T.E. Lawrence on insurgency8
T.E. Lawrence, the British army officer who travelled with and advised the Arab Bedouin during the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turk rule in 1916–1918, wrote extensively. In a 1917 article he listed and elaborated 27 articles or practices outsiders like the British should follow to win over the trust of a specific people, the Bedouin. But his more general thoughts on guerrilla warfare are best gathered from a chapter in the autobiographical account of his role in the revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, first published in 1926. Confined to a tent due to illness, he reflected on the nature and conduct of the war of which he was a part, setting down his ‘shadowy principles’ for what would later be called insurgency. From his contemplations he concluded that a successful rebellion by what he referred to as ‘irregulars’ had to have: ‘an unassailable base, guarded not just from attack, but from the fear of attack’; a friendly population of which only 2 percent had to be active, and the rest quietly sympathetic so that movements were not betrayed; a technologically sophisticated enemy dependent on modes of communications and supply that were therefore vulnerable to disruption; and an enemy that was too weak in numbers as compared to the size of territory to effectively control it by means of interlocking fortified posts. The rebels themselves had to have ‘the virtues of secrecy and self-control, and the qualities of speed, endurance and independence’ from lines of supply, as well as the technical equipment necessary to paralyze the enemy’s communications.
A notable aspect of Lawrence’s strategic thought is that he focused on the support of the people, not the elimination of the enemy. ‘A province would be won’, he argued, ‘when we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of freedom. The presence of the enemy was secondary’ (emphasis added). Lawrence singled out the importance of individual members of the insurgency, contrasting them to the regular forces fighting on the battlefields of Europe: ‘Governments saw men only in mass; but our men, being irregulars, were not formations, but individuals. An individual death, like a pebble dropped in water, might make but a brief hole; yet rings of sorrow widen out therefrom. We could not afford casualties.’ Tactically he said the mode of conduct should be ‘tip and run’, using the smallest force in the quickest time at the farthest place. He likened the character of operations to that of naval war in mobility, ubiquity and independence of bases, rendering the rebel free, as are naval forces in command of the sea, ‘to take as much or as little of the war as he will’. But while the tactics were rapid, the overall battle would be long and protracted. Granted time, mobility, security and doctrine, the insurgent would prevail, not by destroying the enemy but by wearing him out through exhaustion.
In discussing the principles that emerged from his experience during the Arab Revolt, Lawrence developed a theoretical base that would have general application to future irregular wars. Many of his insights have endured. But they collectively comprised just a few pages in hundreds of historical recounting, and in this regard were not fully developed. It is with Mao Tse-tung that we first see the clear fusion of theory and practice in irregular war.
Mao Tse-tung on insurgency
Like many strategic thinkers considered in this volume, the leader of the Chinese Communist party and later founder of the People’s Republic of China was a prodigious writer but is best known for a particular work. Mao Tse-tung’s On Guerrilla Warfare, first penned during the Long March of 1935 and considered the basic text for revolutionary war, set out a strategy that he successfully implemented during and after World War Two, first against the Nationalists, then the Japanese, and later the Nationalists again. Looking at the Marxist, proletarian revolution of Russia Mao quickly realized that the methods of revolutionary war in an industrial society did not readily apply to the largely agrarian population of China. He therefore adapted his tactics and techniques to a peasant-based guerrilla war, his term for what we would today call insurgency because it went beyond tactics to include a specific revolutionary goal.
For Mao, guerrilla warfare was a weapon that a nation inferior in arms and military equipment could employ against a more powerful aggressor nation, and its pursuit in the Chinese context had as its goal the complete emancipation of the Chinese people. The core of his strategic thought is that successful insurgency involves seven fundamental steps: arousing and organizing the people; achieving internal unification politically; establishing bases; equipping forces; recovering national strength; destroying the enemy’s strength; and regaining lost territories.9 These seven steps were later intellectually organized into three ‘phases’, with the result that it has become common to speak of phases of revolutionary warfare. The first comprises consolidating base areas in isolated terrain and persuading inhabitants to support the movement, which gradually acquires the quality of ‘mass’; the second involves direct yet limited action against the enemy, including the use of terrorism and sabotage to procure arms and supplies and thereby equip the masses; and the third entails transforming guerrilla forces into a more orthodox establishment capable of engaging the enemy in a conventional battle.10
Like Callwell and Lawrence before him, Mao recognized that the general features of revolutionary war differ fundamentally from regular operations. Of overwhelming importance is the support of the people. Guerrilla warfare is revolutionary in nature, he argued, because if it is not to fail it must necessarily involve achieving political objectives that coincide with the aspirations of the people. Assistance, cooperation or, at a minimum, sympathy are critical: ‘guerrilla warfare derives from the masses and is supported by them [and] it can neither exist nor flourish if it separates itself from their sympathies’. In his well-quoted phrase, the people are the water and the troops are the fish, and the fish cannot live outside the water. Mao put forward three rules and eight remarks designed to achieve the support, or at least not to engender the hostility, of the people, including such things as being courteous, not stealing or breaking things, and paying for anything damaged.11
