by Max Boot
Considering that Homo sapiens has been roaming the earth for at least a hundred fifty thousand years and his hominid ancestors for millions of years before that, the era of conventional conflict is the blink of an eye in historical terms.14 Moreover, the process of state formation and with it army formation took considerably longer in other parts of the world. “Even as late as 1492,” notes the geographer and historian Jared Diamond, “all of North America, sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific islands, and most of Central and South America didn’t have states.”15 In some of those places, states emerged only during the past century, and their ability to carry out such basic functions as maintaining an army is tenuous at best. Somalia today represents one of the most extreme examples of such state failure, but many other territories are not far behind.
Throughout most of our species’ long and bloody slog, both before the development of urban civilization and since, warfare has been carried out primarily by bands of loosely organized, ill-disciplined, lightly armed volunteers who disdain open battle. They prefer to employ stealth, surprise, and rapid movement to harass, ambush, massacre, and terrorize their enemies while trying to minimize their own casualties through rapid retreat when confronted by equal or stronger forces. These are the primary features both of modern guerrilla warfare and of primitive, prestate warfare whose origins are lost in the mists of prehistoric time and which has only recently been extinguished in the remote jungles of Amazonia and the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Guerrillas therefore may be said to engage in the world’s second-oldest profession, behind only hunting, which draws on the same skill set.
Since at least the days of the Greeks and Romans, primitive warfare and by extension guerrilla warfare has seldom been accorded much respect by Western soldiers and scholars, who have tended to view it as an “irregular,” “unmanly,” even “dastardly” activity and to label its practitioners barbarians, criminals, or savages.16 To take a typical example, Massachusetts colonists in the 1600s complained that Indians fought “in a secret, skulking manner, lying in abushment, thickets, and swamps by the way side, and so killing people in a base and ignoble manner.”17
It is not hard to see why prejudice against guerrillas has been so pervasive. Prestate warriors are, in the words of John Keegan, “cruel to the weak and cowardly in the face of the brave”18—precisely the opposite of what professional soldiers have always been taught to revere. They refuse to grapple face-to-face with a strong foe until one side or the other is annihilated in the kind of warfare immortalized, if not invented, by the Greeks.
Battles among nonstate peoples have often consisted of nothing more than two lines of warriors decked out in elaborate paint shouting insults at one another, making rude gestures, and then discharging spears, darts, or arrows from such long range that they inflict few casualties. Primitive societies lack an organizational structure that can force men on pain of punishment to engage in costly close-quarters combat in defiance of a basic instinct for self-preservation. This has led some observers to suggest that nonstate peoples do not engage in warfare at all but rather in “feuds” or “vendettas” that are for the most part ceremonial and have little in common with “true” war as practiced at Cannae, Agincourt, or Gettysburg. After moving to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, for example, a professional English soldier wrote with scorn that Indians “might fight seven years and not kill seven men” because “this fight is more for pastime, than to conquer and subdue enemies.”19
What such critics overlook is that battles constitute only a small part of primitive warfare. Most casualties are inflicted not in these carefully choreographed encounters but in what comes before and after—in the stealthy forays of warriors into the territory of their neighbors. The anthropologist Lawrence Keeley writes, “One common raiding technique (favored by groups as diverse as the Bering Straits Eskimo and the Mae Enga of New Guinea) consisted of quietly surrounding enemy houses just before dawn and killing the occupants by thrusting spears through the flimsy walls, shooting arrows through doorways and smoke holes, or firing as the victims emerged after the structure had been set afire.”20
Following such an attack, the raiders might disperse before large numbers of enemy warriors could arrive, only to return a few days later, hoping to catch another enemy village unawares. All adult men participate in this type of warfare, and quarter is seldom asked or given. Surrender for warriors is not an option; if they suffer the dishonor of defeat, they are either killed on the spot or, as was common among the Iroquois Indians of northeastern North America, they might be tortured to death and then partially eaten. At the end of such an encounter, the victor rapes the loser’s women, enslaves them and their children, burns crops, steals livestock, destroys the village.
