Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (2 page)

This aspect of the story is not confined to land warfare. As trading states from the mid-eighteenth century on came to depend on the freedom and security of the seas, repeated efforts were made to prey upon the sea lines of communication in wartime. A great deal of damage was done, in many wars, by sea raiders, most notably by Confederate captains during the Civil War and German U-boat skippers in both world wars. But none of these came close to the achievements of the relative handful of American submariners during the Pacific War who, under the inspired leadership of Admiral Charles Lockwood, brought the Empire of Japan to its knees.

Aside from the challenge posed by Lockwood and his “undersea wolves,” Japanese military leaders also had to cope with the first serious use of air power to enable and sustain Allied deep-penetration field operations in the Burma theater. It was here that Orde Wingate pioneered what may come to be a future model of deploying one’s forces with little reference to such constraints as front lines, rivers, or mountain ranges. With a few brigades he caused mass disruption in an entire theater of war. Nearly seventy years later, his feat has yet to be duplicated in scale or effect.

Wingate and the others I have mentioned here, along with the rest of the masters of irregular warfare whose stories form this book, are important precisely because of their continuing ability to shape the future of conflict—and thus the future of the world system. I have attempted to highlight the particular lessons to be drawn from each of the masters, keying on such themes as the possibility of transforming an entire military; integrating irregular and conventional operations; pursuing nation building from the grassroots up; infiltrating insurgent and terrorist groups; and building networks and crafting a capacity for employing swarm tactics.

All these issues lie at the heart of military affairs in our time, an era of perpetual irregular warfare. The great captains of traditional forms of conflict have little to tell us about this. Nor can the classical principles of war provide much help, in particular the notion of the sheer power of mass, which has lived on until now in the form of Colin Powell’s doctrine of “overwhelming force” and other concepts like “shock and awe.” Such ideas were already faltering by the time of the Vietnam War; today it is clear that attempts to retool them against insurgent and terrorist networks will prove just as problematic.

For those who nod sadly at this point, resigned to the notion that irregulars will always remain a step ahead because traditional militaries must continually ready themselves to fight conventional foes, I have good news. “Master lessons” in irregular warfare will not only help us defeat the al
Qaedas of the world; they can provide a new way to fight against big, old-style opponents too—with smaller but more effective forces. So this looming age of irregular warfare is not only one characterized by grave new threats but also by amazing opportunity.

J.A.

Monterey, California

December 2010

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

F
or the past two decades I have been teaching irregular warfare in a graduate-level course of study for elite American and international military officers. This program exists today largely because my colleague Gordon McCormick has nurtured and protected it. I am deeply grateful to him for offering me the opportunity to contribute to its success. My gratitude also extends to the officers who have studied with me over the years and taught me so much along the way. Another colleague at the Naval Postgraduate School, the soldier-scholar Hy Rothstein, to whom this book is dedicated, has given me the benefit of his “master lessons” for many years. He continues to do so.

Major Matt Zahn, U.S. Army, played a crucial role in helping me decide to focus this book’s penultimate chapter on the great Chechen insurgent leader Aslan Maskhadov. Professor Misha Tsypkin then guided me through the subtleties of conflict in the Transcaucasus, pointing the right way ahead at each twist and turn. The indefatigable staff of the Dudley Knox Library once again found every last obscure source I needed, sometimes putting into my hands centuries-old books whose pages I almost feared to turn. Almost.

Ryan Stuart created beautiful, clear maps that will allow the reader to follow the story in each chapter more easily. Sherry Pennell searched tirelessly for just the right picture to capture the spirit of each character profiled in this study. Mary Marvel helped keep materials readily available and well organized.

Ivan Dee once again provided exceptional editorial guidance, right from the start and on through to completion of the manuscript. It has been the great privilege of my professional life to work with him. At Rowman and Littlefield, Jon Sisk, Darcy Evans, and Julia Loy have devoted considerable energy to making sure that this book will “be all that it can be.” I am much obliged to all of them for their efforts.

Finally, as this book touches on historical themes that still resonate in our time, especially the early manifestations of network warfare and swarm tactics, I am grateful to David Ronfeldt for having explored these areas with me over many years. It is growing ever clearer that we were cutting a valuable trail, one that others will no doubt join in enlarging and taking out to ever farther reaches, to the undiscovered places where the future of military affairs is to be found—and perhaps will be reshaped in ways that make our world more peaceful and secure.

INSURGENTS, RAIDERS,
AND BANDITS

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step.

—W. H. Auden

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

—Henry David Thoreau Two things have altered not Since first the world began: The beauty of the wild green earth And the bravery of Man.

—T. P. Cameron Wilson

WAR “OUT OF THE DARK”

War is among the most complex and perilous of human undertakings. Its complexities include those introduced by nature itself, as conflicts are conducted on virtually every type of terrain, on and beneath the surface of the sea, in the skies, and, perhaps one day soon, in outer space. Then there are the challenges posed by weapons systems of all sorts and of ever-increasing ingenuity, and the creative concepts of operations to guide their use. Such complexities are further compounded by the fact that all these elements—terrain, technology, and techniques—are wielded by thinking adversaries against each other, both striving for even the slightest edge that so often divides victory from defeat in wars between near equals.

And what of conflicts in which one side is markedly superior, as in the countless nineteenth-century struggles between advanced, imperial powers and indigenous peoples? The long history of warfare is replete with such unevenness. Parity, as existed between the leading states at the outset of World War I in 1914, is rare. In a world of unfair fights, only human creativity allows the chance to take on one’s betters with some hope of prevailing. So it is that an innovative turn of mind toward unusual tactics and strategies, arising largely in response to material inferiority, lies at the heart of conflict’s area of greatest complexity: irregular warfare.