As for actual operations, Mao argued that basic guerrilla strategy must be based on alertness, mobility and attack. Conducting their activity in the enemy’s rear areas, guerrillas were to exterminate small enemy forces, harass large enemy forces, attack enemy lines of communications and force the enemy to disperse his strength. The influence of Sun Tzu is apparent in Mao’s thought: guerrillas are advised to withdraw when the enemy advances; harass him when he stops; strike him when he is weary; pursue him when he withdraws. Moreover, the revolutionary must be willing to carry out such activities over a period of years, if not decades, prolonging the struggle and making it into a protracted war. ‘There is in guerrilla warfare’, Mao stresses, ‘no such thing as a decisive battle’.12
David Galula on counterinsurgency
Whereas Lawrence and Mao provide the principles and rules of revolutionary war from the revolutionary’s perspective, David Galula, a French military officer who fought during the Algerian War in the late 1950s, presents a counterrevolutionary or, in his words, counterinsurgent approach. ‘Counterrevolutionary’, he argues, has a certain reactionary connotation, and thus he establishes ‘revolutionary war’ as the overall phenomenon, with insurgency and counterinsurgency two, yet very different, aspects of the same war. This is similarly the approach adopted in America’s 2006 counterinsurgency doctrine.13 In his book Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (1964), Galula notes that up until that time there had been numerous analyses of revolutionary war from the insurgent’s perspective, but few studies from the ‘other side’. After surveying the tenets of successful insurgency, he sets out to fill the counterinsurgent vacuum by defining the laws of such warfare, deducing from them its principles, and suggesting concrete courses of action.
The first law Galula determines is that the support of the population is as necessary for the counterinsurgent as it is for the insurgent. ‘What is the crux of the problem for the counterinsurgent?’ Galula asks and then answers. It is not to ‘clear’ a sector of insurgents,
for this can always be done; the counterinsurgent is, after all, the asymmetrically more powerful participant in military terms. Rather, the challenge is to keep it clear, and this cannot be done without the support of the population. This, he argues, is where the fight must be conducted – hence the now well-worn phrase of fighting for the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people – despite the fact, and recognizing, the insurgent has a head start in this area of some years or even decades. Victory for the counterinsurgent does not involve the destruction of an insurgent’s forces because he will readily set up shop elsewhere; rather, it entails the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population, enforced by the population. A large part of this, Galula implies, must be to address porous borders. ‘The border areas are a permanent source of weakness for the counterinsurgent’, he notes, and conversely ‘an advantage that is usually exploited by the insurgent’.14
Galula’s second law centres on how to gain the population’s support – of how not only to obtain its sympathy and approval, but also its active participation in the fight against the insurgent. In a variation of Lawrence’s view that only 2 per cent of the population need actively support the rebellion as long as the rest is passively supportive, Galula observes that in most cases a revolutionary war will have an active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active minority against the cause. The challenge for the counterinsurgent lies in eliminating the minority for the cause, while empowering the minority against it to rally the neutral majority. Galula offers no specific advice on how to do this, except to say that every operation, whether political, economic, military or social in nature must be geared to this end. He further points to the conditionality of the population’s support as a third law, noting that successful military and police operations against insurgents and their political organizations must take place in order to lift the threat of reprisals against the population. However desirable political, social and economic reforms might be, measures to ensure the population’s security must come first. These measures and operations, a fourth law, are necessarily intensive and long in duration. They must successively be applied area by area, not over the whole country at once, a method that in recent years has become known as the ‘oil spot’ approach. Galula sets out eight concrete steps of action a counterinsurgent should follow within a selected area, including such things as concentrating force to destroy the main body of insurgents, cutting off population links with the guerrillas, and winning over or suppressing insurgent remnants.15
Robert Thompson on counterinsurgency
Drawing on his experience in Malaya in the 1950s and also in Vietnam in the early years before the American ‘surge’ of 1965, British air force officer Sir Robert Thompson offered principles of counterinsurgency that echo or complement those of Galula. In his book Defeating Communist Insurgency (1966), Thompson points out that an insurgency cannot be treated in isolation from broader factors. It must be addressed in the context of an overall plan that covers, in addition to security measures, all political, social and economic aspects that bear on the insurgency – an approach not unlike that of today’s ‘whole-of-government’ or comprehensive approach. To do otherwise, he points out, would not bring long-term stability but only invite a return to insurgency.
