Dragonwars

Armed Struggle and the Conventions of Modern War

J. Bowyer Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351290746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

For centuries international order has been troubled by small wars, insurrections, and revolts--low intensity conflicts. With the implosion of the Soviet empire many thought such violence could be eradicated through the growth of democracy, open societies, and increased productivity and education. Instead the world remains filled with turmoil, pogroms, famine, civil war, rebellion, and terror, often instigated by armed and dangerous zealots. To Americans such killers seem alien and inexplicable, fanatics without reason, beyond the reach of conventional containment or retaliation. J. Bowyer Bell here explores the psychological and strategic ecosystems (which he terms dragon worlds) of modern political violence and suggests how America might effectively deal with it.Dragonwars combines analysis with historical examples drawn from America's involvement with armed struggle in Lebanon, Central Am-erica, Greece, and Vietnam. In each instance, Bell argues, American policy was flawed by lack of empathy and historical understanding combined with a belief that failure could be traced to mistakes in details and procedures. The break up of the old bipolar U.S.-Soviet confrontation released suppressed ambitions, tribal greed, and greater flexibility for the small player. With new technologies of terror, zones of security will become smaller, since open societies present attractive targets for zealots. Bell rejects the notion that massive force can effect a swift and final result. Instead, a new type of warrior will be required; one versed in history and empathetic to the belief-systems of the dragonworlds in which they are deployed.Bell acknowledges that his proposals run counter to American belief and practice, but argues that in the face of insoluble conflicts, incremental advantages, through limited altered global arena, Dragonwars will prove an indispensable guide for policymakers, military planners, historians, and political scientists.

Part I

Introduction to Dragonwars

1

The Revolutionary Ecosystem and the Armed Struggle

For centuries international order has been troubled by small wars, insurrections, revolts—low-intensity conflict. During the decades of the Cold War, these struggles were shaped to great power interest, seemingly a by-product of a strategic nuclear stalemate that usually reduced conflict to the edges of events. Idealists assumed that after the implosion of the Soviet empire such violence could be eradicated, justice institutionalized, and wrong answered. And Americans were apt to be the most optimistic of all. A few even felt that history had ended in 1989, that all just grievances could be accommodated. The open society, the democratic system, increased education and productivity would become the norm: if history was not quite over then the future order boded well.

Instead the new world order has been filled with turmoil, pogroms and terror, famine, civil war, and rebellion. Some had always accepted that such was a normal aspect of any global system and largely beyond remedy. In any case there had been conventional wars, the Israelis and Arabs, India and Pakistan, even the United Kingdom and Argentina. And there had been unconventional conflicts arising from turmoil on the margins, unresolved quarrels, the impact of development. The pessimists anticipated more of the same: the old world turmoil but without the strategic nuclear confrontation.

Americans were by nature optimistic and America dominated the counsels of the new world order. It could impose force at a distance. In theory such power could be effectively deployed against those de-termined on deploying violence for undesirable or impossible ends. In practice the cost was often greater than the returns. In post-Vietnam America no one wanted to right Asian wrongs or to pacify Africa. America, NATO, the West was rarely willing to sacrifice for a fair, just, and tidy world. At times intervention for special purpose or the general good was, indeed, initiated by Washington, by NATO, by regional interests, or by the United Nations. Such exercises seldom evolved quite as planned. So the world was seemingly still filled with uncompromising zealots, often armed and dangerous. Even famine and plague were often beyond reach of decency. At times stability could be imposed as in Haiti or the unsavory deposed as in Panama but just as often, in Lebanon or Somalia or Southeast Asia, results were not as intended.

Some violence was seemingly inevitable, had deep roots, resulted from implacable aspirations, high ideals as well as greed and malice. Some lands, like Palestine, had been twice promised. Some states, most states in Africa, were charades incapable of imposing order. And then, even within the heartlands of the West, zealots had appeared seeking radical change at once by means of terror. None of this was new, only more visible to the media and to Americans in the last decade of the century.

There had always been wars, the unexpected appearance of radicals and zealots, and the problem for the powerful in responding to unconventional armed challenges. For two centuries dissenters to the system had sought not an end to history but to drive it in a different direction. The faithful had repeatedly found the truth and employed force in its name. For some, Islam or Mao revived was the answer. Others wanted to create new nations or protect old ones, bring the people to power or punish hereditary enemies. Some had no truth but only the habits of the past or the needs and greed of the present. None of this was really new. Certainly, with the rise of popular nationalism during the French revolution, the global state system had been prone to violence. Since then there were those who pursued their dream of a new nation or a liberated class, those who sought to change history. These were rebels eager to seize the state, colonists opposed to empire, armed advocates of classes or causes. The era of nation-states was an age of violence, discrete, local, regional, and general, great wars and small.

