Army in Algeria, Bourgés-
20

Maunoury announced, was a new kind of Army, because the military 

art had evolved. But it was not a new Army, and many in the Army 

remained not very evolved. In 1954, a decorated officer assigned 

to a public information position, an important job in the eyes of 

revolutionary warfare theorists, showed his medals to another officer, 

saying, “With these, I had a right to hope for something better.”29

The “paras,” elite light infantry, who took pride in their ability to 

track down and kill the enemy, often clashed with the “Specialized 

Administrative Sections,” French military personnel who worked 

with the Algerians and performed what the U.S. military would call 

civil affairs functions. These are just a few of the indications that 

many in the Army resisted the new doctrine because it required them 

to leave behind the conventional understanding of themselves, not 

only with regard to the role of the Army in politics, but with regard 

to the roles and missions of the Army in national defense.30

Just as support for the doctrine of revolutionary warfare was 

not simply self-interested but the result of professional concern 

for the safety of France, so should we conclude that attachment 

to conventional warfare among French officers was not merely an 

irrational longing for traditions. An officer in the French military 

might agree that the kind of warfare that defeated France in 

Indochina and appeared to be defeating it in Algeria was a threat to 

France, without agreeing that it was the only or most serious threat. 

As we have seen in the case of the general officer who resigned 

when armored units in Germany were broken up for the sake of the 

war in Algeria, opposition to revolutionary warfare could reflect a 

different evaluation of the external threats that France faced. Officers 

also could disagree over evolutions of the internal threats to France: 

the threat was not great enough to justify the innovation of military 

psychological action targeted at Frenchmen. One might well conclude 

that the conventional understanding of warfare and of civil-military 

relations was most appropriate for France’s situation. In any case, 

no matter how reasoned, the attachment to conventional ways of 

thought and action was the most important cause for the failure 

of revolutionary and psychological warfare. These innovations 

required the transformation of the French Army. However useful 

the innovation, the transformation they implied was not acceptable 
21

to enough French officers or civilian officials to allow the innovation 

to endure.

THE BRITISH

The British experience with political or psychological warfare 

and insurgency offers a sharp contrast to the French experience with 

revolutionary warfare. We will consider first the development in 

Britain of political warfare, and then turn to the better known topic 

of British counterinsurgency doctrine. 

Political Warfare.

In 1950, as the French were just beginning to consider the 

importance of psychological warfare, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart 

reflected on the long British experience with that mode of war in a 

lecture at the Royal United Service Institution (RUSI). Lockhart, who 

had worked as a spy for the British in Moscow during the Russian 

revolution, had been the Director General of the Political Warfare 

Executive, the agency of the British government that handled 

propaganda abroad, during World War II. In his talk, Lockhart 

stressed that political warfare, “or psychological warfare as the 

Americans call it,” was a regretful necessity: “I regard the modern 

form of political warfare as a necessary evil in war-time and as one 

of the greatest menaces to our civilization and standards of conduct 

in peace-time.” Yet, Great Britain could not set aside this menacing 

technique in the cold war, a period of “neither peace nor war,” 

because political warfare was being used against Britain every day 

“with great violence and cynical disregard for the truth.” Indeed, 

Lockhart contended, political warfare was “the principal weapon of 

the cold war.” Britain, like other democracies, was at a disadvantage 

in waging political warfare against a totalitarian enemy because its 

freedom could be exploited by that enemy, whereas the enemy’s 

repression and secrecy largely were impenetrable. Still, Lockhart 

insisted that Britain should not try to remedy these disadvantages by 

“imitating the methods of the totalitarians.” In other words, political 

warfare, as practiced by Britain, should occur within the constraints 

on government that a free society required. This was not the only 
22

constraint under which it should operate, according to Lockhart. 

Political warfare, he told his audience, was not an independent force 

or power but a mere “handmaid of official policy and strategy.”31

Two years after his own lecture, Lockhart was on hand at the RUSI 

to introduce another political warfare expert, Richard Crossman. 

Among other things, Crossman, then a Member of Parliament, had 

been the Assistant Chief of the Psychological Warfare Department, 

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), in 

1944–45. In his lecture and another given at the same location in 1953, 

Crossman presented political warfare in much the same terms as had 

Lockhart. He insisted that it could not produce results on its own. To 

be effective, political warfare had to be coordinated with diplomatic 

and military activity and subordinated to some overarching strategy. 

Citing examples from World War II where political warfare had failed 

when used on its own, he remarked that this was one of the principal 

lessons he had learned in the war. With regard to political warfare 

in the Cold War, Crossman argued that the totalitarian states were 

defined by the fact that they were always at war. This meant that, 

compared to the democracies, the totalitarian states had a greater 

unity of purpose. 

For Crossman, this, in turn, meant that it was easier for the 

totalitarian states to mount effective political warfare campaigns. 

As he said to a questioner, “In peace-time, you will not be able to 

make a democrat accept the totalitarian concept that one overriding 

objective must be followed by everybody.” Far from seeing this 

difference between democracies and totalitarians as a liability or 

believing that it required the democracies to copy the methods of 

the totalitarians, Crossman saw the diversity of viewpoints in a 

democracy as an advantage. Crossman told his audience that by 

reporting “a bitter controversy” in a democracy one could “give an 

example to the enemy which is highly subversive.” He concluded 

his lecture by arguing for a limited use of psychological warfare, 

one appropriate for a democracy in peacetime, and cautioned his 

audience that, unless Britain was willing to become totalitarian, an 

absurd idea, it could not duplicate what Russia could do in this new 

mode of warfare. It is enough, he said, “to tell the truth, to build up 

credibility, [and] to understand our purpose.”32
23

The views of these two political warfare experts contrast 

sharply with the understanding of psychological warfare that was 

emerging in France. First, unlike French theorists, both Lockhart 

and Crossman argued that the British should not imitate their 

enemies, even though both Crossman and Lockhart admitted that 

these totalitarian enemies had distinct advantages in political or 

psychological warfare. Furthermore, although both men agreed that, 

during war, measures may be necessary that would be unacceptable 

during peacetime and that the Cold War was something between 

peace and war, neither argued for an unconstrained use of political 

warfare. Even Crossman, who acknowledged, as the French did, 

that the totalitarians were permanently at war, refused to conclude, 

unlike many French theorists, that Britain or the democracies had to 

respond in kind. To both of these men, imitating the enemy would 

have surrendered what success at political warfare was meant to 

preserve, the British way of life that included a commitment to civil 

liberties and limited government. To both Lockhart and Crossman, 

political warfare remained a regretful necessity.

In trying to fashion a political warfare weapon compatible with the 

British view of free government, Lockhart and Crossman represented 

mainstream British thinking. During the 1930s, as the British secretly 

planned for the propaganda component of a future world war, they 

refused to imitate what the Germans were doing, even though they 

acknowledged that the Germans excelled at propaganda. After 

World War II, when the British faced a string of internal conflicts 

in their colonies, they remained generally committed to British free 

speech traditions. During the Malaya Emergency, the Colonial Office 

refused to suppress press freedoms in Malaya because such a move 

would contradict “the longstanding tradition of leaving opinion free 

from government regulation.”33 We know of no British student of 

political warfare who ever suggested, as did French theorists, that 

winning the struggle against the totalitarians required adopting 

their methods.

The second way in which the British political warfare experts 

differed from their French counterparts was in their assessment of 

the importance of this technique. French doctrine on psychological 

warfare, we recall, implied that it was, in fact, the heart and soul 
24

of modern warfare. Lockhart called political warfare “the principal 

weapon of the cold war” but did not claim that it was the essence of 

warfare. His insistence that political warfare had to be subordinate 

to policy and strategy suggests that he saw political warfare as just 

another weapon, one particularly suited to the situation of “not 

peace, not war” that existed between the Western democracies and 

the Warsaw Pact. Crossman, too, remarked that political warfare had 

to be subordinate to some overarching strategy if it were to succeed. 

Rather than being the heart and soul of warfare, as the French 

doctrine on psychological warfare claimed, Lockhart and Crossman 

saw it as only another tool to carry on the fight. 

Perhaps the principal cause of the differing British and French 

views of psychological warfare was the difference in their level of 

experience with it. The British were long familiar with psychological 

warfare and had faced an array of issues associated with it. The 

British had used political warfare effectively in World War I, or so 

they and their enemies thought. Although the British government 

dismantled its political warfare capability when the war ended, it 

almost immediately began to rebuild it. The first efforts were the 

introduction of internationally oriented press attachés at some 

British Embassies, initiatives to lure tourists to Great Britain, and 

initiating BBC foreign language broadcasts in the late 1930s. As 

official documents make clear, the point of these efforts, especially 

in response to the increasing power of totalitarianism, was to serve 

national interests by promoting British prestige and influence in the 

world.34 The deliberate effort to use information to promote national 

interests in the emerging struggle with the totalitarian powers 

defined these efforts as political warfare. 

In addition to these various overt efforts, by 1938 the British had 

been trying secretly for several years to prepare to use propaganda 

in a possible war with Germany. The initial impetus came from 

the Air Ministry in 1935. As the military planned for a possible 

conflict with Italy over Abyssinia that year, the questions of both 

censorship and propaganda arose. This led a press attaché in the 

Ministry to consider the issue in the context of a conflict larger 

than a clash in Africa. He wrote a memorandum arguing that the 

organization of propaganda in World War I had been deficient and 

should be improved if another such war broke out. This led to the 
25

establishment of an interministerial committee to consider the issue 

and eventually to plan for the possibility of war. The French had no 

comparable experience. Between the World Wars, they did nothing 

to develop a political warfare capability. A British civil servant sent 

to coordinate a propaganda plan with the French in 1939 reported 

that such coordination was impossible “because the French had no 

plan.”35

Although the British did some planning, they also did a good 

deal of bickering. Infighting among the different ministries and 

organizations involved in information and propaganda efforts 

continued even through the first year or so of World War II.36

This bickering and infighting arose from the petty jealousies, turf 

fights, and resource conflicts typical of bureaucratic squabbling, but 

these fights also involved substantive issues, many of which the U.S 

Government continues to wrestle with. Everyone seemed to agree 

that effective political warfare required the coordination of all sources 

of information. But did that mean that the BBC, for example, should 

be run by the same organization that disseminated disinformation 

to enemy countries? Would this not hopelessly compromise the 

reputation for truthfulness that made the BBC so effective? If one 

distinguished between information and propaganda, the latter of 

which required hiding its source, should propaganda be handled by 

a separate ministry or combined with the organizations that carried 

out sabotage activities overseas, and which therefore had expertise 

in hiding the British hand? Since all these efforts were part of the 

more general effort to support British foreign policy, should not the 

foreign office have a key role or perhaps the directing role? But was 

the Foreign Office competent to direct such efforts? And what role 

should the military have? Did it not have its own interest in and 

need to exercise a propaganda function, as various officers argued 

in the 1930s?37 As British officials debated these questions, they were 

developing their understanding of political warfare, and how it fit 

into Britain’s political and institutional life. In the 1930s, the rise of 

the totalitarian powers prompted these discussions; they did not 

occur after a surprising and devastating defeat, such as the French 

suffered in Indochina, a defeat that might have encouraged a search 

for radical solutions.
26

When one compares the theorizing approach to psychological 

and revolutionary warfare of the French to the more practical, 

empirical approach of the British, one might be inclined to see this 

as a confirmation of national stereotypes. There is some truth to this 

view. Although some authors speculated about developments they 

thought were changing the nature of warfare,38 the British generally 

remained close to their experience. They tended not to claim that 

the changes they noticed were revolutionary or that responding to 

them required a fundamental break with British practice. These were 

also the views expressed by Lockhart and Crossman. Institutionally, 

as well, the British tended to operate in a recurring cycle. Seeing 

political warfare as a “regretful necessity,” the British would not 

devote resources to it until an external threat made that necessary. 

As soon as that threat disappeared, the government dismantled its 

political warfare capability, as it did after World Wars I and II. As 

a new threat appeared (Germany in the 1930s, the Soviet Union in 

the late 1940s and early 1950s), the government re-created that 

capability, incorporating a few changes based on past experience.39

By the time of the Cold War, the British had learned to keep the 

overt and covert parts of their information efforts separate but to 

try to coordinate them through interministerial committees. They 

had also, as represented by the lectures of Lockhart and Crossman, 

come to understand the dangers to democratic government inherent 

in psychological operations. One might characterize the British 

approach as adaptive rather than innovative, but the cumulative 

result was an institutional and doctrinal arrangement that allowed 

the British to use political warfare for the purposes and within the 

limits of democratic government. 

Counterinsurgency.

When we look at the development of what the British came to call 

counterinsurgency—what the French called revolutionary warfare—

we see a process and result similar to those occurring with political 

warfare.40 The British had been contending with border and internal 

security problems in their empire for generations by the time World 

War II began. Indeed, the British continued to deal with them during 

the war. What the British had learned through these efforts was 
27

compiled in such books as Colonel C. E. Callwell’s Small Wars: Their 

Principles and Practice and Charles Gwynn’s Imperial Policing. These 

books and a host of articles in military journals described operations 

against bandits or rebels who were operating as more or less selfcontained armed bands. Thus, in general, these books and articles 

emphasized military operations and not any larger political context. 

In imperial policing, political warfare was not very important. The 

tone is captured in Callwell’s remark that:

the most satisfactory way of bringing such foes to reason is by the rifle 

and the sword, for they understand this mode of warfare and respect it. 

Sometimes, however, the circumstances do not admit of it, and then their 

villages must be demolished and their crops and granaries destroyed; 

still it is unfortunate when this is the case.41

Not every author had quite Callwell’s starkly candid tone, but in 

addressing their imperial policing duties, the British tended to put 

the emphasis on effective military campaigning.

The British took this approach despite their experience in Ireland 

in 1919–21. There they had encountered something more than just 

self-contained armed bands. What they had fought in Ireland was 

an armed political movement, in which the armed force relied on the 

Irish people for support and intelligence and, in turn, helped form, 

sometimes coercively, the people’s political views and motivation. 

In essence, this was the phenomenon that the French would come to 

call revolutionary warfare. Against the Irish, the British finally did 

develop a political warfare or propaganda campaign. In the interwar 

period, the colonial conflicts the British engaged in were more like 

small wars or antibandit campaigns than political or revolutionary 

warfare. 

Some officers noted that changes were occurring—the rise 

of the masses, and therefore the development of mass politics, 

communication, and propaganda with their effects on world 

opinion—that would require a different response from the British. For 

example, when discussing the use of propaganda in guerrilla war in 

1927, one officer argued that “modern methods of communication” 

and what he described as the increased civilization of the Great 

Powers meant that the Great Powers could not respond to colonial 

insurrections with the ferocity they had used in the past. If they did so, 
28

guerrillas would use the new communication technology to exploit 

the more humane sentiment in the cities and the larger world to the 

disadvantage of those powers. So potent was this new combination 

of communication technology and sentiment, the officer argued, that 

it might even topple the metropolitan government. This gave the 

guerrillas a new and significant advantage over the Great Powers. 

The guerrillas gained another advantage by the invention of 

powerful weapons (automatic weapons and high explosives) that 

could be concealed easily on a person or in a city and therefore were 

well-suited to implement “the first principle of guerrilla war”—rapid 

concentration and dispersion.42 Despite these new developments, by 

and large, it was not until after World War II that the British, like the 

French, consistently faced armed political warfare in their overseas 

territories. 

As Timothy Llewellyn Jones has shown in painstaking detail,43

the British responded to this postwar conflict by drawing on their 

accumulated experience, modifying their practice in response to 

what they learned in each of their postwar counterinsurgency 

campaigns. What gradually emerged was the recognition that the 

postwar conflicts in the colonies were different from the rebellions or 

banditry of the past. The difference was that, inspired by nationalism 

and organized politically, the native populations of the colonies 

had changed from largely inert observers of British operations 

against rebels and bandits into decisive participants in the struggle. 

Recognition of this change did not come to the British at once. Nor 

did it seize the military or the government as a whole at any time 

until rather late in the process, if then. It dawned in a piecemeal 

and halting fashion. As the British worked themselves through 

a succession of campaigns, they came to see that force alone was 

no longer sufficient to deal with colonial conflict. They had to pay 

attention to the allegiance of the people. Psychological and political 

dimensions of the struggle were decisive.

