Colonial experience and the theory of counter-guerrilla warfare in the USA: a source study of materials from the RAND Corporation in the first half of the 1960s

Abstract

This paper analyzes materials of the RAND Corporation of the first half of the 1960s, devoted to the study of the colonial experience of European empires and the theory of counter-guerrilla warfare. The entire set of documents created by the RAND Corporation allows researchers, firstly, to analyze the intellectual resource available to the American establishment before the invasion of Vietnam, and to understand the causes of the mistakes and successes of the US armed forces in this region, and secondly, these materials allow to analyze the role of colonial and anthropological knowledge in US foreign policy during the Cold War. The sources considered by us in the paper can be classified both by their typology and by their subject matter: from the point of view of typology, RAND Corporation’s materials are divided into articles, memoranda and symposia materials, as well as from the point of view of subjects on the research of the war for Algeria, the Malay Company, counter-guerrilla warfare in Vietnam and general theoretical issues related to counter-insurgency operations. In the conclusion of the paper the author says about the great role of these sources in the study, both colonial experience and the theory of counter-guerrilla warfare, as well as military, political, social and economic, thus contributing to the interdisciplinarity of scientific papers.