I've mentioned here several times that part of the dilemma for the US military in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the Army is oriented toward counterinsurgency warfare, either in training or in strategy and tactics. The same can be said of the Marines, though some units of both forces do have counterinsurgency training.
Lt. Col. Robert Cassidy addresses that issue in the Summer 2004 issue of Parameters, a publication of the Army War College: Back to the Street Without Joy: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam and Other Small Wars (*.pdf file)
I should mention that the War Colleges, despite being part of the armed services, maintain a high reputation for quality scholarship. In other words, they are not like some of the better-known think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where ideology is paramount and quality of scholarship is entirely secondary. In other words, scholars from the War College can and do express opinions that are critical of currently prevailing practices and assumptions within their own services.
In the first part of his article, Cassidy discusses the importance of the experience of counterinsurgency warfare, and criticizes the Army for not applying those lessons extensively enough (my emphasis):
The US military has had a host of successful experiences in counter-guerrilla war, including some distinct successes with certain aspects of the Vietnam War. However, the paradox stemming from America’s unsuccessful crusade in the jungles of Vietnam is this - because the experience was perceived as anathema to the mainstream American military, hard lessons learned there about fighting guerrillas were neither embedded nor preserved in the US Army’s institutional memory. The American military culture’s efforts to expunge the specter of Vietnam, embodied in the mantra “No More Vietnams,” also prevented the US Army as an institution from really learning from those lessons. In fact, even the term “counterinsurgency” seemed to become a reviled and unwelcome word, one that the doctrinal cognoscenti of the 1980s conveniently transmogrified into “foreign internal defense.” Even though many lessons exist in the US military’s historical experience withsmall wars, the lessons from the Vietnam War were the most voluminous. Yet these lessons were most likely the least read, because the Army’s intellectual rebirth after Vietnam focused almost exclusively on a big conventional war in Europe—the scenario preferred by the US military culture.
… For most of the 20th century, the US military culture (notwithstanding the Marines’ work in small wars) generally embraced the big conventional war paradigm and fundamentally eschewed small wars and insurgencies. Thus, instead of learning from our experiences in Vietnam, the Philippines, the Marine Corps’ experience in the Banana Wars, and the Indian campaigns, the US Army for most of the last 100 years has viewed these experiences as ephemeral anomalies and aberrations—distractions from preparing to win big wars against other big powers. As a result of marginalizing the counterinsurgencies and small wars that it has spent most of its existence prosecuting, the US military’s big-war cultural preferences have impeded it from fully benefiting—studying, distilling, and incorporating into doctrine—from our somewhat extensive lessons in small wars and insurgencies.
The lessons and successes of these programs are salient today because in both Afghanistan and Iraq, improving the quantity and capabilities of indigenous forces, ensuring that there is an integrated and unified civil-military approach, and the security of the population all continue to be central goals.
Part of what is instructive about Cassidy's article is that the wars from which he suggests we have to learn include those mentioned in the quotation above, including the Indian Wars on the North American continent in the 19th century, the Phillipine War and subsequent counterinsurgency efforts there, and the "Banana Wars" in Latin American countries like Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. Those wars don't bring to mind the happiest of memories.
War is war, and it involves killing the enemy. Guerrilla war is nasty business just like any other kind of war, and it carries its own particular brands of nastiness. The military assumption that guerrilla wars should be avoided in not entirely a bad instinct, by any means. But if there had been an honest recognition prior to the Iraq War that what it would involve would be not a glorious "cakewalk" of quick conquest in conventional war, but a protracted, costly, bloody guerrilla war, the public and Congressional discussions prior to the war might have had greater seriousness and greater substance.
Cassidy points out, as have many others, that the dramatic conventional war-fighting capabilities of the US military, which was on display in the initial weeks of the Iraq War when conventional war predominated, in itself makes it inevitable that enemies will use the techniquest of guerrilla warfare and terrorism against the US. Iraq's conventional army couldn't hope to defeat the US military. But the US military has so far been unable to pacify the country and suppress the guerrillas.
Cassidy also looks to those historical experiences for the ways in which integrating the military effort with the particular political needs of counterinsurgency warfare can be accomplished. If the Indian Wars seem like a poor example of enlightened counterinsurgency, the approaches he recommends were associated with Robert Cook, whom he mentions by name, who was known for using methods other than brute force in dealing with the Indians. If the post-Civil War policy toward the Indians had been in the hands of people like Robert Cook, instead of the William Armstrong Custers who predominated, the Indian Wars might not be such an ugly and frequently disgraceful chapter in American history.
The main purpose of Cassidy's article is to recommend several books for use in the study of counterinsurgency. Lited below are the various publications he recommends. I can't speak for the value of individual studies. I will mention, though, that neoconservative and Iraq War hawk Max Boot, whose work is included, hasn't proven himself to be the most astute of strategic thinkers in his writing on Iraq.
Birtle, Andrew J.; U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine 1860-1941 (Washington: US Army Center of Military History, 1988)
Boot, Max; “A Century of Small Wars Shows They Can be Won,” New York Times Week in Review, 6 July 2003.
Boot,Max; Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003)
Brewington, Brooks R.; “Combined Action Platoons: A Strategy for Peace Enforcement,” unpublished paper, USMC Command and Staff College, Quantico, Va., 1996
Cassidy, Robert M.; “Prophets or Praetorians: The Uptonian Paradox and the Powell Corollary,” Parameters, 33 (Autumn 2003)
Cassidy, Robert M.; “Why Great Powers Fight Small Wars Badly,” Military Review, 82 (Sept-Oct 2002)
Cassidy, Robert M.; Russia in Afghanistan and Chechnya: Military Strategic Culture and the Paradoxes of Asymmetric Conflict Robert M. Cassidy, (Carlisle, Pa.: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2003)
Clarke, Jeffrey J.; Advice and Support: The Final Years (Washington: US Army Center of Military History,1988)
Greene, Lt. Col. T. N., ed; The Guerrilla and How to Fight Him
Joes, Anthony James; America and Guerrilla Warfare (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2000)
Kopets, Keith F.; “The Combined Action Program: Vietnam,” Military Review,82 (July-August 2002), 78-79.
Pelli, Frank; “Insurgency, Counterinsurgency, and the Marines in Vietnam,” unpublished paper, USMC Command and Staff College, Quantico, Va., 1990
Sarkesian, Sam C.; America’s Forgotten Wars: The Counterrevolutionary Past and Lessons for the Future (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984)
Sorley,Lewis; A Better War (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999)
Taber, Robert; The War of the Flea: Guerrilla Warfare in Theory and Practice (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1965)
US Department of the Army, A Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam (Washington: Department of the Army, 1966)
US Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual (Washington: GPO, 1940) and the supplementary Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Small Wars (Draft) (Quantico, Va.: US Marine Corps, 2004)
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