U.S. intervention: Low-intensity thinking. (cover story)

UNITED States; NICARAGUA; GUATEMALA

Argues that the U.S. strategy of low-intensity conflict sends the message that it opposes economic development. The U.S. strategy of low-intensity conflict means destroying roads, hospitals, schools--and sends the message that the United States opposes economic development. Inside the Pentagon, the planners and practitioners of low-intensity conflict are winning the internecine bureaucratic battles, getting a bigger share of the declining military budget, and achieving reputations as the strategists with answers to the security dilemmas of the post-Cold War era. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States used its military power or paramilitary power on the average of once every 18 months, either to prevent a government deemed undesirable from coming to power or to overthrow a revolutionary or reformist government considered inimical to U.S. interests. U.S. public opinion consistently opposed a military operation of the size and duration needed to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, but Americans acquiesced to a large-scale war of harassment that continued up to the eve of national elections in February 1990. Today, leading military officers in the United States argue that the major challenges to U.S. military forces are revolutionary strife, random violence, nuclear terrorism, and drug-running--all of them primarily in the Third World, I which has been the only actual theater of combat over the last 40 years.