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Back to the Future: US Counterinsurgency Campaigns in Afghanistan
and Vietnam
Following the American withdrawal from Vietnam, a primary lesson learned was
to avoid another Vietnam. The US Army, in particular, refocused its energies on
potential conventional war with the Soviet Union and in conjunction with the later
Weinberger and Powell doctrines emphasized speed, technology, and size in order to
overawe and destroy an enemy on the battlefield. Recently, the US military, engaged in
counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, has begun reexamining its
experiences in Vietnam and other former counterinsurgency operations, recognizing that
these current conflicts are not conducive to the conventional operations on which much
of the military focuses.
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Examining the lessons of Vietnam, and, in particular, the lessons
of the US Marine Corps’ CAP and the US Army Special Forces’ CIDG programs, can
provide useful guidance for American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This paper examines these two programs to garner suggestions and lessons that
can be employed today and applies these lessons—and their cautions—to Afghanistan
and particularly to the PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team) program being
implemented there. Some of the lessons are unsurprising; the need to gain support of the
population, the advantages of small-unit tactics, and other classic lessons of
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While Special Operations Forces (SOF) and, to a lesser extent the US Marine Corps, have long focused
on what has been alternately called small wars, stability operations, or low-intensity conflicts, only recently
has attention been closely paid to them by the broader armed forces. In January 2004, the United States
Marine Corps finally added a draft addendum to its 1940 Small Wars Manual in order to update the classic
manual. In October 2004, the United States Army produced the draft version of its Counterinsurgency
Operations (FMI 3-07.22). Other recent handbooks for the military include FM 3-06 Urban Stability
Operations and Support Operations (2003), Fm 3-07 Stability Operations and Support Operations (2003),
and JP 3-07.1 Joint Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for Foreign Internal Defense (FID) (2004).
Convention