One has become familiar with the demented logic and the deadened language of prominent American nuclear strategists. This bookfootnote＊ initiates us into a new branch of military mythology: “counter-guerilla warfare” and its associated techniques. It proves almost as frightening as the theory of nuclear strategy proper, since it could so clearly provide the flash-point of a nuclear war. The book mainly consists of articles previously published in US military journals during the waning years of the Eisenhower Administration. We learn at the outset that “most military men, unlike their civilian counterparts, know that we are in a fight”. Dismay is expressed at the contrast between the United States’ immense and variegated military armour, and its apparent helplessness in the face of a popular social challenge. One contributor asks: “What good are Atlas and Polaris in Laos, Cuba, Algeria and the Congo or in the swarming streets of Tokyo, Ankara, Jakarta and Budapest?” What could cause “the overthrow of no less than eight governments that were firm allies of the United States: in Venezuela, Iraq, Cuba, South Korea, Turkey, Tokyo, El Salvador, Laos”? The contributors conclude that, vast though it is, the US armoury still lacks some vital weapon. What can this be? They answers often defy description. At one point it is argued that the US is deficient in, all of things, agents provocateurs: “How many men and women (women are extremely important in crowd management) do we have in training today for the mission of exploiting crowds, mobs and street riots to our political advantage? Do we have any?” In the mild, melancholy twilight of the Eisenhower era demands like this could have been dismissed as ravings of no real political significance, occupational aberrations of the US military mind. But the Kennedy Administration sets them in a new and different context. In this book, the more ultra contributors like James Burnham or Ernst von Dohnanyi (whose article on “Combatting Soviet Guerillas” during World War II appears to be based on personal experience) are joined by such leading functionaries
The book, then, represents a response to the demands of the new administration. It is this which makes it so frightening and illuminating a volume. The most absurd fantasies of aggression receive the oblique endorsement of pronouncements in the same pages by the ideologues and bureaucrats of the regime. Thus in one essay Burnham advocates that the United States should adopt a “new tool” in the “struggle”: POLWAR or political warfare, a system based on: “Blanquist cadres, crowd manipulation, guerillas, psychological warfare, para-military operations, subversion, bribery, infiltration with specialized mobile ranger-type units in active supporting reserve.” He adds: “In a genuine POLWAR system foreign aid is only a key to open a national door for the conduct of field operations: information and propaganda are not a school to teach pale truths about how nice one is, but a psychological weapon to undermine, divert and injure one’s enemy; student scholarships are not a handout to the needy but a cover for training activist cadres.”
The official spokesman are less wild, but show almost no comprehension of the challenge they face. Hillsman quotes Kennedy’s speech of July, 27th, 1961: “We face a challenge in Berlin, but there is also a challenge in South East Asia, where the borders are less guarded, the enemy harder to find, and the dangers of Communism less apparent to those who have so little. We face a challenge in our own hemisphere.” Rostow, in his role of intellectual, refines the analysis: “Communism is best understood as a disease of the transition to modernization” (sic). Throughout the book the contributors attempt to place “guerilla warfare” in a hierarchy of different types of military conflict (nuclear war, local war, guerilla war, etc.); the elementary realization that that guerilla warfare is itself only one possible expression of social conflict rarely impinges.