Category: Vietnam War

Modern warfare history book – “Building Militaries in Fragile States” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) – Mara Karlin interview

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Dr. Mara Karlin started her career working in the Middle East. She then went to graduate school and interned in the Pentagon on strategic issues. Eventually she served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy & force development in the Department of Defense. She is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University where she teaches in the field of Strategic Studies. This is her first book.

1:54 – Dr. Karlin was a policymaker in the Pentagon in the aughts and she worked on building militaries in Pakistan and Lebanon. She had an early interest in Middle East issues and ended up getting an internship in the Pentagon while studying at Johns Hopkins.

3:55 – The book tries to answer the question of how the US can be successful when it builds militaries in fragile states. The US is adverse to sending in its own military into fragile states. The US tries to work with the militaries in these fragile states. Dr. Karlin looked at various case studies from history.

5:19 – She looked at Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The big failure example is the South Vietnam in the 1950s. If the US had succeeded in building the South Vietnam military then the war could have been avoided.

7:15 – Two other failures are Lebanon in the 1980s and in Iraq in recent years. The closest thing to success is US efforts in Greece after WWII.

9:06 – The US got deeply into Greece’s military affairs. That transformed the Greek military and enabled them to beat guerillas and the US didn’t have to send in troops.

15:13 – There were different levels of cooperation. Institutional and strategic versus operational and tactical. People think that the US only started developing foreign militaries after 9/11.

17:28 – More desperation in a government makes foreign countries more willing to listen to what the US has to say.

21:23 – The US goes through stages of increased and decreased support for foreign militaries. However, the US shows consistency in security goals since WWII. Only recently have security issues been inconsistent.

25:25 – Bipartisan agreement on security affairs has recently begun to diminish.

29:38 – The document she found that hit heard the hardest was finding a declassified CIA agency study of a gap in Beirut where attackers were sneaking through to attack their enemies. She also found information on a US official who wanted to stage a coup in Lebanon.

33:31 – She really enjoyed studying the development of the Lebanese military work she had done years before.

36:35 – Body count ideas developed in the Vietnam War has affected how the US has approached building foreign militaries. Recently, the US is shifting away from this quantitative approach to this issue.

39:00 – Dr. Karlin had to apply a paradigm shift to her initial hypothesis.

42:30 – Dr. Karlin discusses Reagan’s decision to have the USS New Jersey launch strikes in Lebanon.

45:35 – Dr. Karlin discusses why Lebanon and its military development is important to the US.

For more “Military History Inside Out” please follow me on Facebook at warscholar, on twitter at Warscholar, on youtube at warscholar1945 and on Instagram @crisalvarezswarscholar

Guests: Dr. Mara Karlin

Host: Cris Alvarez

Tags: military, history, military history, conflict, war, interview, non-fiction book, United States, France, Lebanon, Vietnam, Greece, Iraq, Syria, stabilization, strategic studies

Vietnam War history book – “The Psychological War for Vietnam” (University Press of Kansas, 2018) – Merv Roberts interview

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

 

Dr. Merv Roberts has worked on psychological operations in Afghanistan. His work there inspired him to write a history of psychological operations in the Vietnam War and I interviewed him about this book “The Psychological War for Vietnam, 1960-1968.”

2:07- Dr. Roberts decided on studying Information Operations in Vietnam after he returned from a deployment to Afghanistan. No one had done an over arching study of Psychological Operations in the Vietnam War.

3:38 – The book is on joint operations and looked at both North and South Vietnam. He used the Foreign Broadcast Information Service collections.

5:25 – The North Vietnam program was modeled on the Soviet program. It’s about agitation and propaganda. The American system evolved over the course of the war. It came from the American advertising culture that used subjective truth.

8:38 – North Vietnamese leadership was divided over whether to focus on the North or to spread the revolution to the South. The US started trying to divide these factions in 1967 but then [we] the US ends psy war against the North after the Tet Offensive.

12:14 – The North became ineffective at waging psychological warfare against the South but was very effective in it’s worldwide campaign to get countries against the war.

17:11 – Dr. Roberts compares psychological operations and civil affairs activities. In Vietnam civil affairs fell under psychological operations.

21:31 – Edward Landsdale was good at psychological operations in the region.

23:55 – The North Vietnamese used some anti-war activists to spread their message.

27:03 – FBIS is a largely untapped resource for information on the Cold War and events during this period. He also wants to use Geographic Information Systems in conjunction with FBIS information. He also used the Hamlet level evaluations which he admits many people consider a subjective assessment of villages. There were also terrorist activity reports with geographic data attached. The Friendly Forces file provides data on where friendly forces were during the war.

34:04 – Most Psy Ops guys aren’t trained very well during Vietnam.

35:35 – Going through all the captured documents was fascinating for Dr. Roberts. Much of them haven’t been looked at more than once since capture.

37:03 – There are indications the program was effective in 1968.

39:08 – The Vietnamese go to Texas Tech when they want to research the Vietnam War because of how many documents Tech has from the war. FBIS is harder to get a hold of.

42:25 – There are very few books looking at psychological operations across various wars so this book will help fill that gap.

47:34 – There were problems between various US government organizations on how to do psy op in Vietnam. The State Department had the primacy on what messaging would be done in Vietnam.

 

For more “Military History Inside Out” please follow me on Facebook at warscholar, on twitter at Warscholar, on youtube at warscholar1945 and on Instagram @crisalvarezswarscholar

 

Guests: Merv Roberts

Host: Cris Alvarez

Tags: vietnam war, psychological operations, north vietnam, tet offensive, hamlet program