Thompson also stresses the necessity that the counterinsurgent function in accordance with the law, however tempting it may be to treat guerrilla action outside the normal safeguards of domestic law. To do otherwise, he argues, would undermine the long-term legitimacy of the government that is trying to re-establish control. Like Galula, Thompson identifies the population, not the insurgent, as the primary target, in his case (because he is dealing with communism) recommending the subversive political organization be broken up and eliminated, so as to separate the fish from the water. Finally, he lends credence to Galula’s emphasis on securing specific base areas first, rather than all areas at once, working methodically outward. Thompson recommends the focus of this (oil spot) approach be first on urban and developed localities, where there is the greatest population, communications and economic activity, even if that means, at least in the short term, conceding remoter areas to the insurgent.16
Post-Cold War
Andrew Krepinevich on insurgency and counterinsurgency
As the notable European colonial powers of the early to mid-twentieth century it is perhaps not surprising that much of early strategic thought on revolutionary war was conducted by British and French practitioners. US thinkers on insurgency were slow to emerge, despite or perhaps because of America’s experience in Vietnam. One of the first was Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army and now director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, whose ideas figured extensively in the RMA literature of the 1990s (see Chapter 7), but whose strategic thought both before and since that time has included insurgency and counterinsurgency.
In his book The Army and Vietnam (1986), Krepinevich was one of the first to squarely face the US military’s failure to grasp the nature of the conflict in which it was involved. Krepinevich draws attention to the protracted nature of an insurgency, conducted methodically over years and decades; the three phases of insurgency popularized by Mao; and the fact insurgency focuses on gaining the support of the population, either through willing cooperation or as a result of threats, i.e. capturing the minds, if not the hearts, of the population. Counterinsurgency, in turn, requires winning the hearts and minds of this same population; addressing the conditionality of the population’s support by ensuring long-term security; securing the government’s base areas; separating the guerrilla forces from the population; and eliminating insurgent infrastructure. Counterinsurgency, Krepinevich points out, involves coordination among many government organizations, of which the military is only one.17
Most, if not all, of these themes were recognizable to anyone familiar with the earlier revolutionary warfare literature. Krepinevich’s contribution at this time was not so much to add new strategic thinking on revolutionary war as to highlight the fact that insurgency and counterinsurgency represent major departures from conventional war; that the US Army in the 1970s, still strongly influenced by World Wars One and Two and the Korean War, was neither trained nor organized to fight effectively in an insurgency conflict environment; and to make the case that low-intensity warfare and counterinsurgency represented the most likely arena of future conflict for the US Army – a commonplace perspective in the second decade of the twenty-first century, but no less than a radical argument in 1986.
In later work Krepinevich recasts important ideas into new language for added emphasis. He notes that the centre of gravity in counterinsurgency warfare is the target nation’s population, but goes further to point out that in the case where an external power provides a major portion of the counterinsurgent forces the population of that external power, too, becomes a centre of gravity in the conflict. His reference is to the United States, but it could equally have been to France and the Algerian insurgency that was Galula’s topic. On the central theme of population security Krepinevich highlights the wrongheadedness of focusing exclusively or prevalently on hunting down and killing insurgents. ‘Should counterinsurgent forces … focus their principal efforts on destroying insurgent forces, as is more typical of conventional warfare, and accord population security a lower priority, they will play into insurgents’ hands.’18 So, too, would they do so if they display a lack of patience, since insurgents can make a powerful argument to the population that while foreign troops will someday depart the insurgents will remain, and therefore must be accommodated. Finally, looking to the specific case study of Iraq in the mid-2000s, and echoing the perspective of Galula and Thompson before him, Krepinevich argues it was not possible to guarantee security to all of Iraq simultaneously. Rather, the approach should be one of an expanding oil spot which focuses at first on key (likely urban) areas, and gradually yet inexorably expands outward over time.
Martin van Creveld on non-trinitaria
n war
Military historian Martin van Creveld places insurgent and counterinsurgent activity, what he calls low-intensity warfare, into broad historical context. Writing in the waning days of the Cold War, van Creveld, an Israeli scholar at the University of Jerusalem, notes that for much of human history war was waged by non-state social entities. ‘Trinitarian’ warfare – a reference to Clausewitz’s observation that war as a total phenomenon reflects the interaction of a trinity of forces: the people, the army and the government – is a comparatively recent phenomenon, having dominated the international scene only since after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.
Van Creveld argued that the trinitarian, Clausewitzian universe, resting as it does ‘on the assumption that war is made predominantly by states or, to be exact, by governments’, was coming to an end, to be replaced by ‘non-trinitarian’ or ‘post-Clausewitzian’ warfare.19 Where there are no states, he notes, the threefold division into government, army and people does not exist. And the future global landscape, he argued, was likely to feature an increasing number of warmaking organizations of a non-state variety. Low-intensity conflicts were increasing, a product of the decolonization trend of the post-World War Two period which then took root, once decolonization ended, in other areas of the world. State-to-state warfare had already become comparatively rare, primarily as a result of the spread of nuclear weapons. In van Creveld’s view, states were set to lose their monopoly over armed violence. Indeed, they already had – it was just that ‘the military establishments of developed countries clung to trinitarian war because it was a game with which they had long been familiar and they liked to play’.20 But future war would not be waged by states and armies. Rather, it would be waged by non-state actors like terrorists and guerrillas.
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