The foreign officer in the unfamiliar uniform stood before the ill-equipped soldiery and, lacking a facility in the mother tongue of the troops, he took a weapon in hand and painstakingly demonstrated each of the movements he sought to convey. When he called upon his pupils to imitate, total confusion ensued, accompanied by torrents of laughter. The professional endured stoically for a few minutes, and then exploded: "Goddam de gaucheries of dese badauts. Je ne puis plus. I can curse dem no more."
Thus did Baron Frederick William von Steuben, an early military advisor, begin the celebrated reorganization of the Continental Army. He successfully communicated his desires through the techniques of pantomime and mimicry and captured the affections of his hosts with an inspired bit of multilingual psychology. Few more effective advisory efforts have been recorded in history, although the concept is as ancient as the profession of arms.
The U. S. Marine Corps was not to enter the advisory sphere until 1915, when Major Smedley D. Butler undertook the training of a native Haitian Gendarmerie.
There were various other ventures in did advisory field, but not until World War II the United States find itself projected into relationships that girdled the globe. Virtually all of these took the form of liaison or technical instruction in the use of American equipment, except in two notable cases, Iran and China. Here, advisors actually commanded on occasion, but more importantly, they shaped the counterpart system and extended its purview to operations as well as logistics and training.
Wartime commitments and the rising specter of Communist imperialism led to an extension of advisory efforts as the war ended and the Iron Curtain descended. In response to the Truman Doctrine, Congress detailed troops to Greece in 1947 to serve in "an advisory capacity only." The Military Assistance Program as we know it today is considered to have dated from this legislation.
The pattern of duties within the assorted MAAGs, JUSMAGs, MAGs, and Missions, as they have been variously known, differed from country to country, but generally followed a line of advice in organizational and logistical areas, spilling over into operations or even command when active combat threatened, as it did in Korea in 1950. The early 1950s also brought into common usage the term "country team," which was applied to the relationship between military and economic aid agencies at work in the same country.
Marine Corps contributions to these various commitments were minimal, primarily limited to naval attaches, until 1951 when advisors were assigned to both the fledgling Korean and Chinese Marine Corps. The fruits of 14 years of Korean advisory efforts were realized when the Blue Dragon Brigade stepped ashore in Vietnam in 1965 to face another Communist enemy.
The pattern of aggression that provoked the commitments represented by these various advisory groups has evolved with sinister efficiency. Thwarted by nuclear standoff after World War II, international Communism reverted to its historic tactics of subversion. The most militant practitioners since 1945 have been the Red Chinese, rather than the Soviets and Mao Tse-tung has become the insurgent’s reigning prophet. So acknowledged is Mao as the chief architect of what Khrushchev first termed "wars of national liberation" that his maxims have been incorporated outright into U. S. counterinsurgency doctrine. Joint Chiefs Publication One defines the threat of insurgency in its several gradations as: "A condition resulting from revolt or insurrection against a constituted government which falls short of civil war." In precise parody of Mao the various levels of intensity of insurgency are further delineated: "Phase I, Latent and Incipient Subversion; Phase II, Organized Guerrilla Warfare; and Phase III, A War of Movement."
This insidious design and the range of U. S. responses have collided in South Vietnam. This unhappy land provides the laboratory for a classic experiment in counterinsurgency and a classic test tube for the advisory concept.
The U. S. advisory era began undramatically on 29 September 1954, with the arrival of a Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG). As the French departed, the MAAG began what might be called the purely advisory phase of its involvement. Two other phases would follow, integration of combat support elements, and liaison, each adding new dimensions to the advisory mission.
Meanwhile, the victorious Viet Minh, having climaxed Mao's three phases of insurgent warfare with a decisive defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, reverted once more to Phase I. In defiance of treaty obligations to withdraw north of the 17th parallel, Communist military and political cadres remained in the south to exploit the general distress. Until 1957, their efforts would be largely psychological and unarmed.
MAAG’s concept for employment of the new Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) envisioned resistance to conventional invasion across the 17th parallel in the manner of Korea until treaty forces could arrive. Accordingly, reorganization proceeded along standard U. S. Army lines, a philosophy which the late author Bernard B. Fall disparaged as "the American type war we train for and the Indo-China war we will have to fight."
