Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (47 page)

Rogers’s achievements in the field, like Maskhadov’s, suggest that a force configured for irregular operations may also do well even when facing a traditionally configured foe. Their results buttress the argument in favor of pursuing full transformation instead of integration. Even if such a complete change is infrequently found in history, the great successes that have resulted when militaries have remade themselves in this manner suggest that the model should not be dismissed in favor of the integrative approach.

NARRATIVES AND NATION BUILDING
. Another theme that runs through the history of irregular warfare over the past 250 years concerns the “story” that impels individuals to action. Quite often the narrative is tied to the creation or freeing of a homeland, whether real or imagined, like Osama bin Laden’s cherished “caliphate.” Recognizing the story can be a powerful key to understanding the appeal, persistence, and in some cases the ultimate victory of a range of irregular leaders.

Perhaps the most common narrative is about the need to eject an occupying force and win or restore the nation’s freedom. Greene clearly saw the campaign in the south during the American Revolution in these terms. So did Mina and Davydov, operating respectively in Spain and Russia during the Napoleonic Era. Christiaan de Wet also fits this mold of the resister to the occupation of his country. Closer to the present, Josip Broz Tito also followed this path, even though the land for which he fought, Yugoslavia, was the recent creation of international diplomacy.

For other irregular masters, the act of resisting occupation forces proved an essential step in the process of nation building. There was no truly compelling idea among the Arab tribes of a nation called “Algeria” before Abd el-Kader launched his insurgent campaign against the French. And there was no modern “Italy” before Giuseppe Garibaldi, with conceptual help from Mazzini, began his crusade to drive the French and Austrians from his country. Lawrence too found the allure of nationhood a lively basis for recruiting Arab fighters and sustaining tribal support for his operations. “Nation” was a driving concept for Giap and Maskhadov as well, though Giap used the notion far more successfully.

Win or lose, fighting under the banners of self-liberation and nationhood, each of these masters understood that the ability to conduct an irregular campaign depends heavily upon having a compelling narrative. This is much more the case than in conventional wars. Take, for example, the performance in World War II of German soldiers, who fought with great skill and valor for a regime many despised and a cause almost all knew was irretrievably lost. Insurgents could never perform as well if they didn’t respect their high commands and believe wholeheartedly in their cause. This makes for a fascinating difference in social dynamics between conventional and irregular wars.

The power of the notion of nationhood is such that, in some cases, leaders of counterinsurgent forces have been able to use the allure of a nation-related narrative to help bring about the surrender or defeat of their foes. The great Indian fighter George Crook was able to accomplish this time and again in his campaigns, treating Native Americans with respect and doing his utmost to make sure they would enjoy some sense of sovereignty on lands reserved for them after the end of the fighting. A century later Frank Kitson did something similar, persuading members of the Mau Mau to switch sides, in part on the basis of a shared vision of a free Kenya.

A modern echo of this narrative theme has been heard in the more recent counterinsurgent campaigning in Iraq. The fierce resistance of Sunni tribes to the U.S. occupation was tamped down in 2007–2008 partly by the assurance that, by their joining the Americans in the fight against al Qaeda operatives, their country would be freed, peace would come, and U.S. forces would withdraw. Thus the Sons of Iraq arose to fight alongside their former enemies. The counterinsurgent effort in Afghanistan has been less successful in using these themes to turn hard-core opponents into allies.

DEEP STRIKES AND INFRASTRUCTURE ATTACKS
. It is commonly thought that an edge in tactical mobility is crucial to the success of long-ranging special operations, and that terrain exercises a profound shaping influence on irregular warfare in general. But the masters of this mode of conflict suggest the need for nuance when thinking along these lines. For example, mobility should be thought of in relative rather than absolute terms; the critical point is the need to move and act faster
THAN THE OPPOSING FORCE
. A similar point holds with terrain, which is a constraint for both sides. The problem is not so much with rough country, dense jungle, or high mountains; it is much more a question of whether a force is willing to change its ways to adapt to the demands of such settings.