The history of British colonial warfare and counterinsurgency is 

the story of how the British adapted to these changes. The learning 

process was halted temporarily by World War II, but picked up its 

pace after the war ended. Some officers, like Field Marshall Bernard 

Montgomery, who for a few of the immediate postwar years was 

Chief of the Imperial General staff, remained attached to traditional 
29

methods. When an officer who became an early convert to the 

new counterinsurgency methods explained the approach to him, 

Montgomery replied testily, “I cannot follow such reasoning.”44 Yet 

others, more and more as time passed, could. Hence, almost without 

knowing it, the British developed a successful approach to respond to 

insurgency. This included the key provisions of integrating civilian 

and military efforts; paying attention to information, public opinion, 

and propaganda or psychological operations; and limiting the use of 

force. 

In the case of both political warfare and counterinsurgency, no 

British theorist emerged declaring a revolution in warfare that would 

have challenged long-held views of the proper role of the British 

military or its relation to civil authority, as happened in France. 

On the contrary, both Crossman and Lockhart warned against 

such thinking. In the case of both counterinsurgency and political 

warfare, the British responded to changing external threats and 

enduring domestic constraints and then adapted their organizations 

and doctrine. The British Army was able to do this, in large measure, 

because it became a professional organization at the height of the 

British Empire when imperial duties required adaptation, and 

the geopolitical situation forced the Army to respond to a variety 

of circumstances and conflicts rather than focus on conventional 

warfare in Europe. Adaptability became part of the British military’s 

understanding of itself as a professional organization. 

This professional ethos developed with and through the 

intervention of civilians in military affairs and the involvement of the 

military in politics. Again, this explains, at least in part, the ability of 

the British to deal with forms of conflict like insurgency that have a 

decisive political component.45 As a practical matter, the adaptability 

of the British Army was in keeping with a somewhat self-deprecating, 

improvisational British national style, jauntily epitomized by 

Crossman in his remarks on political warfare. Describing how 

British efforts in this new method of warfare had changed in keeping 

with “the phases of any normal British campaign,” he said that the 

British “nearly always start by being defeated and nearly always 

end by occupying the enemy’s country.” Although almost willfully 

denying that they were doing anything new, and most certainly not 

revolutionary, the British were, in fact, over time devising enduring 
30

innovative responses to new kinds of warfare. A comparison of the 

French and British experiences suggests that innovation to meet 

unconventional threats is more likely to occur and take hold in a 

military that is less connected to proclamations of revolutionary 

change that threaten the military’s self-understanding. 

THE AMERICANS

Psychological Operations and Insurgency.

The American experience with psychological operations was 

more like the British experience than that of the French. The United 

States used psychological warfare techniques during World War I 

but demobilized this capability when the war ended; resurrected 

it during World War II but demobilized it again; and then quickly 

had to reconstitute it as the Cold War developed. The American 

experience also was like that of the British in that the need for 

psychological warfare was not seen as a response to a revolution in 

warfare. Initially, its proponents represented psychological warfare 

as a potentially useful adjunct to conventional arms. After World War 

II, as the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union developed, 

some came to see psychological or political warfare as a decisively 

important component of our national security strategy. More so than 

the British, however, from the moment psychological operations first 

appeared, the American military as an institution remained largely 

opposed or indifferent to them, and later to counterinsurgency, 

even though civilian officials and some in the military argued that 

insurgency was a new kind of warfare that required a transformation 

of the way the military fought. 

To get a sense of typical U.S. military attitudes toward psychological and unconventional warfare, and how deep-seated they are, 

we begin with some of the pre-Cold War military experience with 

these techniques, and then focus on the early Cold War years. 

Psychological Warfare in the World Wars.

American experience with psychological warfare or, more 

broadly, with the use of information to serve national interests, 
31

dates from World War I. President Woodrow Wilson established the 

Committee on Public Information 1 week after the declaration of war 

on Germany. Headed by a civilian, a former journalist, the committee 

included the Secretaries of State and War and the Navy Department. 

The purpose of the committee, never fully realized, was to coordinate 

the work of all federal agencies in the effort to build support for the 

war and American war aims at home and abroad, and to undermine 

support for the war within Germany itself. The military component 

of America’s information or propaganda effort grew from the work 

of the Committee. Heber Blankenhorn, a journalist and pacifist who 

worked on the Committee, came to believe that combat or tactical 

propaganda could play an important role in the war effort. In 

particular, he believed that President Wilson’s words promising selfdetermination, democracy, and justice might be used to undermine 

the morale of enemy soldiers, inducing them to surrender. He tried 

to get the Committee to produce such combat propaganda, but the 

Director of the Committee told Blankenhorn that such efforts were 

the responsibility of the military. 

Consequently, Blankenhorn approached a friend in the Army 

for help and eventually came into contact with the Chief of the 

Foreign Intelligence Branch in the Military Intelligence Service, 

Major Charles Mason. As Mason and Blankenhorn talked during 

January 1918, conversations that ultimately included the Chief of 

Military Intelligence, Blankenhorn succeeded in persuading the 

officers that the military should set up a propaganda section. When 

the intelligence service was reorganized as the Military Intelligence 

Branch in February 1918, it included the Psychological Subsection. 

Blankenhorn, directly commissioned as a captain, was placed in 

charge.46

Blankenhorn and members of his unit arrived in France in 

July 1918, having been told by the Secretary of War, who strongly 

supported psychological warfare, that they were to work only for 

the Commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General 

John “Black Jack” Pershing, and not for the Committee on Public 

Information. From July to the Armistice in November, Blankenhorn 

and his staff, working as part of the Expeditionary Force intelligence 

or G-2 staff, prepared millions of leaflets that were dropped by 
32

airplane or balloon on German lines. The official history of the 

Expeditionary Force claimed that 75 percent of enlisted prisoners of 

war “had believed Allied leaflets, particularly the American variety,” 

and offered anecdotal evidence that the leafleting did produce 

surrenders, as Blankenhorn had thought it would.47

Immediately following the Armistice, the Army disbanded its 

psychological and propaganda offices. Some of the practitioners 

from these offices were transferred to the Political Section of the 

Military Intelligence Bureau, but even this section was cut from 

the staff in 1925. The demise of psychological warfare occurred 

amidst a general demobilization, of course, but the rapidity with 

which the psychological warfare apparatus disappeared suggests a 

lack of appreciation for its contribution to the war effort. This lack 

of appreciation was evident even during the war. Blankenhorn, 

for example, had trouble getting airplanes to drop his leaflets and 

gas for the balloons to carry them. Propaganda and psychological 

warfare remained a matter of minor importance to the Army and 

the Expeditionary Force. The Army Air Service generally thought of 

leaflet-dropping as a low priority. For example, then Colonel Billy 

Mitchell, ordinarily regarded as a visionary, told Blankenhorn that 

propaganda had no place in combat operations. Ironically, given 

Mitchell’s own subsequent encounters with the Army’s judicial 

system, he even threatened to court-martial Blankenhorn if he 

continued to try to get pilots to carry the leaflets. Mitchell was not 

alone in his attitude toward psychological operations. One student 

of Blankenhorn’s efforts argues that the Army’s first psychological 

warrior succeeded despite “the general indifference toward 

unconventional warfare displayed by combat soldiers and their 

hesitancy, if not outright refusal, to consider its use in support of 

operations.”48

The neglect of psychological warfare continued throughout the 

interwar years. By the time the United States entered World War II, 

only one active duty officer, Charles Mason, Blankenhorn’s original 

collaborator and now a lieutenant colonel, had any experience in 

psychological warfare. His initial efforts in 1940 and 1941 to do 

some planning for psychological warfare met, in his own judgment, 

with indifference in the War Department. Blankenhorn himself, 
33

recalled to active duty at Mason’s request, found that the Army 

was reinventing the psychological warfare wheel and that he had 

to fight the same battles all over again, this time with an Army that 

was, in his opinion, even less willing to accept the potential utility of 

psychological activities than it had been during World War I.49

More serious efforts to develop a psychological warfare capability 

began in 1941 thanks to the efforts of Assistant Secretary of War 

John McCloy. Impressed by what he thought the Germans had 

accomplished with propaganda in the opening years of World War 

II—another example of how conventions are established—he pressed 

the Army to create an office that could plan for psychological warfare. 

This office, established in June 1941 with great secrecy (Mason was 

not informed of its existence), and its variously named successors, 

provided analysis of enemy propaganda and liaison with civilian 

offices involved in the information or propaganda effort. The Army 

also established its first tactical radio teams about this time (although 

they did not deploy until later in the war), and produced a training 

manual for combat propaganda and other publications, including a 

lessons-learned report that was intended for the combat theaters.50

German activities in Europe and Latin America increased 

interest in propaganda and public morale among officials and others 

outside the War and Navy Departments. Long concerned over both 

the intelligence he was receiving and the state of public morale, 

President Roosevelt appointed William Donovan as the Coordinator 

of Information in July 1941. In 1942, Donovan’s office was divided, 

in effect, into two components, the Office of War Information, 

responsible for both domestic and foreign information efforts 

(except for those in Latin America, which a separate committee 

handled), and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), under the Joint 

Staff, responsible for sabotage, subversion, guerrilla warfare, and, 

eventually, covert propaganda aimed at foreign audiences.51 The 

Army transferred its responsibility for psychological warfare to OSS 

in late 1942 and shut down its psychological warfare office. This move 

had the effect of decentralizing control of psychological warfare since 

OSS had no authority over theater commanders, who were now in 

effect operating without control from Washington. A year passed 

before the military opened a central office. It did so because C. D. 
34

Jackson, a civilian from the Office of War Information, who was then 

working as a deputy to the military commander of the Psychological 

Warfare Division, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary 

Force, presented papers to Assistant Secretary McCloy arguing for 

the central office. These papers and a series of military assessments 

of psychological warfare, which acknowledged its utility, led to 

the reestablishment of an Army psychological warfare office in 

late 1943. This office remained in existence throughout the war, its 

principal function being the coordination of military psychological 

warfare activities and liaison with the civilian agencies involved 

in psychological warfare efforts. Operations remained under the 

control of theater commanders, with varying degrees of success.52

The greatest problem psychological warfare faced during the war 

was the mixed reception it received from the conventional military. 

Some commanders valued it and wanted it used in their area of 

operations (e.g., Dwight Eisenhower); most did not. Admiral Chester 

Nimitz banned it. Negative views of psychological warfare reflected 

attitudes deeply bred into the military. Like the highly decorated 

French officer noted earlier, who was insulted to find himself 

assigned to a psychological operations job, one veteran colonel on 

Eisenhower’s staff who prided himself on being a tough cavalryman, 

was horrified, he reported, when Eisenhower asked him to take over 

command of the theater’s psychological operations. Another officer 

assigned to a psychological warfare unit reported that commanders 

saw the unit as a nuisance, while enlisted personnel considered it 

a joke. A high-ranking officer reportedly remarked that “the Army 

exists for the purpose of killing our enemies, not for persuading or 

arguing them out of the war.” Even the commander of Eisenhower’s 

psychological warfare effort wanted to command combat troops. 

After getting the chance during a leaflet run to fire the guns on a 

B-17, he remarked that doing so made him feel “like a soldier 

again.” Sometimes when psychological warfare demonstrated its 

effectiveness, it mitigated such ingrained attitudes somewhat, but 

the attitudes were a persistent characteristic of the American military 

outlook.53

Despite the prejudice against psychological warfare, it 

undoubtedly contributed to the Allied victory in World War II and 

consequently earned some support within both military and civilian 
35

agencies of the government. One of the first analysts of America’s 

psychological warfare efforts, who had access to the relevant officials 

and documentary evidence, concluded that there was significant 

support for psychological warfare across the government, if not in 

the military itself, by the end of the war. This support, however, 

tended to manifest itself in resourcing public relations or information 

offices. For example, in the summer of 1945, both the State and War 

Departments informed Congress that funding for the Office of War 

Information should continue (State was particularly concerned 

to keep the Voice of America going). Generals Eisenhower and 

Marshall told Congress that the U.S. occupation forces in Germany 

and Japan would have to provide motion pictures, radio, news, 

and magazines to the Germans and Japanese. The War Department 

maintained a public information office. Support for propaganda or 

tactical psychological operations tended to be more circumscribed, 

although some who supported these activities were influential. At the 

conclusion of the war, Eisenhower offered a positive assessment of 

psychological warfare, remarking that “without doubt, psychological 

warfare had proved its right to a place of dignity in our military 

arsenal.”54

Psychological Operations in the Cold War.

The support enjoyed by psychological operations and information 

campaigns was not enough to prevent their disappearance shortly 

after the war. President Harry Truman authorized closing the Office 

of War Information as soon as the war ended in August 1945. He 

shut down the Office of Strategic Services in September of that year, 

parceling out its functions to the State Department, which got research, 

and the War Department, which got the covert capability. When the 

war ended, Congress forbade government information campaigns 

in the United States and cut the funding for information activities 

and cultural affairs overseas by 50 percent between 1946 and 1948.55

These actions reflected a general dislike of propaganda, the inability 

of the proponents of psychological operations to demonstrate in a 

compelling way its contribution to victory, and the focus among 

those involved in defense matters on reorganizing and streamlining 

the military once the war ended. Finally, even if the government 
36

and the military had been more favorably disposed to psychological 

operations, many of those who had fought the psychological war 

would not have stayed around. They were journalists, artists, and 

advertising men who had done their duty and wanted to return as 

soon as they could to their peacetime pursuits.56 The result was that, 

within a year or two of the war’s end, hardly anything was left of 

the American wartime information management and psychological 

warfare capability.

What did survive demobilization were agency press offices 

and other activities such as Armed Forces Radio and the Voice 

of America that provided information to the American public or 

American servicemen and selected foreign audiences. It was these 

activities that so impressed the French. The military also kept alive 

in a much diminished form its combat propaganda capability. It 

used this capability overseas to deal with civilian populations in 

Germany, Austria, Korea, and Japan, printing and distributing 

newspapers and magazines and running radio stations and movie 

houses. In the United States, the Army formed an experimental 

“Tactical Information Detachment,” performed some studies of 

psychological warfare, and did some planning for its use in a future 

war. This planning began in 1946 after an Assistant Secretary of the 

Navy suggested it was necessary. An interdepartmental committee—

the State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), which 

became the State, Army, Navy, Air Force Coordinating Committee 

(SANACC) after the establishment of the Air Force—conducted the 

planning. As it did so, America’s psychological warfare capability 

continued to decline. In 1947, a memorandum to the Under Secretary 

of State from the SANACC reported that “the Department of State 

and the Military Establishment have no funds appropriated for 

psychological warfare purposes” and that “no psychological warfare 

specialist reserves exist within the Military Establishment or the 

Department of State.”57

As America’s psychological warfare capability withered, events 

overseas were suggesting that such a capability might be necessary 

even in peacetime. By 1947, communists had taken over Poland, 

Hungary, and Rumania and were attempting to take over Greece, 

while continuing to apply pressure on the government of Turkey. In 
37

response, President Truman announced in March 1947, in what came 

to be called the Truman Doctrine, that the United States would supply 

military aid to countries under attack from communist rebellions. 

Other problems had emerged in Europe. The economic and political 

situation in France and Italy, both with large communist parties, 

looked bleak. Fears mounted that the communists might win elections 

in 1948 (communists already were in the cabinets of both countries; 

in France, the Minister of Defense was a communist). In response 

to this threat, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced a 

program of economic aid for Europe in October 1947, a program that 

came to be known as the Marshall Plan. As the U.S. Government 

developed and announced these responses, it and its Western allies 

met with the Soviets in a series of conferences in Moscow to discuss 

peace treaties with Germany and Austria. 

By the end of 1947, these conferences had produced nothing but 

a deterioration in relations between the Soviets and the Western 

powers. In September, the Soviets established the Communist 

Information Bureau (COMINFORM), which included communist 

parties in both eastern and western Europe, launching it with a 

speech by the Leningrad party boss in which he said, “The cardinal 

purpose of the imperialist camp is to strengthen imperialism, to hatch 

a new imperialist war, to combat socialism and democracy, and to 

support reactionary and anti-democratic pro-fascist regimes and 

movements everywhere.”58 Events outside of Europe, for example, 

in the Philippines, where a communist insurgency was underway, 

also caused concern in the U.S. Government. 

