Of course how did Vietnam turn out in the long run in its relationship with China?  The PLA got their butts kicked by them in 1979 and now there is friction over the South China Sea with Vietnam siding with other regional powers and asking the US for support.  The Chinese advisory operations did not result in an alliance that was closer than lips and teeth the way their intervention on behalf of the north Koreans did (though they are probably regretting that relationship now!)

But these three factors for Chinese success (or effectiveness) outlined here are are important considerations and should factor into both decision making and planning.  There are a number of very important lessons to which we should pay attention though those with professional advisory experience will tell you they are common sense. E.g.:

In contrast, the US advisors shared no historical background with their South Vietnamese counterparts, and there was a complete lack of cultural understanding between the two. American advisors were confident in their experience from World War II and the Korean War, and any reluctance by their Vietnamese counterparts to do exactly as the Americans would do was often perceived as laziness or incompetence[II]. The foundational relationship for a successful military assistance partnership was simply not strong as it was for the Chinese and the Vietnamese Communists.

The highlighted excerpt above is an illustration of our lack of cultural understanding and the one track path we follow, e.g., fight the American way or you cannot fight.

To be clear, China’s assistance was critical. As Seals[VIII] points out, China provided professional advice, weapons, logistics, and a strategic deterrence against a US invasion of the North Vietnam. But the fighting was always left to the PAVN and thus China never took the feeling of ownership of away from the Vietnamese.

This is why I advocate that while we need expertise in counterinsurgency we should not be conducting COIN ourselves but instead  conducting foreign internal defense to help a friend, partner or ally in their internal defense and development programs so that they can defend themselves from lawlessness, subversion, insurgency, and terrorism.  If we are doing it for them then we know how that turns out.

Could we substitute Iraq and Afghanistan below?

This is in stark contrast to the ARVN forces who, as US support decreased later in the war, complained that their way of fighting had become dependent on massive amounts of supply and ammunition and significant air support[VI]. They had become accustomed to fighting a materiel and ordnance heavy fight like their US advisors, which was not at all suited to the nature of counterinsurgency warfare fought among the civilian population. Nor were such methods of fighting suited to the ARVN forces capacity to sustain it.

But we should also realize that no two situations are the same and that there are no exact models that are transferable in every way but there are many lessons that do carry over.

Conclusion:

The Chinese may have simply been lucky to support a motivated and culturally compatible Vietnamese military. Given less favorable circumstances the task would no doubt have been exponentially more difficult.  Could Mao’s PLA have advised the Vietnamese, if necessary, in a strategy other than People’s War? Could it have successfully advised a military with which it shared no culture or history if the situation required it? Could Chinese encouragement have provided the necessary enthusiasm for the cause if the Vietnamese Communists were reluctant? One can only speculate. More importantly, can the US advise any of its allies in anything other than its own methods and doctrine if the situation requires something different? Can it tailor advising and assistance to a military that culturally is a poor fit for US institutions? Can the US encourage host nation ownership? Judging from the current efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the answer unfortunately seems to be no.

And a friend responded to my comments on this article on my national security list serve to remind me of this pithy quote that also illustrates one of our American strategic weaknesses:

• “The very massiveness of our intervention actually reduced our leverage. So long as we were willing to use U.S. resources and manpower as a substitute for Vietnamese, their incentive for doing more was compromised.” – Komer, Bureaucracy At War.

Why Military Advising Was So Successful in Vietnam…

by Peter Murphy

Journal Article | June 28, 2015 - 3:58pm

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/why-military-advising-was-so-successful-in-vietnam%E2%80%A6

Why Military Advising Was So Successful in Vietnam…for the Chinese: And What the US Can Learn From It

Peter Murphy

In post-World War II Vietnam, the fact that the Vietnamese Communists consistently demonstrated more motivation to fight and maintained greater popular support than their adversaries leads many to conclude that the communist victory was inevitable and no military action would change what was ultimately a political situation favorable to the communists. It is true that the Vietnamese Communists did enjoy these advantages over the French and later the South Vietnamese government and its poorly motivated military forces. But military action was necessary for the Vietnamese Communists to force out the French and later to force out the South Vietnamese government. No popular uprising was sufficient to create the unified Vietnamese state under communist control without the military victory.

