THE ANSWER TO EXPORTED AGGRESSION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000300280039-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 8, 1999
• Sequence Number: 39
• Publication Date: June 1, 1963
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

THE GU RA EC R1C RtTM 'i'RIL_JTT' n
anitized~F- Approved For Re` lease : CI Ab3b O
SOUTHEAST ASIA:
It is a war of shadows in
he night which calls for
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adi.cal changes in organizatio
and equipment."
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The Answer to
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n expert on counterinsurgency tactics suggests
at "Vietnam's twilight war for the villages
ay yet rank as one of the decisive battles of
world history." Secretary Hilsman, a former
World War II guerrilla fighter himself, stresses
at this form of "hidden aggression" poses a
hreat to the entire Free World-that the Com-
unists see guerrilla wars in Africa, Asia, and
atin America as the best way to expand their
mpires with the least risk. To meet this exported
ggression effectively, Secretary Hilsman says:
We must adopt the methods of the guerrilla
himself-the very tactics our ancestors learned
from the Indians.
Our long-range goal must be "nation-build-
ing"-aid which includes the many things an
American pioneer village needed.
The really important appeal of the West is
the respect for the individual which is built
into Western culture.
by Roger Hilsman,
Secretary Hilsman, the Join to s o a ave e-
fined counterinsurgency as the military, political,
economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by
existing governments to defeat subversive insurgency.
Would you subscribe to this definition?
That is a very reasonable definition, par-
ticularly as applied to the liar East namely, the
Philippines, Malaya, and currently Vietnam. But
I would broaden it slightly by stating that the real
problem is one of extending government control to
areas where governments have never had control
throughout history. In a broader sense this means
providing government services to the villages,
knitting the people into the fabric of the whole
community and national life.
I n Southeast Asia today, there is no pervasive
national spirit as we know it. The villagers in the
back country still feel no deep loyalty to their
government, which seems much further from them
than ours does from us. Since most of the villagers
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is to thwart
from the hemisphere .. .
'tPYRGHT
t
Hower, prosperity cannot be imposed by an
tside ag'incy. Any significant change must be
complishe by the people within a country-by
e plans an&,fforts of those who live there.
,ct
t e 'larger role of developing and maintaining a
1 alfful climate in which the dignity and
c eati'4ty of man may flourish.
s a result, the ultimate good of the A1lia. ce for
rogress will be put off further into the irl'Lure.
Productivity and Diversific Lion
The third element of our over-a i'strategy must
e a better approach to the problems of produc-
ivity and diversification. To .tain the capital
oods necessary for industrialisation, Latin Amer-
an nations must expand th it dollar volume of
xports. Nearly all these.' countries, however,
erive 50 per cent or more;bf their exchange earn-
gs from only one or tw/ commodities. A few are
lmost entirely dependent on one commodity and
hey suffer severely when the international price
evels fluctuate. So until Latin America can
iversify its export commodities and other goods,
t is likely to continue to suffer from the world
arket price fluctuations which have been so
ommon over the last decade.
Both exports and the general standard of living
n Latin America can be improved greatly if
hich has contributed so much to our own growrlr
nd strength, then Latin American policies 4ch
eaken free enterprise are likely to predomiate.
efend and endorse the free enterprise systeWf _
Since 1958 U.S:-rivate investment in Latin
America has fallenff to practically nothing.
esides the decline in''foreign investment, native
atin Americans have widrawn an estimated 10
illion dollars capital and`?ipped it off to Europe
nd the U.S. Next to the prence of communism
i Cuba, the hemisphere's west problem is this
ight of capital.
Not only Latin Americans, but often some in
e U.S., appear to lack appreciation of the value
private enterprise in the foreign mair.4et. In the
ice of a barrage of propaganda against fr,;ee enter-
rise, it is difficult for private business}nen in
atin America to operate and make the impisitant
retribution of which they are capable. Arid, if
ublic spokesmen for the United States do rte
methods are applied to agriculture. Raid reform
programs, in particular, must be cexered around
increased productivity and not. 'around frac-
tionalizing and splintering prodi. ion limits.
Local Govertu ent
The fourth element in.,: ur broader strategy
must be to encourage soulocal government. Our
government-to-governna.'ht aid programs in Latin
America have been c ied out primarily at the
level of the national,iivernments, and hence have
given an overemphAis to centralized government
-to the neglect a~ local government.
Traditionally local and state governments in
Latin Americk have been assigned a minor role-a
factor whiph~ has dampened the economic and
social development of these countries. The de-
velopmea of sound local government should be
encour ged, particularly since an untapped source
of rehue is readily available to them in the form
of property tax.
