assignment
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The Evolution of Irregular War Insurgents and Guerrillas From Akkadia to Afghanistan
ESSAY March/April 2013 Issue Strategy & Con… War & Military …
Published by the Council on Foreign Relations ABOUT EVENTS NEWSLETTERS JOSEPH DULE
Magazine Regions Topics Anthologies Media Book Reviews
THE EVOLUTION OF IRREGULAR WAR Max Boot JOSEPH DULE SUBSCRIBE
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Holding
down the fort: in Chilas, British India, 1898. (Getty Images /
Hulton Archive).
Pundits and the press too often treat terrorism and
guerrilla tactics as something new, a departure from old-
fashioned ways of war. But nothing could be further from
the truth. Throughout most of our species' long and
bloody slog, warfare has primarily been carried out by
bands of loosely organized, ill-disciplined, and lightly
armed volunteers who disdained open battle in favor of
stealthy raids and ambushes: the strategies of both tribal
warriors and modern guerrillas and terrorists. In fact,
conventional warfare is the relatively recent invention. It
was first made possible after 10,000 BC by the
development of agricultural societies, which produced
enough surplus wealth and population to allow for the
creation of specially designed fortifications and weapons
(and the professionals to operate them). The first genuine
armies -- commanded by a strict hierarchy, composed of
trained soldiers, disciplined with threats of punishment --
arose after 3100 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia. But the
process of state formation and, with it, army formation
took considerably longer in most of the world. In some
places, states emerged only in the past century, and their
ability to carry out such basic functions as maintaining an
By Max Boot
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army remains tenuous at best. Considering how long
humans have been roaming the earth, the era of what we
now think of as conventional conflict represents the mere
blink of an eye.
Nonetheless, since at least the days of the Greeks and the
Romans, observers have belittled irregular warfare.
Western soldiers and scholars have tended to view it as
unmanly, even barbaric. It's not hard to see why: guerillas,
in the words of the British historian John Keegan, are
"cruel to the weak and cowardly in the face of the brave" --
precisely the opposite of what professional soldiers are
taught to be. Many scholars have even claimed that
guerrilla raids are not true warfare.
This view comes to seem a bit ironic when one considers
the fact that throughout history, irregular warfare has been
consistently deadlier than its conventional cousin -- not in
total numbers killed, since tribal societies are tiny
compared with urban civilizations, but in the percentage
killed. The average tribal society loses 0.5 percent of its
population in combat every year. In the United States, that
would translate into 1.5 million deaths, or 500 September
11 attacks a year. Archaeological evidence confirms that
such losses are not a modern anomaly.
The origins of guerilla warfare are lost in the swamps of
prehistory, but the kinds of foes that guerrillas have faced
have changed over the centuries. Before about 3000 BC,
tribal guerrillas fought exclusively against other tribal
guerrillas. Although that type of fighting continued after
3000 BC, it was supplemented and sometimes supplanted
by warfare pitting tribes and rebels against newly formed
states. These conflicts were, in a sense, the world's first
insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. Every great empire
of antiquity, starting with the first on record, the Akkadian
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empire, in ancient Mesopotamia, was deviled by nomadic
guerrillas, although the term "guerrilla" would not be
coined for millennia to come. ("Guerrilla," literally
meaning "small war," dates to the Spanish resistance
against Napoleon, from 1808 to 1814.)
In modern times, the same old guerrilla tactics have been
married to ideological agendas, something that was utterly
lacking among the apolitical (and illiterate) tribal warriors
of old. Of course, the precise nature of the ideological
agendas being fought for has changed over the years, from
liberalism and nationalism (the cri de coeur of guerrilla
fighters from the late eighteenth century to the late
nineteenth century), to socialism and nationalism (which
inspired guerrillas between the late nineteenth century and
the late twentieth century), to jihadist extremism today.
All the while, guerrilla and terrorist warfare have remained
as ubiquitous and deadly as ever.