The Vietnamese Communist government and People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) received some material assistance from the Soviet Union, but were primarily advised and assisted by People’s Republic of China (PRC) throughout most of the Indochina Wars. Those Vietnamese troops decisively defeated the French, survived a war of attrition against the US, and completely overran the South Vietnamese forces that had received decades of French and US assistance. It seems the Chinese must have done something right in their military assistance effort.  There are undoubtedly many contributing factors that led to the success of the Chinese assistance effort in Vietnam.  The three most significant of those factors will be examined to see how they facilitated such a success, and why it seems the US continues to have difficulty finding similar success.

The Historical Relationship Between Advisors and the Advised

The first key factor contributing to China’s successful assistance to the Vietnamese Communists was the dynamic of the relationship between the two countries. The Vietnamese Communists and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shared a common brotherhood from their leaders’ mutual involvement in the communist movements of the early twentieth century. Additionally, both countries had recently emerged from struggles against the Japanese and had both been the victims of western imperialism. But perhaps even more important, the two countries shared a much longer historical relationship. The Chinese empires had always exerted a significant cultural and philosophical influence on Vietnam, a country on the periphery of the old Chinese tributary system. But Vietnam also had its own unique heritage and with it a history of resisting Chinese interference in Vietnamese affairs[I].

This created a situation where some cultural similarities mixed with the shared communist ideology and resistance to colonialism would facilitate a mutual understanding and a good working relationship.  Yet this was balanced by a history of Vietnamese independence and mistrust toward their larger neighbor. This second element of the relationship is important because though Vietnam and China quickly established an effective cooperative relationship, this sense of Vietnamese independence helped Vietnamese Communist leadership resist attempts by the Chinese to play too active a decision making role in what was after all a Vietnamese struggle.

In contrast, the US advisors shared no historical background with their South Vietnamese counterparts, and there was a complete lack of cultural understanding between the two. American advisors were confident in their experience from World War II and the Korean War, and any reluctance by their Vietnamese counterparts to do exactly as the Americans would do was often perceived as laziness or incompetence[II]. The foundational relationship for a successful military assistance partnership was simply not strong as it was for the Chinese and the Vietnamese Communists.

The Assistance and Mentorship Was Appropriate

(Continued at the link below)

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/why-military-advising-was-so-successful-in-vietnam%E2%80%A6

Founding Insurgents: What today's military could learn from George Washington. BY JOHN ARQUILLA

Excerpts:

In the main, what took shape was an insurgent approach to the war based on "winning by not losing," and it was nowhere better employed than in the South. It was there that the Revolution was won -- not so much by the main force as by the inspired blending of conventional infantry and irregular raiders. Washington's most effective executor of this approach was the Quaker-turned-soldier Nathanael Greene, who marched his Continentals here and there to draw his opponent, Lord George Cornwallis, after him. While the British were chasing Greene and his men, American irregulars led by Francis Marion ("the Swamp Fox"), Thomas Sumter, and others struck at outposts and supply lines, causing no end of trouble.
…
The true strategic heir of Washington and Greene seems to have been Vo Nguyen Giap -- now over 100 years old -- who guided the skillful blending of conventional and irregular field operations that ultimately prevailed against American might in Vietnam.…
So the battle for the American military's strategic soul goes on unabated. No doubt the predilection to pursue conventional approaches is a natural outgrowth of an industrial age in which sheer mass came to mean so much, particularly in the world wars. But in an information age, when the fundamental dynamic in armed conflict has shifted from mass-on-mass collisions to the simple need to find the hidden -- the key to fighting insurgents and terrorists -- the persistence of the "overwhelming force" mindset imposes huge costs and makes victory ever harder to achieve.

Perhaps the Army is on to something with "Conventional and Special Operations Forces interdependence" which is used some 9 times in the December 2012 Army Capstone Concept. http://www.tradoc.army.mil/tpubs/pams/tp525-3-0.pdf

V/R

Dave

Founding Insurgents

What today's military could learn from George Washington.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/07/03/founding_insurgents?page=full

BY JOHN ARQUILLA | JULY 3, 2013

This week, the 150th anniversaries of Gettysburg and Vicksburg are being observed, their military lessons reabsorbed. But for strategists today it is more appropriate to recall the Revolution than the Civil War. Yes, Gettysburg was a pivotal slugging match that saved the Union from defeat. And the Vicksburg campaign was indeed a masterpiece of maneuver warfare that split the South in two along the Mississippi River. But both were very conventional military struggles, a rare form of conflict today. Instead, our world is now rife with irregular wars, so there is much more value in remembering that American independence was won by insurgents.

