The Theory and Practice of Irregular Warfare

Warrior-scholarship in counter-insurgency

Andrew Mumford, Bruno Reis, Andrew Mumford, Bruno Reis, Andrew Mumford, Bruno C Reis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780367601300
• eBook ISBN: 9781135020095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book offers an analysis of key individuals who have contributed to both the theory and the practice of counterinsurgency (COIN).

Insurgencies have become the dominant form of armed conflict around the world today. The perceptible degeneration of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan into insurgent quagmires has sparked a renewal of academic and military interest in the theory and practice of counterinsurgency. In light of this, this book provides a rigorous analysis of those individuals who have contributed to both the theory and practice of counterinsurgency: 'warrior-scholars'. These are soldiers who have bridged the academic-military divide by influencing doctrinal and intellectual debates about irregular warfare.

Irregular warfare is notoriously difficult for the military, and scholarly understanding about this type of warfare is also problematic; especially given the residual anti-intellectualism within Western militaries. Thus, The Theory and Practice of Irregular Warfare is dedicated to analysing the best perceivable bridge between these two worlds. The authors explore the theoretical and practical contributions made by a selection of warrior-scholars of different nationalities, from periods ranging from the French colonial wars of the mid-twentieth century to the Israeli experiences in the Middle East; from contributions to American counter-insurgency made during the Iraq War, to the thinkers who shaped the US war in Vietnam.

This book will be of much interest to students of counterinsurgency, strategic studies, defence studies, war studies and security studies in general.

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Constructing and deconstructing warrior-scholars

Andrew Mumford and Bruno C. Reis

The concept of the ‘warrior-scholar’ might appear oxymoronic. It welds together the experience of battle with the insights of education and reflection. Yet the notion of anti-intellectualism as dominating Western militaries is a popular one, and is often used to explain a fundamental disconnect between military service as a profession and the academic study of war. Yet the implication that war does not require careful thinking but only bold action is obviously wrong. Since the nineteenth century, schooling has become increasingly important to the emergence of a modern military profession in the West.¹ Fighting competently cannot be simply seen as the antithesis to thinking systematically, but the tension between the requirements of the two is nonetheless real for individuals as well as organizations. This tension will be the central subject of this book.

Warfare may require a more pragmatic, applied, policy-oriented kind of thinking. But the growing professionalization of military officers plus the development of mass armed forces during the past two centuries requires a degree of formalization in the shape of more uniform systematic thinking about the ‘nature of war and the keys of success in the battlefield’ that in earlier centuries might be left to more informal and intuitive command.² So even if most officers in modern mass armies do not need to be military thinkers, modern military professionalism and the enormous changes in the conduct of war in the course of the past two centuries have required the emergence of thinking soldiers. Some of them did so to the point of developing their own contributions to the body of thought about war.³ Even if few aspired to the development of a general theory of warfare, the creation of a new generation of ‘Clausewitzes’ is unrealistic. At least a few of those analysed here in this book – namely David Galula – did try to develop a specific theory of unconventional warfare for conventional armies.

A very good example of the importance of warrior-scholars as promoters of new thinking contributing to the adjusting of military organizations to new threats is their role in advocating counter-insurgency. The reawakening of academic and military interest in irregular warfare since the invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), which ended not in conventional triumph but, unexpectedly, in prolonged bloody counter-insurgencies, has given rise to a new generation of thinkers on the subject who have bridged the divide between theorizing and practice as part of what has been called a ‘new counterinsurgency era’.⁴ This is not surprising according to the historical cases analysed here going back to the end of the nineteenth century. Defending major changes in the military to deal more effectively with an unconventional enemy against which conventional militaries are particularly ill-equipped has, in the past, repeatedly required a lot of thinking and advocacy.

But who are these warrior-scholars that have played such a major role in developing modern counter-insurgency (COIN) in the last century? Going even deeper into the matter, what is a warrior-scholar and is that not a contradiction in terms?

The perceivably ingrained mistrust within Western military culture towards academia, when combined with the historically uncomfortable location of COIN in Western military doctrine, makes our attention all the more necessary. This is perhaps a reflection that irregular warfare is an intrinsically complex form of warfare to conceive strategically and intellectually. Complaints of this sort can be found as far back as the fifteenth century BC, with a Hittite king complaining about ‘irregulars’ who ‘did not dare to attack me in the daylight and preferred to fall on me by night’.⁵ These exact problems have led many armies over the centuries to simply ignore the exigencies of such wars. Sir Robert Thompson claimed that:

because conventional armies… have rarely succeeded in defeating guerrilla movements of any size in the past, there has been a tendency for Generals (and staff colleges) to minimise the role of guerrilla operations as one way of concealing their impotence.