THE GUERRILLA PARADOX
The success of various raiders in attacking and conquering
states from ancient Rome to medieval China gave rise to
what one historian has called "the nomad paradox." "In the
history of warfare, it has generally been the case that
military superiority lies with the wealthiest states and
those with the most developed administrations," the
historian Hugh Kennedy wrote in Mongols, Huns, and
Vikings. Yet going back to the days of Mesopotamia,
nomads often managed to bring down far richer and more
advanced empires. Kennedy explains this seeming
contradiction by citing all the military advantages nomads
enjoyed: they were more mobile, every adult male was a
warrior, and their leaders were selected primarily for their
war-making prowess. By contrast, he notes, settled
societies appointed commanders based on political
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considerations and drafted as soldiers farmers with scant
martial skills.
Nomads' military advantages seem to have persisted
among guerrillas in the modern world; even in the last two
centuries, during which states became far more powerful
than in the ancient or the medieval period, guerrillas often
managed to humble them. Think of the tribes of
Afghanistan, which frustrated the United Kingdom, the
Soviet Union, and the United States. Kennedy's "nomad
paradox" is really a guerrilla paradox, and it asks how and
why the weak seem to so frequently defeat the strong. The
answer lies largely in the use of hit-and-run tactics, taking
advantage of mobility and surprise to make it difficult for
the stronger state to bring its full weight to bear.
Guerrillas often present a further paradox: even the most
successful raiders have been prone to switch to
conventional tactics once they achieve great military
success. The Mongols eventually turned into a semiregular
army under Genghis Khan, and the Arabs underwent a
similar transformation. They fought in traditional Bedouin
style while spreading Islam across the Middle East in the
century after Muhammad's death, in 632. But their
conquests led to the creation of the Umayyad and Abbassid
caliphates, two of the greatest states of the medieval world,
which were defended by conventional forces. The Turkish
empire, too, arose out of the raiding culture of the steppes
but built a formidable conventional army, complete with
highly disciplined slave-soldiers, the janissaries. The new
Ottoman army conquered Constantinople in a famous
siege in 1453 and, within less than a century, advanced to
the gates of Vienna.
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Why did nomads so adept at guerrilla tactics resort to
conventional warfare? For one thing, their targets became
bigger, requiring a shift in tactics. Mounted archers could
not have taken Constantinople; that feat required the
mechanics of a proper military, including a battery of 69
cannons, two of which were 27 feet long and fired stone
balls that weighed more than half a ton. Nor were fast-
moving tribal fighters of much use in defending,
administering, and policing newly conquered states. Those
tasks, too, required a professional standing army. A further
factor dictated the transformation of nomads into regulars:
the style of fighting practiced by mounted archers was so
difficult and demanding that it required constant practice
from childhood on for an archer to maintain proficiency.
Once nomads began living among more sedentary people,
they "easily lost their superior individual talents and unit
cohesion," write the historians Mesut Uyar and Edward
Erickson in A Military History of the Ottomans. This was a
tradeoff that most of them were happy to make. A settled
life was much easier -- and safer.
The nomads' achievements, although great, were mostly
fleeting: with the exception of the Arabs, the Turks, the
Moguls, and the Manchu, who blended into settled
societies, nomads could not build lasting institutions.
Nomadic empires generally crumbled after a generation or
two. Former nomads who settled down found themselves,
somewhat ironically, beset by fresh waves of nomads and
other guerrillas. Such was the fate of the Manchu, who, as
the rulers of China, fought off the Dzungar (or western
Mongols) in the eighteenth century and tried to fight off
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the Taiping rebels in the deadliest war of the nineteenth
century. The Taipings, in turn, tried to develop more
powerful armies of their own, blurring the distinction
between regular and irregular conflict. Since then, many
civil wars, including the one the United States fought
between 1861 and 1865, have featured both kinds of
combat.
IRREGULARS IN THE AGE OF REASON
The dividing line between regular and irregular warfare
grew more distinct with the spread of standing national
armies after the Thirty Years' War. That process, which
went hand in hand with the growth of nation-states, came
to a head in the second half of the seventeenth century.
The period saw the proliferation of barracks to house
soldiers, drillmasters to train them, professional officers to
lead them, logistical services to supply them, factories to
clothe and equip them, and hospitals and retirement
homes to take care of them.
