Each year since, the conditions have gotten worse; now they’re near terminal. Today the grandchildren of my black and Hispanic friends live in squalid conditions resembling those of undeveloped countries. They have no jobs, no hope and no trust in the establishment’s authority. The government is not their friend, but their enemy.
I’ve seen similar despair and resentment on the faces of Yugoslav guerrillas in Trieste after World War II. I saw it among Korean insurgents in 1950, and again in the five long bloody years I fought guerrillas in Vietnam. What all of these disadvantaged young people had in common was a blind dedication, a belief in the efficacy of sheer violence to achieve a kind of rough justice. In Los Angeles the result was two days of rage that left some 50 dead, more than 2,300 wounded, 17,000 arrests and $1 billion in charcoal carnage.
The politicians called it a riot. So did the press. But soldiers call this kind of fighting something else: insurgency, or Low Intensity Conflict (LIC), as the army’s training manuals say. Washington seemed to recognize this when it sent elements of the crack Seventh Infantry Division, the army’s top LIC fighters, from Fort Ord to Los Angeles along with the California National Guard. Many thinkers on warfare believe LIC will be the principal form of combat in the future. Higher levels are too costly in blood and treasure. In most cases-the gulf war was an exception due to Saddam Hussein’s military ignorance-the destructiveness is its own deterrent. So the most ancient form of warfare is now the most contemporary, in Los Angeles no less than Lima. And it’s not just Los Angeles, says police Sgt. Mike Schott of North Richmond, Calif.: “Our cities are not a powder keg waiting to explode, but they’re like a slow fuse burning all the time. Daily there are race crimes: shootings, beatings and violence. L.A.’s flame just got higher. People noticed. But believe me, it’s ongoing everywhere. Day and night.”
Let’s not overstate the comparison. LIC operations in Southeast Asia or Latin America have been premeditated. They seek not rough justice but well-defined political goals. The Los Angeles insurgency was spontaneous. It lacked organized leadership. It had no battle plan. Many of the participants were simply opportunists on a looting spree. But things may not stay that way. Already the two main warring youth gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, have pledged to join forces against the police. This could give inner-city rage both leadership and a command infrastructure. Overall, the city has maybe 1,000 gangs, with an estimated total of 110,000 members. These gangs are well armed, with everything from submachine guns to hand grenades. Even now, many police officers believe that inner-city duty is similar to combat. With the daily doses of danger from sniper fire and ambush, they become hardened like shock troops in an occupation zone.
American police are not equipped, either mentally or physically, for counterinsurgency. For that matter, neither are most regular army troops. Of the 48 insurgencies Americans have fought since the end of World War ii, the score stands: Insurgents 48, United States 0. Vastly superior firepower is irrelevant to such struggles. As the Palestinian intifada shows, urban uprisings are especially difficult, with their house-to-house, block-to-block battles. The government force suffers heavy casualties and property undergoes mass destruction. And in any case, a free society cannot survive through force.
As the smoke clears over L.A., a battered city we had to defend from ourselves, perhaps the two-day war we had here at home will focus us on what we are defending and what our priorities are. We can collapse the Iron Curtain and restore the Emir of Kuwait to his throne, but Americans are not free to walk in safety on the streets of their own cities, nor are inner-city Americans given opportunity and a decent standard of living. As retired U.S. Army Col. Carl Bernard, an eminent authority on revolutionary war, says, “The mistrust, despair, hopelessness of our inner-city minorities need to be defused, and then eliminated.”
Peace is possible. But throwing money at the problem won’t make it go away. The first step is to learn from past insurgencies and overcome the hopelessness that separates the people from the government. This takes leadership. And I have a nominee: Gen. Colin L. Powell. He would follow the example of George C. Marshall, who was detailed to the Civilian Conservation Corps during President Roosevelt’s war on poverty in the 1930s and later rose to become the army’s chief of staff and eventually secretary of defense. In tandem with other military leaders and minority-group role models, Powell could assemble a cadre of people, perhaps from the active and retired ranks of the armed forces, where officers and NCOs have spent the last 20 years solving multiracial problems. This cadre could be organized in a job-training and reconstruction corps to lead our disenchanted youth of all races on a campaign to rebuild themselves, our crumbled roads, swaying bridges, and to tear down the Third World ghettos and rebuild them into modern cities. In the active ranks many of these leaders are being phased out of the military because the cold war is over. What better new war for them to fight? They would win-and win back an important part of our society.