The advisory function in this period was the traditional one of counsel, but not command. Advisor purview extended into all areas, but their numbers were limited, and primary emphasis was on reorganization and training. Marine participation at this time was limited to an assistant naval attaché and a single advisor to the fledgling Vietnamese Marine Corps, which evolved from the French Commando groups in 1954.
The leisurely training pace quickened into an increasingly operational one when the Communists, now called Viet Cong, stepped up the tempo of subversive activity in 1959. By 1961, Mao’s vaunted Phase II, with its guerrilla attacks, was again in progress, and President John F. Kennedy directed a substantial build-up in December. In the year that followed, the number of advisors increased from 1,364 to 9,865, and the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) superseded the MAAG as administrators of the vastly augmented U. S. effort.
Coincident with the influx of advisors was an increase in the Marine Corps contingent, permitting the assignment of a single advisor to each of the now five Vietnamese Marine battalions. These young officers were immediately plunged into a combat operational role that limited but did not obviate the training function. On a one-year tour without dependents, they would spend 32 per cent of 1962 in the field.
The same year ushered in a new phase in the advisory effort, the control of U. S. combat support elements. This evolution was precipitated by the introduction of two helicopter units; one Army and one Marine. Their arrival brought to the experimental arena the fragile machines that have become the very symbol of the counterinsurgency effort. The mission of these now famous “Hueys” and H-34s was direct combat support of Vietnamese forces, but only American advisors could approve their employment and control their disposition.
The advisor was compelled to broaden his range of skills. He was now a forward air controller as well as a ground operational and training advisor. The close co-ordination required made him essentially a commander during helicopter assaults. As one advisor described it: “I was in charge until we reached the treeline.” He was also in the midst of a very real war. The first of the advisory legion fell in combat only a week after President Kennedy’s historic directive of December 1961; and in April 1963, the Army would make it official by approving the award of the Combat Infantryman’s Badge.
U. S. military advisors contributed construction advice to the “Strategic Hamlet” concept, and their military efforts were further expanded to include the training of paramilitary Popular and Regional Forces as well as the ARVN. These innovations represented the first advisory ventures into the sphere known as nation-building. In two more years, Army advisors would be assigned as district and province advisors with specific responsibilities in the civilian as well as the military realm.
Marine Corps participation increased proportionately as the Viet Cong Phase II intensified. “On-the-job trainees” spent one- month tours with the Marine Advisory Group, officers joined the MACV staff, and in 1964 officers and NCOs began filling ARVN advisory billets in the I Corps area.
Advisors during the 1961-1965 period played out a colorful and demanding role. A correspondent depicted the advisory crusade as “a wonderfully American invention, idealistic and romantic in the Lawrence of Arabia mold, and basically unworkable.” Indeed, this period recaptured for a new generation a measure of the appeal the Lafayette Escadrille provided an earlier one. Theirs was a multifaceted endeavor accentuated by a backdrop of increasing combat intensity. Vietnamese Marine battalions by 1964 were spending 83 per cent of their time in combat operations.
Always foremost and most trying among the advisor’s concerns was that of pure counselling. Field advisors were junior in rank to the commanders with whom they worked, and generally less experienced professionally. They had no command authority whatsoever and exerted only the influence their powers of persuasion might work, while suffering the same degree of risk as their counterparts. Indeed, their physical size and peculiar function made them a more frequent target. They were compelled to adjust immediately to the unfamiliar cultural patterns of a totally foreign environment and were required to communicate with great subtlety through the unsubtle medium of sign language and pidgin English. One correspondent summed up his situation: "Our man in charge on the ground with no real say in what happened but with responsibility to make it happen well."
While the rendering of advice was a paramount concern, co-ordination of U. S. assets was an increasingly demanding process that dominated the advisor's time and energies during the actual course of operations. By early 1965, American pilots were also flying U. S. fixed-wing aircraft in close support, reconnaissance, and logistical roles. Helicopter support was augmented to the extent of providing virtually all the evacuation, liaison, and combat lift requirements. The middleman for these multiple agencies remained the advisor, who now held the means to influence critically the course of action—if he used them properly. Countless "After Action Reports" attest the abilities of advisors to do just this with often decisive results.