By the eighteenth century, Western warfare had reached
stylized heights seldom seen before or since, with
monarchical armies fighting in roughly similar styles and
abiding by roughly similar rules of conduct. No change was
more important than the adoption of standardized
uniforms, which meant that the difference between
soldiers and civilians could be glimpsed in an instant.
Fighters who insisted on making war without uniforms
therefore became more easily distinguished. They were
subject to prosecution as bandits rather than treated as
soldiers entitled to the protections of the emerging laws of
war.
But irregulars soon returned to prominence, during the
War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), a conflict
pitting Austria, Great Britain, Hanover, Hesse, and the
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Netherlands against Bavaria, France, Prussia, Saxony, and
Spain. Austria lost the war's early battles, allowing foreign
troops to occupy a substantial portion of its territory. But
Austria managed a comeback thanks to so-called wild men
it mustered from the fringes of its empire: hussars from
Hungary, pandours from Croatia, and other Christians
from the Balkans who had been fighting the Turks for
centuries.
Frederick the Great and other generals at first denounced
the raiders as "savages." But as soon as they saw the
irregulars' effectiveness, they copied the Austrian example.
By the 1770s, light troops (skirmishers lacking heavy
weapons and armor who did not stand in the main battle
line) made up 20 percent of most European armies. In
North America, the British army came increasingly to rely
on a variety of light infantry. Precursors to today's special
forces -- troops trained in guerrilla tactics who are
nonetheless still more disciplined than stateless fighters --
these "rangers" were raised for "wood service," or irregular
combat, against French colonial troops and their native
allies.
One of the cherished myths of American history is that
plucky Yankees won independence from Great Britain by
picking off befuddled redcoats too dense to deviate from
ritualistic parade-ground warfare. That is an exaggeration.
By the time the Revolution broke out, in 1775, the British
were well versed in irregular warfare and were countering
it in Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. Redcoats
certainly knew enough to break ranks and seek cover in
battle when possible, rather than, in the words of one
historian, "remaining inert and vulnerable to enemy fire."
The British army had a different problem: much like the
modern U.S. Army pre-Iraq, it had forgotten most of the
lessons of irregular war learned a generation before. And
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the American rebels used a more sophisticated form of
irregular warfare than the French backwoodsmen and
Native American warriors whom the redcoats had gotten
used to fighting. The spread of literacy and printed books
allowed the American insurgents to appeal for popular
support, thereby elevating the role of propaganda and
psychological warfare. It is appropriate that the term
"public opinion" first appeared in print in 1776, for the
American rebels won independence in large part by
appealing to the British electorate with documents such as
Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense and the
Declaration of Independence. In fact, the outcome of the
Revolution was really decided in 1782, when the British
House of Commons voted by a narrow margin to
discontinue offensive operations. The British could have
kept fighting after that date; they could have raised fresh
armies even after the defeat at Yorktown in 1781. But not
after they had lost the support of parliament.
Most of the revolutionaries who followed were more
extreme in their methods and beliefs than the American
rebels, but, whether left or right, many of them copied the
Americans' skillful manipulation of public opinion. The
Greeks in the 1820s, the Cubans in the 1890s, and the
Algerians in the 1950s all enjoyed notable success
mobilizing foreign opinion to help win their
independence. In Greece and Cuba, the anti-imperialists
won by highlighting the colonies' suffering to spur what
would today be called humanitarian interventions by
Western powers.
Liberal insurgents scored their most impressive victories in
the New World. With a few exceptions, by 1825, the
European colonial powers had been defeated in the
Americas. European revolts at home, such as that of the
Chartists in the United Kingdom and that of the
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Decembrists in Russia, were less successful. Still, by the
turn of the twentieth century, most of Europe and North
America was moving in a more liberal direction -- even
those absolute monarchies, such as Austria, Germany, and
Russia, that remained as such were making greater efforts
to appease and direct popular sentiment.
WARS THAT WEREN'T
At the same time, Western states were extending their rule
across much of the rest of the world in a decidedly illiberal
fashion. The process of colonization and resistance would
do much to shape the modern world and would give rise to
the most influential counterinsurgency doctrine of all time:
the "oil spot" theory, coined by the French marshal Hubert
Lyautey, who in fin-de-siècle Indochina, Madagascar, and
Morocco anticipated the "population-centric" doctrine that
U.S. forces implemented in Afghanistan and Iraq in the
twenty-first century. It involved slowly extending army
posts and settlements, like a spreading oil spot, until
indigenous resistance was crushed, while also trying to
address locals' political and economic concerns.
