Winning Hearts or Squeezing a Balloon: Reassessing Alternative COIN Strategies

• In Event: Counterinsurgency Warfare

Abstract

Recent research on counterinsurgency strategies has seemingly resolved a central debate: “hearts and minds” based approaches are superior to tactics emphasizing overwhelming firepower as the latter strategy alienates local noncombatants. We argue that this scholarship has ignored important ways insurgents adapt—such as moving strategically to avoid counterinsurgents—and consequently overestimated the relative and absolute effectiveness of the “hearts and mind” approach in relative and absolute terms. We employ a mixed methods analysis of the Vietnam War to test the proposition that the Marines strategy, which embedded ground troops near villages as part of the Combined Action Program, caused insurgents to move strategically into the Army regions where exposure to ground units was more costly but less likely. We build on a natural experiment resulting from the shift in-control over I Corp in the northern part of South Vietnam from the Marines to the Army in 1967, and combine this analysis with a set of agent-based models that allow us to model insurgent adaptation. Preliminary results demonstrate that the increase in VC attacks in the Army’s region relative to the Marine’s is consistent with a model in which insurgents move strategically to avoid unwanted contact with the counterinsurgent. When we simulate conflicts where the Marines’ approach is applied to both regions, the difference in attacks between military regions (relative to the observed world) diminishes noticeably. Our approach highlights the importance of taking insurgent adaptation seriously and identifies the efficacy of different COIN strategies across a variety of plausible scenarios.

Authors

• Gregory Smith, Syracuse University

• Mael van Beek, Princeton University