The third and final dimension in this phase of the advisory experiment was added in early 1965. This was the requirement for liaison with U. S. operational units. The Communist insurgency is generally regarded to have reached Phase III proportions at the Battle of Binh Gia on the last day of 1964. A series of other setbacks at the hands of conventionally equipped and operating enemy elements compelled the dispatch of U. S. forces shortly thereafter and ushered in the liaison era. This new challenge demanded advisor dexterity with the radio and placed an increasing reliance on rapport with his Vietnamese counterpart. Now the advisor was required to speak with new and unimpeachable authority on the details of zones of operation, fire responsibilities, and patrol areas. The sometimes loose co-ordination of adjacent Vietnamese units was supplanted by the customary precise definition of U. S. practice. New stress lay also on the advisor's grasp of local intelligence with its special value to American units which were arriving in profusion by the summer of 1965.
Co-ordination with U. S. units brought ever-increasing firepower and added artillery and naval gunfire to the advisor's fire control considerations. Illustrative was an operation in which advisors called fire missions for their counterparts, Vietnamese spotted in Vietnamese to be translated by advisors at the battery position, and counterparts directed fire in pidgin English.
The age of combined operations—another key ingredient in the counterinsurgency lab—was inaugurated for Marines in the fall of 1965. In Operation "Blue Marlin" in November, Vietnamese and U. S. Marines were on adjacent beaches for the first time in history. Among the liaison aspects of the venture was the housing and feeding, on board U. S. ships, of Vietnamese Marines accustomed to squad cooking fires and slapdash sanitation. The much-beset advisory structure once more provided the medium for successful resolution. That this liaison talent has continued is reflected in Pulitzer Prize Winner Peter Arnette’s comment late in 1967: "The U. S. and Vietnamese Marines are working together in an ideal arrangement . . . one not enjoyed elsewhere in the country."
Thus, today, after 14 years of representation in South Vietnam, the advisor performs three functions. He is at once a counsellor to a foreign force with unrestricted purview in the military field, a technical manipulator of multiple U. S. assets, and a jack-of-all-trades liaison officer. The first and last of these are historic advisor duties; the second is a product of this test tube war.
These tasks have accrued consecutively, but unevenly. Officers originally assigned to billets envisaged as conventional training ones were required to adapt immediately to combat advising and then to counterinsurgency emphasis. The arrival of U. S. support elements necessitated the diversion of attention and energies to purely mechanical control techniques. On the part of the average advisor these fluctuations required innovation and self-teaching on the job. Liaison tasks were an extension of the support function, but depended heavily on an instinctive knowledge of the advised unit, its commander, and its capabilities.
An evaluation of the advisory effort since its introduction in the Vietnam experiment would seem to reflect failure in that advisory measures alone failed to halt the spread of insurgency for the second time in two decades. The ultimate issue remains to be determined, however. The fact that the present intensity of advisory effort was not attained until 1965, when Phase III insurgency was already in progress, precludes a common perspective from which to analyze relative results. Had the Vietnamese armed services been trained for counterinsurgency by advisors down to battalion level throughout the period 1955—1961, the current situation might be altogether different. Instead, emphasis did not shift from conventional directions until 1961 and then only in spasmodic sequence. Most Vietnamese units did not see an advisor until they were committed to combat, and training opportunities were thus much reduced. Consequently, advisors with no participation in the training cycle have had to discern shortcomings in the field and find themselves struggling to sustain current operations rather than enhancing future capabilities.
Still there have been definite achievements during the advisory era. Major General William E. DePuy, MACV’s J-3 in 1965, wrote: “Had we not had advisors with Vietnamese units they would have collapsed completely in May, June, and July of 1965. If we didn’t have the advisory system, we would have had to create it.”
Selecting and training the advisor. While the priorities of the three advisory functions may vary, there is general agreement that all three hinge on an intangible: the advisor’s relationship with his opposite number. The vital need, then, is rapport between an advisor who has more formal education, but less rank, and generally much less counterinsurgency experience than his counterpart. The American faces a 12-month tour, of which only half may be face to face with a corresponding Vietnamese. His counterpart, on the other hand, has almost invariably known a long series of advisors, and the present incumbent represents just one more eager face in a passing parade. Against this setting, the American must pursue a process which consists of successively discerning, appraising, communicating, and hopefully overseeing implementation. More often than not it entails frequent reversals, repetition, and revamping toward ever more limited goals. He has nothing to enforce his suggestions except the remote and frequently unpalatable threat of withholding American resources. This advisory process was described by General J. F. Collins, former CINCUSPAC as "like trying to push—not pull—a string of wet spaghetti across a table."