The people of Asia and Africa resisted the colonists'
advance as best they could. Sometimes, they were able to
force serious setbacks; a famous example was the 1842
British retreat from Kabul. But these were only temporary
reversals in the inexorable westernization of the world. By
1914, Europeans and their offspring controlled 84 percent
of the world's landmass, up from 35 percent in 1800.
That non-Europeans did not have more success in
preserving their independence was due in large measure to
Europe's growing advantages in military technology and
technique. But it also owed something to the fact that most
non-Europeans did not adopt strategies that made the best
use of their limited resources. Instead of attempting to
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engage in guerrilla warfare -- which, even if unsuccessful,
might have staved off ultimate defeat for years, if not
decades, and inflicted considerable costs on the invaders --
most non-Europeans fought precisely as the Europeans
wanted them to, that is to say, in conventional fashion.
Westerners thought that most of the areas they conquered
were "primitive" and "backward," but in a sense, they were
too advanced for their own good. By the time Europeans
marched into Asia and Africa, much of those continents
had fallen under the sway of native regimes with standing
armies, such as the Zulu empire in southern Africa and the
Maratha empire in India. Their rulers naturally looked to
those standing armies for protection, typically eschewing
the sort of tribal tactics (a primitive form of guerrilla
warfare) practiced by their ancestors. In most cases, the
decisions quickly backfired. When native rulers did try to
correct course, their impulse was usually to make their
armies even more conventional by hiring European
advisers and buying European arms. The reproductions
were seldom as good as the originals, however, and their
inferiority was brutally exposed in battle.
Why did so few indigenous regimes resort to guerrilla
tactics? In part, because non-Westerners had little idea of
the combat power of Western armies until it was too late.
Too many indigenous empire builders in the developing
world imagined that the tactics they had used to conquer
local tribes would work against the white invaders as well.
Even if those rulers had wanted to ignite insurgencies,
moreover, the ideological fuel was generally lacking, save
in Algeria, Chechnya and Dagestan, and a few other areas
where Muslim rebels waged prolonged wars of resistance
against European colonists. Often, the subjects of these
regimes resented the indigenous rulers as much as, if not
more than, the European invaders. Nationalism, a
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relatively recent invention, had not yet spread to those
lands.
European soldiers in "small wars" were helped by the fact
that most of the fighting occurred on the periphery of their
empires in Asia and Africa against enemies that were
considered "uncivilized" and therefore, under the European
code of conduct, could be fought with unrestrained
ferocity. As late as the 1930s, the British officer and
novelist John Masters wrote that on the northwest frontier
of India (today's Pakistan), Pashtun warriors "would
usually castrate and behead" captives, whereas the British
"took few prisoners at any time, and very few indeed if
there was no Political Agent about" -- they simply killed
those they captured. The very success of the imperial
armies meant that future battles would take place within
imperial boundaries, however, and that they would be, as
the historian Thomas Mockaitis wrote in British
Counterinsurgency, "considered civil unrest rather than war."
Accordingly, imperial troops in the future would find their
actions circumscribed by law and public opinion in ways
that they had not been in the nineteenth century.
The civil unrest of the twentieth century was harder to
deal with for other reasons as well. By setting up schools
and newspapers that promulgated Western ideas such as
nationalism and Marxism, Western administrators
eventually spurred widespread resistance to their own rule.
And by manufacturing and distributing countless weapons,
from TNT to the AK-47, all over the world, the Europeans
ensured that their twentieth-century opponents were far
better armed than their predecessors had been.
THE SUN SETS ON THE BRITISH EMPIRE
To understand why decolonization swept the world in the
late 1940s and why anti-Western guerrillas and terrorists
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fared so well during that period, it is vital to underscore
how weak the two biggest colonial powers were by then.
Even if France and the United Kingdom had been
determined to hold on to all their overseas possessions
after 1945, they would have been hard-pressed to do so.
