Isolating The Guerrilla (1966) By Historical Evaluation and Research Org. (HERO)
 
Insurgent warfare is one of the most significant issues confronting governments and militaries today. Vital to the multi-front war the West currently wages against insurgents and terrorists, Isolating the Guerrilla, a previously classified military study, can contribute to successful outcomes and toward saving thousands of lives in current and future counterinsurgencies and conflicts. 
 
In May 1965 the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now called DARPA) awarded a contact to the nascent research company, the Historical Evaluation and Research Organization (HERO), headed by retired Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy. He, his staff, and his consultants examined 20 historical cases of guerrilla wars to assess the problem of how to isolate insurgent fighters from internal and external support. Twenty-seven people were credited as participants in the study including Trevor Dupuy himself, his father the historian and journalist R. Earnest Dupuy, historian and journalist Marshall Andrews, political scientist Andrew C. Janos, and historians Peter Paret, John Shy, Gunther Rothenberg and Theodore Ropp. This was an impressive cast of reputable and talented scholars. This study, called “Isolating the Guerrilla,” was completed on 1 February 1966.
 
We do not know how this study was received, who reviewed it or what action was taken in response to it. We do not know if it shaped U.S. policy or simply sat on a shelf. Trevor Dupuy never mentioned the study during the time I worked for him and knew him (1987-1995). I never saw a copy of it. The study was classified at the time it was submitted, even though it was developed from unclassified historical data. Colonel Dupuy’s copy was destroyed when HERO went out of the business during the defense cuts of the early 1990s. Founded in 1992, The Dupuy Institute has copies of almost all of the 130 reports that Trevor Dupuy’s previous organizations had done, but it did not have a copy of this one.
 
“Isolating the Guerrilla” was commissioned at the height of U.S. government support for social science research on countering insurgency. Increasing involvement in thwarting a Communist takeover of Vietnam through the late 1950s and early 1960s led to intense interest within the American national security establishment about the nature and character of insurgent and guerrilla warfare. The Defense Department and Army funded an array of researchers and organizations, including government sponsored Federal Contract Research Centers like RAND, Research and Analysis Corporation (RAC), Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), Center for Naval Analysis (CNA), and the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) as well as scholars and universities, and non-governmental organizations like HERO. Several individuals, some with experience fighting guerrillas in the 1940s and 1950s—including Roger Trinquier, David Galula, Richard Clutterbuck, Bernard Fall, and Frank Kitson—published books offering analysis and insights. By the late 1960s, however, much of the government research funding dried up due to public relations missteps, mounting anti-war sentiment, and a growing desire by the military establishment to put the painful and complicated Vietnam War experience behind it. Many promising lines of research were abandoned unfinished and soon to be forgotten, until the United States faced similar challenges in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 21st century.
 
In 2004, The Dupuy Institute was again working on insurgencies, in particular Iraq. This work included developing a large database of 109 post-World War II insurgencies, peacekeeping operations and interventions. In 2006 The Dupuy Institute was contracted to test the theories of nine counterinsurgency experts’ theories against the data that the Institute had collected.2 This did not include Trevor Dupuy’s work. At that time, I looked through the files we had dating back to 1962, and could only find seven reports that had been done by HERO on insurgencies, but we did not have a copy of “Isolating the Guerrilla.”
 
As we were finishing much of our contracted work, I was contacted by Michael F. Trevett. It turns out that the report “Isolating the Guerrilla” had been declassified in October 2004. He had found it in a library at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona. This was an army base not far from Tombstone and the site of the Battle of the OK Corral, but very far from the decision-making centers in Washington, D.C. As Lt. Colonel Trevett states: “Thousands of lives could have been saved in Iraq and Afghanistan had political and military leaders been educated on the information in and findings of Isolating the Guerrilla.”3 He brought me a copy of this report in 2008 and then proceeded to publish it in 2011 at his own expense so that it would be available to the world.
 
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160185
 
This is a copy of the original classified rare document.
 
Soft Cover
231 pages
In Fair Condition