Actuation of this imprecise process must take place in an environment almost totally foreign in both physical aspects and cultural outlook. Research analysts say that the major obstacles to the advisor's adjustment are not the obvious ones of language, food, and living conditions; but rather the varying cultural patterns that are encountered. In Vietnam as elsewhere in the Orient, the ancient concept of "face" offers one such pattern. Motivating the family and unit-oriented Vietnamese toward national goals is another especially challenging assignment for the advisor. Essentially, there is a conflict between the traditional American action-oriented philosophy and the deliberate, stoic attitude of the Oriental.
Obviously, the building of an effective relationship under these conditions is a function of the complex interactions of personality and intellect. The myriad of tips, hints, and pointers that have been amassed by the armed services attest to the multiple shadings that evolve. Most of these sources, however, do concur in a few universal guidelines for neophyte advisors.
Fundamental among these is that the objective in counterpart relationships is to build a degree of mutual respect through good leadership practices and simple courtesy. A happy discovery to most is that generally the international brotherhood of arms then responds to the same soldierly qualities the world over. Incident to any advisory tour, however, is an initiation period of watching, learning, and producing, before "acceptance" is realized. Ideally, this deliberate beginning culminates in a relationship of mutual confidence, fellowship, and understanding that still does not transcend a healthy objectivity on the part of the advisor.
Of paramount importance to the building of this camaraderie, regardless of the personalities involved, is a dedication to becoming part of the unit. This entails the decidedly unrevolutionary trait of persistence; persistence not only in the fleeting trials of combat, but also in the face of adverse living conditions, the monotony of inactivity, and the frustrations of frequently rejected advice.
Another somewhat incongruous trait for the military man is the restraint required to stand aside and permit the counterpart to accept the credit for a mutual success. Of this, Marine Lieutenant General Victor H. Krulak says: "If he is not the sort who can defer to the Vietnamese, willingly have him take the praise and credit, if he does not have the personality which will permit him to lead by suasion and not authority, if he does not understand these things, then he should not be an advisor."
The successful advisor must be technically competent, knowledgeable in area and language, and possessed of communicative and interpersonal skills. Of the advisors queried by the writer, 71 per cent cite "professional competence" as a "most desirable trait," and among a score of personality qualities mentioned—"adaptability,” "sense of humor," "tact"—82 per cent indicated "patience" or the related, "understanding."
Interestingly, these qualities, aside from "patience" and "understanding" differ little from those traditionally identified with the successful leader. Douglas Southall Freeman's renowned maxim "know your stuff" becomes perhaps even more applicable, because as one advisor wrote in allusion to the advisor's solitary posture: "If you didn't bring the knowledge with you, it isn't there."
Physical courage is a universally admired quality that has earned immediate recognition through the ages. The challenge of combat to man's character has perhaps always been the overriding concern to the young advisor approaching his duties, as indeed it has been to the raw soldier marching to the sounds of the guns throughout history. Of this instinct, longtime advisor Colonel Bryce Denno, U. S. Army, cautions: "Few advisors in a war of counterinsurgency, regardless of their rank or duty, need seek opportunities to display their courage. Danger is everywhere; in the city as well as in the countryside, in higher headquarters as in the platoon."
The personality traits sought in the advisor are a bit more complex and interrelated with the aforementioned cross-cultural distinctions. The consensus on the need for patience reflects the basic conflict between the energetic Westerner and the unhurried Oriental. It is also rooted in the unfamiliar—at least to Americans—quasi-war quality of insurgencies. The experienced counterinsurgent does not consider war a suspension of normal life as we do, but perhaps the only way of life he has known. Hence, he girds for the long pull and seeks those few semblances of “normal living” that he can still enjoy. The resultant somewhat apathetic outlook on what Americans consider a life or death struggle is a fundamental barrier in the advisor-counterpart relationship. Indeed, this is the essence of the Communist challenge in “wars of national liberation.” It was in this vein that the late Bernard Fall told the writer: “The American take-charge attitude is our own greatest enemy.”
