ABSTRACT
The great tragedy of counterinsurgency studies is even with great technical prowess seemed to prefer "hard-line" solutions to thinking about new ways of restoring civilian control of military policy. The problem with "internal war" is that now that the "theory of counterinsurgency" has finally been put to the full test, in Vietnam to be exact, and it is plain that the theory does not hold. Counterinsurgents are constrained to establish a conventional war in order to survive in alien surroundings. Precisely the fluidity, the impossibility of determining friend from foe, revolutionist from counter-revolutionist, is what makes counter-insurgency so difficult to implement. Modern revolutions, whether defined as bourgeois or proletarian, tend to have a common base in peasant agrarian demands. In some part, the agrarian sector acts as the "battering ram" of revolution, and both French and Russian revolutions are often declared successful to the degree that they resolved prerevolutionary peasant discontent.
