Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (48 page)

In Kenya, Kitson’s innovative pseudo gangs not only relied on the recruitment of former Mau Mau fighters, they also operated in a highly deceptive fashion. That is, they wandered about the battle zones looking and acting like insurgents while in actuality they were secret scouts for the British—and sometimes even conducted the raids and ambushes that did so much to cripple the Mau Mau. In this respect Kitson married a brilliant new concept of infiltration to the practice of cooptation.

Among modern echoes of Crook and Kitson, the loudest has been heard in Iraq during 2007–2008 when former insurgents switched sides and began to fight against al Qaeda cadres in their country. These stalwart Sons of Iraq did far more to improve the situation on the ground than the rather modest surge of American reinforcements that arrived around the same time. The extent to which Crook-like cooptation may have extended also to Kitson-like infiltration is yet unclear; but if one day there is an end to terrorist networks, their defeat will almost surely be at the hands of the inheritors of Crook and Kitson.

Infiltration was practiced also in a manner resembling the deep strike, but conducted over a protracted period. When Rogers, Davydov, Forrest, de Wet, and Lawrence mounted deep raids, their forces generally went out and came back to a home base. This was also true of Lockwood’s long-ranging submarines. But Orde Wingate gave a whole new meaning to notions of infiltration with his call for a capability to operate far behind enemy lines for indefinite periods. His Chindits, particularly the second expedition, proved that infiltrated forces could, with adequate air support, subsist, persist, and triumph.

Wingate’s ideas have sometimes been conflated with notions of heliborne assault, especially of the kind that characterized the period of American involvement in Vietnam. But this is the wrong lesson to draw, as these latter-day air assault forces resembled short-duration raiders—that is, they went out, hit their targets, and returned. Wingate’s infiltrators, while they did have strongholds, were located far from any sort of friendly infrastructure. And they operated in this fashion for months at a time. Seen in this light, Wingate’s concepts retain their cutting-edge feel, and thus he still awaits the coming of a modern master able to interpret the twenty-first-century implications of his mode of irregular warfare.

*

Having surveyed the past 250 years of irregular warfare, we have these remaining questions: Who will be considered the masters of this era? and What may come next for irregular warfare? Given that the key issues raised by earlier masters—from variants of military reform to nation building, networking, and on to swarming—remain in lively play, these questions are highly relevant.

Will Osama bin Laden one day be ranked among the masters? Certainly the attacks on the United States that he orchestrated and the organization he formed, which held up with such resilience against strong counterblows, suggest that his impact on global security affairs has been profound. But for all bin Laden’s emphasis on elaborate networking, he has had great trouble in empowering his minions to maintain a faster operational tempo. While, al Qaeda cadres and affiliates have pulled off a few major attacks over the past decade, and a few more small-scale “wave attacks” here and there, they have never developed a capacity for sustained swarming. This limitation, probably more than any other factor, will prevent bin Laden from ever being seen as one of the masters of irregular warfare.

If al Qaeda is good at networking but doesn’t do much swarming, the reverse seems to characterize the U.S. military, which now does a great deal of swarming but is loath to network. Save for the physical network of small outposts in Anbar province in Iraq in 2007–2008, complemented by the social network of ties to former tribal insurgents, American field forces have done little networking over the past decade. Among senior American military leaders, army generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal achieved the best results against the terror networks. Petraeus was responsible for the networked swarm in Anbar that put al Qaeda forces on the run and sharply reduced violence there; McChrystal led the elite task forces of swarming raiders operating in other parts of Iraq. But this approach was curtailed, and the endgame in Iraq still hangs in the balance. In Afghanistan, where Petraeus and McChrystal went next, the shift they called for there looked far more like the big-unit approach in Vietnam than a swarm network. Thus the jury is still out on bin Laden, Petraeus, and McChrystal. Not one of them has been able to combine networked organizational forms with sustained swarm tactics.

In other key areas, bin Laden has striven for full transformation of his cadres while his foes have concentrated less successfully on trying to achieve some degree of integration between conventional and irregular capacities. American nation-building efforts have at best muddled along, and al Qaeda’s narrative of a restored caliphate has never really caught on. Neither side has gravely injured the other’s infrastructure, al Qaeda’s being the physical haven in Waziristan and its virtual haven in cyberspace. All have had their innings at cooptation—the Americans in Anbar, particularly—but none have used infiltration well.

Where the central players in the terror war seem not to measure up to the standards of mastery, another candidate emerges if we consider Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah. Over the past few decades he and his organization drove the Israelis from Lebanon, largely by fielding a fully transformed fighting force built around swarm networks, then fended them off again in fighting in the summer of 2006. In terms of nation building and narrative themes, Nasrallah has also proven himself to be quite adept, his organization even rising to form a key part of the Lebanese government. He has also encouraged cooptation campaigns to extend the reach of his core network, but so far he has demonstrated little capacity for deep strikes that might pose serious threats to Israeli or other enemy infrastructure. Even so, as a work in progress Hassan Nasrallah has a shorter way to go to achieve a fully demonstrated mastery of irregular warfare than bin Laden or any of the leading American candidates.

