War by Others’ Means

Delivering Effective Partner Force Capacity Building

Jack Watling, Nick Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367766405
• eBook ISBN: 9781000436952
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A new era of great power competition places a strategic premium on the efficiency with which states can pursue their aims. There is therefore likely to be an expanded scope for partnered operations. Partner force capacity building has a long history, with very mixed results, yet there is little historical memory in the institutions tasked with carrying it out. War by Others' Means uses archival research, interviews with practitioners, and observation of capacity building to understand why states undertake it, how they should select, train and equip their partners, and how they should manage the generation and withdrawal of trainers.

I.
WHY DO PATRONS EMBARK UPON CAPACITY BUILDING?

Since states operate to advance their interests, it is important to appreciate the interests that drive them to undertake partner force capacity building and the objectives they set themselves in such operations. This chapter also explores how states manage - and often fail to manage - conflicting imperatives in the objectives they set themselves. In many instances, the language used to frame objectives is deeply rooted in taxonomies with significant historical baggage. The chapter therefore begins by considering the origins of this type of operation, before breaking down the four principal objectives of partner force capacity building.

Competition and Empire: The Origins of Partner Force Capacity Building

In March 1918, as Allied governments considered their response to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which saw the Bolsheviks make peace with the Central Powers, the British military attache to Russia, Alfred Knox, noted that the ‘success gained by the Spanish guerrillas in the Peninsula War was as much owing to the constant pressure of a nucleus of organised British troops on Spanish and Portuguese territory as to a lavish expenditure of British gold’. Knox argued that Britain must ‘form military bases of reliable foreign elements on Russian soil or we can do nothing’.¹ Knox was drawing upon over a century of precedent in proposing that Britain use professional troops to train, advise and equip Russian forces. As Donald Stoker notes, partner force capacity building can trace its roots to the Napoleonic Wars and the emergence of modern nation-states and the professionalisation of military activity.² Imperial governance often relied upon local units, such as Indian Sepoys³ or the Bushmanland Borderers in South Africa,⁴ which would either have British officers or in many instances attached advisors to partnered commands. The 1815 Congress of Vienna and the subsequent creation of the Holy Alliance created an international framework of mutual support between states with the intent of suppressing revolution,⁵ while states covertly redirected or intentionally stoked revolutionary activity on the territory of their competitors.⁶ The intervention in Russia was very much in line with these traditions. British officials felt that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would likely break down, and wished to secure lines of supply to be able to train and equip the Bolsheviks once they recommenced hostilities with Germany.⁷ By June, it had become apparent that the Bolsheviks would not risk war with Germany,⁸ however egregious the provocation,⁹ and so the Allies intervened in Archangel and Siberia against the Bolsheviks, seeking to mobilise local Russian forces. This initially took the form of Allied officers commanding local Russian levies. However, over the winter of 1918/19 it became apparent in Allied capitals that there was no political will to persist with operations in Russia unless they were quickly successful.¹⁰ Mutinies in Allied forces led to an expectation that forces would be withdrawn in the autumn of 1919.¹¹ As a result, the policy changed to what became known as the ‘bolstering policy’,¹² with the object of enabling the Russian governments opposing the Bolsheviks to ‘stand alone’.¹³ The success of the policy was initially judged by military criteria,¹⁴ but over the spring of 1919 the British government increasingly came to the view that the military capacity of the White Russian forces ultimately rested upon their political legitimacy¹⁵ and the wider strength of their governmental institutions.¹⁶ These were deemed lacking, and combined with the failure of the summer offensive of 1919 led Allied forces to withdraw.

1 The National Archives (TNA), WO 106/1098, ‘Knox to CIGS, Possibilities of Guerrilla Warfare in Russia’, 5 March 1918.

2 Donald Stoker, ‘The Evolution of Foreign Military Advising and Assistance, 1815–2005’, in Kendall D Gott and Michael G Brooks (eds), Security Assistance, U.S. and International Historical Perspectives: Proceedings of the Combat Studies Institute 2006 Military History Symposium (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2006), p. 33.

