Jungle Warfare

Jungle Warfare is a term used to cover the special techniques needed for Military units to survive and fight in Jungle Terrain . It has been the topic of extensive study by military strategists, and was an important part of the planning for both sides in many conflicts, including the Vietnam War and World War II .

Jungle warfare, as understood in modern military terms, was developed during World War II when Allied forces fought the Japanese Imperial Army in the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia. The Japanese, against common belief, were not the ones who developed jungle warfare. At the beginning of the Pacific War (1941-1945), Western soldiers who dominated the Allied forces came from their native lands of Europe, North America, and Australia where open sky, rolling fields, and towns were the common landscape. Without dedicated jungle warfare training, they were physically and psychologically unaccustomed to the strange and clastrophobic jungle environment, and suffered for it. On the other hand, the more nimble and hardy Japanese soldiers were able to adapt better to fighting in the jungle environment, which created the myth that they were masters of jungle warfare. Most of the W.W.II jungle operations, such as those in Burma and the Pacific Islands, were not jungle warfare, but conventional warfare fought between large opposing forces in a jungle covered terrain.

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The real pioneer of jungle warfare, who methodically developed it as a branch of unconventional warfare--the low-intensity, guerrilla-based, "war of the flea" type of revolutionary warfare as it is understood today--was probably the British in Malaya during the Second World War. After the fall of Malaya and Singapore in 1942, a few British officers who eluded capture, such as Freddie Spencer Chapman , escaped into the central Malaysian jungle where they allied with ethnic Chinese Communist guerrillas to fight the Japanese occupiers using the jungle environment to their advantage. (Chapman's war experience was recorded in his memoir ''The Jungle is Neutral'', which has since become a classic--see entry under "Further reading" below.)

After the war, early skills in jungle warfare were further honed in the so-called Malayan Emergency (the term was carefully chosen to avoid the null and void of insurance coverage for businesses due to war and civil unrest), when in 1948 W.W.II guerrilla fighters of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) turned against their former British ally. Early British tactics against MCP guerrillas were unsuccessful, as W.W.II-style conventional-warfare jungle operations were ineffective against an elusive guerrilla force. The British were quick to realize that it would take unconventional means to fight an unconventional enemy in an unconventional war, and the Special Air Service, which was created for unconventional warfare in the deserts of North Africa in W.W.II, were re-activated as the Malayan Scouts. It was the post-war SAS who pioneered the special counter-insurgency tactics in the dense Malayan jungle.

In addition to jungle discipline, field craft, and survival skills, special tactics such as combat tracking (first using native trackers), close-quarter fighting (tactics were developed by troopers protected only with fencing masks stalking and shooting each other in the jungle training ground with air rifles), small team operations (which led to the typical four-man special operations teams) and tree jumping (parachuting into the jungle and through the rainforest canopy) were developed to actively take the war to the Communist guerrillas instead of reacting to incidents initiated by them. Of greater importance was the integration of the tactical jungle warfare with the strategic "winning hearts and minds" psychological, economic and political warfare as a complete counter-insurgency package. This was the earliest form of counter-terrorism warfare in modern times. The Malayan Emergency was declared over in 1960 as the surviving Communist guerrillas were driven to the jungle near the Thai border, where they remained until their giving up of armed struggle in 1989.

The British experience in counter insurgency was passed onto the Americans during their involvement in the Vietnam War, where the battle grounds were, again, the jungle. The Americans further refined jungle warfare by the creation of such dedicated counter-insurgency special operations troops as the Special Forces, Rangers, Long Range Reconnaisance Patrols (LRRP) and Combat Tracker Teams (CTT). During the decade of active US combat involvement in the Vietnam War (1962-1972), jungle warfare became closely associated with counter insurgency and special operations troops. However, although the Americans managed to have mastered jungle warfare at a tactical level in Vietnam, they did not seem to have understood the strategic aspect of winning a jungle-based insurgency war. Hence, the Americans are believed by some to have lost the Vietnam War even though U.S. forces, especially special operations troops, defeated the Viet Cong guerrillas and the North Vietnamese Army in almost every battle.

With the end of the Vietnam War, jungle warfare fell into disfavour among the major armies in the world, namely, those of the US/NATO and USSR/Warsaw Pact, which focused their attention to conventional warfare with a nuclear flavour to be fought on the jungle-less European battlefields. US special operations troops that were created for the purpose of fighting in the jungle environment, such as LRRP and CTT, were disbanded, while other jungle-warfare-proficient troops, such as the Special Forces and Rangers, went through a temporary period of decline, until they found their role in counter-terrorism operations in the 1980s.

In the early 21st century, with the decline of jungle-based Communist insurgency throughout the world and relative peace reigning among the countries located in the tropical rainforest zone, jungle warfare is not in the main training curriculum of most conventional soldiers of major Western armies. In its place, desert warfare in both the conventional and unconventional scope has become the required syllabus because of operational requirements in the hot, arid climate of the Middle East and Central Asia.

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Jungle Warfare