Those students of America’s “small wars” who have bemoaned the absence of a comprehensive bibliographical guide to the subject will find ample reason to welcome publication of Benjamin Beede’s Intervention and Counterinsurgency. Annotated entries include material on theories, policies, and doctrines of military intervention, together with general histories and case studies covering the U.S. experience since 1898. (Of the 31 specific cases—beginning with the Boxer Rebellion and ending with Grenada—14 pertain to interventions in Latin America.)
In a brief introductory essay, Beede offers a number of generalizations about the United States approach to small wars. Some of the points he makes are irrefutable. There is, for example, no question but that the military establishment has resisted fighting, studying, and preparing for the kind of low intensity warfare that, in many ways, renders large unit operations and sophisticated technology irrelevant. Beede is also correct in stressing that local conditions such as the role of a local government will often defy an “American” solution to an intervention, Rambo notwithstanding. The author, however, will not go unchallenged when he suggests that “Democrats have tended to be interveners, while the Republicans have often been faced with the task of liquidating Democratic commitments” (p. xxx), or that pre-World War II campaigns in Latin America were “relatively successful” (p. xxxiii).
The bibliography itself is well organized and, despite what I consider a few important omissions, quite thorough. Because it became dated the moment it left Beede’s hands, I would urge the general editor to arrange for periodic supplements. I have one serious and two minor reservations about editorial decisions governing what case studies should not be included in the book. Although placing the vast literature on Vietnam in a separate volume makes sense, omitting the Philippine-American War, 1899-1902, from Beede’s book does not. The Philippine experience was not so much an extension of the Indian wars of the nineteenth century, as it was America’s introduction to twentieth-century guerrilla warfare and pacification. Insights from the Philippines were subsequently applied to U.S. interventions elsewhere in East Asia, and, more extensively, in Latin America. To a lesser degree, I believe it would have been appropriate to include entries on the U.S. roles in Cuba, 1898-1902, and in the Greek Civil War during the late 1940s.
These reservations should in no way diminish the debt that students of U.S. interventions owe Beede for producing a highly valuable and long overdue reference tool.
