The arms build-up All wars since 1945 have been fought in the third world, with weapons designed and generally produced in advanced industrial nations. By far the most sophisticated technology has been operated by the armies of outside powers; the Dutch, the French, the British, the Portuguese and above all the Americans have all been involved directly in third-world conflicts and, compared with the size and cost of their military efforts, the arsenals of third-world nations seem almost puny. The Americans were spending $25,000 million a year on the war in Vietnam, five times as much as the total world arms trade in that period. New and devastating military technologies emerged out of the direct fighting experience of the rich countries and continued to be developed long after military withdrawal. Some of the new conventional weapons originally designed for Vietnam, such as controlled fireballs or clusterbombs, threaten to inflict a scale of destruction in a future conventional war that is not so far removed from what is generally anticipated to be the outcome of nuclear warfare.
The American defeat in Vietnam and the liberation of the former Portuguese colonies has led to a lull, perhaps temporary, in the active military involvement of the industrial nations. The arming of local forces in the third world can perhaps be viewed as a substitute: a less direct, less unpopular, and less expensive form of intervention, one which other advanced industrial countries, notably the USSR, have long practised. The withdrawal of foreign military forces, combined with the oil crisis and its attendant consequences, may perhaps explain M. Jahoda (eds.), World Futures: The Great Debate (Martin Robertson, forthcoming). A discussion about the relationship between inequality and military spending in Brazil by the Brazilian Marxist Cardoso and by Philippe Schmitter can be found in Alfred Stepan, Authoritarian Brazil: Origins, Policies and Future (Yale University Press, 1973).
## Counter-insurgency strategies
For all the excitement and high-level attention given to 'unconventional warfare' during the early 1960s, probably a majority of ranking US army and US Air Force officers had strong doubts about its efficacy. Products of the Second World War and Korean War experiences, they doubted that razzle-dazzle counter-guerrilla squads, police networks, 'psywar' leaflets, and civic action teams could do the job against well organised, truly dedicated opponents. Rather than attempting to 'meet the enemy on his own terms', they felt that strategies should be developed to force the enemy on to different terms, inherently more advantageous to the US and AR VN. As one military writer said, 'Limited conflicts can be remoulded, by means of basic and applied research. 'lt
The counter-insurgent aimed to outwit, outmanoeuvre, and perpetually harass the guerrilla enemy into submission, whereas more conventional practitioners believed it necessary to force the enemy into ultimate confrontations of one kind or another. The image of victory for the counter-insurgent was a situation where guerrilla casualties slowly mounted, morale slipped, food and water became short, rest was impossible, counter-guerrilla ambushes succeeded, medical support was increasingly weak, people did not help as before, and the government received better intelligence from which to fashion a permanently downward spiral for the anti-government elements. Ultimately the latter would become manageable, at worst a problem of social banditry, at best accepting disarmament and amnesty.
## The World Military Order
78. A Gallup poll taken soon after the Paris Agreement revealed that 57 per cent believed that the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong had contributed to the peace settlement. 79. Dunn, op. cit., p. 12. A hint of the problems involved is contained in Rienzi, op. cit., p. 62, where it is revealed that even at the height of American troop availability a combat division had an area of responsibility covering 3000-5000 square miles, compared to the 200-300 square miles they were organised and trained to cover in conventional warfare. 80. Lt.-Col. Robert C. Jarvis, New York Times, letter to the editor (3 Mar 1975).
Ironically, Col. Jarvis made his argument in favour of continued indefinite military aid to the RVN since, he said, their 'only crime was trusting us'.
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