From 'Compliance' and 'Conciliation' to 'Hearts and Minds': The 19th–Century Origins of U.S. Counterinsurgency Doctrine

In 1829, French general Gabriel Suchet published his Peninsular War (1808–14) memoirs and noted that in 1810 he believed the Spanish “appeared to yield ready compliance” to the French occupation – an assessment far from accurate. Rather, Suchet’s tenure as commander of Napoleon’s forces in northeast Spain witnessed some of the most intense fighting between Spanish guerrillas and French forces. A generation later, General Winfield Scott recalled his own role in the Mexican-American War (1846–48). In his memoirs, Scott lauded the “prowess” of the U.S. Army, but added that “valor and professional science could not alone have dictated a treaty of peace with double our numbers, in double the time, and with double the loss of life, without the measures of conciliation”. This semantic shift in the period between Suchet and Scott represents a profound change in military thinking. In 1847, when Scott launched the campaign to seize the Mexican capital, it was no longer the people who were required to ‘yield compliance’ to the U.S. occupation army, but incumbent upon the invader to offer ‘measures of conciliation’ designed to mitigate insurgency. This change in military thinking – from yielding to winning (or achieving) compliance through conciliatory measures – is not only an important aspect of military occupation doctrine, it represents a missing chapter in the historiography of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency prior to the advent of the ‘hearts and minds’ strategy used in the Vietnam War (1965–75).[1]

RIGHT: Louis-Gabriel Suchet by Jean-Baptiste Paulin Guérin (1783–1855). Title: Français: Le maréchal d'Empire Louis-Gabriel Suchet, duc d'Albufera (1770-1826), commandant en chef l'armée d'Aragon. Source: Wikimedia.

Winfield’s Scott’s ‘measures of conciliation’ preceded the ‘hearts and minds’ doctrine used by the U.S. military in the Vietnam War by more than a century. Yet the historiography of nineteenth-century guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency would lead one to believe it was a twentieth-century creation. The twentieth-century catalyst behind this tendency was the combination of guerrilla warfare and Marxist ideology. Due to this association, much of the literature addressing guerrilla warfare was written during the Cold War (1947–91) in a period where writers attempted to understand the methods of groups aimed at installing communist political systems.

There is a large amount of scholarship on twentieth century Marxist-guerrillas, including the seminal, semi-autobiographical, tactical manuals written by revolutionaries such as Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and General Vo Nguyen Giap. The success of their respective guerrilla movements in China, Latin America, and Vietnam, prompted deep inquiries into the efficacy of insurgent warfare working in tangent with populist political messages. The arrival of ideological and global conflict led historians to examine nontraditional forms of warfare. The term most often used by historians as the antithesis to the conventional form of warfare is ‘guerrilla warfare,’ and it is generally through that narrative that writers have approached the subject.[2]

The nomenclature is important. Until recently frontier warfare was not considered guerrilla warfare – or at least historians did not identify conflicts between whites and non-whites on the U.S. frontier through the lens of asymmetrical warfare. The same can be said of South America – where Europeans expanded their territorial dominance over a continent at the expanse of indigenous groups and former African slaves. Some peoples resisted, some did not. When Native Americans did resist, they usually employed guerrilla warfare because it offered the best chance of victory. Military scholars and historians are beginning to reevaluate the military dynamics of those conflicts resulting in a reclassification of historical precedent. Similarly, the conflicts resulting in Latin American independence are generally classified as ‘guerrilla’ warfare – or at least warfare combining some level of conventional and nonconventional forms deemed ‘hybrid warfare’ (also called ‘compound warfare’) – which is the classification attributed to the Peninsular War by military scholars because of the combined regular/irregular efforts of the British and Spanish. Because of the nomenclature, the Peninsular War is often considered a starting point in guerrilla war studies. Yet, most of the literature dealing with guerrilla warfare comes out of the twentieth century from conflicts originating in the twentieth century.[3]

Walter Laqueur, whose works on politics and warfare spanned much of the Cold War and post-Cold War era, noted that the considerable amount of literature on guerrilla warfare published in the 1950s and 1960s “was based almost entirely on the assumption that this phenomenon constituted a revolution in modern strategy.” Laqueur was correct because the revolution in modern strategy began much earlier and until recently has largely been ignored. The result of that assumption was the corollary belief that the origins of counterinsurgency lay in the twentieth century. Put a different way, because historians and strategists were fixated on twentieth-century communist insurgency, they assumed that counterinsurgency – the means to combat asymmetrical small unit warfare – originated as a response to it.[4]

LEFT: Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond: Surrender of Tortosa, January 2, 1811. Artist: Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond (1795–1875). Source: Wikimedia.

