El Salvador Limited Intervention Equals Limited Returns - History of President Reagan's Cold War Policy to Restrain Soviet Communist Expansion in Central America in Low-Intensity Counterinsurgency

The complexity of the current operational environment, coupled with the increasingly tightened US budget, creates undesirable tensions for the leaders of the United States and the free world. With one war in Afghanistan coming to a closure, instability in Iraq is re-emerging. Joining the enduring crisis in the Middle East and South-Central Asia, President Putin has made his way to the front of major news networks with his Russian world-view of Ukraine. The common theme among these events is that the United States sustains plenty of enemies across the globe, and the issue becomes how to deal with them. The likely answer, found among the policy makers and leaders on Capitol Hill, is to do more with less which reflects back to the early 1990s and the post-Gulf War. This monograph offers the perspective that attempting to do more with less does not work. The purpose of this monograph is to analyze the misconception that using minimal means will produce anything other than minimal results. Using the single case study of the American military intervention in El Salvador in the 1980s, this monograph points to the evidence collected that underscores the results of a policy employing minimal means. Faced with a growing uneasiness coming out of the Vietnam War, the American public simply could not tolerate another war. Under these constraints, President Reagan and the American leadership operating within the diplomatic and military administrations attempted to utilize as minimal an effort required to quell the violence in El Salvador and prevent the spread of Soviet Communism. This monograph analyzes the El Salvador crisis from beginning to end. The origins of the Salvadoran civil war help explain why a country as small and seemingly as insignificant as El Salvador actually mattered to the United States. The geographic location of El Salvador as well as the historical implications of the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary dictate why the US cared. Additionally, the perceived threat of Communist expansion piqued the interest of American leadership and the global community. The United States felt that its hand was forced and responded with military and diplomatic measures due to the growing threat of an insurgent force funded by Soviet and Cuba Communist governments The concluding sections serve as a cautionary tale of using limited means to achieve big results. The US sought major changes within El Salvador, but simply did not allocate the resources necessary to achieve that desired state. American policy makers and military leaders attempted to reform a system through military force and money, and it did not work. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War is what truly ushered in a peace settlement in El Salvador, not the blood and treasure from the United States.