This rising external threat prompted a response. Some weeks 

after the COMINFORM meeting, the Army representative to the 

SANACC sent a memorandum to committee members approving 

the committee’s plans for psychological operations during wartime. 

The representative argued in addition, however, that the events 

of the recent past suggested the need to consider “as a matter of 

urgency [the] desirability or necessity [of] deliberate coordinated” 

psychological warfare in peacetime. The Director of Central 

Intelligence seconded this proposition a few days later in his own 

memorandum to the SANACC. A few days after that, the Secretary 

of the National Security Council forwarded to Secretary of Defense 
38

James Forrestal “a very persuasive and accurate appraisal of the 

need for psychological warfare operations to counter Soviet-inspired 

Communist propaganda, particularly in France and Italy.” This 

memorandum was from Secretary of Commerce Averell Harriman, 

who from 1943 to 1946 had been Ambassador to the Soviet Union and 

then to Great Britain. While transmitting Harriman’s memorandum, 

the NSC Secretary took the opportunity to suggest some basic 

organizational principles to improve the U.S. Government’s 

psychological warfare capability: strengthen the State Department’s 

overt information activities; give the Central Intelligence Agency 

(CIA) responsibility for covert activities, “since it already has contacts 

and communications with appropriate organizations and agents in 

foreign countries”; and appoint an interdepartmental board, chaired 

by the Department of State representative, with the military and CIA 

as members, to set policies for overt and covert information activities 

and to coordinate everything that the government does.59

This sequence of memos in late 1947 set in motion the process 

that restored psychological warfare or, more accurately, elevated it to 

importance as a component of America’s peacetime foreign policy. A 

consensus had formed that “the present world situation requires that 

the U.S. immediately . . . develop and utilize strong and concerted 

measures designed to produce psychological situations and effects 

favorable to the attainment of U.S. National objectives” and that 

these measures be both “white” and “black,” i.e., overt and covert.60

In an interview in 1971, Harriman highlighted the perspective within 

which this consensus formed. In addition to his official positions, 

Harriman had a wide network of influential friends with whom he 

discussed foreign and domestic politics. According to Harriman, 

It was very clear [in the immediate post-war period] that the whole 

of Europe would be weakened, and that communism—without [U.S. 

help]—would take over. I’m sure that was one of the reasons why Joseph 

Stalin broke his agreements, because the situation looked too good in 

Western Europe for a Communist takeover. I think Stalin was convinced 

he could move into Western Europe. He was undoubtedly told by leaders 

in the Communist Parties in Italy and France that their organizations 

were very strong; that with some help they would be able to take over 

Italy and France.61
39

The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were two responses to 

the Soviet threat to Western Europe and by extension to the United 

States. Overt and covert psychological operations in peacetime, a 

significant departure from past practice, was another.

The perception of the external threat was critical in establishing 

the consensus in favor of psychological warfare in peacetime, but 

the external threat was not the only concern at the time among 

decisionmakers, nor was it decisive. Marshall, for example, was not 

part of the consensus in favor of psychological warfare. The Director 

of Central Intelligence told his staff on November 18, 1947, that 

Marshall “does not like the term ‘PW’ and does not seem to favor 

the idea of psychological warfare at this time.”62 In his oral history 

interview, Harriman said that Marshall was one of the last senior 

leaders of the government to recognize the threat posed by the Soviet 

Union. Following the failed Moscow conference in 1947, however, 

Marshall came to recognize the threat. Yet, he opposed psychological 

warfare. His opposition, or at least the State Department’s, appears 

to have derived from sentiments similar to those then present in 

the military establishment. Psychological operations, especially 

covert psychological operations, should they come to light, were 

incompatible with diplomacy and therefore potentially damaging to 

the Department’s efforts. 

The NSC staff made psychological operations more palatable 

to the State Department by dividing the government’s information 

activities in two parts, calling the overt component that accompanied 

U.S. foreign policy “foreign information activities” and referring to 

the covert component as psychological operations. Consequently, 

National Security Council Document 4 (NSC 4), “Report by the 

National Security Council on Coordination of Foreign Information 

Measures” (December 17, 1947), put the Secretary of State in charge 

of providing policy for and coordinating America’s overseas 

information efforts.

NSC 4-A gave the CIA authority to carry out “covert psychological 

operations abroad.” The CIA ultimately defined these operations as 

“all measures of information and persuasion short of physical in 

which the originating role of the U.S. Government will always be 

kept concealed.” NSC 4-A granted this authority to the CIA subject 

to the approval of “a panel designated by the National Security 
40

Council,” which would include representatives from State, the Joint 

Staff, and the military services. This approval process was to make 

sure that the CIA carried out covert psychological operations “in a 

manner consistent with U.S. foreign policy, overt foreign information 

activities, and diplomatic and military operations and intentions 

abroad.” 63

The United States used its new peacetime psychological warfare 

capability in the months leading up to the Italian elections in April 

1948. Those who knew of these operations judged them a success, 

with the Christian Democrats victorious, receiving 48 percent of the 

vote. This result contrasted sharply with events in Czechoslovakia, 

where the communists had complete control of the government 

by March 1948. George Kennan, the Director of the Department of 

State’s Policy Planning Staff, was particularly impressed with what 

psychological operations had accomplished. He became a powerful 

voice inside the government for continuing and increasing what 

he termed “political warfare.” Whereas in December 1947, he had 

argued that State “would wish to consider most carefully the need 

for” each psychological or covert operation before giving its consent, 

in the Spring of 1948, 1 month after the Italian election, he wrote a 

memorandum arguing in favor of establishing an organized political 

warfare capability so that in the future the U.S. Government would 

not have “to scramble into impromptu covert operations.” In January 

1949, he argued that the CIA was not doing enough and told Frank 

Wisner, who was running covert operations, that “every day makes 

more evident the importance of the role which will have to be played 

by covert operations if our national interests are to be adequately 

protected.”

As he was arguing for the necessity of covert operations, Kennan 

was concerned about how they were organized. He argued, echoing 

the arguments that the British had engaged in a decade before, 

that State should have the lead in both overt and covert operations 

because they were political activities and State was in charge of all 

political activities overseas. Like others in the State Department, 

however, he believed that covert activities, if known, would 

undermine or compromise State’s diplomatic efforts. He argued, 

therefore, that State should have authority over the operations but 

take no responsibility for them. The CIA argued that it should have 
41

authority over all covert activities, although it acknowledged that it 

should take policy guidance from State and the military. The agencies 

involved continued to argue over these organizational issues into 

the early 1950s.64

The Military and Psychological Warfare.

As the psychological warfare apparatus took shape in the U.S. 

Government, the military was at best a reluctant and hesitant 

participant. As the SANACC’s planning effort for wartime 

psychological operations took place, the question of the Army’s role 

in psychological warfare was broached with the appointment of 

retired World War II General Kenneth C. Royall as the Secretary of 

the Army in 1947. Royall was skeptical of psychological operations, 

as were a number of high-ranking officers and DoD civilians. Like 

other service Secretaries, Royall argued that the military should 

not be involved with psychological warfare, especially during 

peacetime, because it would involve the military in political matters 

outside its purview and competence. Royal and the other Secretaries 

also argued that the questionable morality of psychological warfare 

would adversely affect the image of the military if its participation in 

this activity became known.65

Two of Royall’s deputies disagreed with him, however, and 

worked with like-minded officers, including Lieutenant General A. C. 

Wedemeyer, the Director of the Office of Plans and Operations, where 

the responsibility for psychological warfare then resided, to give the 

Army a psychological warfare capability. Wedemeyer’s interest in 

this capability derived from his view that the conventional American 

approach to warfare was flawed. In his memoirs, published in 1958, 

Wedemeyer argued against slaughtering the enemy, which he called 

the standard American and British approach, as the only way to 

fight a war. Failing “to use political, economic, and psychological 

means in coordination with military operations” had prolonged 

World War II, he contended, and increased Allied casualties. One of 

Royall’s deputies who worked with Wedemeyer was another World 

War II Army general, William H. Draper, whose responsibilities had 

included the occupied areas, where Army psychological operations 
42

were continuing. The other official was Gordon Gray, who had only 

limited experience in the Army during the war. In an effort to change 

Royall’s mind and preserve the Army’s psychological warfare 

capability, Draper commissioned a study by a civilian consultant 

that described what the Army was already doing in psychological 

warfare. Apparently it helped persuade Royall that the Army should 

have some capability in this area, for he agreed in 1949, toward the 

end of his tenure, that the Army should establish a psychological 

warfare branch. Royall stipulated, however, that a civilian within 

the War Department should have ultimate responsibility for this 

activity. Wedemeyer was not happy with this arrangement, fearing 

that it would compromise the military chain of command, but he 

accepted it and psychological warfare found a precarious place in 

the Army.66

The situation was not much better in the other services. In 1949, 

only the Air Force had an office devoted to psychological warfare, 

which was supposed to develop plans and policies and consider 

logistical requirements. The Navy was in no better shape than the 

Army. Both services “apparently felt that psychological warfare, 

as a peacetime concern, was not sufficiently important to require 

continuous detailed staff consideration.” The Joint Staff did establish 

a component to meet the support requirements that it felt would 

follow from the establishment of a covert capability in the CIA, but it 

otherwise dealt with psychological warfare issues by creating ad hoc 

groups, which meant that knowledge of the issues was ephemeral. 

Members of the Joint Strategic Plans Group (JSPG) expressed concern 

about this state of affairs, feeling that the Joint Staff’s interests had 

not been represented adequately in the interagency discussions that 

led to a peacetime psychological warfare capability.

Part of the problem, according to the JSPG, was a fundamental 

difference in orientation between State and Defense. Defense believed 

in long-range planning, which State did not do because it felt that 

“political contingencies were so variable and intangible that longrange political plans were impracticable, if not impossible.” This 

difference led to frustration and misunderstanding that no amount 

of staff structure would have overcome. But many of the Joint Staff’s 

responsibilities could have been handled more effectively with more 
43

staff. Proposals to augment staff to meet the full range of requirements 

associated with psychological warfare ran into objections from the 

services, however. In the words of the historian of the Psychological 

Strategy Board, “A year of wrangling” passed before the Joint Chiefs 

approved an organizational design.67

The difficult birth of a peacetime military psychological warfare 

capability is most apparent, however, in the Army, where the greatest 

responsibility lay. When Secretary of Army Royall consented to 

the Army having a psychological warfare capability in 1949, this 

did not lead immediately to tangible results. Royall’s successor as 

Secretary of the Army was Gordon Gray, one of the subordinates 

who had worked to change Royall’s views about psychological 

warfare. Now in a position to support this capability, Gray exerted 

pressure on the Army staff, as did Gray’s successor, Frank Pace. Yet, 

in the summer of 1950, 15 months after Royall had first authorized a 

psychological warfare branch, the Army was still trying to identify 

the personnel spaces to fill it. The Army had no schooling underway 

in psychological warfare and only a handful of people qualified to 

conduct it. Pace’s insistence that the Army staff get moving, along 

with the outbreak of the Korean War, finally led the Army to create 

in January 1951 the office that Royall had authorized originally. It 

was no longer a branch but a special staff office, the Office of the 

Chief of Psychological Warfare.68

The creation of the psychological warfare office did not 

resolve the Army’s difficult relationship with this unconventional 

capability. In his meetings with the Chief of Staff, Secretary Pace 

continued to insist on the importance of psychological operations, 

calling them “the cheapest form of warfare.” He inquired directly 

of General Matthew Ridgway in Korea about his ability to conduct 

such operations. Meanwhile, General Robert McClure, in charge 

of psychological warfare, warned his staff at their first meeting 

of the prejudice existing in the Army against their activity. It was 

not seen as the work of a true soldier. Because of this prejudice, 

career-conscious officers were reluctant to become involved with 

psychological warfare. During the war in Korea, McClure repeatedly 

complained, as Blankenhorn had during Word War I, that the Air 

Force was not making sufficient aircraft available for leaflet drops 
44

and had to deal with Army officers who did not see the value of 

psychological warfare. His efforts to assist the Far Eastern Command 

in establishing its psychological warfare office were blocked by the 

Army Staff’s operations office. Some of these difficulties were the 

result of personality clashes and the aggressiveness with which the 

new Psychological Warfare office pursued its responsibilities, but 

“perhaps the major factor . . . was the belief of many staff officers 

that the relatively new fields of psychological and unconventional 

warfare were incidental activities that demanded an unjustified share 

of attention and resources in terms of their real value to the Army.” 

Yet, despite all of these obstacles, by the early 1950s, the Army and the 

military in general had established the peacetime offices devoted to 

psychological operations that remain to this day permanent features 

of military organization and operations. In establishing these offices, 

the military paralleled innovations in civilian agencies that, taken 

together, gave the U.S. Government an unprecedented ability to 

wage psychological warfare in peacetime.69

Psychological operations received a place in the military 

establishment principally because of the efforts of civilians 

(Blankenhorn, McCLoy, Pace, Gray, Jackson) and of soldiers 

like Eisenhower and Wedemeyer, who had the reputations of 

being political generals. The role of these operations was one, not 

surprisingly, that fit well with conventional military operations. 

The military wanted nothing to do with covert operations or with 

psychological operations understood as independent strategic 

activities, such as those employed in Europe after World War II. It 

was not so much the rising Soviet geopolitical threat that caused the 

Army to accept psychological operations as their possible utility in 

the Korean War in support of conventional operations.

The U.S. military was less enthusiastic than other elements of 

the U.S. Government about psychological operations because these 

operations did not fit its understanding of what military operations 

should be. Soldiers achieve victory by engaging the enemy, not 

by talking him to death, as we have seen one U.S. officer put it. 

Psychological operations were much more acceptable, therefore, 

when they supported engaging the enemy. Even then, not all military 

officers and civilian officials would accept them. These attitudes were 
45

sensible as long as the enemy adhered to conventions about what 

militaries should do. When they ceased such adherence, however, 

these conventions became a vulnerability. This is what happened 

when the United States confronted an insurgency in Vietnam. 

Counterinsurgency in Vietnam.

To understand the American approach to counterinsurgency, we 

may consider two events centered on a hotel in Vietnam in 1964. Early 

that year, an Army study team gathered at the Brinks Hotel in Saigon, 

where U.S. officers were billeted, to devise a table of organization and 

equipment for a Vietnamese infantry company. U.S. forces were not 

deployed yet in South Vietnam, but the standard U.S. Army company 

was the model that the U.S. advisory and assistance effort was using 

to build South Vietnam’s Army. These Army companies, however, 

were originally structured to fight in Germany. Recognizing that 

the South Vietnamese were not faring well against the Vietcong, the 

Army analyzed the problem. It carried out extensive research in the 

field, asking “operations research and systems analysis questions,” 

and concluded that the war at that point was one of small fleeting 

engagements. As a result, the infantry company the study team 

devised was self-contained and more able than a standard U.S. Army 

company to operate independently of a battalion structure. As such, 

it was better suited than the U.S. Army’s typical company to the 

small-unit war of scattered engagements then taking place in South 

Vietnam. According to one of the officers involved in the study, most 

of its recommendations eventually were adopted.70

Some months after the study team finished its work, two Vietcong 

detonated a car bomb in the parking area underneath the hotel 

where the team had worked. The explosion killed 2 Americans and 

injured 58. The Vietcong had conducted surveillance of the hotel, 

noting that South Vietnamese officers met Americans there. Buying 

South Vietnamese uniforms on the black market, the two Vietcong 

impersonated a South Vietnamese officer and his chauffeur looking 

for an American colleague. When told by staff that the American was 

no longer at the hotel, the “officer” insisted he was. He announced 

that he would drive himself home in his own car, leaving his 

chauffeur behind to wait for the American. Having been informed 
46

by a Vietcong agent in the South Vietnamese government that the 

American had left the country, the South Vietnamese “officer” knew 

the American would not arrive and spoil his plan. The “chauffeur” 

was directed to wait in his car in the parking area under the hotel. 

