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Robert Komer was the first director of CORDS in 1967 and 68, an ad hoc counter-insurgency program focus on rural pacification most notorious for the Phoenix Program series of extrajudicial killings. In this provocatively titled white paper, written after the Easter Offensive of 1972 and the leak of the Pentagon Papers, Komer makes a set of linked arguments about pacification and counter-insurgency that boil down to "too little, too late, by agencies that didn't care."
A read of high level policy documents in the Pentagon Paper reveal that those in charge: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, recognized the importance of rural pacification. Somewhere between D.C. and the Mekong delta, that emphasis faded away. Komer argues that there was never any unified counter-insurgency command, and in the absence of this unity of effort in country, agencies did what they traditionally did. State treated the government of South Vietnam like a stable sovereign partner nation, though it manifestly was not. The US Army focused on The Big War, high-tech search and destroy, and relegated counter-insurgency to a backwater. Pacification was never more than 10% of the billions of dollars spent annually.
Komer makes several suggestions for what should have been done. The ambassador should have been given proconsul authority over all military and civilian efforts in the war (and in Laos and Cambodia as well). Ad hoc organizations blending personnel from more durable agencies are effective, if properly supported. The US needed to use its leverage over aid to remove corrupt and ineffective South Vietnamese officials and officers, and damn the charges of colonialism.
This book is a good precise of counter-insurgency thinking circa 1972, but has obviously been superseded by events. Komer is biased towards what he did at CORDS, but not so much so to dismiss his conclusions. The problems are two-fold. From a scholarly perspective, "institutional constraints" is a handwave to explain why the Army, State, the CIA, etc all failed so comprehensively. And from a content perspective, I still have no idea what it would actually be like to go up river and wage the kind of pacification war that Komer wanted, to take some bright American kid (~25 years old) and make them the next best thing to God in a foreign province.
A read of high level policy documents in the Pentagon Paper reveal that those in charge: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, recognized the importance of rural pacification. Somewhere between D.C. and the Mekong delta, that emphasis faded away. Komer argues that there was never any unified counter-insurgency command, and in the absence of this unity of effort in country, agencies did what they traditionally did. State treated the government of South Vietnam like a stable sovereign partner nation, though it manifestly was not. The US Army focused on The Big War, high-tech search and destroy, and relegated counter-insurgency to a backwater. Pacification was never more than 10% of the billions of dollars spent annually.
Komer makes several suggestions for what should have been done. The ambassador should have been given proconsul authority over all military and civilian efforts in the war (and in Laos and Cambodia as well). Ad hoc organizations blending personnel from more durable agencies are effective, if properly supported. The US needed to use its leverage over aid to remove corrupt and ineffective South Vietnamese officials and officers, and damn the charges of colonialism.
This book is a good precise of counter-insurgency thinking circa 1972, but has obviously been superseded by events. Komer is biased towards what he did at CORDS, but not so much so to dismiss his conclusions. The problems are two-fold. From a scholarly perspective, "institutional constraints" is a handwave to explain why the Army, State, the CIA, etc all failed so comprehensively. And from a content perspective, I still have no idea what it would actually be like to go up river and wage the kind of pacification war that Komer wanted, to take some bright American kid (~25 years old) and make them the next best thing to God in a foreign province.