Both were essentially bankrupt and could not comfortably
fight a prolonged counterinsurgency -- especially not in
the face of hostility from the rising superpowers. The
Soviets, and later the Chinese, were always ready to
provide arms, training, and financing to national liberation
movements of a Marxist bent.
Most of the decolonization process was relatively peaceful.
Where the British did face determined opposition, as in
India and Palestine, it did not take much to persuade them
to leave. London generally only fought to hold on to a few
bases, such as Cyprus and Aden, that it deemed to be of
strategic significance or, as in Malaya and Kenya, to
prevent a takeover by Communists or other extremists.
When the British did choose to fight, they did so skillfully
and successfully; their counterinsurgency record is better
than that of the French during the same period, and some
of their campaigns, notably that in Malaya, are still studied
by military strategists.
The incidence of guerrilla warfare and terrorism did not
decline with the demise of the European empires. On the
contrary, the years between 1959 and 1979 -- from Fidel
Castro's takeover in Cuba to the Sandinistas' takeover in
Nicaragua -- were, if anything, the golden age of leftist
insurgency. There remained a few colonial wars and a
larger number of essentially ethnic wars (in Congo, East
Timor, and Nigeria's Biafra region) fought to determine
the nature of postcolonial states, but the primary driver
was socialist ideology. Radicals who styled themselves as
the next Mao, Ho, Fidel, or Che took up Kalashnikovs to
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wage rural guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism. Never
before or since has the glamour and prestige of irregular
warriors been higher, as seen in the ubiquity of the artist
Alberto Korda's famous photograph of Che Guevara,
which still adorns T-shirts and posters. The success of
revolutionaries abroad resounded among the Western
radicals of the 1960s, who were discontented with their
own societies and imagined that they, too, could overthrow
the establishment. Tom Wolfe captured the moment in his
famous 1970 essay "Radical Chic," which described in
excruciating detail a party thrown by the composer
Leonard Bernstein in his swank New York apartment for a
group of Black Panthers, one of myriad terrorist groups of
a period whose fame far exceeded its ability to achieve its
goals.
Some governments had considerable success in suppressing
insurgent movements. The 1960s saw the publication of
influential manuals such as Counterinsurgency Warfare:
Theory and Practice, by the French officer (and Algeria
veteran) David Galula, and Defeating Communist Insurgency,
by the British official Sir Robert Thompson, a suave
veteran of Malaya and Vietnam. Galula, Thompson, and
other experts reached a remarkable degree of agreement
that insurgencies could not be fought like conventional
wars. The fundamental principle that set
counterinsurgency apart was the use of "the minimum of
fire." Meanwhile, a "soldier must be prepared to become a
propagandist, a social worker, a civil engineer, a
schoolteacher, a nurse, a boy scout," Galula wrote.
It was one thing to generate such hard-won lessons.
Altogether more difficult was to get them accepted by
military officers whose ideal remained the armored
blitzkrieg and who had nothing but contempt for lightly
armed ragtag fighters. Western militaries marched into the
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next few decades still focused on fighting a mirror-image
foe. When the United States had to confront a guerrilla
threat in Vietnam, William Westmoreland, the commander
of U.S. operations there, formulated an overwhelmingly
conventional response that expended lots of firepower and
destroyed lives on both sides but did not produce victory.
LEFT OUT
Like everyone else, guerrillas and terrorists are subject to
popular moods and intellectual fads. By the 1980s, as
memories of colonialism faded, as the excesses of
postcolonial rulers became more apparent, and as the
desirability of capitalism was revived under U.S. President
Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, leftist movements went into eclipse and the
guerrilla mystique faded. Few but the most purblind
ideologues could imagine that the future was being born in
impoverished and oppressed Cambodia or Cuba. The end
of the old regime in Moscow and the gradual opening in
Beijing had a more direct impact on insurgent groups, too,
by cutting off valuable sources of subsidies, arms, and
training. The Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s, such as
the Italian Red Brigades and the German Baader-Meinhof
Gang, were never able to generate significant support bases
of their own and languished along with their foreign
backers. Nationalist movements, such as the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Irish Republican
Army, fared better, although they were also hobbled by a
decline in outside support.
