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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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