Robert Rogers built a force that could move faster in the North American wilderness than even the Indians. This enabled him and his striking force to cover hundreds of miles over exceptionally rough terrain, most of the time on foot, and then to launch shattering blows, like his raid on St. Francis during the French and Indian War. Denis Davydov took advantage of General Kutuzov’s strategy of trading space for time in the campaign against Napoleon in 1812, creating a force of cavalry raiders that regularly struck far behind the French lines.

By his actions, largely mounted against the invaders’ supply convoys, Davydov began to marry the deep strike to the notion of crippling the enemy’s infrastructure. Abd el-Kader adopted a similar method also against the French in North Africa in the 1830s and 1840s. But his and Davydov’s attacks were confined to supply wagons. With the coming of rail transport and telegraphic communications in the mid-nineteenth century, a whole new world of opportunity opened up for irregular raiders to cripple the advance of modern field armies. The clear master of this sort of campaign was the Confederacy’s Nathan Bedford Forrest who, with quite small forces, threw a very large monkey wrench into Union plans in the western theater of operations during the Civil War. Given that rail and telegraph lines then ran mostly in tandem, Forrest’s task was made a bit easier: both target sets were in the same place. This pattern still held at the time of the Boer War, some thirty years later, when Christiaan de Wet was able to act much as Forrest had before him. During World War I, Lawrence’s riff on this theme was to do enough damage to cripple, but not so much as to force enemy withdrawal from advanced outposts that were costly to hold.

After Lawrence, deep commando raids coupled with attacks on transport and communications infrastructures persisted as a mode of irregular warfare but seemed to have less strategic impact. During World War II all major combatants fielded such raiding forces, yet no leaders of the stature of Rogers, Davydov, Forrest, De Wet, or Lawrence emerged. Despite a great many commando coups mounted during this war, their strategic impact, as many studies have shown, seemed to diminish. The one great exception was in the war at sea, where Charles Lockwood proved that a deep-striking irregular campaign could be waged with a small number of submarines, and that it could have a profound effect on the supply system of a modern maritime nation.

In more recent times the Chechens attempted to revitalize the classic notion of the deep raid; but in their case these attacks were designed to weaken Russian resolve. The Chechens enjoyed mild early success with this technique—for which Aslan Maskhadov had little appetite—but such actions soon brought down the most powerful blowback on the Chechens themselves. The return of the deep raid as a means of striking at infrastructure may require some fundamental rethinking of the concept.

NETWORKS AND SWARMING
. In an organizational sense (as opposed to its electronic or social connotations), a network is characterized by the dominance of lateral linkages among many small nodes, cells, or units. It features great autonomy on the part of field forces, with the central command—such as it is—remaining concentrated on the big picture rather than the tactical details. Swarming is the way networks fight—their many small formations tend to attack enemy troops and other targets simultaneously from several directions.

While some masters of swarm tactics did not operate in network fashion—Nathan Bedford Forrest being the prime example, but see Garibaldi’s operations in Palermo, too—the most successful practitioners married this doctrine to a highly networked organizational structure. During World War II, for example, Tito’s great success in Yugoslavia came in large part from his ability to see the need for a countrywide swarm. His widely dispersed forces were ordered to mount attacks throughout the areas occupied by German and Italian troops and their other allies and collaborators. Tito did this even as Axis regulars were mounting major offensives against him, driving ever southward, and
JAGDKOMMANDO
units were relentlessly hunting down his soldiers.

Tito was able to counter the Axis initiative in this manner partly because the swarming tactics his soldiers employed caused such great consternation, hammering home the point that this was not a linear campaign that could be concluded with the usual sort of straightforward advances. But Tito could not have won without his willingness to trust in his local commanders, many of whom were of differing ethnicity and might even turn against him. Yet for all these risks, Tito realized that the gains to be made by delegating authority out to the edges of the insurgent network far outweighed the potential problems.