Although leftist insurgencies were on the wane, however,
guerrilla warfare and terrorism hardly disappeared. They
simply assumed different forms as new militants motivated
by the oldest grievances of all -- race and religion -- shot
their way into the headlines. The transition from
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politically motivated to religiously motivated insurgencies
was the product of decades, even centuries, of
development. It could be traced back to, among other
things, the writings of the Egyptian agitator Sayyid Qutb
in the 1950s and 1960s; the activities of Hasan al-Banna,
who founded Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood in 1928; and
the proselytizing of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who
in the eighteenth century created the puritanical
movement that would one day become the official theology
of Saudi Arabia. But the epochal consequences of these
religious leaders' ideas did not seize the world's attention
until the fateful fall of 1979, when protesters occupied the
U.S. embassy in Tehran. The embassy takeover had been
organized by radical university students, including the
future Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who
wanted to strike a blow at "the Great Satan" and domestic
secularists. It was followed by the militant takeover of the
Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest shrine in Islam, and
the burning of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. And then,
on December 24, 1979, the Soviets marched into
Afghanistan, thus inspiring the mobilization of a
formidable force of holy guerrillas: the mujahideen.
The threat from Islamist extremists, which had been
building sub rosa for decades, burst into bloody view on
September 11, 2001, when al Qaeda staged the deadliest
terrorist attack of all time. Previous terrorist organizations,
from the PLO to various anarchist groups, had limited the
scale of their violence. As the terrorism analyst Brian
Jenkins wrote in the 1970s, "Terrorism is theater. . . .
Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of
people dead." Al Qaeda and its ilk rewrote that playbook in
the United States and Iraq.
To defend itself, the United States and its allies erected a
variety of defenses. Mostly, this involved improved
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security, police work, and intelligence gathering. Militaries
played an important role, too, although seldom as central
as in Afghanistan and Iraq -- countries whose governments
were toppled by American invasions. In states with
functioning or semi-functioning governments, such as the
Philippines and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. role was limited to
providing training, weapons, intelligence, and other
assistance to help those governments fight the extremists.
Beyond the West's efforts against al Qaeda, popular
protests in the Middle East have dealt terrorist
organizations another blow. The Arab Spring has proved to
be far more potent an instrument of change than suicide
bombings. Even before the death of Osama bin Laden, in
2011, the Pew Global Attitudes Project had recorded a
sharp drop in those expressing "confidence" in him:
between 2003 and 2010, the figure fell from 46 percent to
18 percent in Pakistan, from 59 percent to 25 percent in
Indonesia, and from 56 percent to 14 percent in Jordan.
Even a small minority is enough to sustain a terrorist
group, however, and al Qaeda has shown an impressive
capacity to regenerate itself. Its affiliates still operate from
the Middle East to Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, other
Islamist groups continue to show considerable strength in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hamas controls the Gaza Strip,
Hezbollah holds sway in Lebanon, al Shabab bids for
power in Somalia, Boko Haram advances in Nigeria, and
two newer groups, Ansar Dine and the Movement for
Unity and Jihad in West Africa, have taken control of
northern Mali. Notwithstanding bin Laden's death and
other setbacks to al Qaeda central, the war against Islamist
terrorism is far from won. The 9/11 attacks serve as a
reminder that seeming security against an invisible army
can turn to vulnerability with shocking suddenness and
that, unlike the more geographically restricted insurgents
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of the past, international terrorist groups, such as al Qaeda,
can strike almost anywhere.
SMALL WARS, BIG LESSONS
The long history of low-intensity conflict reveals not only
how ubiquitous guerrilla warfare has been but also how
often its importance has been ignored, thus setting the
stage for future humiliations at the hands of determined
irregulars. The U.S. Army has a particularly dismaying
record of failing to adapt to "small wars," despite its
considerable experience fighting Native Americans,
Philippine insurrectos, the Vietcong, al Qaeda, the Taliban,
and numerous other irregulars. To avoid similar calamities
in the future, today's soldiers and policymakers need to
accurately appraise the strengths and weaknesses of
insurgents.
