Aerial Bombing and Counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War

Abstract

Aerial bombardment has been an important component of counterinsurgency practice since shortly after it became a viable military technology in the early twentieth century. Due to the nature of insurgency, bombing frequently occurs in and around settled areas, and consequently it tends to generate many civilian casualties. However, the effectiveness of bombing civilian areas as a military tactic remains disputed. Using data disaggregated to the level of the smallest population unit and measured at multiple points in time, this article examines the effect of aerial bombardment on the pattern of local control in the Vietnam War. A variety of estimation methods, including instrumental variables and genetic matching, show that bombing civilians systematically shifted control in favor of the Viet Cong insurgents.

Death is in the Air: Bombings in Catalonia, 1936-1939

“…The results -based on the exploitation of a novel fine-grained dataset on Nationalist bombings in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil Warsupport the hypothesis that political dominance by the enemy group has an impact on levels of indirect violence in a locality. This finding is consistent with previous research on other types of civil war (Kocher et al, 2011). Competition, in contrast, does not appear to explain indirect violence, and I ar-36 Source: Serrallonga (2004).…”

“…Finally, we can assume that groups will be interested in indirectly targeting locations with a greater density of internally displaced people, driven by a combination of political, emotional and strategic motives. The inclusion of political and emotional factors makes the theoretical framework here slightly broader than that of the existing literature, which has focused either on military factors (Pape, 1996), bargaining considerations and/or the military balance of power between groups (Hultman, 2007;Boyle, 2009;Vargas, 2008), or on a combination of military and political factors, but which has left emotional variables out of the picture (Kocher et al, 2011).…”

“…The literature on counterinsurgency has tended to focus on the impact of indiscriminate violence on civilian behavior (Kalyvas, 2006;Lyall, 2009;Kocher et al, 2011), coming to the conclusion that this violence is generally counterproductive. While not referring exclusively to this type of violence, authors who have focused on the determinants of civilian victimization have argued that it is related to the balance of power between contenders (Ziemke, 2008;Hultman, 2007;Vargas, 2009;Boyle, 2009).…”

“…For example, Kocher et al (2011) emphasize the relevance of political alignments at the local level in explaining bombings. They provide evidence from Vietnam, an irregular civil war where what they describe as indiscriminate violence (empirically referring to bombings) tended to occur in political strongholds of one side or the other.…”

Denial and punishment in the North Caucasus

“…Unless the state is a passive actor -and we know it is not -the literature overlooks a potentially decisive interaction between the contagion of insurgent violence and corresponding state efforts to contain it. This omission has not entirely prevented cross-pollination between the literatures on conflict diffusion and counterinsurgency (Lyall, 2009;Kocher et al, 2011), but the state's ability to shape the geographic spread of violence remains under-explored.…”