The chauffeur parked the car and then informed a guard that he was 

going to get something to eat but would be right back. He watched 

the car explode from a nearby cafe.71

The meeting and the bombing at the Brinks Hotel suggest an 

important fact about the war in Vietnam that deserves attention 

from those interested in military innovation: contrary to the 

impression sometimes given, the U.S. Army did learn and innovate 

in Vietnam. It reorganized itself, deployed new technology, took on 

new tasks, and devised new tactics. The Army deployed a new airmobile division to Vietnam and developed and refined air-mobile 

tactics with helicopters, an innovation that combined new tactics 

by a new organization using new technology, the epitome of the 

type of transformation that the U.S. military today hopes to create 

throughout its forces; it deployed night vision sensors; it developed 

and deployed communications technology that gave commanders 

unprecedented connectivity to echelons of command above and below 

and beside them. The result of these innovations was that “tactical 

operations in South Vietnam often bore little resemblance to those 

of the past.”72 The Army also undertook activities in South Vietnam 

that bore little resemblance to conventional military operations. It 

ultimately assigned advisors to each of South Vietnam’s 236 districts 

and participated in a series of efforts to pacify the countryside, a 

learning process that culminated in the establishment of the Office of 

Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development (CORDS) in 1967. 

The Army also rewrote its doctrine. The 1962 version of Field Manual 

100-5, Operations, the Army’s foundational doctrinal publication, 

contained a chapter on “Military Operations Against Irregular 

Forces,” absent from earlier editions of the manual. The chapter 

provides a sound counterinsurgency doctrine. The Army, then, did 

innovate during the War in Vietnam.73

The explosion at the Brinks Hotel, however, is only a small 

bit of evidence indicating that these innovations were essentially 

irrelevant. They were irrelevant because, like the plan to change the 

South Vietnamese Army devised at the Brinks hotel, they were based 
47

on a conception of warfare that emphasized engaging and defeating 

enemy forces. But at this point in the long conflict, the enemy was 

not fighting that kind of war. The enemy was infiltrating government 

organizations and civil institutions and carrying out dramatic sneak 

attacks, like the bombing of the Brinks Hotel, that were insignificant 

for the conventional military balance but important for the political 

struggle that was the primary focus of the enemy.

It is important to note that during the long and complex fight in 

Vietnam, engaging enemy forces was sometimes, perhaps more often 

than not, the most important thing to do. For example, following 

the political crisis touched off by the demonstrations of the Buddhist 

priests, the Diem assassination, and the increasing effectiveness 

of Vietcong and North Vietnamese military activity (1964–65), 

engaging the enemy was not merely a military cultural preference. 

It was a necessary response to the enemy’s activity and the political 

situation it created. There was no other way to stop the collapse of 

South Vietnam. The Army’s operations stabilized the situation and 

might have led to victory if the political situation in Vietnam or in 

the United States had been more supportive.74 Earlier in the war 

(1961–64), however, the Army had a freer hand in determining how 

it should respond to events in Vietnam than it did later. During the 

first years of American involvement in Vietnam, the situation was 

bad but not desperate. Nor was the enemy operating in large units. 

Yet, the Army at that stage pursued or, rather, trained and equipped 

the South Vietnamese Army to pursue, the same strategy—seek and 

engage the enemy—that it followed later in the war. 

The Army’s commitment to its customary way of doing things 

is evident in the history of the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups 

(CIDG). As part of efforts underway to increase the security of the 

South Vietnamese population, an Army officer working for the 

CIA came up with the idea of having U.S. forces train and advise 

Montagnards, tribal people living in the highlands of Vietnam. The 

purpose of the program was to get the Montagnards to stop the 

Vietcong from gaining control of their villages and tribal areas. In 

the fall of 1961, the Special Forces began training and supporting 

what came to be called CIDG. Run by the CIA, the program focused 

on village defense, although it included a strike force that the 
48

program planners intended to use to protect the program’s training 

center and to provide additional protection to any villages that the 

Vietcong might attack in force. In their support of CIDG, the Special 

Forces aimed at the insurgency’s social-political center of gravity by 

winning the loyalty of the villagers. For example, they conducted 

medical assistance in the villages and included in the program 

other civil affairs activities, work with the United States Agency for 

International Development (USAID), and psychological operations. 

In a process characteristic of much good innovative practice, the 

Special Forces experimented. Its official historian notes that, in the 

field, counterinsurgency was practiced and adjusted empirically 

with “many tactics attempted on a ‘let’s-try-it-and-see-whathappens’ basis. If something worked, then it became an acceptable 

counterinsurgency tactic; if not, it was dropped.”75 Working in the 

CIA program, supported by the Agency’s money and its flexible 

and militarily unorthodox supply system, the Special Forces had 

control of their resources (people, time, money) and the latitude and 

flexibility to develop their counterinsurgency practices. While not 

without problems, the program succeeded. After reviewing CIDG 

activities in Vietnam in early 1963, the Special Assistant to the Chief of 

Staff for Special Warfare Activities reported that “the CIDG program 

holds the key to the attainment of the ultimate goal of a free, stable, 

and secure Vietnam. In no other way does it appear possible to win 

support of the tribal groups, strangle Vietcong remote area redoubts, 

and provide a reasonable basis for border patrol.”76

The Army soon brought the autonomy of the Special Forces in 

the CIDG program to an end, however. As the program succeeded—

with more villagers joining and the area under control of the South 

Vietnamese government increasing—the CIA requested more 

Special Forces. As the involvement of the Special Forces grew, it 

became more appropriate, at least in the eyes of the John F. Kennedy 

administration after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, for the military to run 

it. This is what apparently persuaded Secretary of Defense Robert 

McNamara to have his department take charge of the program, a 

decision he reached following an inspection trip to Vietnam in 

May 1962.77 This decision accorded with the views of the Army’s 

leadership. They disliked having U.S. forces involved in operations 
49

that did not fit their strategy of seeking the enemy and engaging 

him. They also disliked that the CIDG program allowed military 

forces to operate outside the control of the regular military command 

structure. McNamara’s decision to bring the program under military 

control took care of these problems. With the end of the CIA’s logistic 

responsibility for the program, all control passed to the U.S. Military 

Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). From that time on, the U.S. 

Army assumed complete responsibility for Special Forces activities 

in Vietnam.78

Once control of the CIDG program passed to the Army, 

operational control of Special Forces detachments was transferred 

to conventional military officers, who had little experience in 

counterinsurgency. Both the program and the missions of the 

Special Forces in Vietnam were reoriented to support the Army’s 

conventional operations and strategy, leaving population protection 

to the South Vietnamese Army. Village defense became less 

important, for example, as the CIDG training camps were turned 

into bases for offensive strikes against Vietcong. With the Army’s 

assumption of the South Vietnamese border surveillance and control 

mission in 1963, the responsibilities of the Special Forces shifted 

further away from pacification and population security operations 

to missions viewed by the military hierarchy as more aligned with 

conventional Army doctrine. “In such operations, CIDG forces were 

used as regular troops in activities for which they had not been 

intended, and in many cases, for which they had not been trained or 

equipped.”79 To address this problem, the Army began organizing 

the CIDG as a more conventional force. It established a standardized 

table of organization and equipment (TO&E) for a CIDG light 

guerrilla company in an attempt to “standardize” indigenous forces 

for better pursuit of the Vietcong. This was part of the plan devised 

at the Brinks Hotel and symbolically blown up there a few months 

later, epitomizing the irrelevance of Army innovation in Vietnam.80

The Army put an end to the CIDG for the same reason that later 

in the war it opposed the Marines’ Combined Action Platoons (CAP), 

small numbers of Marines who, rather than chase down and engage 

the enemy, stayed in villages and helped villagers protect themselves.81 Neither the CIDG nor the CAP fit the Army’s conception 
50

of warfare. We can gauge how strongly it held to its conception 

of warfighting if we recall the efforts made by the Kennedy 

administration to change the Army. The new administration 

believed, correctly, that the Army was not prepared to conduct 

counterinsurgency.82 The administration set out to correct this problem 

by exerting pressure on the Army from the highest level. President 

Kennedy took a special interest in and pushed the development of 

counterinsurgency capabilities immediately after he took office, as 

part of his administration’s new strategy of developing an array of 

responses to the Soviet threat. In a special address to Congress in May 

1961, Kennedy discussed the problem of insurgency, as he did when 

he addressed the West Point graduating class in 1962. On this latter 

occasion, he spoke of the need for “a whole new kind of strategy, a 

wholly different kind of force,” to meet the threat of insurgency.83

Even before Kennedy’s address to the West Point class, the 

administration was calling on DoD to improve its ability to counter 

insurgency. For example, National Security Action Memorandum 

(NSAM) 2 (February 3, 1961), disseminated shortly after Kennedy took 

office, called on the DoD to put more emphasis on counterguerrilla 

forces; NSAM 56 (June 28, 1961) called on the Department to 

assess future requirements for unconventional warfare; NSAM 110 

(October 25, 1961) urged the Department to use the results of the 

study requested in NSAM 56 to budget resources for unconventional 

conflict, even though the study was not complete, lest another year 

pass without improvement in U.S. preparations for unconventional 

warfare; NSAM 119 (December 18, 1961) called on the Pentagon 

to make use of civic action, i.e., the use of military forces “on 

projects useful to the populace at all levels,” in the struggle against 

insurgency.84

The Kennedy administration also took steps to reorganize 

the executive branch in an effort to coordinate and integrate its 

counterinsurgent activities better and to make sure that the DoD 

was part of them. Its principal move in this direction was to set up 

in January 1962 the Special Group (Counterinsurgency), a collection 

of Cabinet-level officials from relevant agencies, including the DoD. 

This reorganization was part of the effort to encourage the DoD 

to take counterinsurgency seriously. NSAM-124, which set up the 
51

Special Group, stated that the Group was designed to ensure that 

“subversive insurgency (‘wars of liberation’)” was recognized 

throughout the government as “a major form of politico-military 

conflict equal in importance to conventional warfare.” In particular, 

it stated that the function of the Group was “to insure that such 

recognition is reflected in the organization, training, equipment, and 

doctrine of the U.S. Armed forces.”85 In addition to the Special Group, 

the Kennedy administration set up other interagency coordinating 

groups at lower levels in the government, on which the DoD also 

had seats.

More direct pressure was brought to bear on the military. Kennedy 

met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss counterinsurgency, 

and had a similar meeting with Army commanders, during which 

he suggested that promotions would depend on experience in 

counterinsurgency. Kennedy backed up this “hint” by arranging 

for Colonel William Yarborough, who was the commander of the 

Special Forces headquarters and had worked with the Philippine 

Scouts prior to World War II, to be promoted to brigadier general 

and then to major general. Kennedy also sent Secretary McNamara 

a memorandum informing him that he (Kennedy) was not satisfied 

with what the Department and the Army were doing with regard to 

guerrilla warfare, and that he wanted military personnel at all ranks 

educated in the requirements of counterinsurgency. High-ranking 

members of the Administration, including the Deputy National 

Security Advisor, carried the administration’s message directly 

to military personnel by making speeches to military audiences. 

Kennedy himself paid a visit to the headquarters of the Special Forces 

at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.86

The new administration not only exhorted the Army to develop 

the new mission of counterinsurgency and dangled the carrot of 

promotion as an incentive, it laid out in detail a comprehensive policy 

and strategy for responding to insurgency. NSAM-182 (August 

24, 1962), titled “United States Overseas Internal Defense Policy,” 

represented insurgency as the result of communists hijacking the 

unrest created by modernization, that is, the profound socioeconomic 

changes sweeping the developing world. To prevent the communists 

from succeeding, the policy called for a counterinsurgency program 
52

combining diplomatic, legal, social, economic, psychological, and 

military measures. It listed activities that each agency of the U.S. 

Government ought to undertake to support the policy. The first task 

listed for the DoD was to “develop U.S. military forces trained for 

employment in unconventional warfare and counterguerrilla and 

other military counterinsurgency operations.” There followed 15 

other tasks for the Department, including developing equipment, 

doctrine, and research and development capabilities to support its 

counterinsurgency forces. The policy also instructed the Department 

to work with civilian agencies engaged in counterinsurgency and, 

in a reference to the Special Forces, to “develop language-trained 

and area-oriented U.S. forces for possible employment in training, or 

providing operational advice or operational support to indigenous 

security forces.”87

All of this effort by the civilians did cause the Army to make 

some changes. As we noted above, it rewrote its basic doctrine to 

include counterinsurgency, making the doctrine accord with the 

new “Overseas Internal Defense Policy.” In 1961, it established a 

new organization, the Fifth Special Forces Group, whose mission 

was counterinsurgency in Vietnam. The Army upgraded the Special 

Forces headquarters at Fort Bragg to the status of “Special Warfare 

Center.” It created the Office of the Special Assistant to the Chief of 

Staff for Special Warfare Activities in February 1962. The Army staff 

developed some innovative counterinsurgency ideas and a program 

to increase (again) the numbers of the Special Forces. Also in 1962, 

the Army opened a counterinsurgency school in Okinawa, Japan, and 

throughout this period expanded the courses on counterinsurgency 

taught at Fort Bragg for non-Special Forces Army personnel.88

While these changes were not insignificant, they amounted to relatively little, given the priority and urgency the Kennedy administration had articulated. Most Army doctrine remained unchanged; other 

changes in the Army were superficial. Senior officers disparaged the 

administration’s emphasis on counterinsurgency.89

Thus, despite significant civilian pressure for the Army to take 

counterinsurgency seriously and despite promising potential, the 

two alternatives to its search-and-destroy missions—the CIDG 

early in the war, and CAP later on—the Army persisted in its 

preferred strategy. It refused to countenance an alternative that, by 
53

protecting civilian populations, might have at least complemented 

its conventional efforts. Army Chief of Staff General William 

Westmoreland explained his opposition to CAP by arguing that he 

did not have the troops to put a squad in every village in imitation 

of the Marines. Yet, by one estimate, at the high point of the U.S. 

commitment, Westmoreland had enough troops to implement a CAP 

program and still have some divisions in reserve to handle largerscale attacks. Even if we dispute the wisdom of such a diversion of 

Army assets—U.S. strategy called for South Vietnamese Regional 

and Popular Forces to provide local security (leaving U.S. units 

free to counter depredations by enemy mainforce units—a more 

compelling argument against Westmoreland’s claim that he did 

not have enough troops is that such a program did not have to be 

implemented everywhere all at once. It could have been done bit 

by bit, even as the Army kept searching for and destroying larger 

enemy units. The Marines ran their CAPs, by one estimate, with only 

2.8 percent of the Marines in Vietnam. Thus Army resistance to the 

idea of imitating the Marine program was not only practical, it was 

cultural as well. Perhaps it would be better to say that because it 

had cultural overtones, it seemed practical. In any case, derogatory 

comments made by senior Army officers about the Marines’ CAP 

program, reminiscent of comments made about the Special Forces 

in the CIDG program, indicate that not only the effectiveness of the 

program, but its operational style was the issue for the Army.90

In extenuation of General Westmoreland and the Army, two 

things may be noted. First, alternatives to the strategy of attrition 

that Westmoreland followed were not self-evidently war winners.91

Second, contrary to some claims, neither the Marines nor the CIA 

were particularly innovative in Vietnam. The CIA simply ran another 

paramilitary operation (CIDG), an action very much part of its usual 

repertoire. The population protection aspects of the program do not 

appear to have been the CIA’s contribution but an Army officer’s, 

as previously noted. The Marines did devote more time to the 

unconventional business of population security than the Army did 

and developed an innovative program (CAP) in Vietnam, but this 

resulted from the efforts and leadership of individuals, often junior 

officers but including Generals Lewis W. Walt and Victor Krulak. If 
54

Walt and the others involved in these efforts had not been in place 

when they were, there is no guarantee that the Marines would have 

innovated in Vietnam. The Corps as an institution did not accept 

counterinsurgency as a mission, despite its long experience with 

improvisational operations in its role as a constabulary force prior 

to World War II. During the counterinsurgency era, the Corps, like 

the Army, remained devoted to its principal mission, in the case of 

the Corps, amphibious operations. The Marine general most closely 

identified with counterinsurgency, Krulak, was denied promotion 

to Commandant, the Corps’ highest position, in part because of his 

association with this unconventional approach to conflict. Because 

counterinsurgency was their core mission, we might argue that 

not even the Special Forces innovated in Vietnam, at least not in 

doctrine, however much their attention to the local populations and 

their trial-and-error approach led to innovation or adaptation in 

counterinsurgency practice.92

The stout resistance throughout the military to civilian calls for 

more attention to counterinsurgency contrasts with the final acceptance and continued survival of psychological operations following 

World War II. The obvious reason why one innovation failed and 

the other succeeded, at least to some extent, is that psychological 

operations support conventional operations, whatever else they may 

do. In fact, such operations have found a home in the military to the 

extent that they support conventional operations. Counterinsurgency, 

with its emphasis on protecting populations rather than destroying 

the enemy, represented too much of a departure from conventional 

warfare. The Kennedy administration believed that insurgency was a 

new kind of warfare, “a major form of politico-military conflict equal 

in importance to conventional warfare.” In a sense, the military as an 

institution could not be won over to such a concept. 

