Jungle warfare

Dense vegetation can limit lines of sight and arcs of fire, but can also provide ample opportunity for camouflage and plenty of material with which to build fortifications.

Jungle terrain, often without good roads, can be inaccessible to vehicles and so makes logistical supply and transport difficult, which in turn places a premium on air mobility.

The Chindits were a special force of 3,500 that in February 1943 launched a deep penetration raid, code-named Operation Longcloth, into Japanese occupied Burma.

When the Japanese launched their late 1943 Arakan offensive they infiltrated Allied lines to attack the 7th Indian Infantry Division from the rear, overrunning the divisional HQ.

The situation maps of the fighting along the roads leading to Imphal resembled a slice of marble cake, as both sides used the jungle to outflank each other.

Another major change by the British was that use of air support both as an offensive weapon to replace artillery and as a logistical tool to transport men and equipment.

Immediately after the fall of Malaya and Singapore in 1942, a few British officers, such as Freddie Spencer Chapman, eluded capture and escaped into the central Malaysian jungle, where they helped to organize and train bands of lightly-armed local ethnic Chinese communists into a capable guerrilla force against the Japanese occupiers.

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 who were protected only with fencing masks and stalked and shot 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 rain forest canopy) were developed from Borneo's native Iban people to actively take the war to the Communist guerrillas, instead of reacting to incidents that were initiated by them.

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 they gave up their armed struggle in 1989.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Portugal was engaged in jungle warfare operations in Africa against the independentist guerrillas of Angola, Portuguese Guinea and Mozambique.

The situation was unique in that small armed forces, those of Portugal, conducted three large-scale counterinsurgency wars at the same time, each in a different theatre of operations and separated by thousands of kilometres from the others.

During the 8 years of active U.S. combat involvement in the Vietnam War (1965–1973), jungle warfare became closely associated with counter insurgency and special operations troops.

However, although the American forces managed to have mastered jungle warfare at a tactical level in Vietnam, they were unable to install a successful strategic program in winning a jungle-based guerrilla war.

[10][11][12] Hence, the American military lost the political war in Vietnam for failing to destroy the logistics bases of the Viet Cong and the Vietnamese People's Army along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Hawaii was chosen as the location for JOTC due to its climate, geography, capacity, and operational history in jungle training within the Pacific.

During World War II the JOTC, also known as the Pacific Combat Training Center, was established in Hawaii to teach soldiers survival and fighting skills in tropical environments.

[19] Another jungle warfare training center, Camp Gonsalves, is operated by the United States Marine Corps on northern Okinawa Island, Japan.