A constant in modem times was recourse to limited force. There were small wars between states and small wars against states and even transnational rebels waging war of a sort against whole systems. There were wars for the tribe, for the faith, for the people: all small, often offering a muddle of causes, each different and each much the same. So for two centuries there have been low-intensity conflicts, Dragonwars. The collapse of the Soviet empire not only changed nothing but the context of such wars, but it also initiated a new set of conflicts within the successor dynasties.

Traditionally such little wars come and go. Only a few are protracted. Only a few trouble the great powers or even the historian. Most attacks on the system simply disappear, changes made or the country pacified, the empire withdraws from the margins, nothing much changes. In recent times times those involved on the margins have emerged in the capitals of the post-industrial world bringing terror to the world stage. The developed world of instant communication, mass politics, a post-industrial economy, advanced technology has in turn generated rebels with impossible causes and absolute convictions. No matter, most often the rebels end in shallow graves, footnote to local history. The weak rarely win. The center holds and things do not fall apart.

On the other hand, in some cases the center does not hold. The weak grow strong or the strong have no staying power. Revolution and insurrection may be dubious ventures but have imposed spectacular change, turned China communist, help destroy the great empires of Europe, replaced the weak and vulnerable in the Third World.

Some conflicts are even less ordered that the classical insurgences. Beyond the core of the post-modern world, there are still bandit zones, provinces beyond the law, and new nations where the regime does not rule but exploits, does not engender loyalty and cannot impose order. The revolutionaries and rebels, the fanatics and the transient terrorists, the irregulars of the Third World generate the violent muzak of the new world order but rarely if ever great change.

Almost all of these low-intensity campaigns are pursued with similar unconventional tactics. The unconventional means—insurrection, the way of the guerrilla, urban or rural, the use of terror—become convention. And so the unconventional generated a broad spectrum of response: experts, libraries, academic careers, military academies, tactics, techniques, and special units. These are focused on the means the weak used to achieve power. To counter the deployed assets of the conventional the classic underground shapes a congenial ecosystem that guarded the revealed truth, allowed the faithful to persist but imposed severe penalties on capacity. This underground is a perceptual creation. Those underground may spend their lives seemingly no differently than before, attend school, hold a job, deliver the milk, but all the time are armed agents of change, driven by revelation. They, of course, may be guerrillas in the outback, soldiers of a bandit army, irregulars in a bush war, but are as often part of the everyday world— gunmen only on call, defenders only when attacked. Their world is not only the visible but also that beyond easy reach, an unannounced agenda, priorities that are not those of the conventional, habits and customs arising from the faith and necessity. They pose their own perceptions against real power.

While many go underground as idealists, the faithful, possessed of the truth that could be deployed as advanced ideology or a return to the religious basics, thus forming classical revolutionary ecosystems, many others pursue armed struggle as vocation: traditional bandits of the outback or vengeful tribesman, defenders at the crossroads or rural agitators burning bams. Some are driven underground by the power of the center. All, however, to some extent, were and are shaped by aspirations denied. All find a necessity for recourse to violence. And all must contend with the capacities of the system, usually the state system. All share the necessity to operate out of weakness, against the strong, operate often in secrecy, in opposition without recognized legitimacy or often hope of swift victory. Their war is irregular, their cause denied, their hidden world safe only by recourse to unconventional tactics. Thus the faithful enter the underground, create their own hidden world, both real and imagined, and so engage in a protracted armed struggle. This is an asymmetrical war that opposes conventional power and assets with the will of the dedicated. For those underground, victory is promised by history not by tangible power. To win, their faith must persist until the will erodes the capacity of the center.

Not all those within a underground belong to a new and vital faith. Many who deploy unconventional tactics are conventional. Those without ideals but appetites or habits deploy not perception but tactics and commitment that generate conflicts asymmetrical in assets as much as in perceptions. These are the bandits or warlords who rely on custom, lack of options and tradecraft to persist. Persistence often is the great convention of such an unconventional campaign, persist for gain, persist in loyalty to the old, persist for lack of alternatives, and by necessity persist out of sight in the outback or underground. There even the mad and the criminal may find haven.