Judgments about innovation in Vietnam and elsewhere need 

to be tempered of course by the recognition of their contingent 

nature. Innovation is a complex event, transformation even more so. 

Outcomes are far from certain. Vietnam illustrates this point. Apart 

possibly from the Special Forces, if we are to find innovation in the 

military in the counterinsurgency era, we need to look at individuals 

like Krulak. Indeed, if the Marine Corps’ reputation for innovation in 

Vietnam properly rests on a few individuals, then one might argue 
55

that the Army’s reputation for lack of innovation rests on the same 

basis. As Lewis Sorley has noted, if President Lyndon Johnson had 

chosen one of the other candidates for the job that Westmoreland 

eventually got, the Army’s operations in Vietnam might have taken 

a different direction.93 The three other candidates all developed into 

critics of search-and-destroy. One of the three, Creighton Abrams, 

succeeded Westmoreland, and tried to make population security a 

more important part of the Army’s efforts in Vietnam. If Johnson 

had chosen one of these three instead of Westmoreland, history 

might record that instead of innovating only organizationally, 

technologically, and doctrinally, the Army in Vietnam might have 

innovated strategically as well, possibly producing a better result. 

CONCLUSION

Defeat in Indochina and an ongoing threat in Algeria prompted 

the French to innovate in unconventional warfare. Military officers 

pushed the innovation; imitation of the Indochinese enemy and 

victorious allies guided it; civilians assisted it. Ultimately it failed. 

An external threat prompted American civilians to push the 

U.S. military to innovate with psychological operations and in 

counterinsurgency. The military resisted in both cases. Ultimately, 

it accepted psychological operations to the extent that they were in 

accord with the conventions of the military profession (e.g., nothing 

covert) and supported conventional operations. The military 

rejected counterinsurgency. A defeat in Indochina prompted 

the U.S. military to focus all the more strongly on conventional 

warfare.94 External threats prompted the British, including civilians 

and military in almost equal measure, to adapt continually to a 

variety of unconventional threats, developing capabilities in both 

political warfare and counterinsurgency. This process of adaptation 

continues to the present. British peacekeeping following the end 

of the Cold War was arguably a further development of the British 

approach to counterinsurgency. The British also approached certain 

unconventional tasks in the Iraq War of 2003 differently from and 

arguably better than the Americans.95 How do we explain these 

different responses to unconventional warfare?
56

Limitations to Innovation and Transformation.

Material interests and interservice or intraservice rivalries 

do not explain much, if anything. As we noted in discussing the 

French case, narrow or self-serving bureaucratic, service, branch, 

or individual interests do not explain the support of French officers 

for revolutionary warfare. In the case of the United States, material 

self-interest also does not appear to be a good explanation for why 

the military treats unconventional warfare as unenthusiastically 

as it does. The U.S. military and its industrial suppliers and their 

supporters in Congress had and have a good deal invested in the 

continuation of conventional warfare. The military has consistently 

failed to “sell” unconventional warfare, even to administrations that 

were eager buyers. By itself, therefore, material self-interest does not 

explain the U.S. military’s support for the kind of warfare it prefers. 

If material self-interest were an explanation for military behavior, 

the military would have adapted to the demands of unconventional 

warfare more readily. 

In all the cases we examined, external threats were an important, 

if not the most important, motivation for innovation. Such threats 

engage the institutional interests and professional concerns of 

military officers and those involved with national security. In the 

case of unconventional threats, however, military professionalism 

explains why certain militaries do not adapt readily. While the 

professionalism of the military makes the military attend to external 

threats, it also leads the military to see those threats through the lens 

of professional conventions. These conventions ultimately channel 

thinking and resources into conventional paths, toward M-1 tanks 

rather than Army Special Forces, toward carrier air wings rather 

than Navy SEALS, and toward F-16s rather than Combat Talons. 

Whatever the threat, conventional technology, organization, and 

doctrine tend to become the answer.96 Even more so, the fundamental 

orientation of the military, which is to engage the enemy directly, 

does not change. Four years into the war on terrorism, reports 

surfaced that the Pentagon was rethinking its focus on conventional 

warfare. A high-ranking civilian official involved in this process 

explained what this meant: “When we’ve talked about precision 

warfare in the past, it’s been in terms of hitting a tank or an SUV from 
57

15,000 feet in the air with a precision munition. In the future, the talk 

about precision gets down to the level of using individuals to go 

after individuals.”97 Transformation is about putting projectiles into 

targets ever more quickly and precisely, whether the target is a tank 

or a forehead. “Find, fix, finish” is the mantra for both conventional 

and unconventional warfare. In this view, the focus of the Special 

Operations Command on its direct action mission, the direct 

application of force to the killing or capturing of terrorists, despite 

all the lessons and analysis indicating its limitations, is evidence of 

the power of the conventional warfare paradigm. This convention 

remains the prevailing view in the DoD. The QDR Report defines the 

indirect approach as working by, with, or through other forces. It sees 

the difference between conventional and unconventional warfare, 

therefore, as one of means. The only example of this approach offered 

in the QDR is T. E. Lawrence’s leadership of irregular forces (Bedouin 

tribesmen) against the Turks at Aqaba. In other words, according 

to the QDR Report, the indirect approach is getting others to take a 

direct approach. In both conventional and unconventional warfare, 

closing with and engaging an enemy force remains the objective.98

The one consistency in our historical and contemporary 

experience with unconventional warfare is that innovations in this 

area will not succeed if they challenge the fundamental sense of 

identify and the self-understanding of a military. The U.S. military 

innovated continuously in Vietnam to get better at engaging and 

killing the enemy, but could not do so to get better at or even to 

undertake protecting civilians. The French doctrine of revolutionary 

warfare called for a fundamental change in the nature of the French 

Army, one that made dealing with and protecting civilians a high, 

if not the highest, priority. This effort at innovation failed. The 

British Army, on the other hand, developed an adaptive style that 

allowed it to accommodate a role in unconventional conflict. Its 

experience in the 19th century as it professionalized was principally 

in colonial warfare against irregular forces. Both the British and the 

French had traditions of imperial policing, but only the British were 

able to convert their tradition into a useful method of dealing with 

insurgents. One important difference between the French and British 

experience was the view, held by many in France, that insurgency or 
58

revolutionary warfare was a new kind of warfare that would supplant 

conventional warfare as the most applicable response to future 

threats to the French nation. This implied of course that the French 

Army had to change in a fundamental way and that civil-military 

relations had to change as well. These requirements amounted to too 

great a transformation in the French Army’s understanding of itself 

for it to succeed. The British Army did not have to face the challenge 

of radical change. It therefore managed to adapt or at least to adapt 

better than its American and French colleagues. When it comes to 

innovating or transforming, at least for unconventional warfare, 

it is the self-understanding of a military that is critical and not, as 

various analyses of conventional military innovation argue, whether 

civilians intervene, or military mavericks take the lead, or the rivalry 

is within or between the Services.

Since September 11, 2001 (9/11), the unconventional threat has 

assumed a generally accepted importance it did not previously have. 

The past experience we have examined suggests, unfortunately, that 

the U.S. military will not innovate successfully to meet this threat. 

Current experience appears to confirm this. The report of the 9/11 

Commission concluded that, confronted with the threat of al-Qai’da, 

the national security establishment could provide Presidents Bill 

Clinton and George Bush only a “narrow and unimaginative menu 

of options.”99 Two years into the war against terrorism, Secretary of 

Defense Donald Rumsfeld, appearing quite doubtful on the matter, 

asked his senior advisers whether the Department had changed 

enough or could change enough to fight this unconventional threat. 

Four years into the war, Rumsfeld reportedly was dissatisfied with the 

U.S. Special Operations Command’s response to the war.100 Clearly, 

change has occurred in response to 9/11, but as the foregoing brief 

review suggests, it has come slowly or not at all in many cases.101 

Moreover, one might wonder how far-reaching or enduring any 

change will prove. The QDR and other DoD documents state that 

irregular warfare and stability operations enjoy as high a priority as 

combat operations,102 but the Kennedy administration, to no enduring 

effect as we have seen, once declared counterinsurgency to be the 

equivalent of combat operations. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, 

Secretary Rumsfeld’s rhetoric was eerily reminiscent of the words 

spoken about so-called “wars of national liberation” by Kennedy at 
59

West Point in 1962. At military schools today, counterinsurgency is 

a hot topic, much as it was for a few years in the early 1960s.103

Implications for Policy and Strategy.

Past and present experience suggests that the U.S. military will 

continue to innovate within its understanding of what warfare is, 

and that these innovations will doubtless aggregate into some sort 

of transformation of conventional warfare capability, but these 

innovations and the transformation they drive will be largely 

irrelevant to unconventional conflict. In simple terms, the U.S. military will get better and better at putting projectiles into targets, 

whether bullets into foreheads or missiles into tanks, but this skill 

will not be decisive in unconventional conflict. If this limitation 

in the capability of the military to transform itself is permanent, it 

would mean that DoD, to answer Secretary Rumsfeld’s question to 

his advisors, will not be able to change enough to prevail in the fight 

against jihadism. This suggests, in turn, that DoD should not have 

as prominent a role in this fight as it has had so far. If we accept 

this conclusion, we face a series of difficult questions. Which agency 

or department could replace DoD? If none could, would some sort 

of interagency organization work, or should DoD retain the lead 

but establish a new DoD organization devoted to unconventional 

warfare? If a new interagency organization develops, should DoD 

still establish a new organization devoted to unconventional warfare 

so that it will be able to make relevant contributions to the interagency 

effort? 

Before considering such questions, we should examine the 

assumption that gives rise to them, i.e., that the current conventions 

about warfare that govern DoD’s conduct will not change. If this 

assumption is wrong, then DoD might alter itself so that it could 

better deal with unconventional threats, making a new interagency or 

DoD unconventional warfare organization unnecessary. Throughout 

the long history of humans warring on each other, the accepted 

notion of what warfare is has seen considerable change.104 Might it 

not continue to do so? To answer this question in turn, we begin by 

briefly considering how the current warfighting convention came to 

be.
60

What we know today as conventional warfare is the result of 

centuries of technological, socio-economic, and political change. The 

self-understanding of the U.S. military as a professional organization 

matured in the latter stages of these developments, mediated by 

a specific institutional (presidential) and geostrategic (isolated, 

internally focused) setting and also affected by the long-term interplay 

of various civilian, military, political, and bureaucratic interests. In 

the latter part of the 19th century, the U.S. military, particularly the 

Army, became a professional force when it faced no serious external 

enemies. Consequently, politicians left the Army alone. It became 

the Army’s understanding that it should be left alone to perfect the 

military art as it understood that art. The hold of this formative period 

on the U.S. Army remains powerful. Some present-day “cavalry” 

units wear spurs; the Army’s Blue dress uniform resembles a 19thcentury cavalry officer’s. When President George W. Bush spoke 

at the Citadel shortly after the U.S. military had swept the Taliban 

from power, the remark that received the biggest ovation from the 

cadets was his description of U.S. military forces as having led the 

first cavalry charge of the 21st century.105

As the United States came to need a larger Army in the 20th 

century, the country’s presidential system and its doctrine of the 

separation of powers helped protect the Army and the other services 

from civilian intervention. Whether or not Congress was in the 

hands of a party different from the President’s, representatives and 

senators had motives to oppose the President’s military initiatives. 

For example, the level of military spending in a congressional district 

or state matters to a representative or senator regardless of who is in 

the White House. The military serves two masters, with each having 

different, often competing interests. This weakens the control of either 

master, helping insulate the military from outside influence. It allows 

the services to define themselves as devoted to defending the nation 

from what threatens it, as those threats are understood through the 

military art and the conventions of the military profession, not in 

response to the changing demands of politicians.

To the question of whether current U.S. military conventions 

about warfighting might change, the first answer we reach is that 

they are unlikely to do so in the short term or as a result of civilian 
61

intervention. The U.S. military’s formative experiences have made it 

resistant to such pressure. Moreover, the direct levers on the military 

that a President or Secretary of Defense holds and which are often 

cited as levers to prompt innovation—budgeting, promotions, force 

structure, etc.—are subject to review by Congress and comment by 

journalists and interest groups. This means that intervention by the 

President or the Secretary of Defense carries political risks. Donald 

Rumsfeld’s fights with the services and Congress over the direction 

of the military threatened his job before 9/11.106 Given the military’s 

institutional commitment to what it does and has always done, it 

also is unlikely that replacing generals will do much good. It might 

allow us to win a campaign that we would otherwise lose, but it 

will not change the way the institution thinks.107 That thinking, and 

the now habitual or conventional way of responding to the world, 

have been and remain relatively impervious to the manipulation of 

interests. 

To this argument about the futility of civilian intervention, one 

might respond that civilians simply have not tried hard enough. 

Yet, even if one were willing to pay the political costs of massive 

civilian intervention in the personnel and budgetary work of the 

military in order to promote transformation against unconventional 

threats, two objections to doing so would arise. First, civilian 

intervention might decrease our security from external threats. This 

would occur if such intervention made the military too attentive to 

domestic political pressure and not attentive enough to changing 

threats in the security environment, particularly when those threats 

run counter to the prejudices of domestic politics. Second, civilian 

intervention might increase our vulnerability to internal threats. 

Political intervention strong enough to change the military could 

well undermine the military’s political independence, which might 

both transform America’s civil-military relations in a deleterious 

way and undermine the professionalism of America’s military. This 

consequence need not reach the degree of civil-military turmoil that 

the French suffered as a consequence of defeat in Indochina and 

Algeria to be a development that the United States should try to 

avoid. 
62

In the Short Term.

The character of the U.S. military and the institutional setting in 

which it operates suggest that, in the short term, it will be difficult to 

change the self-understanding of the military so that it is better able 

to deal with unconventional conflict. Faced with this conclusion, 

we return to the set of questions we previously asked concerning 

what substitute for DoD’s lead role in the struggle against jihadism 

might exist. Three answers or some combination of them seem 

possible. DoD can retain the lead in the struggle against jihadism, 

and we can continue to muddle through; or we can transfer as much 

responsibility as possible for the struggle from DoD to another 

agency or agencies; or we can create a new organization within DoD 

from those components which have experience with unconventional 

warfare. Each of these responses has virtues; none is completely 

satisfactory. 

Muddling through may not make things worse, at least in the 

short term, but it would not improve them either. Innovation to 

meet the unconventional threat would continue as it always has 

at the point of contact with the enemy, but, given the inertia of the 

warfare convention, such innovations would have limited effect 

and staying power.108 Even if the military devotes more resources 

to unconventional or irregular warfare, it is likely to continue to 

treat unconventional warfare as a lesser-included case, despite 

current rhetoric to the contrary. Inconveniently, the history we 

have examined suggests that unconventional warfare is different 

fundamentally from conventional warfare. It is a different case, and 

not a lesser-included case, vis-á-vis conventional warfare. As we 

have noted, British officers began reporting this development in the 

1920s, as changing political ideas and new technologies combined to 

limit the power of Europeans to impose their will in their colonies.109

Thus, the development of unconventional warfare is a kind of 

revolution in military affairs. “Muddling through” as a response to 

such a revolution will probably be an inadequate response over the 

longer term.110 

As an alternative to merely muddling through, we might transfer 

responsibility for the unconventional response from DoD. This 

would help insulate the struggle from the conventional approach 
63

that is inappropriate for it. It would move the emphasis of our 

response back toward police and intelligence work, which is most 

appropriate, restricting DoD to that limited aspect of the fight against 

jihadism marked by an interface with nation-states and their forces. 

