I was reading this earlier this evening, it's from a Black Coffee Briefing at the AEI by Gary Baurer. (Be warned they have just re-instated these Black Coffee Briefings after stoping them just after the end of the invaison of Iraq. I think)
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But there are lessons learned from Vietnam that are worthwhile, and the truth is Americans know how to fight small wars, how to conduct counterinsurgencies. Vietnam was not the only experience we had in that, and much of what we know that is still useful and timely can be found in the Marines' small war manual that was published in 1940, which is something of a compilation of the American experience over 150 years of fighting counterinsurgencies and fighting small wars.
Now, what are the key ingredients for successful counterinsurgency strategy? Well, the first one is that your policy has to be coordinated; that is, you're not just conducting a military campaign independent of your economic and political reconstruction. They have to go hand in hand.
When you enter an area militarily, you also have to be entering an area with economic aid, reconstruction aid, and a good deal of political effort to reconstruct the politics in that region. One would have to ask the question in Iraq today whether, in fact, we have that kind of coordination, whether Mr. Bremer's office and the military officers there, in fact, have a coordinated team effort to do this sort of thing.
The second thing that has to happen is, which is one of the more difficult things for Americans to do, is you have to swamp an area. You have to take a lot of troops and put them in a particular area, root out the bad guys, stabilize the area, bring in all of your economic and political aid, stay there for a while, and convince the people in that region that the bad guys aren't going to be on their streets and that you're going to remain until things are settled.
EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT
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http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.642/transcript.asp