Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (3 page)

Beyond simply adopting partisan tactics to confront traditional aggressors and terrorists, military elites may also employ other irregular warfare techniques—including commando-style raiding—to defeat guerrilla movements. This is the basis of a major strand of thinking in the field of counterinsurgency, though it should be noted that military experts have often tried to defeat insurgents by using big units, traditional tactics, and overwhelming firepower against them—the approach that the U.S. military eventually settled upon and lost with in Vietnam. Thus military special operations forces’ irregular warfare missions often overlap substantially with guerrilla techniques and may be employed to fight other militaries or terrorist organizations as well.

Similarly, guerrillas often go beyond using straight insurgent tactics against standing militaries and incorporate significant elements of terrorism. Certainly Mao and Giap, in their respective campaigns, were not at all averse to liquidating the innocent in order to make a point. This was a dark pattern seen in many guerrilla wars of liberation in their heyday over half a century ago, from the Mau Mau in Kenya to Chinese Communist operations in Malaya, to many other salient examples from the 1950s. Much more recently, the late insurgent/terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi virtually fused insurgency and terrorism, blending resistance to the American occupation of Iraq with calculated violence aimed at so-called Muslim apostates.
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Lest we assume that this linkage is something only benighted peoples fall prey to, consider the period of the American Revolution, when guerrilla tactics against British redcoats went hand-in-hand with systematic terrorism conducted against the Tories, those colonists whose loyalties remained with King George III. The Tories themselves showed considerable skill at mixing insurgency and terror. The conflict was so unremitting that, in the wake of defeat, the vast majority of surviving Tories chose to leave the country, settling in Canada. In this respect—that is, in the remorseless brutality of the connection between insurgency and terror—the conflicts in colonial-era America and modern Iraq have something very much in common.

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Given the several facets of irregular warfare, and the large areas of overlap between them, it should not be surprising that attempts to grasp these complexities have often foundered. The best, and certainly most troubling, example of conceptual confusion can be found in the most recent attempt by Pentagon experts to define irregular warfare: “A violent struggle among state and nonstate actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population.”
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While this view captures some sense of irregular warfare arising in unequal fights between nations and, say, networks, it misses the notion that either the weak
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the strong may resort to special operations, insurgency, and terrorism, using small units. Further, this official document—issued on the sixth anniversary of 9/11—reflects a curious lack of attention to the idea that irregular warfare may be employed by a standing military in a general conflict.

Academic attempts to understand irregular warfare have been either too inclusive or restrictive. For example, one of the latest texts covers insurgency and terrorism, but excludes military special operations—and then adds such events as civil war, revolution, and coup d’état.
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The range of battlefield special operations, to which most militaries show at least some attention, is missed. Further, one need only look to the American Revolution and the Civil War to see that these types of conflicts may be conducted in a mix of conventional and irregular ways. The same is true of overthrowing a sitting government from within. The fascist generals who sought control of Spain in 1936 did so primarily by means of a conventionally waged civil war that saw nearly a million Spaniards killed.

Efforts to simplify the concept of irregular warfare have tended to slight the complex elements that are so necessary to a proper understanding of the phenomenon. More than twenty years ago the notion of “fourth-generation warfare” was introduced—the four generations represented by line-and-column musketry some centuries ago, fire and movement tactics, mobile maneuvering, and, most recently, insurgency.
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The problem with this formulation—which is wildly popular within the U.S. military—is that the generational phenomenon simply doesn’t exist historically. The Mongols, a completely mounted force, were masters of mobile maneuver nearly four centuries
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massed volley fire. Insurgents predated the Mongols by more than a millennium, if one goes back to the Sicarii Zealots who opposed the Roman occupation of Judea. And so on. The generational concept is simply inaccurate. Better to think in terms of conventional and irregular warfare always coexisting, sometimes quite uneasily, with one or the other ascendant in different eras.

The second major attempt to organize our thinking about irregular warfare came in the early 1990s with the introduction of the notion of “asymmetric conflict.” Initially the idea was limited to explaining why weak nations sometimes attack their betters and how the use of innovative military means helps make this possible.
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After 9/11 this concept was embellished to include any acts an aggressor might undertake that a more “civilized” defender would refrain from imitating: attacks with chemical weapons, actions directly against the environment, hostage taking, and a host of other forms of violence, most associated with terrorism.
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But this concept too has a limitation: it falls afoul of the problem that virtually all warfare consists of actions intended to be asymmetric. The checkerboard deployment scheme of ancient Rome’s many legionary maniples was an asymmetric response to the massed Hellenistic phalanx—but it was regular, not irregular, warfare. Lord Nelson’s notion of “breaking the line” of opposing ships was an asymmetric response to classic line-ahead naval formations. The tank was an asymmetric technological response to trench warfare. Military affairs have long been the realm of the asymmetric, whether having to do with the irregular or not.

This brief survey of definitions brings us back to the need to focus on the heart of the matter: small units, used creatively across the three fundamental forms of irregular warfare: insurgency, terror, and special operations. At least one definition has been advanced that reflects this formulation and provides a common root for thinking about all of irregular warfare. It comes from the German nobleman, legal scholar, and World War II paratroop commander Baron Friedrich August von der Heydte. Writing in 1972, at the outset of what is considered the modern age of terror, the year of the Olympic massacre in Munich, he held that irregular warfare was a type of conflict

in which the parties are not large units, but small and very small action-groups, and in which the outcome is not decided in a few large battles, but the decision is sought, and ultimately achieved, in a very large number of small, individual operations, robberies, acts of terrorism and sabotage, bombings and other attacks. Irregular warfare is “war out of the dark.”
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Here von der Heydte keys on the organizational element that defines this mode of operations—the dominance of small units of action—and links it to the three forms of violence embraced by irregular warfare. He even goes an important step further, associating irregular warfare with long, attritional struggles aimed at wearing down the enemy, rather than on short, sharp wars that may be won in a single decisive battle, or a few victories strung close together.