Primitive warfare has been consistently deadlier than civilized warfare—not in total numbers killed (tribal societies are tiny compared with urban civilizations) but in the percentage killed. The Dani tribesmen of New Guinea, the Dinka of northeast Africa, the Modoc Indians of California, the Kalinga headhunters of the Philippines, and other nonstate peoples studied by ethnographers over the past two centuries suffered considerably higher death rates from warfare annually (sometimes five hundred times higher) than did the most war-ravaged European countries, such as twentieth-century Germany and Russia. The average tribal society loses 0.5 percent of its population in combat every year.21 If the United States suffered commensurately today, that would translate into 1.5 million deaths, or five hundred 9/11’s a year. Archaeological evidence confirms that such losses are no modern anomaly: at one early burial site in the Sudan, Djebel Sahaba, which was used sometime between 12,000 and 10,000 BC, 40 percent of the skeletons showed evidence of stone arrowheads; many had multiple wounds.22 That shows the ubiquity and deadliness of warfare at a time when, to the modern eye, guerrillas would have been barely distinguishable in intellectual sophistication from gorillas.
There was little ideology or strategy behind the kind of war waged among tribal warriors in prerecorded times or even more recently. They did not employ “lightning raids by ad hoc companies,”23 in the words of one modern scholar, because they concluded, after careful consideration of all the alternatives, that this was the surest way to hurt their foes. They fought as they did simply because it was the way their fathers had always fought, and their grandfathers before them. It was all they knew. That sort of instinctual guerrilla warfare remained the commonest kind until recent centuries.
What changed with the coming of the first civilizations is the kind of foes that tribal warriors confronted. Before circa 3000 BC, tribal guerrillas fought exclusively against other tribal guerrillas. While that type of tribe-on-tribe warfare continued long after 3000 BC, it was supplemented and sometimes supplanted by warfare pitting tribes and rebels against newly formed states. The history of ancient Mesopotamia—a time long before the events described in the Bible or the Iliad—is replete with struggles between guerrilla-style raiders and the world’s first states. It is not much of a stretch to describe these conflicts as the world’s first insurgencies and counterinsurgencies.
4.
AKKAD AND THE ORIGINS OF INSURGENCY
Mesopotamia, 2334–2005 BC
THE VERY FIRST empire on record and, not coincidentally, the first standing army were built by Sargon, an early-day Saddam Hussein whose capital was Akkad, a city believed to have been located near modern-day Baghdad. According to legend, his was an early rags-to-riches tale. He was said to have begun life like Moses, an orphan who was sent floating in a wicker basket on the river and was found by a farmer. He rose from being cupbearer to the king of the city-state of Kish to being king of all he surveyed. Between 2334 and 2279 BC, he subdued what is now southern Iraq along with western Iran, northern Syria, and southern Turkey. Victorious in thirty-four battles, he called himself “king of the world.”
The secret of Akkad’s military success is unclear, but it may have been its possession of a powerful composite bow ti
pped with bronze arrowheads, whose impact has been called “as revolutionary, in its day . . . as the discovery of gunpowder thousands of years later.” Other weapons included the lance, spear, javelin, mace, and battle-ax. Just as important was the maintenance of an extensive bureaucracy to fund and sustain Akkad’s army, providing soldiers with such essentials as “bread and beer.”
This military machine was kept fully employed not only in seizing new domains but also in holding on to those already conquered. Defeated cities constantly rose up to resist imperial control. The Akkadians responded with what a modern scholar describes as “mass slaughter, enslavement, and deportation of defeated enemies, and the total annihilation of their cities.” Calling himself a “raging lion,” Sargon was faithful to the injunction of one of his gods, Enlil, who instructed him to show “mercy to no one.” One city after another was left, in the words of the ancient tablets, a “ruin heap.”
