Page 117 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

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strived to eliminate the most efficient and honest local officials, especially in the villages,
so as to force the government to employ inept and corrupt personnel, who would discredit
the public administration. As it was said, it was necessary to win the hearts and minds of the
indigenous people but sometimes that was in conflict with military demands. According to
General Giap’s imagine, if the guerrilla was like a fish in the water, one needed to deprive
it of water, but without causing too much loss to the population, which was trapped in the
crossfire between guerrilla retaliation and government repression. Hyper-technological wars
that Americans wanted to fight to reduce their losses often did not let to obtain that goal: a
village destroyed by napalm was hardly a good way to conquer the hearts and minds of the
people. «It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it», was the paradoxical dec-
laration of a U. S. Army Major at the end of a battle in the city of Ben Tre, on the Mekong
delta. . This is a problem that repeats itself today.
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In Vietnam, one saw the combination of «technological illusion» and moral weakness
which led Americans to being defeated and the dichotomy between the technological wars
of the West, which wanted to minimize risks for its soldiers and the «dirty» wars of tribes,
ethnic, political and religious groups of the «other World». Commenting that conflict an his-
torian wrote: «The military doctrine of the West has actually evolved to conceive the utopia
of wars in which it is possible to fight only with machines, employing just tens of men to
make them work». Already in Algeria and Indochina in the ‘50s and ‘60s, there was the crisis
of infantries, the oldest backbone of all armies, due to the «increasing inability of the Western
populations to cope with the amount of physical fatigue, sacrifice and, ultimately, death, a
capacity which pre-industrial populations still possess» , so that French and americans had
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to rely on special corps, like the Foreign Legion or the Green Berets.
The British had significant successes in fighting guerrillas after the Second World War .
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The most important was in Malaya, following a political-military strategy based on collabo-
ration with the conservative indigenous authorities, utmost respect for the local culture and
traditions, economic aids and administrative support to eliminate dissatisfaction, training of
regular friendly forces and limited use of air force and artillery to avoid victims among civil-
ians whose support was sought, high combat level of special forces which operated in close
contact with the population and aggressive border patrolling to prevent the inflow of support
for guerrillas and to prevent them from escaping.
The tactical problem of how to confront guerrillas and terrorists who worked infiltrat-
ing into the civil population, which was loyal to them or forced by them, has been one of
the main problems to be solved in today’s conflicts. It would be an illusion to look for ever
more «intelligent» weapons to solve it. If the declared purpose of today’s wars, which are
no longer called by their name but rather under a vast list of other politically correct defini-
tions, is to change the political, social and economic situation of the countries in which the

51 See G. C. Herring, America’s Longest War. The United States in Vietnam 1950-1975, iV ed., New York,
th
2002, p. 233.
52 Galli della loggia, Il mondo contemporaneo ..., cit., pp. 266-268 (the whole chapter 7, L’Occidente alla
guerra, is particularly interesting.) Thanks to their modern weaponry, Western soldiers try not to «get into
contact with bloodshed» (Qiao Liang-Wang Xiangsui, Guerra senza limiti. L’arte della guerra asimmetrica
fra terrorismo e globalizzazione, Gorizia, 2001. p. 75 [1 ed., Beijing, 1999]).
st
53 For a brief description, see J. Pimlott, (ed.) British Military Operations 1945-1984, London, 1984.