ADVICE ON "RIOT CONTROL"
Writing in the Japan Times for September 10, retired U.S. Brigadier General S.L.A.Marshall turned his attention to the uprisings in Newark and Detroit.
"President Johnson's program to put down insurrection in the cities," the military affairs analyst writes, "is as orthodox as squads right: ‘Give the troops -- regulars and National Guard -more riot training.' But the value of any such directive depends upon the ability of those who decree it accepting the realities of a wholly new problen.”"
The general believes Johnson isn't taking a new situation into account: "Block-to-block fighting in a city cuomplex against a declared enemy is a probblem which the U.S. Army understands... It is met and solved by calling in heavy support fire, thereafter shooting or capturing any armed person who gets in the way.
This, General Marshall writes, must be ruled out. Further, "routine methods of riot control" aren't applicable: "Riot is more or less spontaneous mob action and can usually be quelled by shooting to wound or to kill while indi-~ viduals will still react primarily to fear of death. But if the real menace is not riot per se, but a new form of revolutionary warfare, as insidious as what the Viet Cong has visited on Southeast Asia, the problem has a wholly different dimension."