Mobilize Our Best Minds
Professor William Stokes, at our Center's
Conference on National Security, noted that we
ought to be concerned not only with what we are
against, with prohibiting further encroachments
of Marxism-Leninism, and eliminating what is
already there. We must also concern ourselves
with "the alternative attitudes and values, with
the 'alternative economic concepts and ideas, and
with he alternative political methods, forms of
organization, and procedures."
He is right. We have not done nearly enough to
mobilize our best minds and skills within this
country-experts in land productivity, taxation,
industrial pioneering, local management, educa-
tion-to establish `rapport with key individuals
and groups in Latin America.
To summarize: our minimum strategic objective
is to thwart and eliminate Egmmunism from the
hemisphere as an alien and intolbCable system. Our
larger objectives are manifold, 'but a first step
toward them is to establish a nationa`4 riority to
marshal the best people we have in searchhpf ways
to share with our Latin American neighbof's,,the
lessons of our own successful experiences. Tlie,.
the Alliance becomes one for true knowledge out
of which can spring the climate for progress-not
of totalitarianism such as the Soviets seek, but of
creativity, initiative, and self-reliance.
9-3
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exported Aggression
istant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs
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make nearly all the material goods they use, they
have relatively little commercial, political, or
psychological contact with other villages or the
provinces around them.
In such circumstances, there does not have to
be a basic discontent with the government for a
guerrilla unit. to thrive. It is just a question of
the villagers' isolation.
Recently, in Northeast Thailand, a government
team visited 40 villages not particularly isolated
ones, either. In 10 of them the people had never
seen a government official -no policemen, no
firemen, no health inspectors, no one.
In villages like these, it is relatively easy for an
outside subversive power to recruit young men for
guerrilla bands by simply promising sheer
adventure, just to get away from the boring,
monotonous tasks of an agricultural life.
For example, in my person.4l experience with
the OSS in Burma duriug World War II, we
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found only about 10 per cent of the people to be
pro-West. Another 10 per cent were pro-enemy,
but the rest were either indifferent or else just so
isolated that they had no ideological convictions
one way or the other. Yet we were able to recruit
over 30,000 guerrillas for OSS operations in
Burma, and in spite of our white faces.
To draw a parallel with a situation closer to
home, one may ask whether the citizens of
Chicago "supported" the hoodlum gangs which
flourished during the 1920's. Certainly the shop-
keeper hit by the protection racket did not support
the gangs, but he often had no choice except to go
along with them. The same thing is true in many
of the isolated villages in some of the under-
developed areas of the world.
In the past, you have defined this guerrilla activity in
Southeast Asia as internal war, or hidden aggression.
What do these terms imply?
80039-3
 A~ a former World S9f1Yf1i~tizedllLaA
__ i___p
ft titer himselF AA. D....
ll.l_
er
m
""First-hand the intricacies of this special
kind of warfare. Wounded while serving
with "Merrill's Marauders" in the China-
Burma-India Theatre, he later commanded
a guerrilla battalion operating behind
enemy lines. In 1945, he was a member of
a rescue mission that released his father,
Colonel Roger Hilsman, from a prisoner-
of-war camp in Manchuria.
After receiving his Ph.D. degree in 1950
from Yale, he spent the next three years
in London and Frankfurt, engaged in
NATO planning. From 1953 to 1956, he
was a member of the faculty of inter-
national politics at Princeton's Center for
International Studies. In February of
1961, he was appointed Director of In-
telligence and Research for the Depart-
ment of State. Mr. Hilsman was named
Assistant Secretary for For Eastern Affairs
on April 25 of this year.
He has authored and co-authored several
books, including Strategic Intelligence and
National Decisions, Alliance Policy in the
Cold War, and NATO and American
Security.
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I Ile ris activity in Vietnam is really
aggression in the truest sense of the word. Over
the centuries international law has categorized
aggression as an overt attack. But here we have, as
President Kennedy has said, "a subterranean
war," which doesn't fit easily under the doctrines
of international law.
I call it hidden aggression, or twilight warfare,
because it is an attack directed across an inter-
national boundary. It is clearly an attempt by one
state to bring down another by exported terror.
From North Vietnam, the Communists are send-
ing in trained cadre, propaganda, money, equip-
ment, and directions to the Viet Cong terrorists in
South Vietnam. All the while they try to maintain
the fiction that it is an internal uprising.
The pattern of the Vietnam war so far has
followed closely Mao Tse-Tung's three stages of
guerrilla warfare. In the first stage, sympathizers
are recruited and indoctrinated, and a base is
built from which weapons, rice, and other supplies
can be distributed. The second stage is one of
terror, hit-and-run tactics, ambushes, night
attacks, and assassinations. This is the stage in
which we are engaged now. Finally, in the third
stage Mao says there must be a change to a true
civil war where the terrorist bands are turned into
conventional armies to fight the regulars by con-
ventional means. As a practical matter, the Com-
munists hope to create enough political chaos and
instability so that the government will fall by a
coup d'etat, letting them move in and skip the
third stage.
