---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John Ashworth <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 8:12 AM
Subject: [sudan-john-ashworth] The Guerrilla Myth
To: Group <[email protected]>
This article begins with a blatant error, "the most astonishing fact
about the current international scene is that there isn't a single
conflict in which two uniformed militaries are pitted against each
other", forgetting that the armies of Sudan and South Sudan are
"pitted against each other" at this moment. It's probably also fair to
say that the armies of India and Pakistan are "pitted against each
other", having suffered casualties within the last few days. But
otherwise it's an interesting article.
John
BEGIN
The Guerrilla Myth
Unconventional wars are our most pressing national security concern.
They're also the most ancient form of war in the world. Max Boot on
the lessons of insurgency we seem unable to learn.
Author Max Boot discusses his new book, "Invisible Armies: An Epic
History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present," with
WSJ weekend Review editor Gary Rosen.
Updated January 18, 2013, 9:59 p.m. ET
Wall Street Journal
By MAX BOOT
For a student of military history, the most astonishing fact about the
current international scene is that there isn't a single conflict in
which two uniformed militaries are pitted against each other. The last
one was a brief clash in 2008 between Russia and Georgia. In our day,
the specter of conventional conflict, which has dominated the
imagination of the West since the days of the Greek hoplites, has
almost been lifted.
But the world is hardly at peace. Algeria fights hostage-takers at a
gas plant. France fights Islamist extremists in Mali. Israel fights
Hamas. The U.S. and its allies fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Syria's Bashar al-Assad fights rebels seeking to overthrow him.
Colombia fights and negotiates with the FARC. Mexico fights drug
gangs. And various African countries fight the Lord's Resistance Army.
These are wars without front lines, without neatly defined starting
and end points. They are messy, bloody affairs, in which attackers,
typically without uniforms, engage in hit-and-run raids and often
target civilians. They are, in short, guerrilla wars, and they are
deadly. In Syria alone, more than 60,000 people have died since 2011,
according to the United Nations. In Mexico, nearly 50,000 have died in
drug violence since 2006. Hundreds of thousands more have perished in
Africa's civil wars. The past decade has also seen unprecedented
terrorist attacks, ranging from 9/11 to suicide bombings in Iraq. To
understand today's world, you have to understand guerrillas and the
terrorist movements that are their close cousins.
Fidel Castro gave firing instructions to guerrilla fighters in the
Sierra Maestra, a mountainous region in the heart of Cuba. After a
long guerrilla war begun in 1953, Fidel Castro overthrew the dictator
Batistsa in 1958 and set up a socialist regime in Cuba.
Unfortunately, our ignorance of guerrilla war runs deep, even as we
find ourselves increasingly entangled in such conflicts. Contrary to
popular lore, guerrilla warfare wasn't invented by Che Guevara or Mao
Zedong, and terrorism long predates the 1972 Munich Olympics. Nor is
insurgency, as some have suggested, a distinctively "Oriental" form of
warfare, difficult for Westerners to grasp.
Examining guerrilla warfare's long history not only brings to light
many compelling, half-forgotten characters; it lays to rest numerous
myths and allows us to come to grips with the most pressing national
security issue of our time. What follows are lessons that we need to
learn—but haven't—from the history of guerrilla war.
1. Guerrilla warfare is not new. Tribal war, pitting one guerrilla
force against another, is as old as humankind. A new form of warfare,
pitting guerrillas against "conventional" forces, is of only slightly
more recent vintage—it arose in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. Calling
guerrilla warfare "irregular" or "unconventional" has it backward: It
is the norm of armed conflict.
Many of the world's current boundaries and forms of government were
determined by battles between standing armies and insurgencies. Think
of the United Kingdom, which was "united" by the success of the
English in defeating centuries-old Scottish and Irish guerrilla
movements. The retreat of the British Empire was partly the result of
successful armed resistance, by groups ranging from the Irish
Republican Army in the 1920s to the Zionists in the 1940s. Earlier
still, the war waged by American colonists, some of them fighting as
guerrillas, created the U.S., which reached its present borders, in
turn, by waging centuries of unremitting warfare against Native
American insurgents.
It is hard to think of any country in the world that has avoided the
ravages of guerrilla warfare—just as it hard to think of any organized
military force that hasn't spent a considerable portion of its energy
fighting guerrillas.
2. Guerrilla warfare is the form of conflict universally favored by
the weak, not an "Eastern" way of war. Thanks largely to the success
of Chinese and Vietnamese Communists in seizing power in the 20th
century, there has been a tendency to portray guerrilla tactics as the
outgrowth of Sun Tzu and other Chinese philosophers who were
supposedly at odds with the conventional tactics espoused by Western
sages such as Carl von Clausewitz.