The ideal advisor, then, possesses all the normal military virtues in a high degree. Moreover, he has a capability to shift emotional gears across the range from objective appraisal and subtle communication to inspirational action, while keeping the objective in ever-sharp perspective.
The future of the Advisor in Vietnam. The immediate and most challenging development is the reorientation of the ARVN toward Revolutionary Development. This revised mission means an increase in Vietnamese “clear and hold” type operations while U. S. and some Vietnamese units continue to search out and destroy the major enemy elements, which show no signs of abandoning the war of maneuver. A static security posture in the overwhelmingly rural areas will bring social, political, and economic factors into play where military considerations alone once dominated. It will also mean that the operational advisor who transitioned before from peace to war to liaison will now rechannel his efforts toward nonmilitary matters.
This evolution spotlights the sector and subsector advisors who first arrived in the spring of 1964. An analysis of their mission will illustrate the new objectives that now affect all advisors to some degree. Described as “the executors of the U. S. effort at its most productive end,” the subsector advisor is charged with the military tasks of training and operational supervision of the local Popular Force units plus liaison with transient U. S. or ARVN forces. He has the civilian-slanted responsibilities of monitoring the activities of the USIS, and the ARVN Revolutionary Development Cadres.
Whatever the degree of progress in these efforts, it is evident that Vietnam will see closer associations between the Armed Forces and people than ever before with all the inherent hazards. This undertaking will entail not only a revision in mission, but also in attitude, which will ultimately revolve more surely than ever on the collective advisor-counterpart relationships at the lowest levels. General Lewis Walt says of the pacification-oriented advisors: "All efforts will start and stop under their influence." There are grave doubts expressed about the future of this new endeavor. Hanson W. Baldwin, Military Editor of the New York Times, sums it up succinctly: "I am not at all sure they [the ARVN] can be trained to perform these duties, but I am sure that we must make the attempt."
Although there is no current plan for Marine subsector and sector advisors in the Army pattern, a new facet has opened that introduces Marines into the Revolutionary Development picture. In 1966, ten officers were loaned to the AID for training and utilization as provincial advisors, and this year 20 more were added as advisors to Revolutionary Development Cadres. This necessitates their stepping out of uniform and devoting their attention to guiding the economic aid programs at the user level.
The prospects of this new project are intriguing. The results, which remain to be evaluated, may give an insight into the ability of the future advisor to transition from a purely military to an economic sphere. This concept could well find important application in postwar Vietnam, as well as in the early stages of future insurgencies.
A final topic which might be considered a natural evolution of the advisor role is in the integration of U. S. and Vietnamese units. This is a working and successful reality in the III Marine Amphibious Force's Combined Action Company concept. This meshing of a Marine squad with three squads of popular forces into platoons and then companies has been strongly endorsed by two Marine Commandants. Baldwin considers this "the most helpful way of using South Vietnamese manpower. . . yet attempted and represents a logical extension of the duties of the advisor to the new phases of the war." This technique for providing local security uses an American as company commander, assisted by a Vietnamese Executive Officer, and imposes on the Commander as well as the integral squad leaders many of the ramifications of advising. Although he has the important advantage of operational command, he still must communicate and motivate successfully in the same type of environment that surrounds the advisor.
This is far from a new innovation. Smedley D. Butler was but one of a succession of legendary Marine figures—Sgt. Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller was another—who trained and led the various Gendarmeries of the "Banana Wars." More recently and more pertinently, battalions that were half-French Union and half-Vietnamese fought long after native units had disintegrated at Dien Bien Phu.
Far from being eclipsed, the American advisor will be in the forefront of both the "war of movement" against the main enemy forces and the continuing war for the hearts and minds of the people. He will transition progressively, as enemy strength ebbs, to a role perhaps best approximated by the new venture into the AID realm. He may conceivably become more involved in integrated efforts with consequent increased authority. Unquestionably, he will be called upon, as he has been for the 13 previous years, to adapt abruptly and unerringly to new trends and dynamic situations. Equally predictably, the measure of his success will be the measure of confidence he is able to inspire in his diminutive counterpart, whose stakes in this test tube war remain the highest.
