Learning from our past how a Vietnam-era pacification program can help us win in Afghanistan

Download
Author
Bumgarner, Amy S.
Date
2009-09Advisor
Johnson, Thomas H.
Ear, Sophal
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Weak, failing, failed and post-conflict states pose one of the greatest national and international security challenges of our day. The stabilization and development of faltering states is in both the short- and long-term interests of the United States because stable states pose fewer security challenges. Afghanistan is a failed state that presents security challenges on a global scale as well as a classic case study on insurgency that needs a strong counterinsurgency response. A successful counterinsurgency needs an explicit strategy for winning the trust and confidence of the local population. Ultimately, the biggest problem is recognizing the importance of human terrain and understanding the population. Currently, operations in Afghanistan are managed at the provincial level. Only operations pushed down to the district and village level can capture these intricacies. This is where and how lessons from the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program used in Vietnam apply. CORDS combined the previously separate civilian and military pacification efforts in Vietnam into one program and resulted in what may have been the only truly integrated civilian-military command in U.S. history. This thesis will assess the lessons learned from fighting a counterinsurgency in Vietnam via CORDS and how they apply in Afghanistan.
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Cold war agency: the United States and the failure of the Diem experiment
DeSormier, Casey P. (Monterey, California: Naval Postgraduate School, 2017-03);The efforts of the Bush administration in the early 2000s to establish democratic regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq reflect an American foreign policy tradition that began at the end of World War II. The pairing of national ... -
Refighting the Last War Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template
Johnson, Thomas H.; Mason, M. Chris (2009);It is an oft-cited maxim that in all the conflicts of the past century, the United States has refought its last war. A number of analysts and journalists have mentioned the war in Vietnam recently in connection ... -
Training and organization for COIN conflicts a historic perspective with contemporary applications
Peifer, Jeremy L. (Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School, 2010-12);After eight years of conventional U.S. Army involvement in Afghanistan, the Infantry Brigade Combat Team (IBCT) have remained organized and trained to defeat a peer or near-peer enemy in a direct, symmetrical conflict. ...