Where conventional conflicts—on land, at sea, or in the air, and with whatever weapons—all tend to conform to the consistent, straightforward pattern of employing large masses of forces, fleets, and air wings, irregular warfare is primarily distinguished by the small size of its fighting units and their penchant for stealth and hit-and-run surprise attacks. Instead of a division of infantry charging forward against fixed defenses, an irregular approach would feature, say, a dozen commandos slinking across the lines to blow up the enemy’s key defenses. Or perhaps an entire corps (several divisions) would be broken into small “packets” of infiltrators capable of raiding and exploiting gaps, as Japanese general Yamashita chose to do with his forces in the amazing conquest of Malaya early in 1942. At sea, instead of the head-on clash of large battle fleets, one or a relative handful of stealthy submarines might be lurking, swarming, preying—like German admiral Karl Doenitz’s U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Tactics aside, the fundamental and defining characteristic across the range of forms of irregular warfare is the small unit. These examples from World War II suggest that the small can be useful even in the biggest of wars. Thus a central aspect of irregular warfare is the employment of small military units in innovative ways, primarily against larger, more traditional formations.

A second form of irregular warfare is that conducted by guerrillas, their name derived from the small bands of Spaniards who effectively resisted occupation of their country by Napoleonic forces between 1808 and 1814.
1
While introduced in its current incarnation more than two centuries ago, guerrilla warfare did not come into its own as a dominant concept of operations until the eruption of a series of anticolonial wars of liberation waged from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s. In the heyday of these struggles, ranging from Mao Zedong’s victory in China in 1949 to Vo Nguyen Giap’s successful campaign against U.S. forces some two decades later, irregulars and their “pop-up” mode of attack proved exceptionally effective. Small bands of fighters put large professional militaries on the run again and again during this period, in a string of startling victories that brought colonialism to an almost complete end. Even in those instances where insurgents were defeated militarily—in places like Algeria, Kenya, and Malaya—colonial overlords departed anyway. The cost of continuing to try to control various rebellious peoples who had become habituated to the ways of irregular warfare was seen as too great.

How different this result was from most colonial wars of the nineteenth century, when indigenous peoples all too often tried to fight the armies of the great powers head-on and were slaughtered in the process. The Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898 was emblematic. In this clash a vastly outnumbered Anglo-Egyptian force—eight thousand British and about double that number of native levies—used a mix of machine guns, light artillery, and gunboats operating on the River Nile to decimate a force of more than sixty thousand Muslim zealots in just a few hours. And this was the general pattern during the “scramble for Africa,” as well as in colonial ventures in other venues, such as the bloody repression of Chinese religio-nationalists at mid-century, which saw at least twenty million killed in the Taiping Rebellion. Firepower regularly overcame native valor, and by century’s end much of the surface of Asia and Africa had fallen under colonial control.

There were a few exceptions. The plains Indians of North America fought guerrilla style, staving off inevitable defeat at the hands of a much more numerous and technologically advanced foe: Americans in pursuit of their “manifest destiny.” The Russians, following their own expansionist dreams, ran into difficulties against the Chechens of the Caucasus mountains, who used similar hit-and-run tactics to hold out for many years—a form and spirit of resistance that would awaken once again late in the twentieth century. Even the British, riding high in the wake of victory over the Dervishes at Omdurman, soon found themselves deeply embroiled with the South African Boer
KOMMANDOS
, a few thousand fighters whom it took an expeditionary force of more than five hundred thousand troops to contain.
2
On the whole, however, the first wave of resistance to expanding industrial powers collapsed quickly, in large part because of the indigenous peoples’ choice to employ conventional tactics when they enjoyed an initial edge in numbers over colonial expeditionary forces.

The third leg of an irregular warfare triad is terrorism. This is yet another mode of conflict based chiefly on the notion of employing small units in innovative ways—the aim in this case being to kill the innocent in hope of coercing or blackmailing others into compliance with one’s wishes. To be sure, large conventional forces have occasionally been used for terroristic purposes—the deliberate firebombing of cities during World War II being an example of such a misuse of airpower. But in the main, terror tends to be practiced by the few as a means of challenging those more powerful. As opposed to irregular military operations, which seem to find a useful niche in most major conflicts—and in less conventional settings too—and guerrilla warfare, which has blossomed over the past half century and currently accounts for most of what can be called “irregular,” the record of terrorism has been problematic. While it has been hard to extirpate terrorist organizations, it has proved just as difficult to point to many cases in which they have achieved their aims. In the judgment of the military historian Caleb Carr, terrorism “has been one of the most self-defeating tactics in all military history.”
3
A quick glance at more than forty years of fruitless Palestinian terrorism in pursuit of statehood suggests just how hard it can be to make this form of warfare support the achievement of one’s aims.

If the three faces of irregular warfare—small units, guerrilla tactics, and terrorism—suggest far more complexity than exists in traditional conflict, still greater depths remain to be plumbed. There are no neat dividing lines between the three forms. For example, standing militaries that establish elites in order to have a capability for the
COUP DE MAIN
commando strike sometimes find themselves forced to employ these units to conduct guerrilla style insurgencies.
4
During World War II, for example, the Russians found themselves detaching some of their best soldiers to fight, far behind the lines, with partisan forces whose job was to attack the Nazi invaders’ supply lines. Similarly, the U.S. Army Special Forces—the Green Berets—were formed in 1952 with the idea that they would lead insurgent resistance to Soviet occupation forces in any new European war that might break out. This tradition lives on today in what the Special Operations Command calls “unconventional warfare,” an activity that features small numbers of American soldiers fighting “by, with, and through” indigenous bands of friendly forces in remote theaters of operations in the ongoing struggle against terror networks.