In reality, ancient Chinese and Indian armies were as massive and
conventional in their orientation as the Roman legions. It wasn't the
Chinese who had a cultural proclivity toward guerrilla warfare but
rather their nomadic enemies in Inner Asia. For these tribesmen, as
for others ranging from the Sioux to the Pashtuns, irregular warfare
was a way of life.
But even tribal peoples such as the Turks, Arabs and Mongols, who
employed guerrilla tactics in their rise to power, turned to
conventional armies to safeguard their hard-won empires. Their
experience suggests that few people have ever chosen guerrilla warfare
voluntarily; it is the tactic of last resort for those too weak to
create regular armies. Likewise, terrorism is the tactic of last
resort for those too weak to create guerrilla forces.
3. Guerrilla warfare has been both underestimated and overestimated.
Before 1945, the value of guerrilla campaigns was generally
underestimated, leading overconfident officers such as George
Armstrong Custer to disaster. Because irregulars refuse to engage in
face-to-face battle, they have not gotten the respect they
deserve—notwithstanding their consistent ability, ever since the
barbarian assaults on Rome, to humble the world's greatest empires.
Since 1945, opinion has swung too far toward considering guerrilla
movements invincible. This is largely because of the success enjoyed
by a handful of rebels such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel
Castro. But focusing on their exploits distracts from the ignominious
end suffered by most insurgents, including Castro's celebrated
protégé, Che Guevara, who was killed by Bolivian Rangers in 1967.
In reality, though guerrillas have often been able to fight for years
and inflict great losses on their enemies, they have seldom achieved
their objectives. Terrorists have been even less successful.
4. Insurgencies have been getting more successful since 1945, but they
still lose most of the time. According to a database that I have
compiled, out of 443 insurgencies since 1775, insurgents succeeded in
25.2% of the concluded wars while incumbents prevailed in 63.8%. The
rest were draws.
This lack of historical success flies in the face of the widespread
deification of guerrillas such as Guevara. Since 1945, the win rate
for insurgents has indeed gone up, to 39.6%. But counter-insurgency
campaigns still won 51.1% of post-1945 wars. And those figures
overstate insurgents' odds of success because many rebel groups that
are still in the field, such as the Kachin separatists in Myanmar,
have scant chance of success. If ongoing uprisings are judged as
failures, the win rate for insurgents would go down to 23.2% in the
post-1945 period, while the counter-insurgents' winning percentage
would rise to 66.1%.
Like most business startups, most insurgent organizations go bust. Yet
some groups such as the Provisional IRA and Palestine Liberation
Organization, which fail to achieve their ultimate objectives, can
still win concessions from the other side.
5. The most important recent development in guerrilla warfare has been
the rise of public opinion. What accounts for the fact that guerrillas
have been getting more successful since 1945? Much of the explanation
can be found in the growing power of public opinion, brought about by
the spread of democracy, education, communications technology, mass
media and international organizations—all of which have sapped the
will of states to engage in protracted counter-insurgencies,
especially outside their own territory, and heightened the ability of
insurgents to survive even after suffering setbacks.
The term "public opinion" first appeared in print in 1776, which is
fitting, since it played a major role in persuading the British to
negotiate an end to their conflict with the American colonies. Greek
rebels in the 1820s benefited from public opinion in the West, where
sympathizers such as Lord Byron rallied their governments to oppose
Ottoman abuses. A similar strategy of relying on international support
was pursued by Cubans against Spain in the 1890s and Algerians against
France in the 1950s; it remains a key Palestinian strategy against
Israel.
A spectacular vindication of this approach occurred during the Vietnam
War, when the U.S. was defeated not because it had lost on the
battlefield but because public opinion had turned against the war. The
same thing almost happened in Iraq in 2007, and it may yet happen in
Afghanistan.
6. Few counter-insurgency campaigns have ever succeeded by inflicting
mass terror—at least in foreign lands. When faced with elusive foes,
armies often have resorted to torturing suspects for information, as
the U.S. did after 9/11, and inflicting bloody reprisals on civilians,
as Mr. Assad's forces are now doing in Syria. Such strategies have
worked on occasion (usually when rebels were cut off from outside
support), but just as often they have failed.
The armies of the French Revolution provide an example of successful
brutality at home: They killed indiscriminately to suppress the revolt
in the Vendée region in the 1790s. As one republican general wrote, "I
have not a single prisoner to reproach myself with. I exterminated
them all." But the French could not match this feat in Haiti, where
they used equally brutal measures but could not put down a slave
revolt led by the "Black Spartacus," Toussaint L'Ouverture.