One might object that DoD must remain in charge precisely because 

dealing with the nation-states that support terrorism is critical to our 

success against jihadism. This view, itself a reflection of conventional 

prejudices, seems largely unfounded. Although helpful, nation-state 

support is not critical for terrorists. Jihadism has not abated, certainly 

not operationally, since it was deprived of control of Afghanistan. In 

any event, stronger and less arguable objections to this alternative 

exist. We have no police force capable of taking charge of a global 

struggle and no likely candidate for such a role. The Federal Bureau 

of Investigation (FBI) is consumed with transforming itself to deal 

with the internal threat from terrorism, and should not be burdened 

with an additional and very difficult duty. The CIA’s operational 

capability is global and its role critical, but its clandestine character is 

incompatible with the public and political character that leadership 

in the struggle against jihadism requires. More important, no matter 

which agency was in charge (for example, the State Department), it 

would tend to let its own perspective dominate what should be an 

integrated interagency effort. An interagency organization would be 

best, then, but it would need to be one unlike any that has so far 

existed and certainly altogether different from the still-born LowIntensity Conflict Board within the NSC mandated by the same 

legislation that established the Special Operations Command.111

Shifting leadership from DoD to a new interagency organization 

would leave DoD’s capability unreformed and unable to contribute 

as required. The history and analysis we have presented suggest that 

improving DoD’s capability will require establishing an organization 

within DoD devoted to unconventional warfare.112 The argument 

for this new organization is the same as the one used to support 

the establishment of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM). 

Just as it was unlikely that special operations forces could flourish 

within conventional military organizations, so is it unlikely that 

an unconventional warfare capability can flourish in a department 

that has become dominated by the direct approach to carrying 
64

out its responsibilities. Yet, setting up an effective unconventional 

warfare organization within DoD would be difficult, certainly 

more difficult than setting up SOCOM. SOF’s direct action mission 

fits more easily into the warfare convention than does the indirect 

approach of unconventional warfare. Playing on this similarity 

between direct action and conventional warfare was one of the ways 

that early proponents of an improved special operations capability 

used to sell the Army on this idea.113 Proponents of an improved 

unconventional warfare capability will not have that advantage. 

Given DoD’s warfighting culture, if such an organization comes into 

being, it is likely always to lead a precarious existence.114 Committed 

civilian leaders, including legislators, and military officers would 

have a hard time preventing such an organization from being either 

overwhelmed or worn down by the inertia of the conventional. Yet, 

such a separate organization remains probably the best hope for an 

effective unconventional warfare capability in DoD. 

In the Long Term.

Our analysis to this point leads to the conclusion that the best bet 

to improve the U.S. Government’s capacity to wage unconventional 

warfare in the short term is a new, untried interagency organization 

and a separate unconventional warfare organization in DoD that will 

have difficulty thriving. Might a longer-term perspective change the 

analysis and the recommendations that flow from it? At first glance, 

the prospects for DoD changing to meet the unconventional threat over 

the long term look good. The institutional setting that helps insulate 

the services from political pressure to transform (our presidential 

system) is not likely to change (the United States is not likely to adopt 

a parliamentary system), but the geo-strategic setting that affects the 

professional understanding of the military already has. Since World 

War II, the United States has emerged from its insular, isolationist 

shell, employing its power and military forces overseas repeatedly. 

For most of this postwar period, the United States faced a significant 

conventional threat in the Soviet Union. This allowed the military 

to discount the unconventional threat. More fairly, given limited 

budgets, time, and human capacity, the existence of the conventional 
65

threat, which was by far the most important, required the military 

to treat the unconventional threat as a lesser-included case of the 

greater threat. Over the coming decades, if we continue to encounter 

unconventional threats without facing a powerful conventional threat, 

then the U.S. military, as a professional force attentive to external 

threats, should adapt institutionally to these unconventional threats. 

After all, some change in the military’s outlook was occurring in the 

1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed and the U.S. military faced a 

series of unconventional threats and operational challenges.115 The 

attacks on 9/11 prevented further change, one might argue, only 

because the Bush administration responded to them by fighting the 

war on terrorism in large measure as either a struggle between states 

or a matter of killing or capturing enemies. This approach returned 

conventional warfare to prominence and stopped the military’s 

adaptation to unconventional warfare. The Bush administration even 

has given the one organization in the military supposedly devoted 

to unconventional warfare, the Special Operations Command, the 

conventional task of target acquisition and destruction. If over the 

longer term, this conventional approach to the unconventional 

problem of jihadism fails, then future administrations and the U.S. 

military—guided by its professional devotion to the defense of the 

United States—are likely to change to meet the unconventional 

threat. 

This change to meet the unconventional threat over the long term 

will be unlikely to occur, however, if a conventional threat arises 

comparable to the one posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold 

War. In that case, the military’s professional concern is likely to 

focus on that conventional threat, since it will reinforce established 

patterns of thought and action. A critical point, then, in assessing 

long-term prospects for DoD adapting to unconventional warfare is 

the development of our strategic situation with China. China appears 

to be the one country that, in the the future, could pose a conventional 

threat sufficient to eclipse the unconventional threat. If it does, then 

the U.S. military, once again, is likely to treat unconventional warfare 

as a lesser-included case of conventional warfare. 

If it is true that the future status of unconventional warfare 

depends on what happens with China, then it will be difficult to 

predict. But as Dr. Stephen Biddle has argued incisively,116 what 
66

happens with China is not entirely beyond our influence. An 

emphasis by the United States in its conflict with jihadism on the 

unilateral use of conventional military force, especially focused on 

other nations or their forces, even in the name of democratization, 

is likely to encourage great power competition and, hence, the rise 

of China as a conventional threat to the United States. A unilateral 

conventional approach by the United States is likely to increase such 

competition in the future because it will appear threatening to other 

nations and spur their efforts to counter American power. Fighting 

jihadism in a multilateral manner, on the other hand, emphasizing 

cooperative efforts in human intelligence and policing, is likely to 

retard the rise of great power competition and, hence, the rise of 

China as a conventional threat to the United States. In brief, our 

inability to understand and use an unconventional approach to 

jihadism today is likely to promote the rise of China as a great power 

competitor tomorrow and to that extent to discourage adaptation to 

unconventional threats in the future. 

We might not need to worry about our failure to adapt to 

unconventional threats, and hence the more rapid rise of a great 

power rival, if we maintain a comparative advantage in conventional 

warfare. This advantage would allow us to contend with the rival on 

terms that would be best for us. This assumes, however, that the 

unconventional threat, while remaining fundamentally different 

from the conventional threat, will not pose as great a danger to us as 

the conventional threat. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Terrorist 

acquisition of an enormously lethal chemical, biological, radiological, 

or nuclear (CBRN) weapon is already an unconventional threat that 

rivals any conventional threat. Another unconventional threat that 

might rise to the level of the conventional threats we are accustomed 

to would be the political success of the jihadist insurgency within 

Islam. If jihadists came to control one or more strategically important 

(oil, nuclear weapons) Islamic country, that might shift the balance 

of power in the world against the United States as decisively as the 

rise to preeminence of China. At the moment, this threat is less real 

than the threat of terrorist acquisition of CBRN weapons, but may 

become more real over time if we continue to respond in a largely 

conventional fashion to the jihadist insurgency.
67

A long-term perspective toward our ability to adapt to 

unconventional threats suggests a competition for our attention, 

so to speak, between conventional and unconventional threats.117

Which threat wins the competition for our attention is not entirely 

in our control, as we have seen, but we can affect the competition. 

To repeat, we may be able to retard the emergence of a great power 

competitor in the future if we improve now the effectiveness of our 

unconventional response to jihadism and make it the centerpiece 

of our efforts. In doing so, we would remove an incentive for great 

power competition, as noted above. Improving our unconventional 

warfare capability now also makes sense as the best way to deal with 

unconventional threats that are likely to increase. Taking measures 

to deal with unconventional threats now, therefore, will improve 

our security in the short term and, by possibly reducing great power 

competition in the long term, make us more secure in the future. 

RECOMMENDATION 

Our analysis of the long-term prospects for adaptation to 

unconventional threats has concluded that short-term adaptation 

is the best way to deal with the long-term issues. Our analysis of 

the short-term prospect for adaptation has concluded that the most 

promising steps are to establish two new organizations—a new kind 

of interagency organization devoted to unconventional warfare, and 

an unconventional warfare organization within DoD. If we give these 

innovative organizations a central role in our response to jihadism, 

we will not only increase our security now, but in the long term as 

well by forestalling the rise of a great power competitor. If the very 

idea of great powers and great power competition is fading and 

along with it the importance or even the existence of conventional 

warfare,118 then these innovative organizations for unconventional 

warfare will be the beginning of a truly revolutionary transformation 

of our warfighting capability.

Adaptation to unconventional threats in the short term will be 

difficult because those threats are not yet deemed serious enough to 

overwhelm the conventional orientation of the U.S. military and U.S. 

Government. In these circumstances, using shorter-term incentives 

(control of budgets, promotions, etc.) to reinforce the longer-term 
68

incentives provided by the changing strategic setting might encourage 

the process of adjustment to unconventional warfare. The history we 

have examined suggests that, in any event, the adjustment is likely 

to be slow, intermittent, and stumbling, with rapid change proving 

superficial and substantial change emerging bit by bit, if at all. It also 

suggests that for the U.S. military, the adjustment is most likely to 

come, if it comes, from the inside, by relying on the professionalism 

of the military. Unlike encouragement with incentives, direct 

civilian intervention is unlikely to work, especially if it insists that 

a transformation of the military—a fundamental change in how the 

military thinks about war and itself—is necessary.119

Implicit in the analysis we have offered is the assumption that 

the military cannot focus at the same time on both conventional and 

unconventional warfare, that one or the other inevitably will suffer. 

Good infantrymen can do many things well, but in relying only on 

them and good infantry thinking, the best we are likely to manage 

in unconventional warfare is muddling along. The requirements for 

each kind of warfare are distinct and rarely complementary. The issue 

here is not so much budgetary (our unconventional warfare capability 

should be low-tech, for example)120 as it is cultural. The two kinds of 

warfare require two different ways of thinking and evaluating. There 

is no reason to believe that any organization or the people within it 

will be equally good at both. We are entering a period when, because 

of socio-economic and technological developments, the claim of the 

Kennedy administration—that unconventional warfare is “a major 

form of politico-military conflict equal in importance to conventional 

warfare”—is indeed coming true. It is therefore appropriate to 

develop new organizations to deal with this kind of conflict, much 

as we developed new organizations to deal with the Cold War. 

Establishing these new organizations would in effect acknowledge 

that the changes proposed by the Kennedy administration were the 

first halting efforts to deal with a true revolution in military affairs. 

But again, to grant the possibility that unconventional warfare has 

become a potent force does not require us to go to the extreme of 

arguing that the age of the nation-state and its distinctive style of 

warfare is over. It requires only that we recognize, which has been 

less of a problem since 9/11, that nonstate forces pose a serious threat 

that deserves a response different from but certainly as serious as the 
69

response the DoD is making to the apparent revolution in military 

affairs in conventional warfare.

ENDNOTES

1. Quadrennial Defense Review Report, February 6, 2006, pp. 3–4, www.defenselink.

mil/qdr/, accessed February 10, 2006.

2. Ibid., p. 9.

3. For example, Terry C. Pierce, Warfighting and Disruptive Technologies: 

Disguising Innovations, New York: Frank Cass, 2004, summarizes much of the 

literature on innovation but focuses on conventional warfare.

4. Leslie C. Eliason and Emily O. Goldman, “Theoretical and Comparative 

Perspectives on Innovations and Diffusion,” in The Diffusion of Military Technology 

and Ideas, Emily O. Goldman and Leslie C. Eliason, eds., Stanford, CA: Stanford 

University Press, 2003, p. 8; Martha Finemore, “Norms, Culture, and World 

Politics: Insights from Sociology’s Institutionalism,” International Organization, 

Vol. 50, Spring 1996, pp. 328–330.

5. Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War, French and British Military Doctrine between the 

Wars, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 28. 

6. For references to support this claim and a discussion of it within the 

perspective of conventional strategic thinking, see Colin S. Gray, Irregular Enemies 

and the Essence of Strategy: Can the American Way of War Adapt? Carlisle Barracks, 

PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, March, 2006, www.

strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?PubID=650, accessed May 10, 

2006.

7. Bernard Fall, Street without Joy, New York: Shocken Books, 1972, especially 

pp. 34, 40, 105, provides an account of the fighting and Giap’s strategy. Figures 

in this paragraph are taken from Maurice Larkin, France Since the Popular Front, 

Government and People, 1936-1996, Oxford: Clarendon Press, second edition, 1997, 

p. 240; and Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic, 1944-1958, translated by Godfrey 

Rogers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 217.

8. François Géré, La Guerre Psychologique, Paris: Economica, 1997, provides the 

best account of the development of psychological warfare in France. On p. 129, 

he lists some of the early presentations and writings on revolutionary warfare. 

General Lionel-Martin Chassin published some of the first reflections on Indochina 

and revolutionary warfare in 1954.

9. Colonel Charles Lacheroy, “La Guerre Revolutionnaire,” La Defense Nationale, 

Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958, pp. 312–321, who was one of the 

leading theorists of revolutionary warfare, refers to the Vietminh’s efforts to 

control body and soul. Lacheroy’s first writings on revolutionary and psychological 

warfare circulated as mimeographs among French officers beginning in 1954. See 
70

John Stewart Ambler, The French Army in Politics, 1954-1962, Columbus: The Ohio 

State University Press, 1966, p. 398.

10. Colonel Laure, quoted in Jean Planchais, “Petite histoire de l’action 

psychologique,” Signes du Temps, Vol. 1, January, 1959, p. 11.

11. Georges Meyer, “La guerre psychologique dans la 2eme guerre mondiale,” 

Hommes et mondes, Vol. 10, No. 112, 1955, pp. 560–572, provides details on the 

state of French psychological warfare capabilities before and during World War II. 

Meyer was a former director of the press and information service in the ministry of 

war. See also Philippe Ratte and Jean Thyrard, Armee et communication, une histoire 

du SIPRA, Paris: ADDIM, 1989, pp. 10–35.

12. Ratte and Thyrard, Armee et communication, pp. 67, 69–71, 76, 80; Géré, La 

Guerre Psychologique, pp. 92–99; Maurice Mégret, L’Action Psychologique, Paris: 

Libraire Artheme Fayard, 1959, pp. 110–111.

13. Ambler, The French Army in Politics, p. 218; Géré, La Guerre Psychologique, pp. 

182, 193–194; George Armstrong Kelly, Lost Soldiers: The French Army and Empire in 

Crisis, 1947–1962, Boston: MIT Press, 1965, pp. 184–185. 

14. Géré, La Guerre Psychologique, pp. 181–182; Ratte and Thyrard, Armee et 

communication, pp. 103, 111; Lieutenant Colonel Frédéric Guelton, Martin S. 

Alexander, trans., “The French Army ‘Center for Training and Preparation in 

Counter-Guerrilla Warfare’, CIPCG, at Arzew,” in Martin S. Alexander and J. F. V. 

Keiger, France and the Algerian War, 1954–1962: Strategy, Operations and Diplomacy, 

London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002, p. 41.

15. Maurice Bourgés-Maunoury, “Le Problèm Algerien,” Revue militaire 

d’information, Vol. 274, July, 1956, pp. 6–7.

16. “Instruction provisoire sur l’emploi de l’arme psychologique,” le 29 Juillet 

1957, p. 4., at www.infoguerre.com/fichiers/tta117.pdf, accessed February 4, 2003; 

Ambler, The French Army in Politics, pp. 219, 315; Kelly, Lost Soldiers, pp. 184–185.

17. “Instruction provisoire,” pp. 3, 5, 7 29, 47; General Jacques Allard, “Verités 

sur l’affaire algerienne,” Revue de Défense Nationale, Vol. 26, January, 1958, pp.10, 

19–21, 39.

