3/19/2009

Spanish MoD visits Kosovo. Meanwhile, Mattis told The Hill, before NATO Summit. CIA-Vietnam Histories declassified


Prefacio español:

Mientras que la ministra de Defensa viaja a Kosovo -con fallo de motor de C-130 incluido- donde esperamos haga públicas algunas decisiones, las cosas siguen su incierto rumbo, como corresponde a las guerras híbridas.

Abajo inserto textos y lecturas sugeridas (la de Laos que va al final es muy, pero que muy instructiva). La foto es de "Caribou's" regulares e "irregulares" en el aerodromo de Vung-Tau (Vietnam, c. 1970). Guerras Posmodernas avisa de El camino hacia la regulación de las PMC anotando el “Documento Montreaux” de septiembre de 2008.

Que tengan un buen puente...



Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:07:00 -0500

Some excerpts:

"I am absolutely certain that irregular warfare will be with us in future conflicts; we need to only look back to last summer's Russian incursion into Georgia, where we saw many irregular aspects in that war," Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis told committee members.

Conventional Russian combat units employed "irregular forces in front of them," Mattis said, when they entered the northern Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia last August. Georgia, now a democratic nation, was a Soviet satellite state during the Cold War.

And study of the second Lebanon War, in which Hezbollah guerillas and Israeli troops clashed in southern Lebanon between July and August of 2006, also highlights how irregular warfare is increasingly being employed against conventional military forces, Mattis said.

Based in Norfolk, Va., Joint Forces Command is one of the 10 unified combatant commands and is the primary U.S. military force-provider. Mattis wears a second hat as NATO's supreme allied commander for transformation.


(...)

"We recognize that we can never predict the future precisely, and we must expect to be surprised in matters of national security," Mattis said.

(...)

And as the military institutionalizes its irregular warfare capability, Mattis said, it must also strive to "maintain our nuclear and conventional superiority, which brings great benefit to the international community."

At this point, the United States "cannot abrogate any aspect of the conflict spectrum," Mattis said. "By that, I mean the enemy will gravitate to the area that they perceive to be our weakness."

Therefore, he said, the U.S. military "cannot give up conventional capability, we cannot give up nuclear superiority, but we must develop irregular [capability], if we want to checkmate the enemy."


2. From SWJ Forums,

Vietnam Histories

This release consists of six declassified histories volumes and describes the CIA's role in Indochina during the Vietnam War. These histories written by Thomas L. Ahern, Jr., are based on extensive research in CIA records and on oral history interviews of participants. The release totals some 1,600 pages and represents the largest amount of Vietnam-era CIA documents yet declassified. (February 2009)

Document List

a) CIA and the Generals (13.2 MB PDF) Covert Support to Military Government in South Vietnam

b) CIA and the House of Ngo (13.1 MB PDF) Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954-63

c) CIA and Rural Pacification (71.3 MB PDF)

d) Good Questions, Wrong Answers (2.7 MB PDF) CIA's Estimates of Arms Traffic through Sihanoukville, Cambodia, During the Vietnam War.

e) The Way We Do Things (7.1 MB PDF) Black Entry Operations into Northern Vietnam

f) Undercover Armies (29.2 MB PDF) CIA and Surrogate Warfare in Laos

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