ABSTRACT
United States involvement in low-intensity conflict, which has alternatively gone by the names of “small wars,” “insurgencies,” “low-intensity conflict,” “third world wars,” or “irregular warfare,” was often discretionary. During the Cold War, U.S. policymakers, officers, and scholars viewed these conflicts through the prism of the struggle against the Soviet Union, and were thus motivated towards occasional involvement in the effort to counter Communist-inspired insurrections, but with mixed results. The mixed results were partially due to the fact that most Americans indeed believed that involvement in these conflicts remained discretionary. To avoid a direct war with the other superpower, we could abandon a state to its fate in the hopes of fighting the next round of the Cold War on more hospitable terrain.
