Wager Mage
Wager Mage
Photo: Gotta Be Worth It
The answer is 'yes,' but not by military force alone. As the United States enters its fourth year of combat in Iraq, with victory over insurgents and terrorists more elusive than ever, it is worth recalling an insurrection early in the Cold War.
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Read More »With Magsaysay installed as defense minister and Lansdale at his side, important political reforms were put into effect. After surveying the wreckage that the military had left in its wake, Lansdale concluded, “the most urgent need was to construct a political base for supporting the fight. Without it, the Philippine armed forces would be model examples of applied military doctrine, but would go on losing.” Once a viable political base had been established, he believed, it would be able “to mount a bold, imaginative and popular campaign against the Huk guerrillas.” In short, Lansdale realized that political warfare had a better chance to succeed than conventional military action. A key element of the new political offensive was the psychological dimension. Noting that “at the time I arrived in the Philippines, the Huks clearly outmatched the government in this weapon,” Lansdale immediately set out to change the government’s approach. The Huks followed the Communist tradition by using slogans as an approach to the locals. Posters proclaiming “Land for the Landless” and “Ballots Not Bullets” recalled Vladimir Lenin’s earlier appeals to Russian masses for “Peace, Land and Bread.” Such slogans may seem simplistic today, but that was in fact their appeal. They told a story and offered hope with a few words. The Huks had an organizational structure for their psychological operations (psyops) as well. Each military unit had a political officer in charge of propaganda, morale boosting, self-criticism and agitprop. These latter operated in secrecy throughout the population, producing propaganda leaflets, gossip and other “whispering” campaigns. Lansdale and his team began their own campaign to “out revolutionize the revolutionaries.” He created a Civil Affairs Office (CAO, generally referred to as “cow”) to train civilian personnel and soldiers to undertake “peoples war.” Each Battalion Combat Team (BCT) was assigned a CAO section trained to instruct troops in the proper behavior toward the populace: As Lansdale put it, “to make the soldiers behave as the brothers and protectors of the people…replacing the arrogance of the military” which had plagued civil-military relations to that point. Lansdale came up with the term “civic action,” which has since become the universally accepted designation for such actions. In the Philippines this new kind of warfare began with a transformation of attitude and behavior. The government and army began assisting farmers in land courts, care of civilian casualties in hospitals was improved, soldiers undertook cheap labor in rural areas, and a widespread program of agrarian credit gradually began converting locals from bitterly opposing the government to actively assisting it against the Huks. Soldiers were instructed to talk with the residents and attend local events. The result was a transformation of tactical intelligence on Huk movements, often in less than a week’s time. Magsaysay and Lansdale personally toured provinces, overseeing civic action projects, including the construction of “Liberty Wells” that would provide pure water. Propaganda teams attended local fairs and parties, distributing pro-government leaflets and announcing civic action programs through bullhorns brought in from the States by Lansdale. With the cooperation of the Roman Catholic Church, Lansdale and Magsaysay arranged to infiltrate Huk areas with government sympathizers who conducted whispering campaigns against the Communists and their anti-Catholic methods. Establishing radio stations in barrios and distributing receiving sets throughout the population introduced propaganda via the airwaves. “Dirty tricks” were also part of civic action. The Huks had been buying weapons and ammunition from corrupt government suppliers. Once Lansdale discovered the supply chain, Magsaysay made the dealers an offer they couldn’t refuse. Rather than prosecuting the suppliers, he arranged for them to send faulty and contaminated materiel to Huk guerrillas. Grenades and rifles began exploding prematurely in Huk hands, and some weapons refused to fire at all. Within weeks of that move, illicit arms sales to the Huks ground to a halt. Lansdale also played on local superstitions and cultures as a means of political warfare. In Philippine cultural lore an asuang, or vampire, haunted interior regions at night. In one area, for example, regular troops were unable to move against Huk strongholds until a combat psywar team began planting stories that an asuang was living in Huk-infested hills. The psywar squad killed a Huk insurgent, punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels to drain it of blood, then put the corpse back on the trail. The following day no Huk guerrillas were found within miles of the area. Human intelligence (“humint”) was also a mainstay of the political counterrevolution. With the Huks trying hard to recruit manpower, Lansdale arranged for a large number of volunteer agents to infiltrate Huk units. Many of them not only provided critical intelligence to the army but rose rapidly in the