A survey of US experiences in guerilla fighting over the years at Strategy Page:
After a decade of fighting Islamic terrorists the U.S. Department of Defense finally realized, at the most senior levels, that the nature of, and progress in this war was being poorly presented to the national leadership and the public. Actually, from the very beginning, there was a reluctance to reveal the masses of data collected and how it was analyzed. Partly this was to prevent the enemy from realizing how much information on terrorist operations it possessed. But another reason was the fact that such a large mass of data could be interpreted many different ways, some of them unfavorable to the United States. Thus there was no “body count” or any other type of measure released by the Department of Defense. Internally, there were various metrics (measurements) presented to senior military and political leadership. The big problem was the use of aggregation (combining a lot of data together that should not have been combined). That was a problem that slowly became obvious over the last decade.
It’s now recognized that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere, like Yemen, Somalia, North Africa and so on) were all somewhat different and that context for each of them was crucial if you were going to analyze them. For example; al Qaeda is more of an idea than a centralized organization. Thus the al Qaeda found in each country, or part of a country, usually has different means and motivations. The war in Iraq was actually several separate wars going on at the same time, and occasionally interacting with other “wars” nearby. Same thing in Afghanistan and places like Somalia. Measuring progress is more accurate if you show the unique trends in all the different wars. Some of them ended early, some escalated and some are still in progress while others evolve into new kinds of conflicts. In other words, the military should use contextual assessment in reporting what is going on with guerilla conflict (or “irregular warfare” in general.)
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When the United States first got involved with Vietnam in the late 1950s, there was good reason to believe American assistance would lead to the defeat of the communist guerilla movement in South Vietnam. That was because the communists had not been doing so well with their guerilla wars. In the previous two decades, there had been twelve communist insurgencies, and 75 percent of them had been defeated. These included Greek Civil War (1944-1949), Spanish Republican Insurgency (1944-1952), Iranian Communist Uprising (1945-1946), Philippine Huk War (1946-1954), Madagascan Nationalist Revolt (1947-1949), Korean Partisan War (1948-1953), Sarawak/Sabah “Confrontation” (1960-1966), Malayan Emergency (1948-1960), Kenyan Mau-Mau Rebellion (1952-1955). The communists won in the Cuban Revolution (1956-1958), the First Indochina War (1945-1954) and the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). The communists went on to lose the guerilla phase of the Second Indochina War (1959-1970). Guerillas make great copy for journalists. You know, the little guy, fighting against impossible odds. What we tend to forget (and the record is quite clear, and easily available), is that these insurgent movements almost always get stamped out. That does not make good copy, and the dismal details of those defeats rarely make it into the mass media, or the popular consciousness.
