9
enough.
16
Looking at the decade after the end of the involvement in Vietnam most
researchers on the subject do seem to agree that relatively little was published, and even
that, had little impact in terms of the dominant doctrinal thought in the armed forces or
the major themes in IR. And if relatively little in America usually means a significant
amount and variety of material, it is also true that books and articles do not automatically
doctrine make, and not all doctrine is seen as equally important.
17
It is to these problems,
particularly in connection with the question of the challenges that new technology poses
to traditional counter-insurgency doctrine that we will now turn. Certain that there is
indeed a gap in the study of small wars, and if it is not exclusively American, the US has
shown a particularly strong academic and military resistance to what seems to be been
seen as a lesser form of war, bellow the level of serious soldiers and serious scholars.
18
16
Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr., Rebellion and Authority : An Analytical Essay on Insurgent
Conflicts, (Chicago : Markham Pub. for RAND Corp, 1970) is probably the most representative and
interesting work.
17
For the 1980s see Michael T. Klare and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Low Intensity Warfare :
Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency and Antiterrorism in the Eighties, (New York, Pantheon Books, 1988);
and especially Loren B. Thompson (ed.), Low-Intensity Conflict : The Pattern of Warfare in the Modern
World, (Lexington : Lexington Books, 1989). For the 1990s see e.g. Ralph Peters, Fighting for the Future :
Will America Triumph? (Mechanicsburg : Stackpole Books, 2001), 2
nd
rev. ed. The original edition dated
from 1999, and it essentially collects articles published by Peters during the 1990s, namely in Parameters
the Army War College Journal. Other significant names of the period include Steve Metz, who heads the
Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College; Larry Cable that we already quoted is another
significant name, or for his radical critique of the intellectual paradigms that presided over Vietnam, D. M.
Shafer, Deadly paradigms : the failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency policy, (Princeton : Princeton University
Press , 1988). More recently two active duty officers John Nagl and Robert Cassidy have indeed been
active in this field, not least by producing two recently published doctoral dissertations: J. A. Nagl,
Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam : Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, (Westport :
Praeger, 2002);
18
J. A. Nagl, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, p.128 makes reference to the
suspicion with which the special forces were seen by US Army officers.
Convention