This analysis might of course be overtaken by a future in which irregulars become armed with weapons of mass destruction. A few nuclear or biological weapons in the hands of Osama bin Laden or Hassan Nasrallah would change the game completely. For these men command networks that are virtually impervious to threats of retaliation in kind. How could a terror network be nuked in return if it struck first by, say, destroying a major American city? Or if terrorists infected with deadly diseases, in their communicable incubation phases, simply wandered about airport terminals in the United States? The darkest possible future for irregular warfare is the one in which terror networks seize such capabilities.

Indeed, it is this possible future that should convince us that taking a “long war” view of the struggle against terror is completely wrongheaded. Instead the spirits of Crook and Kitson need to be rekindled in some modern master attuned to the skillful use of their respective methods of cooptation and infiltration. Both won out quickly against difficult opponents who had successfully resisted the brute-force efforts of their adversaries for many years. Their techniques offer us the best way ahead, perhaps the only way to defeat the networks before they arm themselves with the deadliest weapons.

Leaving aside the specter of mass destruction, in the near term the greater likelihood is that “mass disruption” will be pursued by the next aspiring master (or masters) of irregular warfare. In the physical world this would consist of a capacity for mounting many small-scale attacks; but the concept may also be applied in the virtual world. Modern society and security depend heavily upon cyberspace-based systems whose disruption would inflict enormous costs upon all. We know that these systems, despite the proliferation of stout firewalls and other security measures, are highly vulnerable.

The only saving grace of the moment is that hackers who possess the technical skills to mount highly disruptive attacks are not sufficiently radicalized to want to do so. And those terrorists with the desire to commit acts of mass disruption don’t yet have the skills to accomplish them. But at some point this gap between motivation and capability will close, opening up the prospect of a virtual covert war of all against all, of the kind described by Frederik Pohl in his dystopian classic
THE COOL WAR
. This cool-war world does not demand that the malefactors be disaffected terrorists. Indeed, in Pohl’s tale the leading nations themselves are drawn to the apparent promise of secret wars of mass disruption.

Whoever starts the next war, whether nation or network, we can be almost fully assured that the conflict will unfold largely along irregular lines, in either the physical or virtual world, or both. This prospect should provide us with all the reason we might need, right now, to scrutinize the many methods of the earlier masters. For victory in future conflicts will increasingly incline toward the side that demonstrates a deeper understanding of how to employ such concepts. In this respect the long debate between the leading conventional and irregular military theorists and practitioners that has flared continually since the 1750s seems finally to be over. The irregulars have won—a sure and troubling portent of the darkness that lies ahead.

NOTES

1. WAR “OUT OF THE DARK”

1.
GUERRILLA
is the Spanish word for “small war.”

2. The term
COMMANDO
, which enjoys widespread modern use, initially referred simply to a unit of mounted infantry of some 100 to 150 guerrilla fighters.

3. Caleb Carr,
THE LESSONS OF TERROR
(New York: Random House, 2001), 12.

4. “Guerrilla warfare,” “insurgency,” and “partisan operations” should all be thought of as synonyms.

5. See Loretta Napoleoni,
INSURGENT IRAQ: AL ZARQAWI AND THE NEW GENERATION
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).

6. Joint Staff,
IRREGULAR WARFARE JOINT OPERATING CONCEPT
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 2007), 5.

7. James Kiras, “Irregular Warfare,” in
UNDERSTANDING MODERN WARFARE
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 234.

8. The seminal article is by William Lind, K. Nightengale, J. Schmitt, J. Sutton, and G. Wilson, “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,”
MARINE CORPS GAZETTE,
October 1989, 22–26.

9. See T. V. Paul,
ASYMMETRIC CONFLICTS: WAR INITIATION BY WEAKER POWERS
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

10. For this expansion upon Paul’s initial concept, see Roger W. Barnett,
ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE: TODAY’S CHALLENGE TO U.S. MILITARY POWER
(Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2003).

11. Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte,
MODERN IRREGULAR WARFARE IN DEFENSE POLICY AND AS A MILITARY PHENOMENON
, trans. George Gregory (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1986), 3.

12. Admiral McRaven introduced and analyzed the notion of “relative superiority” in his
SPEC OPS: CASE STUDIES IN SPECIAL OPERATIONS WARFARE
(Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1995).

2. FRONTIERSMAN: ROBERT ROGERS

1. Winston Churchill,
A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES
, vol. 3,
THE AGE OF REVOLUTION
(New York: Cassell, 1957), 148.

2. At the time of this war there were some eighty thousand French colonists in North America but more than 1.5 million British settlers.

3. Cited in Richard Holmes,
REDCOAT: THE BRITISH SOLDIER IN THE AGE OF HORSE AND MUSKET
(London: HarperCollins, 2001), 41.

4. Fred Anderson,
CRUCIBLE OF WAR: THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR AND THE FATE OF EMPIRE IN BRITISH NORTH AMERICA, 1754–1766
(New York: Knopf, 2000), 411.

5. Under the mercantilist policies of the time, trade goods were to be shipped first to Britain, marked up in price, then sent back out to the American colonies.

6. Francis Parkman,
MONTCALM AND WOLFE: THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE FRENCH EMPIRE IN NORTH AMERICA
(New York: Collier Books, 1962), 301.

7. For a complete listing of these rules, see Robert Rogers,
JOURNALS OF ROBERT ROGERS OF THE RANGERS
(London: Leonaur, 2005), 58–65. A somewhat bowdlerized version of the plan of discipline also appears in Kenneth Roberts’s novel
NORTHWEST PASSAGE
.