The seed of another Special Forces mission was planted.
In 1957, Yarborough took command of the 7th Infantry Regiment and moved it to Germany from Fort Benning, Georgia. From there he was sent to Counterintelligence in Europe… and then to Fort Bragg, to command Special Forces.
NEW FORM OF WAR
John Kennedy's thoughts on unconventional warfare were a response to very real worries back in the 1950s and 60s — the seemingly relentless and insidious spread of the "Communist Empire" and the sudden collapse of colonialism.
Colonialism — the rule by Western powers over Third World peoples for the sake of their economic exploitation — had lasted several centuries. Its death (except in the Soviet version) took approximately two decades, the years following the end of the Second World War.
Sadly, the departure of the old colonial masters brought few blessings to the newly independent Third World nations; the old masters left behind very few capable indigenous leaders and very little for them to work with. The "white man's burden" was a never-delivered promise. In most newly decolonized Third World nations, the infrastructures necessary to maintain a society as a going concern were lacking — transportation, education, health care, banks and investment, and most of all, enforceable laws and an effective justice system to protect them. More often than not, the emerging Third World leaders were primarily interested in personal aggrandizement and wealth rather than in the long, hard toil needed to build a viable nation.
The citizens of those nations, meanwhile, wanted what everybody else wants — better lives for themselves and their children. "We've thrown the old masters out," they argued, sensibly (and often after long, hard struggles, pain, and sacrifice). "Now we deserve to see the fruits of our victory."
When the fruits didn't immediately appear — and in fact seemed to recede ever further into a future ever more squalid and rotten with corruption — its not hard to imagine their dismay, nor to see how quickly their mood turned nasty.
Naturally, this potentially explosive situation became a major arena in the battle between the Communist powers and the West. At stake were power and influence over a great part of the world's population, as well as control over a vast wealth of natural resources.
The more ideologically driven Communists started out with a number of advantages in this contest: They had no link with the old, discredited colonial powers, and they promised heaven on earth… and soon. The Chinese, in particular, had also developed effective techniques for transforming the dismay, discontent, and rage against the failed or failing Third World governments into mechanisms that seriously threatened those systems.
The Western powers (the United States in particular, as their leader) started fighting with serious disadvantages. Communism represented the bright and shiny future. The democracies, and capitalism, represented the discredited past. Nor were the democracies especially skillful in the PSYOPs part of the struggle. Democratic capitalism and the rule of law, adapted to the cultural requirements and traditions of each society, remains the best hope for most of the world's people. The West did not do a very good job selling that truth.
Meanwhile, Mao Tse-tung's victory in China showed the way for others: Dismay and discontent can be transformed into dissent and dissidence. Dissidence can be transformed into subversion and terrorism. Subversion and terrorism can be transformed into active insurrection. Insurrection can be transformed into guerrilla war. And in time, guerrilla war can be transformed into conventional military action — but only when the guerrillas feel totally confident that the outcome favors them.
Each stage in the process supports actions aimed at exploiting the ruling system's weaknesses. The aim is not direct confrontation, but to cause a rotting from within. Agents corrupt or "turn" politicians. Other agents take over labor unions, student groups, farmers' collectives; they infiltrate the media, the military, and the police — all as vehicles for propaganda and subversion.
The revolutionaries do not expect to destroy the system in a single blow or series of blows. Any weakness will do — economic, political, psychological, physical. In fact, the greatest vulnerability of any system is often psychological — will. As a result, eroding the will of the enemy to continue the struggle is always a chief aim of the underground opposition. This can take a very long time — years, even decades. The subversive leadership, as Mao has taught, must always remain patient.
It follows that each stage is supported by the ones before it, and each stage remains active even as new ones arise. At the same time, the various elements and stages of the subversive underground are protected from detection by means of a complex cell structure. Chop off a finger, but the body remains, and a new finger grows.
It follows as well that all of these elements depend on near-flawless intelligence, and on the whole they get it. Their eyes are everywhere; they know whatever the people know.
It follows, finally, that the more active stages depend almost totally on the support of the people — for supplies, intelligence, money, and recruits. Very often this support comes at great risk and considerable cost. The governing bodies — like the Germans in occupied France — look for payback opportunities, or else simply for ways to send a strong message. The more threatened they become, the more likely they are to flail about violently — to the psychological advantage of the revolution.
Of course, standing up under such assaults requires strong, highly motivated people.
From this comes Mao's famous sea and fish image. The people are the sea; the revolutionaries arc the fish. The sea supports the fish. It also hides them from predators. The revolutionaries only want to show themselves when they are not themselves vulnerable. Then they fade back into the sea, or the mountains or the jungle.
Of course, the revolutionaries almost always received support from one or another Communist power. It was a war by proxy.
Meanwhile, all too often, Third World leaders sold their services to the highest bidder, or to whichever bidder was handy at the moment.
This was President Kennedy's new kind of war. It went under many names — revolution, peoples' war, subterranean war, multidimensional war, slow-burn war, war in the shadows. All of these names were useful, and described a significant aspect of the struggle.
The focus on concealment and complexity, however, points to a hard but basic truth: The old way of fighting wars simply did not work. You couldn't just send in the cavalry, or an armored corps. You could bomb a people back into the Stone Age, and their children would come out of their holes, throw stones, and vanish back into the holes.
Where's the enemy? Who are we actually fighting? When we take a piece of territory, do we hold anything worth holding?
The President had it right: A new kind of fighting force was required. This force had to know guerrillas inside and out — how they lived, how they fought, how they swam in the sea of the people. The Bank-Volckmann-McClure Special Forces had no problems there, but skill at behind-the-lines sabotage and running around with guerrillas was far from enough. For the early Special Forces, guerrillas and partisans were expected to be our friends. A reorientation was needed when guerrillas became our enemies. It wasn't a gigantic reorientation, but attitudes had to change and new skills had to be learned.
For one thing, you couldn't begin to uproot guerrillas without at the same time understanding and attacking the shadowy mechanisms that spawned and sustained them — the vast network of subversion, terror, support, and intelligence. But doing so without utterly wiping out the very freedoms that the United States was trying to preserve and promote was a daunting task.