It is important neither to underestimate nor to
overestimate the potency of guerrilla warfare. Before 1945,
since irregulars refused to engage in face-to-face battle,
they were routinely underestimated. After 1945, however,
popular sentiment swung too far in the other direction,
enshrining guerrillas as superhuman figures. The truth lies
somewhere in between: insurgents have honed their craft
since 1945, but they still lose most of the time. Their
growing success is due to the spread of communications
technology and the increasing influence of public opinion.
Both factors have sapped the will of states to engage in
protracted counterinsurgencies, especially outside their
own territories, and have heightened the ability of
insurgents to survive even after suffering military setbacks.
In the fight against insurgents, conventional tactics don't
work. To defeat them, soldiers must focus not on chasing
guerrillas but on securing the local population. Still,
effective population-centric counterinsurgency is not as
10/2/17, 9)47 PMThe Evolution of Irregular War | Foreign Affairs
Page 19 of 22https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2013-02-05/evolution-irregular-war
touchy-feely as commonly supposed. It involves much
more than winning "hearts and minds" -- a phrase invented
by Sir Henry Clinton, a British general during the
American Revolution, and popularized by Sir Gerald
Templer, a general during the Malayan Emergency, in the
late 1940s and 1950s. The only way to gain control is to
garrison troops 24 hours a day, seven days a week, among
the civilians; periodic "sweep" or "cordon and search"
operations fail, even when conducted by counterinsurgents
as cruel as the Nazis, because civilians know that the rebels
will return the moment the soldiers leave.
Although control can be imposed at gunpoint, it can be
maintained only if the security forces have some degree of
popular legitimacy. In years past, it was not hard for
foreign empires to gain the necessary legitimacy. But now,
with nationalist sentiment having spread to every corner of
the world, foreign counterinsurgents, such as the United
States, face a tricky task, trying to buttress homegrown
regimes that can win the support of their people and yet
will still cooperate with the United States.
What makes counterinsurgency all the more difficult is
that there are few quick victories in this type of conflict.
Since 1775, the average insurgency has lasted seven years
(and since 1945, it has lasted almost ten years). Attempts
by either insurgents or counterinsurgents to short-circuit
the process usually backfire. The United States tried to do
just that in the early years of both the Vietnam War and
the Iraq war by using its conventional might to hunt down
guerrillas in a push for what John Paul Vann, a famous
U.S. military adviser in Vietnam, rightly decried as "fast,
superficial results." It was only when the United States
gave up hopes of a quick victory, ironically, that it started
to get results, by implementing the tried-and-true tenets of
population-centric counterinsurgency. In Vietnam, it was
10/2/17, 9)47 PMThe Evolution of Irregular War | Foreign Affairs
Page 20 of 22https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2013-02-05/evolution-irregular-war
already too late, but in Iraq, the patient provision of
security came just in time to avert an all-out civil war.
The experiences of the United States in Iraq in 2007-8,
Israel in the West Bank during the second intifada, the
British in Northern Ireland, and Colombia in its ongoing
fight against the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia) show that it is possible for democratic
governments to fight insurgents effectively if they pay
attention to what the U.S. military calls "information
operations" (also known as "propaganda" and "public
relations") and implement some version of a population-
centric strategy. But these struggles also show that one
should never enter into counterinsurgency lightly. Such
wars are best avoided if possible. Even so, it is doubtful
that the United States will be able to avoid them in the
future any more than it has in the past. Given the United
States' demonstrations of its mastery of conventional
combat in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, few adversaries in the
future will be foolish enough to put tank armies in the
desert against an American force. Future foes are unlikely,
in other words, to repeat the mistake of nineteenth-
century Asians and Africans who fought European
invaders in the preferred Western style. Guerrilla tactics,
on the other hand, are proven effective, even against
superpowers.
In the future, irregulars might become deadlier still if they
can get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction,
especially a nuclear bomb. If that were to happen, a small
terrorist cell the size of a platoon might gain more killing
capacity than the entire army of a nonnuclear state. That is
a sobering thought. It suggests that in the future, low-
intensity conflict could pose even greater problems for the
world's leading powers than it has in the past -- and those
problems were already vexing enough.
10/2/17, 9)47 PMThe Evolution of Irregular War | Foreign Affairs
Page 21 of 22https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2013-02-05/evolution-irregular-war
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