Sargon did not entirely neglect the need to win over his subjects, especially the Sumerians, who lived in Mesopotamia. He spread the Akkadian language and offered patronage to the arts. His daughter, Enheduanna, a princess, poet, and priestess who is often considered the world’s first author, wrote cuneiform verse celebrating the unity of Sumerian and Akkadian gods. This was intended to buttress Sargon’s legitimacy as a Semite to rule over Sumerians.
But after Sargon’s death, revolts rippled across the empire, and they were only temporarily suppressed by Sargon’s son Rimush, who “annihilated” rebellious cities. Rimush’s older brother, Manishtushu, who may have usurped his throne and murdered him, found that “all the lands . . . which my father Sargon left had in enmity revolted against me.”
Weakened by incessant uprisings, Akkad was finally brought down around 2190 BC by neighboring mountain peoples, including the Hurrians, Lullubi, Elamites, and Amorites. The most devastating were the Gutians from the Zagros Mountains of southwestern Iran, who have been described as “fierce and lawless barbarians.” Mesopotamian inscriptions described the highlanders, who may be said to have been the first successful guerrillas on record, in terms that would be instantly familiar to Europeans or Chinese of a later age as “the fanged serpent of the mountain, who acted with violence against the gods . . . who took away the wife from the one who had a wife, who took away the child from the one who had a child, who put wickedness and evil in the land of Sumer.” Such has ever been the reaction of settled farmers ravaged by rootless “barbarians.”24
After the fall of Akkad, nomads who moved on foot, not on horseback (domestication of horses and camels was just beginning), swarmed all over Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine for two hundred years. Brigands and pirates came in their wake, there being no imperial authority to keep the peace. The city dwellers of Sumeria looked with fear and loathing upon these outsiders—so capable militarily, so uncouth culturally. They were described as a “ravaging people, with the instincts of a beast, like wolves,” and they were denigrated as “men who ate not fish, men who ate not onions,” men who “stunk of camelthorn and urine.” (Camelthorn is a noxious weed native to Asia.)
In 2059 BC, the empire of Ur in southern Iraq erected a “Wall Facing the Highland” to keep nomads out of central Mesopotamia. This construction project wound up running over time and over budget because its builders were constantly harassed by Amorite nomads (“tent dwellers . . . [who] from ancient times have known no cities”), and in the end it could not provide lasting security any more than could the Great Wall of China or the Morice Line erected by the French in Algeria in the 1950s. In 2005 BC the Elamites, “the enemy from the highlands,” sacked Ur, turning the great city into a “ruined mound.” They left “corpses floating in the Euphrates” and reduced the survivors to refugees who, according to Mesopotamian tablets, were “like stampeding goats, chased by dogs.”25
5.
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
Persians vs. Scythians, 512 BC
THE ANCIENT CITY-STATES of Mesopotamia were the first polities to be ravaged by nomadic guerrillas. They were far from the last. Nomads would become history’s most pervasive and successful guerrillas.
The essential problem that confronted their enemies is simple to state but hard to resolve: How do you catch raiders? Unencumbered by elaborate equipment or lengthy supply trains, they have almost always been able to move faster than conventional military units. Their motto might as well be a modern phrase as simple as “Catch me if you can.” Most pursuers have failed. Notable early failures may be found in ancient Persia under the Achaemenid dynasty.
This was one of the greatest empires of the ancient world, with its capital first in Pasargadae and then in Persepolis. From colossal stone buildings ringed by imposing columns, bureaucrats presided over a vast realm broken down into provinces governed by satraps (governors), ruled according to a complex body of law, funded with an efficient system of tax collection and some of the world’s first banks, linked together by all-weather highways and a horse-borne postal system, and defended by a crack army whose elite were known as the “Immortals.”