We Must Adopt Guerrilla Tactics
To fight this exported aggression effectively, we
must adopt the methods of the guerrilla himself--
the very tactics our ancestors learned from the
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"Our job in Vietna
as it is military
C YRGHT
Indians. We must realize that the guerrilla does
not care about north or south, or east or west. He
doesn't care about this town or that piece of real
estate. He lives to fight, to ambush, to kill. His
only goal is to kill--not to seize and hold territory.
It is nonsense to assume that regular forces
trained for conventional war can handle jungle
guerrillas adequately. Regular forces are essential
for regular military tasks, but twilight warfare is
something special. It is a war of shadows in the
night which calls for radical changes in organiza-
tion, combat doctrine, and equipment. The main
ingredients for success are constant patrols, good
communications, mobility, and a capacity for
rapid concentration. Our key units might be
decentralized groups of 50 men, self-reliant and
able to operate autonomously, fanned out into the
surrounding countryside.
Let me again draw on my experience in Burma.
At one stage my outfit-consisting of four
Americans and 200 Burmese --kept an entire
3,000-man Japanese regiment marching and
countermarching through the mountains far away
from the front where they would have done more
good. What we would have feared most would
have been smaller groups patrolling steadily. The
Japanese were much better soldiers than our
guerrillas. They were better trained, tougher, and
more mobile. But they fought us as if we were
regular troops. We never tried to take or hold
ground. We laid ambushes, fired our weapons, and
ran just as fast as we could. After a month of
chasing us, this 3,000-man regiment had over a
hundred casualties; we had only one.
One of History's Decisive Battles
Vietnam's twilight war for the villages may yet
rank as one of the decisive battles of world
history. In one sense, it is no more or less decisive
than an effective deterrent against a Korea-type
war, nor is it more or less decisive than an
effective strategic nuclear deterrent. However,
even as we have prepared for both conventional
and nuclear wars, the Communists have been
giving increased emphasis to internal warfare. Of
course, we can take some credit for their change in
strategy. Our nuclear force build-up has paid off,
and so have our efforts to build ground forces, our
alliances, and our sacrifices in Korea.
Now the Communists are beginning to see possi-
bilities for guerrilla wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America as the best way to expand their empires
with the least risk. So the Vietnam war is quite
decisive, in the first place, because unless we de-
velop an effective counter there, we may well find
ourselves in the same difficulty in some of these
other areas. Secondly, this war is decisive in that
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as muc political an econ m
e long-range task is nation- building. "
the steps needed to fight it are the very steps
needed for building the new nations of the world
into independent, self-sustaining states. Our job in
Vietnam is as much political and economic as it is
military- the long-range task is nation-building.
What are the steps involved in nation-building?
To become a stable nation, Vietnam needs much
more than dams, power stations, steel mills, and
other giant foreign aid projects which will have to
come sooner or later. This sort of foreign aid is
important, of course, but on a longer term basis. In
the short term, these people need more simple aid
such as communication routes, so that goods and
services can flow freely from village to village
throughout the country. There must be a way for
information about the needs of the people to flow
upward, and a way for government services to
flow downward to answer these needs. They need
health programs, police security, educational sys-
tems, economic help, sewer systems- the very
things many an American pioneer village needed
over 100 years ago.
Strategic Hamlet Program
An important part of this nation-building pro-
gram is to provide the villagers with the physical
security so necessary to peaceful progress. This is
what the strategic hamlet program does. We are
helping the villagers ring their villages with barbed
wire, much as our frontier towns were protected
with stockades. Then 20 or 30 in a village of 200
are trained to use weapons such as hand grenades,
shotguns, and carbines. And they are given a
radio with which they can contact province head-
quarters for help if they are attacked by a large
band of terrorists.
But the strategic hamlet program involves far
more than just physical security. It is also a
vehicle for getting government services to the
people to help enlist popular support for the
government. And as the government becomes
more popular, and as more villages are secured,
the Viet Cong will be isolated more and more from
their key sources of supply -the villages of the
back country. No longer will marauding bands of
five or six guerrillas be able to walk into villages
and either seize or buy rice.
If they can't get into the villages, and if they are
occasionally ambushed themselves, will the Viet
Cong then start to wither?
That's right. By cutting off this important
supply line to the villages and by keeping them on
the move, we will begin to make the guerrillas
suffer from lack of food, from hunger, and from
discomfort. They will begin to dry up.