He goes on to add that in this ‘Generals were not alone’, that in fact ‘a large portion of the intellectual community in the West… was even further behind’.⁶ Of course this may well be somewhat of an exaggeration, but there is a perceptible and enduring gap in attention to conventional and unconventional warfare.⁷

In the context of the emergence of modern warrior-scholars during the military Enlightenment in the eighteenth century there were entire volumes devoted to what become known as petit guerre/kleine Krieg, or small war, derived from the Spanish guerrilla. But these volumes were in fact referring to small-scale military operations that were usually conducted by small ‘detachments’ of often irregular forces on the fringes of major operations by regular forces. Acts of harassment and reconnaissance were undertaken by what today we would call ‘special forces’ of chasseurs/Jäger. Clausewitz was on the threshold of something new – guerrilla warfare or insurgency as we understand it – and writes about both. But while taking note of the latter, he does not really address in any depth the challenges of counter-insurgency.⁸ The emergence of a significant number of warrior-scholars in the field of counter-insurgency had to wait for the prolonged campaigns of colonial pacification in the nineteenth century.

The warrior-scholars analysed in this book represent some of the most interesting examples of these thinkers-cum-practitioners since that time. The book seeks to provide a variety of examples of these military thinkers on unconventional warfare across time and space, from well-known to little-known campaigns. We opted to try and widen the perspective by looking at military thinkers of different nationalities and involved in different campaigns, even if most of our attention will be focused on the decades after 1945, which have so often been the source of analogies for ‘fixing’ counter-insurgency today. But we do cover the time span of modern counter-insurgency, including one of the ‘founding fathers’ of military thought on small wars, General Charles Callwell, as well as one of the most influential, if now maligned, examples of a warrior-scholar today: General David Petraeus.

Why talk of ‘warrior-scholars’ and not simply of ‘military intellectuals’? Mainly because these were soldiers who have mixed their own experience of actual counter-insurgency operations with an active contribution to analytical and systematic thought – in other words, theorizing (with a small ‘t’) about irregular warfare. In other words they did not simply have the status of military officers, but were actually engaged in commanding during unconventional armed conflict, not just writing about it. This is not an easy mix to achieve. Therefore the chapters in this volume pose a basic set of analytical questions in order to holistically conceptualize contributions to the corpus of warrior-scholarship in irregular war:

• What are the profiles and the career paths of these warrior-scholars, and what institutional tensions do they reveal?
• What was their actual impact in specific campaigns and in their military organizations?
• Have they notably moved academic debate on the issue of COIN forward?
• The praxis of warrior-scholars – be it in the bazaars of Algiers or the mountains of Afghanistan – is an element that sets their theorizing apart from other academic analysis of COIN, but to what effect?

These are the crucial questions that cut across all the chapters in this book and the following pages.

The professional profile and organizational impact of warrior-scholars

In terms of profile it is clear from these cases that a warrior-scholar can be both an innovative student of the profession of arms and a synthesizer and effective advocate of existing, but largely forgotten or marginalized, knowledge. Sometimes wisdom lies in knowing where to find the answers through in-depth study of the past, not necessarily in coming up with the answer all by oneself. There are, therefore, at least two major types of warrior-scholar:

1. There are those who are more ‘warrior’ than ‘scholar’. They are primarily practitioners, but with a systematic analytical approach to warfare, a studious interest in military history, and who know where to find the answers as well as how to develop them and apply them once found, most notably in new written doctrine.
2. Then there are those who are more ‘scholar’ than ‘warrior’, who are basically using warfare experience as food for thought, with some hope of their published work having an impact in actual military organizations and campaigning.

Both share this common trait of being thinking soldiers, concerned not just with memorializing lessons, but with systematizing critical analysis about warfare. In the mercurial and complex operational environment of counter-insurgency – which is profoundly and often disturbingly different from conventional warfare – warrior-scholars are crucial if tactical advantage is to be levered for strategic gain into some kind of new thinking that can be translated into new campaign planning, operational directives, force structure, doctrine and training.

This chapter will therefore analyse not only the phenomenon of warrior-scholars in COIN, but also reflect on the often uneasy association between academia and the armed forces, as well as between the conventional army structure and new military thinkers within the ranks, who often have an unconventional career and seem to pay a heavy price for their role as military innovators. The cases that follow show how important innovative warrior-scholars are in moving conventional armies towards more effective adaptation to unexpected challenges like counter-insurgency, but also the many difficulties they face in achieving success in three extremely difficult tasks: deeply changing military organizations in terms of their doctrine and core mission; winning against politically savvy and elusive insurgents; and winning the attention and respect of academic scholars working on these subjects.