Those in control, those with legitimacy, recognition, power and responsibility, tangible assets, and possession of the state tend to prevail: not always because then tomorrow would always be like yesterday. At times some at the center lack capacity and so can be defeated. When those in charge are defeated in a swift coup or by simple intimidation, conspiracy and audacity will do rather than an underground. Then no protracted struggle need be contemplated. Even when the underground persists, most armed struggles fail, simply later rather than sooner. Truly protracted campaigns like that of the Irish Republican Army or the Palestinians are the exception and offer classical examples of the armed struggle—an evolving challenge to existing order by those too persistent to ignore but not powerful enough to triumph. Their tactics mimic those of classical irregulars, the martial tribes, warlords, truculent clans that seek to preserve history rather than accept change just as the bandit can be taken as a rebel.

The chaos of great wars and the failure of will to maintain empire meant that in this century the vocation of the irregular—despite the risks—was not without triumphs. At times the successes came against those who felt no need to defend the existing order, but at other times— Ireland, Algeria, Vietnam, or Cuba—against substantial opposition. Mao in China did indeed change history. Some struggles found accommodation, as in South Africa, or moved on to an end game as in Palestine and Northern Ireland. And some of the traditionalists, the irregulars of Yemen or Afghanistan or Somalia, managed to defend history against the center. No matter the particular outcome, the global order, old or new, with or without the Cold War, generated thousands of underground movements dedicated to an armed struggle in thousands of irregular campaigns.

For a century each decade has seen special examples, particularly rich arenas of disturbance. Africa or India gripped by ethnic and religious slaughter, once Latin America and before that China, province of warlords. The filter of the Cold War simply hid a continuing phenomena: the struggle for old causes or new, in the outback or in the capitals of Europe, unconventional violence by those without countervailing power but compelling interests opposed to the state. If some of these rebellions are no more than bandit forays, others are modem classics: armed struggles arising from deep ideological commitment and displaying all the techniques and tactics of modem insurrection. These may threaten the center and often trouble international order. A few escalate into conventional war and some are chronic. Visibility often depends not on scale—tens of thousands may die unnoted in the south Sudan or in the mountains of central Asia without notice—but on perception, the media, or the priorities of the center. This is obviously true when the campaign takes place at the center, in Rome or in New York. Yet, the perception of national strategic interests has from time to time provoked a massive conventional response to a marginal arena as in Vietnam or Algeria or Afghanistan.

The most classics examples are wars pursued by those who, possessing the absolute truth, would transform the future. They attack from the protection of a perceptual ecosystem beyond reach of all but the righteous. There underground, in a Dragonworld quite unlike the everyday, committed to a dream but confined by incapacity, the faithful persist in a long war that rarely produces the future imagined but most often assures in the fullness of time despair, defeat, and ruin. For at least two centuries, each classical example has been shaped as an armed struggle: revolutionary violence by the few seeking to impose a vision on the many, seeking to change objective reality by recourse to the gun and a dream. For analysis the grievance and the goal—a communist society, the return of the king, an Irish republic, or a fascist regime—are less significant than the energy supplied by commitment. Revolution is not the province of one special ideology, even if for most the language of the Left has predominated since the arrival of the industrial age, nor best understood by the physical nature of the arena, a special history, or the societal factors of the time. What matters is the faith that generates energy that in the service of an armed struggle against entrenched state power can only be deployed in certain universal ways.

The dynamics of all armed struggles are much the same. In Italy the new fascists and the post-Mao communists were very different in aspiration but quite similar in their dynamics, in their underground existence, in their craft and assumptions, different but the same. And the Italian gunmen and terrorists shared much with those whose armed struggle was isolated in the altiplano of Peru or the streets of Beirut; even the defenders of Bosnia or the clan warlords of Somalia shared much more than guns and craft. There have been all manner of revolts. Alone those against the British Empire after 1944 included Arab and African nationalists, Zionists, conservative and pious Greek irredentists on Cyprus, Chinese communists in Malaya, Irish republicans, and elsewhere idealists, clansmen, socialists, liberals, and adventurers. And all of these armed struggles against the Crown—from the Mau Mau in Kenya to the National Liberation Front in Southern Arabia—were if different also were the same: energy protected by a perceptual defense and released in certain ways. Their prospects, as was the case with all underground regardless of the enemy, were everywhere limited by power and by the very nature of the protected ecosystem of the faith and persistence assured by special circumstances and the nature of the underground.