As historian Joseph Ellis makes clear in his new account of that time,Revolutionary Summer, George Washington was initially far too tied to notions of conventional stand-up fights and nearly lost the whole army in his disastrous 1776 campaign in Manhattan. After a narrow escape, he learned his lesson and seldom thereafter ran such risks. Washington grew content, for the most part, to keep the Continental Army "in being," posing an ever-present threat that the British always had to take into consideration in their planning. In the meantime, Washington sent off smaller forces to fight in savage actions, as at Oriskany, and in skillful operations like those that culminated in the great victory at Saratoga.

In the main, what took shape was an insurgent approach to the war based on "winning by not losing," and it was nowhere better employed than in the South. It was there that the Revolution was won -- not so much by the main force as by the inspired blending of conventional infantry and irregular raiders. Washington's most effective executor of this approach was the Quaker-turned-soldier Nathanael Greene, who marched his Continentals here and there to draw his opponent, Lord George Cornwallis, after him. While the British were chasing Greene and his men, American irregulars led by Francis Marion ("the Swamp Fox"), Thomas Sumter, and others struck at outposts and supply lines, causing no end of trouble.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/07/03/founding_insurgents?page=full

Village Stability Operations: An Historical Perspective from Vietnam to Afghanistan

It is always good to look at history.

Since this paper relies heavily on COL Kelly's Vietnam Studies monograph on US Special Forces in Vietnam: 1961-1971 here is the link to it.  This is a very useful source for those who want to look at the CODG program as well as some of the early organizations of Special Forces (A Team, B Team, and C Team): 

http://www.history.army.mil/books/Vietnam/90-23/90-23C.htm

V/R
Dave

Village Stability Operations: An Historical Perspective from Vietnam to Afghanistan

by Mark L. Brown, Jr.

Journal Article | March 28, 2013 - 2:30am

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/village-stability-operations-an-historical-perspective-from-vietnam-to-afghanistan

"The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish . . . the kind of war on which they are embarking." 

                                                                               - Karl von Clausewitz

Over the course of America’s 235 year history she has declared major war five times and has been involved in over 180 small conflicts (Boot 2002). The United States has experienced every facet of warfare in almost every geographical setting on earth (Boot 2002). Extensive archives of military strategy which could undeniably provide potential solutions for the strategic problems we are facing in warfare today are as easily accessible as a Google search. However it took the United States over eight years of fighting in the austere terrain of Afghanistan before the Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command Afghanistan (CFSOCC-A) finally proposed the strategy of the Civilian Defense Initiative (CDI). Within less than a year’s time this strategy was renamed and finally rested with the title of Village Stability Operations (VSO). Today Village Stability Operations is the premier strategy touted by the current US administration and is considered by many the strategy for success in Afghanistan.

When first tasked with implementing what is now called the Village Stability Operations (VSO) strategy in April 2009, a proposal of what the strategy should roughly resemble was forwarded through the 7th Special Forces Group’s chain of command to Operational Detachment Alpha 7224 (ODA or “the Detachment”). The briefing that was included in the mission description was established by input from Dr. Seth Jones of the Rand Corporation and Brigadier General Reeder, the Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command Afghanistan Commander (CFSOCC-A). The proposal depicted the typical counter insurgency (COIN) mission under the overarching mission in Afghanistan of Foreign Internal Defense Mission (FID). Special Forces conduct both of these mission sets on a routine basis. However the VSO mission differed from the usual mission of train, interdict, and disrupt which the Special Forces and conventional counterparts had been waging since the inception of the war in Afghanistan. The ODA realized that the VSO strategy proposal was essentially a combination of COIN and FID, and was similar to tenants that are taught in the Robin Sage portion of the Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC).

When the Detachment started its initial planning on how to operationalize VSO, it conducted a historical study of some of the proposed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and came to realize that some of the key components harkened back to the Special Forces’ strategy of Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) in Vietnam. CIDG was one of Special Forces’ greatest success stories in American history and by far the greatest example of how to fight unconventional warfare with an economy of force approach and modest foot print. Amongst all the different theories, schematics, and pillars of counter insurgency, the CIDG experience was American made and executed with precision.

