The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency - William Rosenau, Austin Long, Rand Corporation.
Fresh interest in the history of counterinsurgency has focused renewed attention on the Phoenix Program, the United States' primary effort to improve intelligence coordination and operations aimed at identifying and dismantling the communist underground during the Vietnam War. Modern-day advocates of the program argue that it was devastatingly effective, but detractors condemn it as a merciless assassination campaign. Without a clearer understanding of the truth about Phoenix and its overall effectiveness, analysts risk drawing flawed conclusions about the program's applicability to contemporary conflicts.
The authors explore the Viet Cong underground (the target of Phoenix operations) and the early US and South Vietnamese operations designed to dismantle it. Tracing the provenance and evolution of the Phoenix Program from these early operations, they identify the program's three elements and assess its overall success. They conclude that the truth about Phoenix and its effectiveness lies somewhere between the extremes of today's competing claims: The program made positive contributions to counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, but its political costs to the United States were substantial. The authors note that the Phoenix Program highlights the continuing importance of intelligence coordination and anti-infrastructure operations in contemporary counterinsurgency.
Full document at Rand.
Comments
I'm just an old grunt with an opinion...
We seem to have lost the nerve of the Great Generation; we kowtow to the opinions of others and fail to fight wars the way they have been won for generations - by defeating the enemy in detail.
COIN should be the means by which we utilize the full force and measure of US in a covert manner to eliminate the opposition leadership and take the enemy out of it's loop.
We need to go after the bankers and financiers as well as keeping the pressure up on the rest of their logistics chains. We need to continue to make terrorism 'bad for business'.