18. D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency 

Policy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 159–161.

19. Ambler, The French Army in Politics, pp. 296–298, 315; Bougeard, René Pleven, 

p. 260.

20. Ambler, The French Army in Politics, pp. 296–298. Peter Paret, French 

Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria, the Analysis of a Political and Military 

Doctrine, New York: Praeger, 1964, pp. 54–55, also argues that it was the French 

military experience in Indochina and Algeria that led officers to accept the doctrine 

of revolutionary warfare. Rene Delisle, “La Crise Interne du Corps des Officiers,” 

La Nef, Vol. 7, July/September, 1961, pp. 39–50, considers and rejects the argument 

that revolutionary warfare was popular with the nontechnicians in the Army and 

served merely as a defense of their interests. Raoul Girardet, La société militaire de 
71

1815 a nos jours, Paris: Perrin, 1998, pp. 278–279, describes the effect of the war in 

Indochina on the French Army. For the contrast between the human element of 

war and “push-button” war, see Lacheroy, “La Guerre Revolutionnaire,” p. 10. For 

the connections between Indochina and Algeria, see Capitaine Jean-Marc Marill, 

“L’heritage Indochinois: adaptation de l’armée francaise en Algérie, 1954–1956,” 

Revue Historique des Armées, Vol. 187, June, 1992, pp. 26–32.

21. Ambler, The French Army in Politics, p. 176. Cf. Girardet, La société militaire 

de 1815 a nos jours, p. 285.

22. Ambler, The French Army in Politics, pp. 344, 342.

23. Irwin Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945-195, 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 212–215; Géré, La Guerre 

Psychologique, pp. 94–95, 127–128, 181–182; Ambler, The French Army in Politics, 

p. 160–162, 309, 326; Bernard Chantebout, “Le partage des responsibilities de la 

defense entre politiques et militaries de 1945 a 1962,” in Olivier Forcade, Eric 

Duhamel, and Philippe Vial, Militaires en Republique 1870-1962, Les Officiers, Le 

Pouvoir et la Vie Publique en France, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999, p. 86; 

Delisle, “La Crise Interne du Corps des Officiers,” p. 44–45.

24. Raoul Girardet, La société militaire de 1815 a nos jours, pp. 274–275; Ambler, 

The French Army in Politics, pp. 221, 254; Larkin, France Since the Popular Front, p. 

277.

25. Ratte and Thyrard, Armee et communication, pp. 103, 113; “Instruction 

provisoire,” pp. 30, 39, 41; Géré, La Guerre Psychologique, pp. 157–158; Paret, French 

Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria, p. 77. 

26. Ratte and Thyrard, Armee et communication, pp. 106, 111; Paret, French 

Revolutionary Warfare, p. 77; Géré, La Guerre Psychologique, pp. 224; Chef de 

Bataillon Etcheverry, “Réflexions sur la guerre subversive d’Algérie,” Revue des 

Forces Terrestres, July, 1959, p. 43.

27. Ratte and Thyrard, Armee et communication, pp. 110–112, 113–114, 118, 129.

28. Bernard Chantebout, “Le partage des responsibilities de la defense entre 

politiques et militaries de 1945 a 1962,” in Militaires en République, 1870–1962, Les 

officiers, le pouvoir et la vie publique en France, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 

1999, p. 83; Christian Bougeard, René Pleven, Un Francais Libre en Politique, Rennes: 

Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1995, p. 259. 

29. Ratte and Thyrard, Armee et communication, p. 120.

30. Ambler, The French Army in Politics, pp. 162–163; Jean Planchais, Une Histoire 

Politique de L Armée: de Gaulle a de Gaulle, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967, p. 338; 

Mégret, L’ Action Psychologique, p. 111; Girardet, La société militaire de 1815 a nos 

jours, p. 299.

31. Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, “Political Warfare,” Journal of the Royal United 

Services Institute, Vol. 95, 1950, pp. 193, 195, 198, 202, 203. 
72

32. Richard Crossman, “Psychological Warfare,” Journal of the Royal United 

Services Institute, Vol. 97, 1952, pp. 320–321; and Crossman, “Psychological 

Warfare,” Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, Vol. 98, 1953, pp. 353–360.

33. Philip M. Taylor, “‘If War Should Come’: Preparing the Fifth Arm for 

Total War,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 16, January 1981, pp. 34–35; L. 

Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial 

Counter-Insurgency 1944–1960, London: Leicester University Press, 1995, pp. 105, 

italics in original, 11, 75, 89. 

34. Taylor, “‘If War Should Come’: Preparing the Fifth Arm for Total War,” 

p. 31; Captain A. I. Pemberton, “Propaganda: Its Theory and Practice,” Journal 

of the United Service Institution of India, No. 255, April, 1929, p. 148; John B. Black, 

Organising the Propaganda Instrument: The British Experience, The Hague: Martinus 

Nijhoff, 1975, pp. 1–8; Charles Cruikshank, The Fourth Arm, Psychological Warfare 

1938–1945, London: David-Poynter, 1977, p. 9.

35. Charles Cruikshank, The Fourth Arm, Psychological Warfare 1938–1945, 

London: David Poynter, 1977, p. 28.

36. Arthur Willert, “Publicity and Political Propaganda in International Affairs,” 

International Affairs, Vol. 17, November-December, 1938, pp. 809, 817; Taylor, “‘If 

War Should Come,’” p. 33. 

37. Lieutenant Colonel H. L. F. Dimmock, “Propaganda,” Journal of the United 

Service Institute of India, Vol. 68, April, 1938, pp. 223, 226; Pemberton, “Propaganda,” 

p. 144, 145; Thomas Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency 1919–1960, London: 

Macmillan, 1990, pp. 30, 31, 36, 11, 68.

38. For example, Major C. B. Denning, “Modern Problems of Guerrilla Warfare,” 

Army Quarterly and Defence Journal, Vol. 13, 1927, pp. 347–354; Willert, “Publicity 

and Political Propaganda in International Affairs,” pp. 809–810; 811. See also 

Taylor, “‘If War Should Come,’” p. 30. 

39. Cruikshank, The Fourth Arm, pp. 25–26; Mariel Grant, “Towards a Central 

Office of Information: Continuity and Change in British Government Information 

Policy, 1939–51,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 34, January 1999, p. 60; W. 

Scott Lucas and C. J. Morris, “A Very British Crusade: The Information Research 

Department and the Beginning of the Cold War,” in British Intelligence, Strategy 

and the Cold War, 1945–1951, Richard J. Aldrich, ed., London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 

95, 106; Richard Aldrich, “Unquiet in Death: The Post-War Survival of the `Special 

Operations Executive’, 1945–1951,” in Contemporary British History, 1931–1961, 

Politics and the Limits of Policy, Anthony Gorst, Lewis Johnman and W. Scott Lucas, 

eds., London: Pinter Publishers, 1991, pp. 198–199; Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden 

Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, New York: The Overlook 

Press, 2002, pp. 122–141.

40. This account of British counterinsurgency draws on Mockaitis, British 

Counterinsurgency, and Timothy Llewellyn Jones, “The Development of British 

Counterinsurgency Policies and Doctrine, 1945–52,” Ph.D. Dissertation, London 

University, 1991; John Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency: From Palestine to 
73

Northern Ireland, London: Palgrave, 2002, takes a more critical view of British 

counterinsurgency efforts.

41. Colonel C. E. Callwell, Small Wars, Their Principles and Practice, 1906; third 

ed., with an introduction by Douglas Porch, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska 

Press, 1996, p. 41.

42. Major C. B. Denning, “Modern Problems of Guerrilla Warfare,” Army 

Quarterly and Defence Journal, Vol. 13, 1927, 349–350.

43. Jones, “The Development of British Counterinsurgency Policies and 

Doctrine, 1945–52.”

44. Quoted in Llewellyn, “The Development of British Counterinsurgency 

Policies and Doctrine,” p. 138. 

45. Deborah Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change, Lessons from 

Peripheral Wars, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994; Hew Strachan, The Politics 

of the British Army, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997; Hew Strachan, “The British 

Way of Warfare,” in The Oxford History of the British Army, General Editor, David 

Chandler and Associate Editor, Ian Beckett, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 

1996, pp. 398–415.

46. This and the following paragraph are drawn from Clayton D. Laurie, 

“‘The Chanting of Crusaders’: Captain Heber Blankenhorn and AEF Combat 

Propaganda in Word War I,” The Journal of Military History, Vol. 59, July, 1995, 

pp. 457–482; and Stanley Sandler, “Cease Resistance: It’s Good for You!”: A History of 

U.S. Army Combat Psychological Operations, Fort Bragg: United States Army Special 

Operations Command, Directorate of History and Museums, 1999, pp. 18–37.

47. Sandler, “Cease Resistance,” p. 33–34, 36–37. Consider also in this regard the 

arguments of Laurie, “‘The Chanting of Crusaders,’” pp. 477–479.

48. Laurie, “‘The Chanting of Crusaders,’” pp. 475, 479, 481; Sandler, “Cease 

Resistance,” p. 21.

49. Sandler, “Cease Resistance,” pp. 38–39, 43; Alfred H. Paddock, U.S. Army 

Special Warfare, Its Origins, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002; revised 

edition, p. 6; Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion, Communication Research 

and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 16; 

Laurie, “‘The Chanting of Crusaders,’” p. 480.

50. James Robert Mock and Cedric Larson, Words that Won the War: The Story 

of the Committee on Public Information, 1917-1919, Princeton: Princeton University 

Press, 1939, pp. 342–344; Harold W. Thatcher, Planning for Industrial Mobilization, 

1920–1940, N.P.; Historical Section, General Administrative Services Division, 

Office of the Quartermaster General, 1943, pp. 95, 152, 165, 197, 274; Paddock, U.S. 

Army Special Warfare, pp. 3–8; Sandler, “Cease Resistance,” pp. 40–43.

51. Milton C. Cummings, “Cultural Diplomacy and the United States 

Government: A Survey,” N.P.: Center for Arts and Culture, 2003, pp. 1–3, www.

culturalpolicy.org/pdf/MCCpaper.pdf, accessed July 23, 2003; Sandler, “Cease 

Resistance,” pp. 42; Bradley F. Smith, The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of 
74

the CIA, New York: Basic Books, 1983, pp. 55–68; Richard W. Steele, “Preparing the 

Public for War: Efforts to Establish a National Propaganda Agency, 1941–1942,” 

The American Historical Review, Vol. 75, October, 1970, pp. 1640–1653.

52. Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, pp. 8–18. Sandler, “Cease Resistance,”

pp. 38–202, gives a detailed account of psychological operations during the war.

53. Lawrence C. Sorley, Radio Warfare: OSS and CIA Subversive Propaganda, 

New York: Praeger, 1989, pp. 68–72; Kenneth A. Osgood, “Form before Substance: 

Eisenhower’s Commitment to Psychological Warfare and Negotiations with 

the Enemy,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 24, Summer, 2000, p. 410; Sandler, “Cease 

Resistance,” pp. 48, 53, 79, 197, 200–201.

54. E. Lilly, “Short History of the Psychological Strategy Board,” December 21, 

1951, National Security Council Staff Papers, NSC Secretariat Series, Box 6, Dwight 

Eisenhower Library, p. 12; John A. Pollard, “Words Are Cheaper than Blood,” 

Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 9, Autumn, 1945, p. 301; Letter, General of the Army 

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Headquarters, U.S. Forces, European Theater, Office of the 

Commanding General, quoted in Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, p. 20.

55. Lilly, “Short History of the Psychological Strategy Board,” pp. 12–13, 19, 

23–24; Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 

1945–1961, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998, p. 5; Gerhard L. Weinberg, A 

World at Arms, a Global History of World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 1994, p. 584. Pollard, “Words Are Cheaper than Blood,” pp. 287–296, offers 

evidence that tactical propaganda, leaflets, and loudspeakers worked.

56. Lilly, “Short History of the Psychological Strategy Board,” pp. 14, 20, 22–23; 

Steele, “Preparing the Public for War”; Pollard, “Words Are Cheaper than Blood,” 

pp. 283–285; Richard W. Steele, “The Great Debate: Roosevelt, the Media, and the 

Coming of War, 1940–1941,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 71, June 1984, pp. 

69–92; Joseph Barnes, “Fighting with Information: OWI Overseas,” Public Opinion 

Quarterly, Vol. 7, Spring, 1943, pp. 34–35; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, p. 5; Gregory 

Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin, America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 

1947–1956, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 2; Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by 

Design, the Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 

1999, pp. 171–172. 

57. Lilly, “Short History of the Psychological Strategy Board,” p. 36–37; Paddock, 

U.S. Army Special Warfare, pp. 56; “Memorandum from the Secretary of the StateArmy-Navy-Air Force Coordinating Committee, Moseley, to the Under Secretary 

of State, Lovett,” October 15, 1947, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950, 

Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (hereafter, FRUS), Document 242, www.

state.gov/www/about_state/history/intel/index.html, accessed February 13, 2006.

58. Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations 

with respect to Intelligence Activities, U.S. Senate, 94th Congress, Second Session, 

Report 94-755, Book IV, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Foreign and 

Military Intelligence, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, April 

23, 1976, p. 26; Andrei Zhdanov, “Report on the International Situation to the 
75

Cominform,” September 22, 1947, www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/04/

documents/cominform.html, accessed July 30, 2003.

59. “Memorandum by the Army Member of the State-Army-Navy-Air Force 

Coordinating Committee, Pixtou,” c. October 20, 1947, FRUS, Document 243; 

“Memorandum From Director of Central Intelligence Hillenkoetter to the StateArmy-Navy-Air Force Coordinating Committee,” October 22, 1947, FRUS, 

Document 244; “Memorandum From the Executive Secretary of the National 

Security Council Sidney Souers, to Secretary of Defense Forrestal,” October 24, 

1947, FRUS, Document 245.

60. “Memorandum From the Deputy Director, Wright, to Director of Central 

Intelligence Hillenkoetter,” November 4, 1947, FRUS, Document 247.

61. Richard D. Mckinzie And Theodore A. Wilson, “Oral History Interview 

with W. Averell Harriman,” Washington, DC, 1971, Truman Presidential Museum 

and Library, www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/harriman.htm, accessed July 31, 2003.

62. “Minutes of Staff Meeting,” November 18, 1947, Records of the Central 

Intelligence Agency, Job 80-0173R, Box 31, Folder 3, quoted in “Memorandum 

of Discussion at the 2d Meeting of the National Security Council,” footnote 2, 

November 14, 1947, FRUS Document 250.

63. “Memorandum From the Executive Secretary, Souers, to the Members of the 

National Security Council,” December 9, 1947, FRUS Document 253; “Department 

of State Briefing Memorandum,” December 17, 1947, FRUS Document 256; “Policy 

Planning Staff Memorandum,” March 29, 1948, FRUS Document 263; Supplementary 

Detailed Staff Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence, p. 28; Forrest C. Pogue, 

George C. Marshall: Statesman, New York, Viking Press, 1987, pp 152, 192–196.

64. “Department of State Briefing Memorandum,” December 17, 1947, FRUS, 

Document 256; “Policy Planning Staff Memorandum” May 4, 1948, FRUS Document 

269; Memorandum From the Director of the Policy Planning Staff, Department of 

State, Kennan, to the Assistant Director for Policy Coordination, Central Intelligence 

Agency, Wisner,” January 6, 1949, FRUS Document 308; “Memorandum From 

the Director of the Policy Planning Staff, Kennan, to the Under Secretary of State, 

Lovett,” October 29, 1948, FRUS Document 305; “Psychological and Political 

Warfare,” FRUS Introduction; Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin, pp. 16–18.

65. “Memorandum for the President of Discussion at the 12th Meeting of the 

National Security Council,” June 3, 1948, FRUS Document 283; “Memorandum for 

the President of Discussion at the 13th Meeting of the National Security Council,”

June 27, 1948, FRUS Document 291; Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, pp. 43–45, 

48.

66. Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, pp. 57–60, 64; General Albert C. 

Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Reports! New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958, pp. 

91, 95.

