Despite the media and the respectable leaders of antiwar movements endlessly repeating the lie that US forces withdrew from the Vietnam War due to peaceful protests in the streets of American cities we are not fooled. The US withdrew from Vietnam because it’s military was on the verge of collapse due to widespread desertion, the killing of officers and small-scale mutinies. US Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr. describes this process in considerable detail and amusing despair in the first article in this pamphlet, “The Collapse of the Armed Forces” which first appeared in Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971.
In "Harass the Brass!", Kevin Keating, a communist from San Francisco, examines the suppressed history of resistance and rebellion in the ranks of the US military. Much of Keating's information is taken from "The Collapse of the Armed Forces" so it may at first appear redundant to include both articles. However Keating obviously has far better politics than Colonel Heinl and includes some information about earlier revolutionary mutinies in Russia, Germany and Spain. Other writings by Kevin Keating can be found at: www.infoshop.org/myep/love_index.html
"Mutiny in Banja Luka" by the Internationalist Communist Group is about a mutiny by Bosnian Serb soldiers in 1993. All the recent wars in Yugoslavia took place despite considerable resistance from conscripts, especially in the various Serbian armies. Resistance to the Kosovo war by Yugoslav army reservists is described in the last article in this pamphlet, “We Won’t go to Kosovo” by an unknown author connected to the London based group No War but the Class War. The Internationalist Communist Group has a website at http://www.geocities.com/Paris/6368/index_uk.htm. No War but the Class War has a website with a lot of information about mutinies at http://www.geocities.com/nowar_buttheclasswar/index.html
The quasi-mutiny that forced the US out of Vietnam led to the end of the use of mass conscript armies by the major Western states. This "modernist" organisation of the military that was so susceptible to mass revolt has now been superseded within the major powers by "post-modernist" militaries that do not rely on masses of poorly trained infantry. Instead they employ large amounts of extremely sophisticated and expensive weapons, surveillance and communications technology coupled with highly trained Special Forces and where necessary cheap mercenaries (eg the Kosovo Liberation Army and The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan). When the post-modern US military has fought modern armies (Iraq 1991 and 2003, Yugoslavia 1999) it has won due to the refusal of the enemy soldiers to fight in movements echoing the earlier revolts that ended World War One and the Vietnam War. While easily able to smash its enemies on the battlefield the contemporary US military is not equipped for occupation duties as shown by its rapidly unravelling occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Given the reports of extremely poor morale among the US troops in Iraq perhaps I will soon have the opportunity to produce a pamphlet about the first mass revolt within a post-modernist military as a sequel to this one about revolts in modernist militaries.
Canberra, Australia December 3 2003 |