guerrilla command structure. Aware that many of their men might well be government agents, many Huk irregulars turned themselves in. Magsaysay began exerting tight discipline over both the army and government. He eliminated “fire-free” areas where innocent civilians had been killed. Interrogation techniques were made more civilized, and soldiers went into local barrios armed with food, clothing and medical supplies. Magsaysay was beating the enemy on his own terms, offering hope for a better future and eliminating the source of grievances against the government. He also came to realize that local armies recruited from within the population provided the best antiguerrilla personnel. The fact that Americans were not involved as ground troops in fact helped the cause immeasurably. As a Philippine lieutenant colonel wrote at the time:
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Read More »Foreign troops are certain to be less welcome among the people than are the regular armed forces of their own government. Local populations will shelter their own people against operations of foreign troops, even though those they shelter may be outlaws. For this reason, native troops would be more effective than foreign forces in operations against native communist conspirators. It would be rare, indeed, if the use of foreign troops would not in itself doom to failure an anti-guerrilla campaign. Gradually the civilian populace was won over and Huk support eroded. The institution of a system of rewards for information about suspected Huks helped turn the insurgents to the defensive. The government instituted land reform, and a generous amnesty program convinced thousands of Huks to abandon the war. In effect, the Magsaysay/Lansdale team usurped the Communist call for land reform by making that issue the lead item in the government’s 1951 political campaign. The politicians were mastering counterinsurgency in areas where soldiers never dreamed of going. The November 1951 elections were widely seen as fair and free, with Philippine troops guarding public meetings to prevent Huk coercion and high school students and ROTC cadets guarding polling places. In a turnout of more than 4 million (where 5 million were registered), the army transferred and guarded ballot boxes in full view of the public as well as the American press and observers. The result was a definitive victory for democracy and a crushing defeat for the Huk insurrection. As a final blow against the Communist guerrillas, Lansdale noted, the election allowed him the opportunity to “pay them back in their own psychological coin.” He added, “And I took it.” Lansdale had used authentic Huk ID material and, via agitprop cells, succeeded in planting “Boycott the Election” instructions into Huk propaganda channels. The ruse succeeded beyond imagination; within days the entire Huk apparatus was defiantly urging a boycott on voters. As related by Lansdale himself, this psywar deception felled the Huk movement for good: Then came election day and its shockers for their side: the huge turnout of voters and the clear evidence of honest ballots. The government forces, the press, and the citizen volunteers…publicly called to the attention of the Huks and their sympathizers how wrong had been their predictions about the election. Ballots, not bullets, were what counted! If the Huk leaders could be so wrong this time, then in how many other things had they been wrong all along? Why should anyone follow them anymore? The Huk rank and file starting echoing these sentiments, and Huk morale skidded. Groups of Huks began to come into army camps, voluntarily surrendering and commenting bitterly that they had been misled by their leaders. Well, it was true enough. They had. Within 18 months of TAKING OFFICE, Magsaysay and his American adviser had stopped the Communist insurgency in its tracks. In retrospect, the Huk insurgency in the Philippines was a true popular rebellion that had originated during the war to harass the Japanese occupation. Magsaysay and his U.S. adviser ended the insurgency by employing even more popular measures, combined with police-style battle tactics. The Philippine government victory and the role played by Colonel Edward Lansdale in securing an end to the localized guerrilla war there provided a valuable example for counterinsurgency specialists in the years prior to American intervention in Vietnam, and to this day they show the superiority of policies of attraction over policies of suppression. The victory against the Huks, however, has generally gone unheeded within the U.S. military hierarchy; most officials instinctively prefer conventional tactics and weapons, regardless of circumstances. In a post-Vietnam environment, with brilliant conventional triumphs against Iraq both in 1991 and 2003, the four-year effort to end the current insurrection offers a tragic contrast to the accomplishments of a single Air Force officer more than half a century ago. John J. Tierney Jr. is the Walter Kohler Professor of International Relations at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., and the author of Chasing Ghosts: Unconventional Warfare in American History. For additional reading, try: Lessons Learned: The Philippines, 1946-1953, by Edward G. Lansdale. Originally published in the March 2007 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.
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