This book emphasizes human agency in relation to counter-insurgency and military adaptability. To some extent it echoes Mark Moyar’s ‘leader-centric’ notion of counter-insurgency performance.⁹ But it also attempts to analyse how individual contributions to counter-insurgency theory can shape, as well as being conditioned by, wider organizational praxis and military culture. Any organization, be it a multinational company or a national military, especially in times of great and difficult change, is only as effective as the individuals striving to achieve their targets, finding new ways to innovate and attain ever greater levels of effectiveness. Framing the book in these terms does its best to avoid lapsing into what Joshua Rovner has critically labelled the ‘hero narrative’ of modern studies of counter-insurgency by demonstrating how agency (the warrior-scholar) and structure (organizational bureaucracy and command hierarchies) interact, and how warrior-scholarship in irregular war has often been the result of getting things wrong on many occasions. Tapping into these experiences, and holding up the flaws as well as attributes of some high profile warrior-scholars, will, we hope, contribute to the historiography of COIN and avoid the hagiography of Rovner’s ‘hero narrative’.¹⁰

Any military organization wishing to achieve greater flexibility, improvement in tactical and operational effectiveness, or strategic clarity, therefore must seek individual leaders with the capacity to think critically about the nature of their experiences and extract pertinent lessons for the purposes of theorization and doctrine. The military, as with other organizations, needs, in constructivist terms, ‘norm entrepreneurs’. This raises the crucial question for this volume of how well warrior-scholars performed as promoters of change in organizational culture.¹¹ The military needs, in Realist terms, drivers of strategically required change. A crucial question in evaluating the impact of warrior-scholars is how well they performed as strategists, clearly seeing the changing military requirements of a changing distribution of power and its use in the international system.¹² This is not to say that other approaches may not profit from this kind of approach. For instance, Critical Security Studies may well want to use these cases as examples of the organic intellectual devoted to defending the status quo by developing more effective ways of securing the state. Yet these warrior-scholars are often adopting wider approaches to security by pointing to the importance of politics, economics, healthcare or education even if in a very instrumental way; as well as being explicitly or implicitly critical of the way their states and their military responded to counter-insurgency.

It is important to make clear that warrior-scholarship is an important, but by no means sole, component, of the multicausal reasons for organizational change and adaptation. But the hallmark of the best warrior-scholarship is how it interacts with and leverages other factors involved in this process, such as shifts in the global order, changes to military or political leadership, and changes to military technology. The best warrior-scholars are military meteorologists, forecasting changes in how certain forms of warfare will develop and how best to prepare for them. They are also among the best examples of what individual agency can achieve in probably the most demanding of contexts (war), in one of the most demanding of institutions (the military).¹³ It is therefore an important subject for future research to look both at the vital and wider theme of the ability of the military to learn and adapt, and more specifically to look at the intellectual quality of its officer corps and its ability to produce capable warrior-scholars.

Military thinkers and good military leaders in general will benefit from good knowledge of warfare, past as well as present, and sound critical thinking about war. So even if evidently not all warriors can be, wish to be, or should be scholars, they could certainly benefit from some greater contact with critical analysis and greater knowledge of relevant cases that are more attuned to the interests of military audiences.

The warrior-scholars included in this volume are disparate in their backgrounds, status and acceptability to their respective senior commanders. But all of them share the fact of having been in some way relative outsiders – mavericks who have challenged conventional wisdom, sometimes at a considerable cost to themselves and their careers. They have all thought outside of the box in relation to irregular warfare and been willing to expound upon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: introducing warrior-scholars
• 1 Constructing and deconstructing warrior-scholars
• 2 Warrior-scholarship in the age of colonial warfare: Charles E. Callwell and small wars
• 3 David Galula and Roger Trinquier: Two warrior-scholars, one French late-colonial counterinsurgency?
• 4 Warrior-scholars in the United States Marine Corps: from the small wars in the Caribbean to the ‘three block war’ and beyond
• 5 A very sharp eye: Moshe Dayan’s counterinsurgency legacy in Israel
• 6 Low intensity operations in theory and practice: General Sir Frank Kitson as warrior-scholar
• 7 Warrior-scholarship in the age of globalised insurgency: the work of David Kilcullen
• 8 Counterinsurgency, American-style: David Petraeus and twenty-first century war
• Index