The most prolific counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine to come out of the Cold War is embodied in the phrase ‘winning hearts and minds.’ Commonly used during the Vietnam War, U.S. military and political leadership employed the phrase to outline a strategy for the pacification of the rural population in South Vietnam – an allied state fighting an insurgency. Regardless of the debates on the efficacy of that doctrine, the constant deliberation of it in the media contributed to the belief that it was a novel form of counterinsurgency separated from past conflicts. U.S. Lieutenant General Fred Weyand noted the contrast with the Second World War: “‘In Germany we didn’t worry about people, about winning their hearts and minds,’ Weyand says. “In Vietnam, this turned upside down. …We did not deter the terrorists and the guerrillas. It became obvious to me that the priority objective in Vietnam is control of the people.’”[5]

In his 1964 work Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, COIN expert David Galula stressed the importance of winning over the population during a guerrilla war. Galula argued that since the insurgent cannot attack larger, more established forces, he must “carry the fight to a different ground where he has a better chance to balance the physical odds against him.” That fight is carried on ideologically “new ground” directed at the sentiments of the people. According to Galula, the key for the insurgent to winning the war is to “dissociate the population from the counterinsurgent”. Although the concept seems clear, recent experts have questioned the validity of the ‘hearts and minds’ doctrine in counterinsurgency because it fails to account for a myriad of ancillary factors in controlling populations. These factors include political culture, perceptions of foreigners, and religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the discussions centering around ‘hearts and minds’ in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the belief that counterinsurgency was a contemporary, twentieth-century subject. The Vietnam War thus became an important turning point in military studies because, as Weyand noted, the largely forgotten social side of warfare (i.e. Jomini and Clausewitz) returned to inform a new generation of military strategists and scholars.[6]

Footnotes:

[ ] Louis-Gabriel Suchet, Memoirs of the War in Spain, from 1808 to 1814, Vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), 81; Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, Memoirs (New York: Sheldon & Co., 1864), 540. Amended excerpt from: Benjamin J. Swenson, “Rewriting the ‘Detestable’ Rules of War: The ‘Guerrilla System’ and Counterinsurgency in Napoleonic Spain and the Mexican-American War, 1808-1848,” (PhD diss., Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), Barcelona, 2021), 21–4.
[2] Mao Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, 1937; On Protracted War, 1938; Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (La Guerra de Guerrillas) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961); Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War People’s Army (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961); The South Vietnamese People Will Win, 1965; Military Art of People's War: Selected Writings (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970).
[3] See: Williamson Murray, Hybrid Warfare: Fighting Complex Opponents From the Ancient World to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Frank Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid War (Arlington: Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, 2007); Gilmar Visoni-Alonzo, The Carrera Revolt and ‘Hybrid Warfare’ in Nineteenth-Century Central America (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). See also: James K Wither, “Making Sense of Hybrid Warfare,” Connections 15, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 74. Wither notes the discrepancy between historians and strategists in defining terminology: “Not surprisingly, there are many definitions of hybrid warfare. The concept has been delineated in different, if related, ways and these definitions have evolved in a relatively short period of time… One approach to hybrid warfare takes a historical perspective. This defines the term simply as the concurrent used of both conventional and irregular forces in the same military campaign.” See also: Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2005). Smith uses Clausewitz and traces the advent of modern warfare to the Peninsular War. For Latin American guerrilla warfare, see: Daniel Castro, Revolution and Revolutionaries: Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999); Richard Weitz, “Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Latin America, 1960-1980,” Political Science Quarterly 101, no. 3 (1986): 397-413.
[4] Walter Laqueur, “The Origins of Guerrilla Doctrine,” Journal of Contemporary History 10, No. 3 (July 1975): 341.
[5] The Post-Crescent, Appleton, Wisconsin, Jan. 28, 1968. See: Jacqueline L Hazelton, “The Hearts and Minds” Fallacy: Violence, Coercion, and Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare,” International Security 42-1 (July 2017): 80-113.
[6] David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 1964), 4; Michael Fitzsimmons, “Hard Hearts and Open Minds? Governance, Identity, and the Intellectual Foundations of Counterinsurgency Strategy,” Strategic Studies 33, no. 3 (June 2008): 337–365. See also: Richard Shultz, “Coercive Force and Military Strategy: Deterrence Logic and the Cost-Benefit Model of Counterinsurgency Warfare,” The Western Political Quarterly 32, no. 4 (Dec. 1979): 444-466.

"Wars of the Mexican Gulf: The Breakaway Republics of Texas and Yucatan, US Mexican War, and Limits of Empire 1835-1850" by Benjamin J. Swenson (Author) Casemate Imprint: Pen & Sword Military, November 2024. Hardcover, 272 pages. 

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From the publisher, "One nation in turmoil, another seeking aggrandizement, smaller states jostling for security, mercenary expeditions, and political and racial armed struggles breaking out. In 1835 the northern Mexican state of Texas declared its independence and won it after defeating General Santa Anna’s forces at the Battle of San Jacinto. A few years later, as a larger and looming war with the United States approached, the gulf state of Yucatan did the same by claiming itself a separate republic. For Mexican authorities, the existence of breakaway republics on its periphery represented an existential crisis and an opportunity for U.S. and European interests. For many on both sides, the US-Mexican war officially beginning in 1846 after the Republic of Texas was annexed to the United States was merely a continuation of a conflict that began ten years earlier. Adding to the turmoil, the uprising in Yucatan by indigenous Maya against a criollo minority in 1847 and the contemplated military intervention and annexation of that republic by American leadership towards the end of the war sheds light on a conflict with ethnic, national, and international dimensions. In his second transnational history of the Mexican-American War, historian Benjamin J. Swenson examines the breakaway republics of Texas and Yucatan and demonstrates how the war was not only a manifestation of American expansionism and internal Mexican disunion, but a geostrategic contest involving European states seeking to curtail a nascent imperial power’s dominance in North America."    ☞ Buy on Amazon