Vietnam, Iraq and the rebirth of counter-insurgency

Abstract

Events in Iraq during the period 2006-8 marked a profound shift both in how the US Army understood its role in the Vietnam War and how it approached counterinsurgency warfare. The shock of failure in Iraq had dislocated several of the US Army's core assumptions about how war should be fought and what the lessons it had learned from Vietnam meant. Now, the Army's challenge was to make sense of Vietnam again in light of the lessons of Iraq and to re-evaluate the place of counterinsurgency in its doctrine and, more broadly, its culture. Part of this re-evaluation and reimagining took place at the Army's Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the new doctrine to deal with the unexpected challenges the Army now faced in Iraq was put together. This paper will explore how understandings of the Vietnam War intersected with the Iraq experience in terms of counter-insurgency doctrine. Doctrine writers and strategists revisited the Vietnam War to draw different, more pertinent lessons from that conflict. The manner in which they did this illustrates the way in which institutional memory can change to suit contemporary needs.