67. Lilly, “Short History of the Psychological Strategy Board,” p. 62–64, 75–76, 

78–79.
76

68. Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, pp. 61, 63, 91–94; Lilly, “Short History 

of the Psychological Strategy Board,” p. 86.

69. Paddock, U.S. Army Special Warfare, pp. 97, 94, cf. p. 147, 100–101, 118, 102–

103, 107.

70. John A. Nagl, “British and American Army Counterinsurgency Learning 

during the Malayan Emergency and the Vietnam War,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Oxford: 

University of Oxford, 1997, pp. 185–186.

71. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam, A History, New York: The Viking Press, 1983, pp. 

408-409.

72. Robert A. Doughty, The Evolution of US Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946–76, 

1979; Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, and Washington, DC: The 

Center for Military History, 2001, p. 30.

73. The argument for noninnovation in Vietnam focuses principally on doctrine, 

where this argument is most true. See, for example, Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The 

Army and Vietnam, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Krepinevich, 

p. 39, however, misrepresents the quality of the discussion of counterinsurgency 

doctrine in FM 100-5, 1962. For innovation in Vietnam, see Lieutenant General 

John Hay, Jr., Vietnam Studies, Tactical and Materiel Innovations, Washington, DC, 

1974. Peter M. Dawkins, “The United States Army and the ‘Other’ War in Vietnam, 

A Study of the Complexity of Implementing Organizational Change,” Ph.D. 

Dissertation, Princeton: Princeton University, February 1979, provides a detailed 

discussion of the Army’s involvement in the advisory program. 

74. Jeffrey Record, “Vietnam in Retrospect: Could We have Won?” Parameters, 

Winter, 1996–97, pp. 51–65, summarizes the views of those who believe that the 

Army’s strategy could have worked.

75. Francis J. Kelly, U.S. Army Special Forces, 1961–1971, Washington, DC: 

Department of the Army, 1973, p. 10.

76. Shelby L. Stanton, Green Berets at War, U.S. Army Special Forces in Southeast 

Asia, 1956–1975, Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1985, pp. 38–39; Letter, DA Office 

of the Chief of Staff, Subj: Special Warfare Field Visit to Vietnam and Okinawa, 

13–30 Jan 63, dated January 30, 1963, p. 3, quoted in “Outline History of the 5th 

SF Group, Airborne, Participation in the CIDG Program, 1961–1970,” p. 11, www.

ehistory.com/vietnam/pdf/sfcidg.pdf, accessed October 1, 2002. See also Thomas K. 

Adams, U.S. Special Operations Forces in Action: The Challenge of Unconventional 

Warfare, London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1998, p. 85; Krepinevich, The Army and 

Vietnam, pp. 70-71; Kelly, U.S. Army Special Forces, pp. 4, 19–44. On the problems in 

the CIDG program, see, for example, General William B. Rosson (USA, ret.), “Four 

Periods of American Involvement in Vietnam: Development and Implementation 

of Policy, Strategy, and Programs, Described and Analyzed on the Basis of Service 

Experience at Progressively Senior levels,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Oxford University, 

1979, p. 124.

77. Rosson, “Four Periods of American Involvement in Vietnam,” pp. 149–

151.
77

78. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, pp. 72–74.

79. Kelly, U.S. Army Special Forces, p. 49.

80. Ibid., U.S. Army Special Forces, pp. 34; 46-48; Krepinevich, The Army and 

Vietnam, pp. 73–75. I have not uncovered any documentary evidence that the work 

done at the Brinks Hotel was the basis for the CIDG table of organization and 

equipment, but the timing is right and the CIDG table is similar to what the Army 

study team developed. Compare Kelly, U.S. Army Special Forces, p. 48; and Nagl, 

“British and American Army Counterinsurgency Learning,” pp. 185–186. 

81. On the Marines and counterinsurgency, their operations in Vietnam and 

the CAPs, see Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, pp. 172–177; Allan R. Millett, 

Semper Fidelis, The History of the United States Marine Corps, New York: The Free 

Press, 1980; revised and expanded ed., 1991, pp. 548–549, 570–572, 589–590; Keith 

F. Kopets, “The Combined Action Program: Vietnam,” Military Review, Vol. 82, 

July-August, 2002, pp. 78–81; T. P. Schwartz, “The Combined Action Program: A 

Different Perspective,” Marine Corps Gazette, Vol. 83, February, 1999, pp. 63–72; 

and General Lewis W. Walt, U.S. Marine Corps, Strange War, Strange Strategy, A 

General’s Report on Vietnam, New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1970, pp. 81–84.

82. Doughty, The Evolution of US Army Tactical Doctrine, p. 25.

83. John F. Kennedy, “Remarks at West Point to the Graduating Class of the 

U.S. Military Academy, June 6, 1962,” p. 226.

84. The NSAMs are available at www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/nsam.htm, accessed 

September 19, 2002.

85. www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/images/nsam124a.jpg, accessed September 19, 

2002.

86. Lloyd Norman and John B. Spore, “Big Push in Guerrilla Warfare,” 

Army, Vol. 12, March, 1962, p. 33; Adams, U.S. Special Operations Forces in Action, 

p. 68; Krepinevich, The Army in Vietnam, pp. 30–33; Douglas S. Blaufarb, The 

Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present, New York: 

Free Press, 1977, p. 65; Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation, The Politics of Foreign 

Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy, New York: Doubleday & Company, 

1967, pp. 415, 424; Kelly, U.S. Army Special Forces, pp. 5–6.

87. For NSAM 183, see www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/images/nsam182a.jpg, accessed 

September 20, 2002; “United States Overseas Internal Defense Policy,” September 

1962, declassified copy in possession of author, pp. 28–29.

88. Rosson, “Four Periods of American Involvement in Vietnam,” pp. 98, 109–

110, 113–115; Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, p. 76.

89. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, pp. 30, 36–37, 43–44. 

90. Ibid., pp. 174–177; Kopets, “The Combined Action Program.”

91. For comments on the effectiveness of attrition and criticisms of alternatives 

to it, see Scott Sigmund Gartner, Strategic Assessment in War, New Haven: 

Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 133–137; Doughty, The Evolution of U.S. Army 
78

Tactical Doctrine, p. 39; James J. Wirtz, “Intelligence to Please? The Order of 

Battle Controversy during the Vietnam War,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 

106, Summer, 1991, 239–263, especially p. 245; Robert S. McNamara, James G. 

Blight, and Robert K. Brigham, with Thomas J. Biersteker and Colonel Herbert 

Y. Schandler (U.S. Army, Ret.), Argument without End, In Search of Answers to the 

Vietnam Tragedy, New York: Public Affairs, 1999, pp. 313–371, especially pp. 348–

362, 409–419; Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, pp. 167, 178, 190, 255–256; Walt, 

Strange War, Strange Strategy, p. 105; Schwartz, “The Combined Action Program: A 

Different Perspective,” pp. 63–72. Millett is less enthusiastic about the CAP effort 

than Krepinevich. He also claims, contrary to Krepinevich, that Marines in CAPs 

suffered higher casualties than Marines in other units. Compare Krepinevich, The 

Army and Vietnam, p. 174; and Millett, Semper Fidelis, pp. 590. See also, Millett, 

Semper Fidelis, p. 602.

92. Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change, argues that the Marines and 

the CIA innovated in Vietnam; Rosson, “Four Periods of American Involvement in 

Vietnam,” p. 124; Kelly, U.S. Army Special Forces, p. 10; Stanton, Green Berets at War, 

pp. 38–43; Millett, Semper Fidelis, pp. 570–572, 548–549, 582–583, 602; Krepinevich, 

The Army and Vietnam, pp. 172–174, 232; Lewis Sorley, A Better War, The Unexamined 

Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, New York: Harcourt 

Brace & Company, 1999, p. 1.

93. Sorley, A Better War, p. 1.

94. Doughty, The Evolution of US Army Tactical Doctrine, p. 40–42.

95. Thomas R. Mockaitis, Peace Operations and Intrastate Conflict: The Sword or the 

Olive Branch? Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1999; John Keegan, The Iraq War, 

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, pp. 175, 182, 193, 209.

96. Thomas R. Searle, “Making Airpower Effective against Guerrillas,” Air & 

Space Power Journal, Vol. 18, Fall 2004, pp. 13-23.

97. Bradley Graham, “Pentagon Prepares to Rethink Focus on Conventional 

Warfare; New Emphasis on Insurgencies and Terrorism Is Planned,” Washington 

Post, January 26, 2005, p. A2.

98. Gordon Lubold, “Rumsfeld Leads Talks on Reshaping DoD,” Army Times, 

January 23, 2006, p. 12, vi, 11.

99. The 9/11 Commission Report, The Final Report of the National Commission on 

Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 

2004, p. 350.

100. “Rumsfeld’s war-on-terror memo,” October 16, 2003, www.usatoday.com/

news/washington/executive/rumsfeld-memo.htm accessed October 8, 2004; Bradley 

Graham, “Shortfalls of Special Operations Command Are Cited,” Washington 

Post, November 17, 2005, p. A2.

101. For example, DoD does not acknowledge that it faces a global insurgency. 

R. R. Keene, “In a Historic Move, the Corps to Stand Up a Special Ops Command,” 

Leatherneck, Vol. 88, December, 2005, pp. 46-47; Dana Milbank, “Rumsfeld’s War on 
79

‘Insurgents,’” Washington Post, November 30, 2005, p. A4. Brigadier General Robert 

L. Caslen, the Joint Staff’s Deputy Director for the Global War on Terrorism, 

recently remarked that “we do not go as far as to say it is a global insurgency 

because it lacks a centralized command and control.” Quoted in Sharon Behn, 

“Terrorist Growth Overtakes U.S. Efforts, Pentagon Deputy Warns of Decadeslong War,” Washington Times, March 2, 2006, p. 13. 

102. Department of Defense Directive 3000.05, “Military Support for Stability, 

Security, Transition, and Reconstruction, SSTR, Operations,” November 28, 2005; 

News Briefing with Principal Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Ryan Henry 

and Director, Force Structure, Resources and Assessment, Joint Staff Vice Adm. 

Evan Chanik, February 3, 2006, www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2006/tr20060203-

12424.html, accessed February 13, 2006. Henry: “. . . before we’d always said major 

combat operations, everything else was a lesser included subset. But now we’re 

saying that we have two co-equal type of activities that we do operationally.”

103. Thomas E. Ricks, “Lessons Learned in Iraq Show Up in Army Classes,” 

Washington Post, January 21, 2006, p. A1; Lloyd Norman and John B. Spore, “Big 

Push in Guerrilla Warfare,” Army, March 1962, p. 33; “DoD News Briefing,” 

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, September 20, 2001, www.defenselink.

mil/news/Sep2001/t09202001_t920ruma.html, accessed January 30, 2006; John F. 

Kennedy, “Remarks at West Point to the Graduating Class of the U.S. Military 

Academy, June 6, 1962,” The Public Papers of the Presidents, John F. Kennedy, 1962, 

Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977, p. 226.

104. John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, Boulder, Colorado: 

Westview Press, 2003.

105. The argument in this paragraph and the next borrows from Avant, Political 

Institutions and Military Change; and Jerry M. Cooper, “The Army’s Search for a 

Mission, 1865–1890,” in Against All Enemies: Interpretations of American Military 

History from Colonial Times to the Present, Kenneth J. Hagan and William R. Roberts, 

eds., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. On the connection between attachment 

to the cavalry and problems of innovation and transformation, see Edward L. 

Katzenbach, “The Horse Cavalry in the Twentieth Century: A Study in Policy 

Response,” in American Defense Policy, John E. Endicott and Roy W. Stafford, Jr., 

eds., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

106. Al Kamen, “Donny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” Washington Post, September 

7, 2001, p. A27; and Richard Lowry, “Bombing at the Pentagon,” National Review, 

Vol. 53, Issue 17, September 3, 2001, p. 36.

107. Secretary Rumsfeld is now conducting an experiment to test this point, 

having recalled General Peter J. Schoomaker from retirement to serve as Chief 

of Staff of the Army in an apparent effort to speed up the transformation of the 

Army.

108. As Matthew G. Karres and Michael Richardson report, 

a review of cases that span a century of US irregular warfare operations 

provides evidence that, at times, the military hierarchy did allow 
80

subordinates to innovate and did listen to their recommendations, with 

positive outcomes as a result. This evidence also illustrates, however, 

that the military has failed to institutionalize these lessons and is prone to 

have to relearn them from conflict to conflict, and at times this relearning 

process has resulted in the failure of an operation. 

Matthew G. Karres and Michael Richardson, Innovation from Below: the Role of 

Subordinate Feedback in Irregular Warfare Operations, Thesis, Naval Postgraduate 

School, June 2001.

109. Major C. B. Denning, “Modern Problems of Guerrilla Warfare,” Army 

Quarterly and Defence Journal, Vol. 13, 1927.

110. For unconventional warfare as a revolution in military affairs, see David 

Tucker, “The War on Terrorism and the Western Way of Warfare,” in The West at 

War, Bradley C. S. Watson, ed., Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, forthcoming, 2006. 

Ivan Arreguín-Toft, “How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict,” 

International Security, Vol. 26, No. 1, Summer 2001, pp. 93–128, documents and 

explains the increasing success in the 20th-century of the weak against the strong.

111. For an argument for and a description of an effective interagency 

organization, see David Tucker and Christopher J. Lamb, “Restructuring Special 

Operations Forces for Emerging Threats,” Strategic Forum, Institute for National 

Strategic Studies, National Defense University, January 2006.

112. Ibid.

113. “Interview with General E. C. Meyer” by Dr. J. W. Partin, Arlington, VA, 

July 14, 1988, p. 2, copy in author’s possession.

114. “Precarious” is how Susan Marquis describes the existence of Special 

Operations Forces prior to the establishment of the Special Operations Command. 

See Susan Marquis, Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special Operations 

Forces, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997.

115. General Henry Shelton, “Peace Operations: The Forces Required,” National 

Security Studies Quarterly, Vol. 6, Summer 2000, shows the “lesser-included case” 

assumption weakening, at least verbally.

116. Stephen Biddle, American Grand Strategy After 9/11: An Assessment, Carlisle 

Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, April 2005, 

www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?PubID=603, accessed May 3, 

2006.

117. This discussion of long-term trends assumes that the distinction between 

conventional and unconventional warfare will remain in the future. This may 

not be a safe assumption, since, as noted in the introduction, this distinction—

unconventional warfare deliberately targets civilians, conventional warfare does 

not—has eroded in the 20th century. If the distinction disappears or as it disappears, 

we should expect the U.S. military to adapt, since in this case conventional and 
81

unconventional threats to the United States will no longer compete for the attention 

of the military. There simply will be one threat. In this case, attacks on American 

noncombatants would occur not as an “asymmetric strategy” pursued by an enemy 

who despaired of competing with our conventional forces. (For example, see Qiao 

Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare, Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts 

Publishing House, February 1999, translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information 

Service, www.terrorism.com/documents/ TRC-Analysis/unrestricted.pdf, accessed May 

10, 2006.) Such attacks would be the only strategy. This would be a true revolution, 

not just in military but in human affairs, since it would imply that the modern state, 

whose fundamental purpose is to protect its citizens, had become obsolete. It would 

mean that organizations or movements like al-Qai’da, which lack sovereignty and 

territory, yet have power and affect world politics, would no longer aspire, as alQai’da still does, to both sovereignty and territory. This political transformation 

may not be possible. If it is, whether it would return us to something like the world 

of the Middle Ages or propel us into some new world, it is not likely to happen 

within anything that could be considered a planning framework, unlike the rise of 

China or the acquisition by terrorists of CBRN. We therefore may acknowledge it 

as a possibility but ignore it as a factor in our planning.

118. Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War, New York: Basic Books, 

1991; “Through a Glass Darkly: Some Reflections on the Future of War,” Naval War 

College Review, Vol. 53, Autumn 2000, pp. 25–44.

119. On this point, consider officer attitudes as reported in Thomas G. Mahnken 

and James R. FitzSimonds, The Limits of Transformation: Officer Attitudes toward the 

Revolution in Military Affairs, Newport Paper, No. 17, Newport, Rhode Island: 

Naval War College Press, 2003.

120. For a defense of this claim, see Gray, “Irregular Enemies and the Essence 

of Strategy,” pp. 35–38.