The other great swarm network of World War II was the one built and sent into battle by Charles Lockwood. His relatively small numbers of submarines were dispersed throughout the extensive Japanese maritime empire, attacking it simultaneously at several points on any given day. Aside from the technological demands of such a campaign—submarines with long-range cruising capability, and stealthy enough to operate in waters otherwise controlled by enemy forces—Lockwood understood the need to empower his skippers with almost complete tactical discretion. Once he found the right officers, those most comfortable with taking the initiative when commands from above were few, the campaign caught fire and did more damage to the enemy than any other American military activity of the Pacific War.

By way of contrast, it is interesting to note that in the Battle of the Atlantic Lockwood’s German counterpart, Admiral Karl Doenitz, ran his U-boat campaign in far more controlled fashion. While the Germans were able to add a tactical swarm to their operations, in the form of wolf-pack attacks on convoys, Doenitz’s insistence on maintaining close control over these forces via radio ran the fatal risk that the Allies might break his codes and either find his subs or reroute their convoys out of harm’s way. In the event, his codes
WERE
broken, many of his U-boats were found and sunk, and the courses of many Allied convoys were diverted away from contact with his forces. A “full Lockwood” approach was probably not possible for Doenitz; but something less centrally controlled might have given his U-boats a much better chance of winning.

In the postwar era, Giap made use of a Tito-like, countrywide swarm, first against the French then later against the Americans. Like Tito, he also assigned a great deal of local authority to cadres dispersed throughout Vietnam. Both the French and U.S. forces, in their respective periods of involvement, dealt reasonably effectively with the swarms they confronted. The French response was a combination of garrison-type forces and small raiding units; the Americans, at least early on, emphasized the use of small “combined action platoons,” of just a few dozen soldiers each, who lived and fought side by side with local anti-Communist fighters. Only when the French reverted to a major conventional offensive and the Americans switched to their “big unit war” did they both go awry. Had one or the other stuck with the notion of forming their own networks to defend against Giap’s swarms, Hanoi likely would not have won out in the end.

Of all the masters I have surveyed in this book, Aslan Maskhadov showed the greatest capacity for empowering networks and building a concept of operations around the notion of swarming. His 1996 offensive, which drove the Russians from his country, will stand as one of history’s great campaigns. For it was a very tough test: against vastly superior Russian numbers and firepower, Maskhadov relied on small teams of twelve to twenty men each, and gave all of them great discretion as to how and when to engage the enemy. His networked swarm succeeded brilliantly. But, in an ironic turn, it was Maskhadov’s inability to rein in his network that led to the ill-advised invasion of Dagestan and the eventual return of a far more effective Russian force. In this respect Maskhadov’s tale is a profoundly cautionary one for those who embrace notions of networking: what you create you may not be able to control.

COOPTATION AND INFILTRATION
. One of the most important developments in irregular warfare emerged during the decades-long nineteenth-century struggle against the Native American tribes of the West. While it is easy to say that the brave fight of these essentially Stone Age peoples was doomed from the outset, the truth is that they often enjoyed better armaments (thanks to gunrunners) and greater mobility than the U.S. military units arrayed against them. The Apaches in particular seemed to hold a persistent edge against their adversaries. That is, until George Crook hit upon the idea of convincing some of his former foes to join the fight on his side. He did this largely with subtle, skillful psychological appeals and genuine compassion for the plight of these doomed peoples.

Thus Crook was able to subdue the Apaches with a very small force in a reasonably short span of time, where those who had come before him had failed with large numbers of troops and years of field operations. Crook was on to something: it is often possible in irregular warfare to reach out to enemy fighters with every chance of persuading them to switch sides. Still, there are few examples of this practice among the other masters. Tito recruited antifascist Italian soldiers who wished to join his partisans, but they fought like any other guerrillas, simply augmenting his existing force rather than arming it with infiltrators. It seems that only Frank Kitson truly captured the spirit of Crook, and even did him one better.