The great underground asset is the will founded on revealed truth. Maoist thought is more important than arms: the former is vital and the later can always be found, stolen, bought, manufactured. The faith, on the other hand, is revealed—one faith for Mao and another for the Moslem. Some have faith in the past or the tribe, are less incandescent in conviction but reassured by habit and ethos. The truth may vary, is often contradictory, at times can be found in in competition with other revelations. The intensity of the committed also may vary, can be found pure in Brigate rosse or the leadership of the Khmer rouge and only as a trace element in the anarchy of Liberia. There are all sorts of low-intensity conflict, some classical, some arising from greed or parochial issues. Even the classical revolutionary campaign is not rare. Over much of the century at any given moment, there have been hundreds of revolutionary undergrounds and many classics. The phenomena is common.

To the faithful, sooner rather than later, the only viable means to change the future appears this resort to the gun, to revolt. Some traditional defenders or tribal levies come with such a vocation: the gun as heritage and tool. The modem rebel is apt to be a convert to the gun, a volunteer to the underground. There in a world shaped by perceptions the faithful trust that will can overpower the state, for it is largely the state that controls the future. At times there are universal enemies but even then a state is apt to be prime enemy—the Great Satan dominated the West and so is enemy of Islam. Mostly an armed struggle is arena-bound, state opposed, may speak for a universal but kills the particular in one place, seeks Islam in Egypt or communism in Italy. The dream may be universal but the enemy is in the palace, the police, the regime, the empire.

An armed struggle may vary in intensity, vary in the numbers involved or the degree of turmoil. What is apt to matter the most is what the involved assume matters. The perception of observers may be in error as to the degree of intensity and of threat. Terror spectaculars may be the province of the few but add enormously to the sense of action. Killing in the outback may have little impact in bandit societies but the murder of Europeans by the Mau Mau shattered complacency in colonial Kenya. The direction of the campaign, the intensity of the struggle, the shape of the future is not determined by numbers, by data deployed, but by what is assumed is real, what matters matters.

To those underground revelation promises all. They are willing to take on an empire with a dozen faithful and a few revolvers. What those who must operate underground seek is a means to act strategically on the future by operations on the morrow. The tangible means can be acquired, the strategic promise of the truth is a gift achieved by analysis. This analysis usually imposes the responsibility to pursue a military campaign.

If the military action can be protracted, if the underground can protect the faithful, a campaign evolves, again each special yet again each driven by general currents. A rural post-Maoist insurrection has much in common with a neo-fascist terror campaign even if the action seems quite diverse. All those engaged in pursuing an armed struggle are involved in a thrust to orthodoxy, seek to deploy a legitimate army in the service of a recognized government that successfully controls the arena. Mao moved from a few gunmen fleeing capture in time through various stages to command real armies engaged in a real war. The hidden galaxy of the faith does not want to be hidden. All want to be able to discard the secrecy of a hidden ecosystem, not to rely on will and the legacy of history but on real power. They want to be an army with banners, a party with power, a movement that controls the future and the past. An armed struggle thus always seeks to control, to control by right as well as by power, to control the arena, control events, control time and place, people and history. This revolutionary will, no matter how intense, can seldom defeat reality imposed by tangible power. The index of books on revolution are filled with the acronyms of guerrilla movements long forgotten by all but specialists. The weak seldom win. Secrecy, a safe haven, a congenial hidden ecosystem of the faith, great cunning, dedication, talent, and audacity can and often do produce another failure. The Palestinians had almost everything and ended with almost nothing, and even this was something for mostly the center holds or at the end of empire withdraws only overt control and development expense to maintain interests in other ways. Still, there have always been those driven to arms by the requirements of their vision.

In the classical case those transformed by the dream persist until the will triumphs over overt power. Such an lethal asymmetrical dialogue is easily found in the modem world, if unevenly distributed. If the power at the center is too great, too brutal and efficient, too legitimate, there can be no revolt. Almost no one rises to achieve a blood sacrifice. And if center is too feeble to resist the faithful, there is no need for an armed struggle, an underground. A coup will do or simply...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part I: Introduction to Dragonwars
• Part II: The Dynamics of the Underground
• Part III: America and the Dragonwars
• Epilogue
• Sources
• Index