Remarks to Members of a Special Seminar of the foreign Service Institute.

I WANT to welcome you all to the White House and to tell you that I am very appreciative to have a chance to say a word to you. This is a matter in which I have been greatly interested, and with the support of General Taylor, our Military Representative at the White House, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the AID Agency, CIA, and the other groups in Government, we have been attempting to put a good deal more emphasis in recent months on this problem of counter-insurgency. It has so many ramifications, as you know from your analysis of it, and it requires a mastery of so many different areas of national, international life that it has required, I know, study by all of you at the foreign Service Institute, and will require continued analysis by all of you, I hope, after you graduate, so that we can improve our courses.

The foreign Service Institute has done an excellent job in laying this out. We are anxious that all of the military colleges emphasize this phase of our struggle. We are anxious that beginning really at the three military academies, that they attempt to inculcate an interest in this phase of military life. We are anxious that all those who are promoted in the career services of the foreign Service itself, of the CIA, and the AID agency and the military departments, that all of them, particularly the senior officers, have had at least some contact with this subject at various schools so that we become really far more expert than we have ever been in the past.

This most ancient form of warfare, going back as it has to its earliest beginnings, has become far more important than it has ever been in the past, and it is going to become more important in the future. As the great weapons become more deadly and as more and more nations possess them, there will be of course, as has been very clearly pointed out by those who make themselves our adversaries, more and more emphasis on this kind of war, insurgency, guerrilla, and the other kind of struggle, the so-called wars of liberation. So that as the thermonuclear weapons get higher and higher in their megatonnage, and as there becomes less and less occasion to use them, then of course there will be more and more emphasis on this kind of struggle. This is not merely a military effort, but it also requires, as I have said, a broad knowledge of the whole development effort of a country, the whole technique of the National Government to identify themselves with the aspirations of people.

The problem, of course, that we face is that in so much of the world the problems that the people face are so staggering, and there is no immediate answer to them. The United States does not have sufficient capital itself to make an immediate imprint. We can join the countries and encourage them and offer them hope and indicate that they are moving, but even in a country with the resources of Mexico, with the population increasing nearly 31/2 percent, with I out of every 20 children getting beyond the sixth grade, and a country with the highest standard of living in Latin America, we can see how serious are the problems that so much of the world faces. And therefore this technique of the guerrilla, where you need only one guerrilla, and it requires 15 or 20 troops to track him down, and where you have so much misery which can be exploited, offers a very effective weapon for the overthrow of legitimate governments.

We sometimes take some encouragement in the fact that there are so many obvious evidences of a desire of people to be free and a desire of people to maintain their anti-Communist position. What we realize, and I am sure you realize, is the technique of the Communists which emphasizes organization, which requires comparatively few people, the people to be at the pressure point at the key moment. And when you realize the Castro experience, starting with such a small number of people, and what eventually came about, you cannot be satisfied to merely feel that 75 or 80 or 85 percent of the people are anti-Communist. They work on a much more selective basis, and it will require the best we have.

So I was anxious to have you come to the White House because we want to emphasize the necessity for the experience which you are going through, that it be shared by all people in the National Government who have anything to do with our international relations. Every senior officer, as I say, in all the key departments must have a comparable experience to yours, have the knowledge that you have, have their attention focused on it. This is particularly true, as I say, in the key agencies, the military across the spectrum, to the State Department, and the agencies in between. They all must concentrate their energy on what is going to be one of the great factors in the struggle of the sixties.

So you are particularly welcome at the White House as men who have been among the first to take the particular courses that you have taken. I congratulate the Institute for its initiative, and we are going to attempt to encourage this kind of effort in every other college and school that we have which is involved with national security. So we wish you the best of success. I am glad to sec that your assignments are responsive to your training.

A couple of weeks ago we had a group in from, I think, the Institute who had valuable training, and one of them was going to be in charge of reserve officers at Alameda Air force Base. It is not exactly what we want, but I am glad to see that in this case you are all going some place where you can use it, and we wish you the very best of success, because I think you can render a real service to the country.

Thank you.