The future of the advisory concept in any insurgency environment. The foregoing examination of the counterinsurgency proving ground that is Vietnam has traced the gamut of advisory activities as they have unfolded against the panorama of insurgency situations. The experiment is far from completed. We can accurately forecast the direction of some advisory efforts and others are pure speculation. The Communist enemy in Vietnam continues to follow Mao's strategic blueprint to the letter. The only speculation can be the degree to which he will pursue the Phase III warfare that he calls the “strategic offensive,” or whether he will be compelled through diminution of resources or political expediency to revert to Phase II or even Phase I.
While the final analysis in Vietnam must be postponed, our experiences to date provide a basis for pondering the future. Such efforts are spurred by chilling reminders from all quarters that we can indeed expect to be challenged by new Communist-inspired insurgencies in the future. Vo Nguyen Giap has said: “South Vietnam is the model of the national liberation movement of our time. . . . If the special warfare that the U. S. imperialists are testing ... is overcome, then it can be defeated anywhere in the world.”
It is painfully obvious that we cannot maintain sufficient forces throughout the world to smother every smoldering insurgency, even if our presence was everywhere politically acceptable. The advisory structure provides us with the flexibility to maintain a “front line” representation around the world, which is at once symbolic, contributory, and relatively inexpensive. If properly employed and staffed to meet the pattern of aggression, the introduction of operational forces might be precluded altogether, or at least reduced in its proportions.
The decision to commit a MAAG of Vietnam proportions in a preventive capacity would of course depend on an accurate appraisal of the subversive threat by either the host nation or country team members already on the scene. Ideally, we would detect and immediately blanket an insurgency in its Phase I festering. An optimum sequence of introduction of MAAG elements, consistent, of course, with the receptiveness of the host nation, would occur simultaneously at the lowest possible level—battalion, training center, and district or comparable political subdivision. All observers concur that advisory effectiveness increases dramatically as representatives reach lower echelons. Colonel Bevan G. Cass, U. S. Marine Corps, an extraordinarily successful attaché in the 1965 Dominican crisis, even states unequivocally that “the only effective advising is at the lowest levels.” The necessary balance between advisors and the supporting establishment is a limiting factor in the size of a MAAG, especially in politically sensitive countries. As an ex-advisor put it: “Parkinson’s Law is a real threat.” However, an expensive logistical tail can be curbed coincidentally with a gain in rapport by a determined advisory effort to integrate as completely as practicable into the native establishment.
A contingent of well-trained, carefully selected advisors working jointly and in an unhurried atmosphere, toward nation-building and increased effectiveness of the armed forces, could return with interest the initial cost of injecting such a MAAG structure. The specific direction and slant of their efforts would be determined, as it has been through history, by the dynamics of the particular situation; however, certain tenets should apply. For example, the mix of advisory talents, military and civilian, should be tailored to the peculiar requirements of the situation, and back-up tiers should respond accordingly. As one war correspondent wryly put it: “If they wanted helicopters and a heavy allotment of Baptist preachers and could document their demand in terms of their locale and its problem, those things would go into the team ...” An accent on engineering-type skills and special talents in the political and sociological fields will probably be of increased importance in the makeup of future advisory elements.
A second major guideline would be continual emphasis on the closest possible assimilation into all aspects of host country life. This would only perpetuate the long-time policy of Marine Corps advisors in Vietnam who have habitually subsisted with their counterparts rather than in the various MACV compounds. This collective identification with the host nation should be enhanced by a degree of fluency in the native language and a length of tour that contributes to the continuity of the working relationship. This would offset Bernard Fall’s criticism that “even the best advisor can’t accomplish much in six months.” The association fostered by these measures would perhaps more closely approach that of the Peace Corps than the traditional MAAGs.
Should the insurgency then flame into the active guerrilla warfare associated with Phase II, advisors who had trained their military units in counterinsurgency would accompany them' into combat and evaluate their preparation in the field. Simultaneously, the necessary counterinsurgency measures could be applied in the nonmilitary areas, according to preconceived procedures. Additionally this broad advisory base should provide an intelligence gathering capability that could detect insurgency trends and reduce our response time accordingly.
If all these measures failed to halt a further deterioration into a war of movement, the advisor could effectively abet the build-up of second and third-tier back-up forces. Also, indigenous forces should be pre-oriented toward specific roles in relation to U. S. operational forces. Conceivably, the predominantly security role newly assigned the ARVN today would be appropriate, or perhaps there would be needed a degree of integration such as represented in our Combined Action Companies. Possibly, even reconnaissance in the tradition of American Indian Scouts would be most useful. Whatever the eventuality, it should be preplanned, and the locally oriented. Intelligence-conscious advisor is the key to its implementation.