Of course, we are not at that stage yet in
Vietnam. However, we have come a long way and
have made much progress recently. During the
last half of 1962, outlying villages containing
roughly half a million people were made secure by
the government, bringing the share of rural popu-
lation in secured villages to about 51 per cent. The
Viet Cong controls about eight per cent.
This still leaves around 40 per cent of the
rural population unsecured. It is to this group that
the government must extend its services and
control in the next phase.
In the mountain regions during the last year we
have helped the Vietnamese train over 37,000
Montagnard tribesmen in the use of simple weap-
ons, how to set up village defenses, and how to
patrol areas between villages. But one Special
Forces team I know of is most proud of a com-
pletely non-military kind of project-a village
market. They went to the province capital and
persuaded a tailor, a tobacco merchant, and a
general store operator to move to the Montagnard
village where they were stationed. Then they
persuaded the villagers in the area to start pro-
ducing a surplus of what they grow, and to bring
the excess to the market where they could sell it
and buy thimbles, needles, thread, pots, pans---
the instruments for a better life that they could
never have before.
This isn't warfare in the usual sense and it isn't
killing Viet Cong. But it is the real way to fight
the Communist terror. It is a vital step in nation-
building, and that is our long-range goal.
Nation-building in Vietnam involves: (1) guerrilla warfare training, (2) development of strategic hamlets, (3) establishment of v
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Secretary Hilsman, it has been said that the Com-
munists are offering a "spiritual" challenge to the
people in Asia, telling them, "We need you desper-
ately, whoever you are, whatever you can do. Ours
is the revolution of the future. You can be the liberators
of mankind."
In contrast, it has been said that the American ap-
peal offers no such "cause" but merely a slight ma-
terial gain through our aid and assistance programs.
We have been told that there really isn't an "American
side." Is this theory true, or half-true, or is it com-
pletely inaccurate or obsolete?
There is no question in my mind that this
theory is completely obsolete. In terms of appeals,
the Communists are not doing at all well. The
normal Communist ideology does not cut much ice
anymore. Where they do make headway, they
capitalize on an appeal to nationalism, or they use
threats of terror and retaliation.
The theory about American appeals is also
obsolete. We have a spiritual appeal that is a truly
revolutionary one-a government interested in
the wants and needs of the people. In the past,
government has usually meant if anything- an
official who collects grain or yams and gives
nothing in return. So we have a revolutionary
appeal to excite and inspire these people--the
simple but very effective concept that govern-
ment exists to serve and protect them.
In a sense, the whole nation-building program
has a revolutionary, "spiritual" appeal, not only
in Vietnam but in all the world's underdeveloped
areas. This is really the guts of the Alliance for
Progress program, except that in Vietnam
nation-building must proceed under the guns of
Communist terrorism. The barbed wire and guns
of a strategic hamlet program would not be
needed in a country not under attack as Vietnam
has been, but the civic action certainly would.
But the really important appeal of the West is
the respect for the individual which is built into
Western Culture. In contrast, the whole Com-
munist Bloc leans toward a monotonous grayness
the Tibetans should act like the Chinese, the
Chinese like the Russians, and the Russians like
the Poles. There is not the diversity which is
found in the Free World.
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What can industry here in the United States do to help
these countries build their civilizations? For example,
Dr. Wernher von Braun has said that much of the
success of the space program has resulted from the
individual contributions and innovations of private
industry. He told us that he spends a substantial part
of his time "trying not to drown in all the many ideas
which come to us." Do private companies face this
same kind of challenge in "nation-building programs"
as they have already faced in aerospace and defense?
They most certainly do. There are many areas
of science and technology where new ideas can
help Vietnam and similar countries to discover
new approaches to their problems. Right now
scientists in this country are on the brink of some
discoveries in genetics which are just as dramatic
and exciting as the discovery of the nuclear
reaction. Some of them may help to solve many of
the tremendous problems in disease, overpopula-
tion, and food shortages.
To help break the illiteracy problem we may be
able to use a communications satellite, providing
a country with a complete television network
which could be picked up on television sets
powered by wood-burning generators. We could
increase a teacher's exposure a hundred times.
Chemistry, biology, electronics, physics-every
science you can name-may have some answers
if we can get researchers to focus on the problems.
How optimistic are you that our nation-building pro-
gram will succeed in Vietnam? Do you have a time-
goal in months or years?
Right now about Vietnam I am optimistic-but
cautiously so. It is not a question of winning a
battle or defeating an army. It is a question of
building a nation, and that takes time. So far
things are going rather well, but we have to think
in terms of years instead of months. It will be
some time before you can go anywhere in Vietnam
with a feeling of complete safety and security.
Of course all the new nations like Vietnam need
time. No magic of science can transform their way
of life overnight. It took seven years to eliminate
guerrillas in Malaya. It may take more than this
in Vietnam, or it may take less. But I think time
is on our side.