The architect of Persia’s rise was King Cyrus II (“the Great”), of whom the Greek soldier-scholar Xenophon wrote in glowing terms that he “struck all men with terror and no one tried to withstand him; and he was able to awaken in all so lively a desire to please him that they always wished to be guided by his will.”26 Sadly, Cyrus’s magic did not work with the nomads of the steppe. He met his end in 529 BC, apparently while campaigning against Massagetae tribesmen in Central Asia.27
He was succeeded by a young lance bearer, Darius, who seized the throne from one of Cyrus’s sons. Darius, also styled “the Great,” was more fortunate than his predecessor, but not much more successful in his clashes with the Scythians, another race of steppe nomads who were closely related to the Massagetae. The Scythians and Massagetae were cut from essentially the same cloth as all of the horse-riding nomads or seminomads—Huns, Xiongnu, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Seljuks, Mongols, Tatars, Manchus—who would terrorize the Eurasian plain until the eighteenth century AD. They also had more than a bit in common with the Sioux, Cheyenne, Apache, and other tribes that would attack American settlements in the trans-Mississippi West in the nineteenth century. All of the Eurasian tribes migrated with their herds of sheep, goats, horses, cattle, camels, and sometimes yaks across the grasslands of Asia in search of suitable pasture. They survived on whatever their livestock could provide—from meat and milk for their diet to leather and hides for their clothing and dung for their fires—and they lived in tents known as yurts. Their hard way of life made them expert horsemen and archers far more adept at warfare than most of the sedentary peoples they encountered. Every man was a warrior, and the average warrior’s ferocity was legendary. The world’s first historian, Herodotus, wrote in the fifth century BC that the “Scythian soldier drinks the blood of the first man he overthrows in battle” and makes a drinking cup out of the skull. Some Scythians, Herodotus claimed, even flayed “the right arms of their dead enemies” and made capes or quiver covers out of their skin.28
Darius decided to punish these ferocious raiders for their raids into his territory. Around 512 BC, he crossed the Bosporus over a pontoon bridge—an impressive feat of military engineering—and advanced with hundreds of thousands of soldiers through the Balkans into what is today southern Ukraine. Much to Darius’s frustration, the Scythians refused to stand and fight. Knowing they were too weak to counter the Persians in open battle, the Scythians chose to retreat, Herodotus wrote in his Histories, “driving off their herds, choking up all the wells and springs as they retreated, and leaving the whole country bare of forage.”29 Darius became so frustrated that he sent a plaintive message to Idanthyrsus, the king of the Scythians, demanding, “Thou strange man, why dost thou keep on flying before me. . . . [C]ome, let us engage in battle.”
Idanthyrsus sent back a disdainful reply: “That is my way, Persian. . . . We Scythians have neither towns nor cultivated lands, which might induce us, through fear of their
being taken or ravaged, to be in any hurry to fight with you. . . . [W]e shall not join battle, unless it pleases us.”30
This illuminating exchange neatly summarizes the gulf of incomprehension that separates “regular” armies from their “irregular” foes. It could have taken place between virtually any civilized king and nomad chieftain in the ancient or medieval world or between many a president or prime minister and guerrilla or terrorist leader today. At least Darius was smarter than many commanders who have been in his sandals. He knew when he was beaten. He trudged back to Persia with his army still intact.
6.
“CREATE A DESERT”
The Origins of Counterinsurgency in
Assyria and Rome, 1100 BC–AD 212
MOST ANCIENT EMPIRES responded to the threat of guerrilla warfare, whether waged by nomads from the outside or rebels from the inside, with the same strategy. It can be boiled down to one simple word: terror. Ancient monarchs sought to inflict as much suffering as possible to put down and deter armed challenges. Since, with a few exceptions such as Athens and the Roman Republic, ancient polities were monarchies or warrior states, rather than constitutional republics, they seldom felt bound by any moral scruples or by any need to appease public opinion—neither “public opinion” nor “human rights” being concepts that they would have understood. (The former phrase was not coined until the eighteenth century, the latter not until the twentieth, although the ideas they describe have been traced back to ancient Greece.)