Advisory team members could well be the nucleus for an operational staff arriving on the scene, actually assuming assignments for which the groundwork had been previously laid. However, they would logically serve best as they serve today—in a liaison role where their rapport permits them to speak with the authority of the indigenous commander, thereby reducing the inevitable frictions generated by the intervention of foreign troops. Indeed, the advisory mission's own demeanor should well establish the atmosphere of acceptance into which operational units could come. Should the command of indigenous or integrated units become a reality, the advisor who has earned his home team "letter" is the obvious choice.
In keeping with the credo of "first in, last out," the advisory sequence should perform equally in reverse. The successful containment of Phase III should prompt the earliest feasible withdrawal of operational units, with the MAAG returning to its original configuration. If the insurgency is totally suppressed, or political considerations dictate, the advisory structure should be systematically withdrawn. The support and intermediate-level echelons should depart first, leaving the sector and subsector advisors or their equivalents until last. At this stage these advisors might well exchange uniforms for civilian clothes and proceed in the pattern of our AID advisor today. In fact, they might well become a stay-behind element in the Peace Corps pattern. This is not unprecedented in our history. In 1901, soldiers in the Philippines were given the option of returning home for demobilization or remaining as teachers. Some did, stay, and many prominent Filipinos, including former Ambassador Carlos Romulo, were products of soldier-taught schools.
Should the presence of a complete MAAG structure be politically unfeasible; even a handful of advisors, provided they could be inserted at the lower levels, would provide a symbolic American presence. Secondment (temporary assignment) to the foreign service, in the British tradition, would offer one more possibility of achieving the same representation. For this, too, there is an American precedent in the seconding of Marine and naval officers to the Dominican government's Gendarmerie during the "intervention era."
Whatever course the advisory role of the future takes, it is safe to assume that heavy reliance will rest, as it always has, on the abilities of the individual advisor. The most unwieldy system can be made to work, and can be ultimately refined by able officers, while the closest adherence to the soundest of systems will falter with inadequate personnel. Obviously, priority of selection and appropriate training of advisors can pay incalculable dividends in money saved and, more importantly, in lives, both our own and those of friendly nations.
Along with these broad professional talents required of future advisors are the personality traits that will always shape the counterpart relationships that spell success or failure in any program. Their critical importance has been aptly demonstrated in Vietnam, and they will not change in the future world that awaits us. Our current selection processes should be adequate to provide the blend of knowledge, maturity, confidence, and adaptability we seek.
Looking ahead, then, it is evident that the advisory concept will continue to play a vital counterinsurgency role in its current configuration. However, it may hold an even greater potential for service in the preventive capacities that reduce or remove the causes for insurgency. This will mean a trend toward duties that are progressively more nonmilitary. As our national efforts to improve human Circumstances increase, our worldwide representation will grow but will become increasingly more decentralized. Obviously it is in the best interests of our service and country that the Marine Corps keep pace and ensure a substantial participation in this representation. The broad talents sought in these individuals are but a projection of the self-reliance so traditionally revered in the Marine small unit leader. The record of nearly two centuries of expeditionary service have given present-day Marines a legacy of decentralized, many-sided incursions on foreign shores. The advisory crusades of tomorrow represent a logical extension of this tradition that could become the brightest chapter yet in an enduring record of difficult tasks well done.
A graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy with the Class of 1953, Lieutenant Colonel Leftwich has served in the Second Marine Division as a platoon commander (1954 to 1955), a company commander (1960 to 1962), and as Aide to the Commanding General (1962 to 1963). His overseas duty includes Okinawa and Japan (1955 to 1966) and Advisor to the Vietnamese Marine Corps, Vietnam (1965). He has been a company officer at the Naval Academy (1957 to 1960), Aide to the Commandant, Marine Corps Schools (1963 to 1964), a Tactics instructor at Quantico (1966), and a Systems Analyst at HQMC (1967 to 1968). He is now Marine Corps Assistant/Aide to the Under Secretary of the Navy, Washington, D.C.