The SWORD Model of Counterinsurgency

A Summary and Update

by John T. Fishel and Max G. Manwaring, Small Wars Journal

The SWORD Model of Counterinsurgency (Full PDF Article)

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the United States military turned its back on counterinsurgency (COIN). Except for a few Special Forces officers and soldiers, and a handful of others, there was no interest or effort devoted to COIN. America was never again going to fight a war like that. All of the Army's attention was devoted to stopping the Soviet armored hordes on the North German Plain and in the Fulda Gap by means of the Active Defense promulgated in the 1976 edition of FM 100-5, Operations. By that time, the curriculum at the Army's mid-level school for officers, the Command & General Staff College (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth, had almost completely eliminated any reference to COIN. In the late 1970s there was even a concerted effort to purge the CGSC files of any curriculum references to COIN! Only through the heroic efforts of LTC Don Vought, who hid the offending material in files on terrorism (which was the new topic du jour), were the lessons of the past saved for future generations of doctrine writers and officer students.

By 1981 there had been some minor changes. Communist insurgents (the FSLN) had seized power in Nicaragua in 1979. Other communist insurgents were attempting the same in neighboring El Salvador and the Carter Administration was beginning to support the government, however, unsavory. There was also a worrisome insurgency sputtering along in the Philippines and the U.S. was beginning to provide limited assistance to the anti-Soviet insurgents in Afghanistan. These developments resulted in a new manual, FM 100-20, Low Intensity Conflict (1981), which was primarily a rehash of the COIN manuals of the Vietnam era. In 1981, the United States Southern Command sent a team of officers to El Salvador, headed by Brigadier General Fred F. Woerner, to assess the situation and recommend a strategy for American support to the Armed Forces of El Salvador (ESAF). The result was the famous Woerner Report, produced in draft but never finalized or published. Nevertheless, it provided the U.S. COIN support strategy until the war ended 11 years later. One of its recommendations was an expanded security assistance effort which resulted in the "birth" of the 55 man U.S. Mil Group. Its first commander was Colonel John Waghelstein who went to El Salvador with the promise that he would command the 7th Special Forces Group on his return.

The war in El Salvador, which appeared to be going badly even into 1984, sparked some interest at the highest levels of the Army. That year, the Vice Chief of Staff, General Maxwell R. Thurman, asked the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) at the Army War College if it could conduct research to determine the "correlates of success" in COIN. The question, posed in that form, implied a quantitative study with a fairly large number of cases. Coincidentally, SSI had just hired Manwaring -- then a Reserve Lieutenant Colonel, who had recently come off several years of active duty in the U.S. Southern Command (Southcom) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). In his civilian life, Manwaring had been an academic political scientist and was trained to design and conduct that type of research. Manwaring became the lead researcher on the project which resulted in the SWORD Model.

The intent of this article is threefold. First, it addresses the methodology and development of the SWORD Model in context. Second, it reports the findings of the research using the model. And, third, it addresses the utility of the model both in light of the two major strategic approaches to counterinsurgency and, especially, at the operational and tactical levels of war.

The SWORD Model of Counterinsurgency (Full PDF Article)