Dell and Querubin’s paper 'Nation Building Through Foreign Intervention' (2016) finds evidence from the Vietnam War that a strategy aimed to capture the ‘hearts and minds’ of civilians would fare better than one based on ‘overwhelming firepower’. This is because the latter can boost civilian support for the enemy and weaken state capacity.
Picture by Chandler Cruttenden, Unsplash
In 1967, two years after the US put boots on Vietnamese ground, increasing tensions along the demilitarised zone called for the transfer of the US Third Marine Division to the frontline. Its previous occupation zone was left under the command of the US Army. Not long afterwards, armed conflicts quickly intensified in the ex-Marine (now Army-controlled) zone, with the refugee count increasing five-fold.
However, Viet Cong did not launch new offensives or insurgencies in that area. Nor did Army and Marine personnel differ – they came from the same stock.
Marines versus Army
The only difference of note was simply one of operational doctrine – the Army was instructed to over-awe the local population into submission by ‘Overwhelming Firepower’, whereas the Marines were told to capture the ‘Hearts and Minds’ of the locals by developing civil assistance, cooperating with the local police, and building schools, roads, marketplaces and hospitals.
Dell and Querubin (2018) seized this opportunity for natural experimentation, by comparing the developments around the borders of Marine Corps- and Army-controlled operational zones. Vietnamese people there were similar in all characteristics, owing to their close proximity to each other. Whatever differences that arose between them during the War should be attributable to the only variable that separates them – operational doctrines.
These differences were enormous. The authors find that, during and right after the war, individuals living on the Marine side of the boundary were 39% more likely to complete primary school education, 19% more likely to receive medical services, and 28% more likely to have public works constructed in their hamlets, as one would expect from the Marine doctrine.
The benefits did not stop at humanitarian niceties; military outcomes improved as well. Hamlets just falling into Marine’s side were 10% less likely to be classified as ‘high security’ risk, 56% less likely to have armed Viet Cong presence, and 48% less likely to witness Viet Cong-initiated attacks. US and South Vietnamese troops were also less likely to become casualties.
Death by a rounding algorithm
To improve the robustness of their study, the authors included in their analysis another dimension of the War, with a focus on the US Air Force bombings.
The Air Force did not bomb indiscriminately, but allocated loads according to a metric called the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES). The HES gives a score from A to E to evaluate the target-worthiness of hamlets. However, because it is so coarse, hamlets that were otherwise quite similar to each other could fall, or not, into the ‘target-worthy’ category. By comparing ‘bombed’ and ‘not bombed’ similar hamlets to each other, the researchers could gain further support for their hypothesis of the counter-productive effect of the ‘overwhelming force’ approach.
The results are just as staggering. In terms of military objectives, moving from no bombing to sample-mean bombing, a hamlet was found to be 25% more likely to support Viet Cong infrastructure, 27% more likely to host Viet Cong guerrilla squad, and 9% more likely to witness attacks on local government officials.
Furthermore, local state capacity was compromised. ‘Sample-mean bombing’ hamlet’s administration was found to be 8% more likely to be classified as ‘high threat’, its village committee was 21% less likely to be filled in full, and its local government was 25% less likely to collect taxes. The economy was similarly devastated: goods stocks were depleted, and more households were reduced to subsistence.
Implications
History is littered with the backfiring of excessive force, from the downfall of neo-Assyria, the early demise of Qin to Rome’s punishments of its rebellious subjects. This paper now puts the weight of econometric evidence behind history.
Nevertheless, as the authors themselves note, such wrong-headed policies were still carried out, pointing to US actions in Afghanistan. Putin’s war in Ukraine is the latest addition to that list.
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