Even in the ancient world, when there were no human-rights activists
or cable news channels, empires found that pacifying restive
populations usually involved carrots as well as sticks. There were
considerable benefits to participating in the Pax Romana, which won
over subject populations by offering "bread and circuses," roads,
aqueducts and (most important) security from roving guerrillas and
bandits.
7. "Winning hearts and minds" is often successful as an anti-guerrilla
strategy, but it isn't as touchy-feely as commonly supposed. The fact
that the U.S. and other liberal democratic states cannot be as brutal
as dictatorial regimes—or, more precisely, choose not to be—doesn't
mean they cannot succeed in putting down insurgencies. They simply
have to do it in a more humane style. In Iraq in 2007-08, Gen. David
Petraeus showed how successful a "population-centric" strategy could
be, at least in narrow security terms, by sending troops to live in
urban areas and by wooing Sunni tribes.
The best-known term for this strategy is "winning hearts and minds"—a
phrase popularized by the British Gen. Gerald Templer, who saved
Malaya from a communist insurgency in the 1950s. But the term is
misleading, since it suggests that a counter-insurgency campaign is
trying to win a popularity contest. In reality, the populace will
embrace the government only if it is less dangerous to do so than to
support the insurgency. That is why successful population-centric
policies aim to control the people with a 24/7 deployment of security
forces, not to win their love and gratitude by handing out soccer
balls, medical supplies and other goodies.
8. Most insurgencies are long-lasting; attempts to win a quick victory
backfire.The average insurgency since 1775 has lasted seven years. The
figure is even longer for post-1945 insurgencies—nearly 10 years. The
length of low-intensity conflicts can be a source of frustration for
both sides, but attempts to short-circuit the process usually
backfire. The U.S. tried to do just that in the early years of the
Vietnam and Iraq wars by using its conventional might to hunt down
insurgents in a push for what John Paul Vann, a legendary adviser in
Vietnam, decried as "fast, superficial results." It was only when the
U.S. gave up hopes of a quick victory that it started to get results.
A particularly seductive version of the "quick win" strategy is to try
to eliminate the insurgency's leadership, as the U.S. and Israel
regularly try to do with airstrikes against groups such as al Qaeda
and Hamas. Such strategies sometimes work. The Romans, for example,
stamped out a revolt in Spain by inducing some of the rebels to kill
their leader, Viriathus, in 139 B.C.
But there are just as many cases where leaders were eliminated but the
movement went on stronger than ever—as Hezbollah did after the loss of
its secretary-general in an Israeli airstrike in 1992. Targeting
leadership is most effective when integrated into a broader
counter-insurgency effort designed to separate the insurgents from the
population. If conducted in isolation, such raids are about as
effective as mowing the lawn; the organization can usually regenerate
itself.
9. Technology has been relatively unimportant in guerrilla war—but
that may be changing. All guerrilla and terrorist tactics, from
airplane hijacking and suicide bombing to hostage-taking and roadside
ambushes, are designed to negate the firepower advantage of
conventional forces. In this type of war, technology counts for less
than in conventional conflict. Even the possession of nuclear bombs
hasn't prevented the Soviet Union and the U.S. from suffering
ignominious defeat at guerrilla hands. To the extent that technology
has mattered in low-intensity conflicts, it has often been the
non-shooting kind. As T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") said, "The
printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern
commander." A rebel today might substitute "the Internet" for "the
printing press," but the essential insight remains.
The role of destructive technology will grow in the future, however,
if insurgents get their hands on chemical, biological or nuclear
weapons. A terrorist cell the size of a platoon might then have more
killing capacity than the entire army of a nonnuclear state like
Brazil or Egypt. Cyberweapons also have the potential to wreak havoc.
That is a sobering thought on which to end. It suggests that in the
future, guerrilla warfare and terrorism could pose even greater
problems for the world's leading powers than they have in the past.
And those problems have been substantial, varied and long-lasting.
—Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and
the author of "Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare
from Ancient Times to the Present" (Liveright), from which this is
adapted.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323596204578243702404190338.html?KEYWORDS=max+boot
END
______________________
John Ashworth
Sudan, South Sudan Advisor
[email protected]
+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile)
+211 919 695 362 (South Sudan mobile)
+27 82 050 1235 (South Africa mobile)
+44 750 304 1790 (UK/international)
+88 216 4334 0735 (Thuraya satphone)
PO Box 52002 - 00200, Nairobi, Kenya
This is a personal e-mail address and the contents do not necessarily
reflect the views of any organisation
--
--
The content of this message does not necessarily reflect John
Ashworth's views. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, John Ashworth is
not the author of the content and the source is always cited.
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "sudan-john-ashworth" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected]
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.co.za/group/sudan-john-ashworth
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"South Sudan Info - The Kob" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
