Development by RAND Corporation of Practical Guidelines for the U.S. Armed Forces in Vietnam Based on Analysis of Japanese Experience with the Manjuri Rebels

Abstract

Introduction. Recently, the interest of representatives of the expert and scientific community has been growing in the transformations of one of the most famous practices of rebel activity after the Second World War – the Maoist model of people’s war. Its interpretations in the framework of expert support for the foreign policy activities of the USA are prompted with great attention and caution not only to the role of methodological restrictions, disciplinary filters, the intellectual climate and relations with customers of analytic products of this kind. No less important, as this article shows, are the transfers of ideas and practical experience – the usual debate about the export of democratic and socialist models of development during the Cold War often consists of a scientific discussion on the periphery of the question of the importance of exporting the Chinese model of people’s war in the history of international relations after 1945. Methods and materials. Interdisciplinarity is the feature of research. The search for the political connotations in the RAND reports wrote during the Cold War and devoted to the experience of counterinsurgency in Manchuria during the 1930s demanded the use of the methods practiced by the historical and political sciences simultaneously. Analysis. Accordingly, particular attention was paid to the peculiarities of expert support for decision-making in the United States at the initial stage of the Cold War in the context of the RAND activities, which in the framework of cooperation with the Ministry of Defense practically monopolized the analytical support of American politics in Vietnam and South-East Asia as a whole in the organization of counterinsurgency in the 1960s. The focus of the research is the study by RAND experts of the historical experience of previous powers on the example of forms and methods of anti-insurgency activities of the leadership of the Manchukuo and Kwantung army in Manchuria which reveals both the phenomenon and the causes of the distortion of historical realities of the Interbellum era during the Cold War. Results. The RAND experts thought that the Chinese case of the Interbellum offered the answers on two major questions of tactics and strategy of counterinsurgency in the “Third world”: on the enemy, as well as on the ways and methods to crush him. But methodological self-containment lessened critical value of that memorandum and made it more easer the infiltration of the key ideas about the Chinese model of the people’s war widely presented in the government, military and political circles of the USA during the 1960s into the research made by the RAND Corporation experts.