This emphasis on protracted, small-scale conflict may provide us with the most important clue to understanding what it takes to master irregular warfare. We are used to thinking of the great strategists and tacticians as squaring off against each other, after preliminary maneuvering, in brief, bloody, decisive battles between large armies or fleets: Scipio and Hannibal at Zama in 202 B.C.E.; Marlborough and Tallard at Blenheim in 1704; and, during the Napoleonic Wars, Nelson and Villeneuve at Trafalgar in 1805, with Wellington and Bonaparte at Waterloo ten years later. Alternately, when only one master was at work, we think of slashing campaigns like the series of battles fought by the heavy cavalry of the Byzantine general Belisarius, who in the sixth century restored much of the territory of the collapsed western Roman Empire, or the vast swift conquests of the Mongols under Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century.

But in irregular warfare there are virtually no set-piece battles; there is no armored, high-speed blitzkrieg
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Far from quickly settling the fates of peoples, irregular campaigns are generally slow and cumulative. Think more of the example of Vietnamese general Giap who, for the most part, hewed to a strategy of slowly wearing down his opponents—first the French, later on the Americans—over a period of decades. Terror is intended to work in the same manner, gradually breaking the adversary’s will to resist with continual small actions. This is surely al Qaeda’s strategy today.

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What then are the traits associated with mastery of the art of irregular warfare? Given the protracted nature of this mode of conflict, it seems clear that patience must be one of the virtues of the commander of irregulars. Beyond this there seems to be a rough divide between what one might label “operators” and “planners.” Operators in irregular warfare are to be found out at the leading edge of the fight—like Robert Rogers, the pioneering ranger leader; John Paul Jones, the Revolutionary sea raider; or Nathan Bedford Forrest, the great Confederate cavalry commander of the Civil War. Skillful planners of irregular warfare campaigns include the American Revolutionary leader Nathanael Greene, Vietnamese general Giap, and—it must be said—Osama bin Laden. Sometimes the operator and the planner are one person, as was the case with Cochise, the great Native American leader who inspired the Apaches to fight exceptionally effectively against near hopeless odds. T. E. Lawrence was another hybrid in that his strategic vision was as good as his desert survival skills and his demolitions expertise. As the modern phenomenon has unfolded over the past 250 years or so, the masters of irregular warfare have emerged from each of these three categories: the operator, the planner, and the hybrid leader.

Beyond individual qualities, how does one measure mastery? Is victory a prerequisite? This seems a sensible yardstick but does not account for the fact that most irregular warfare arises in situations where the material imbalance is great, the edge almost always to the conventional forces. That the more powerful side sometimes wins such wars, thanks to sheer weight of numbers and firepower—but not always, as Vietnam shows—should not be held against the skillful irregular who fights well and holds out for a long time against insuperable odds.

No, a victorious outcome alone cannot be the measure of mastery in irregular warfare, just as Hannibal and Napoleon are not removed from the ranks of the great captains of conventional warfare because they were ultimately defeated. Planning and fighting well, and demonstrating an ability to persist in the face of great adversity, are traits one must also associate with mastery.

Fighting well in irregular settings may still involve some of the canonical principles of conventional war, the ideas and maxims developed and refined over at least the past two millennia. The most salient conventional concept is that of mass. Strategy often demands moving the largest number of forces over the greatest distance in the shortest time. In the words of the rebel raider Nathan Bedford Forrest, victory goes to those who can get there “fustest with the mostest.” A related point is to hit the enemy with as much of your force as possible at a point where he is the least concentrated and least prepared to absorb your blow. This formulation, perhaps the most important in conventional warfare, was the key to Lord Nelson’s sea victory at Trafalgar as well as to the successful run of armored blitzkrieg campaigns by the Germans in the early years of World War II. Almost all conventional conflicts reconfirm the importance of massing one’s forces at the decisive point.

But the commander of irregular forces is almost always heavily outnumbered and outgunned, often at the very point of contact with the enemy. Thus something other than expertise in maneuvering massed forces is required. In the irregular realm, this something else is stealth. Irregulars’ small numbers often allow them to approach undetected, enabling them to strike by surprise—a key factor from World War II commando raids to the al Qaeda attacks on 9/11. Alternately, even when detected, the small size of the irregular force conveys an advantage in speed over larger, bulkier foes. For example, Robert Rogers and his rangers were detected on their approach to the village of St. Francis—a base for French-inspired terror raids against British colonists during the 1750s—and were soon pursued by large numbers of converging French and Indian forces. But the rangers had a speed advantage over their pursuers and were able to reach the target in time to inflict a stinging blow on the enemy. Their edge in mobility also served them well on the retreat afterward; only the reluctance of British regulars to come to their aid on the last leg of the march home caused most of the casualties the rangers suffered.

The edge conveyed by stealth, surprise, and speed has been described by one of the U.S. military’s finest irregular warriors, the Navy SEAL (the acronym stands for sea-air-land) admiral William McRaven, as a form of “relative superiority” that must be exploited swiftly because it tends to erode nearly as quickly.
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Thus a master of irregular warfare must understand that speed and stealth can to some extent substitute for mass. The small size of irregular units—whether they are special operators, insurgents, or terrorists—also allows them a much wider range of movements likely to go undetected. It is hard to move a brigade or a division very far under cover. But a dozen members of a Special Forces A-Team? Sixteen SEALS in a platoon? Nineteen terrorists boarding planes simultaneously? Much easier to go much farther undetected.