During the period from 1954 to 1971, the longest COIN/FID mission ever conducted by an American force was directly implemented by the US Special Forces (USSF) in South Vietnam. In the initial stages of American USSF involvement in Vietnam, President Kennedy emphasized to new Army lieutenants graduating from West Point “[t]hat this is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin - war by guerillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him” (Arnold 2009).  President John F. Kennedy stated that pure military skill is no longer enough to address the current defense challenges that our nation is facing (Olson 2011). He further elaborated that a full spectrum of military, paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success (Olson 2011). President Kennedy’s proposal of a whole new military strategy was considered to be ahead of his time by many. He displayed an innate ability to recognize the future of modern irregular warfare and identify it as one of the greatest existential threats to the United States beyond that of high intensity conflict. Many who have done the thorough analysis would agree that President Kennedy rather than a visionary could have been a tremendous steward of US military small war history.

Various Special Forces elements operated under the auspices of military advisory groups in South Vietnam as early as July 1954, just three months after the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu (Kelly 1973). From 1954 until 1957 there were roughly 342 trainers in country, advising, training, and assisting the fledgling South Vietnamese Army (Kelly 1973). By 1957, the 1st Special Forces Group had trained over 58 men of the South Vietnamese Army which formed the trainers of the elite Vietnamese Special Forces units (Kelly 1973). With the exponential growth of the Viet Cong insurgency, the counter insurgency strategy drastically needed to be expanded and it came to be known as the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (Kelly 1973).

The Civilian Irregular Defense Group took place in rural villages where Special Forces would set up area development centers and focus on local defense and civic action. Primarily the CIDG strategy resulted in an ODA occupying a village after they made their initial assessment which encompassed tribal elder wishes with rapport building. That ODA would be responsible for establishing a village security force comprised of roughly 10-12 men per village depending on populace size and enemy activity in the area (Kelly 1973). A larger village within that same province would have a more fortified position with the construct of a Mobile Strike Force (MIKE Force) and civil action platform. The MIKE force was essentially a 35 man element or larger of a more highly trained indigenous force (Kelly 1973). The MIKE force’s main mission was to provide a counter offensive strike capability to defend villages, local defense forces, and the ODAs in them. The MIKE force was trained, advised and led by an ODA.

(Continued at the link below)

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/village-stability-operations-an-historical-perspective-from-vietnam-to-afghanistan

Empirical Studies of Conflict Project Web Site (ESOC)

Please see below the announcement from my good friend Joe Felter.  I think this resource will be very helpful to analysts, researchers, students and practitioners.  I have looked over the site and it contains a lot of very useful information and data that I think will continually evolve with collaboration with interested parties.  Note the 6 country pages below.

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC) website, which can be accessed at http://esoc.princeton.edu/ .

ESOC identifies, compiles, and analyzes micro-level conflict data and information on insurgency, civil war, and other sources of politically motivated violence worldwide. ESOC was established in 2008 by practitioners and scholars concerned by the significant barriers and upfront costs that challenge efforts to conduct careful sub-national research on conflict. The ESOC website is designed to help overcome these obstacles and to empower the quality of research needed to inform better policy and enhance security and good governance around the world.

The ESOC team includes about forty researchers (current and former) and is led by six members: Eli Berman, James D. Fearon, Joseph H. Felter, David Laitin, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Jeremy M. Weinstein.

The website is organized by countries and research themes. The six country pages are: Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The content is structured according to five themes: Demographic/Socioeconomic, Geography, Infrastructure, Public Opinion, and Violence. The website currently hosts about 45 ESOC data files, over 35 ESOC peer-reviewed publications (with replication data), and ten working papers. The ESOC team has also posted links to many external data repositories and external readings that have proven useful for analysis. The website will be regularly updated with new micro-level conflict data and contextual information, as it is compiled and submitted by ESOC researchers.

We are a new and evolving research network with limited staffing resources, so please accept our apologies if we’ve inadvertently overlooked key readings or acknowledgements. We welcome your suggestions on additional materials to host on the site.

Please contact us if you would like to contribute data relevant to ESOC. We are committed to archiving replication data and useful information on all the countries in which we work, and we anticipate expanding our coverage.   Also, please share this resource with your colleagues and others who may benefit from our website.

Analyses can only be as good as the data supporting it. We hope ESOC’s commitment to making more and better quality data widely available as a public good will help raise the bar in the quality of conflict research being conducted and the important policies it informs.

Best regards,

Joe Felter and Jake Shapiro (ESOC co-Directors)