3 William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).

4 TNA, WO 126/15, ‘Bushmanland Borderers, 1899–1902’.

5 Brian E Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics After Napoleon (London: Harvard University Press, 2014).

6 Though this competition played out most intently beyond Europe - see Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (London: John Murray, 1990) - it arguably culminated in the German facilitation of Bolshevik revolution in Russia as an act of deliberate strategy. See Stanley G Payne, Civil War in Europe, 1905–1949 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

7 A position that evolved from policy prior to the treaty (see TNA, CAB 23/4, ‘War Cabinet Minutes’, 10 December 1917) and saw the Bolsheviks as the least bad option (see TNA, CAB 24/41/41, ‘Intelligence Bureau, Weekly Report on Russia by Colonel Jones’, 5 February 1918); it was a prospect that senior Bolsheviks dangled before Allied diplomats. See Vladimir Lenin, quoted in Geoffrey Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), p. 135; Leon Trotsky, ‘Note from Commissar for War Trotsky to Colonel Robbins on the Attitude of the Allies Should Brest-Litovsk Go Unratified’, in Jane Degras (ed.), Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy: Vol. 1, 1917–1924 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 56; TNA, CAB 23/6, ‘War Cabinet Minutes’, 12 April 1918.

8 Vladimir Lenin, ‘Theses on the Present Political Situation, 12 May 1918’, Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 27 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 365–81; Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Edinburgh: Birlinn Limited, 2008), p. 63; Parliamentary Archives, Westminster, LG/F/18/1/26, ‘Sir Eric Geddes to Lloyd George’, 29 June 1918.

9 Chicherin, ‘Protest to the German Foreign Ministry, 22 April 1918’, in Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, p. 71; TNA, CAB 23/6, ‘War Cabinet Minutes’, 3 June 1918.

10 Andrew Soutar, With Ironsides in North Russia (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1970), p. 26.

11 Lawrence James, Mutiny in the British and Commonwealth Forces, 1797–1956 (London: Buchan and Enright, 1987), pp. 133–34.

12 TNA, CAB 23/9, ‘War Cabinet Minutes’, 12 February 1919.

13 TNA, WO 106/1288, ‘Colonel Elmsley to WO’, 29 November 1918.

14 TNA, FO/175/7, ‘Poole to Lindley’, 16 August 1918; TNA, FO 175/13, ‘Nash to Balfour’, 9 September 1918.

15 TNA, CAB 23/9, ‘War Cabinet Minutes’, 12 February 1919.

16 TNA, WO 106/1233, ‘Knox to DMI’, 28 August 1918; TNA, FO 175/9, ‘Suggested Organisation of Food Control’, 31 August 1918; Churchill College, Cambridge, CHAR 16/7, ‘Churchill to Lloyd George’, 7 May 1919.

This trajectory bears a strong resemblance to later campaigns in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but for now the relevant point is that partner force capacity building during the Allied intervention in Russia may be said to have pursued three sequential objectives as articulated by Allied officials:

• To politically influence the Bolsheviks to see resistance to German treaty violations as a viable policy option, and thereby restart fighting on the Eastern Front.
• To defeat the Bolsheviks by mobilising effective military opposition against them across Russia.
• To develop the military and political institutions of the White Russian governments to be able to maintain their independence from Bolshevik rule.

These continue to be typical of the primary objectives of partner force capacity building operations, though it is worth emphasising that they each lead to different priorities. The Allied pursuit of political influence with the Bolsheviks was not intended to turn them into an effective military force, but to split Germany’s efforts; if Germany had to fight on the Eastern Front it was presumed that it would win, but would lose on the Western Front because of the troop commitment to the East. Conversely, there was a persistent tension between the competing imperatives to create effective White Russian forces, and the need to build the political legitimacy of the White movement.

There is a fourth common objective in partner force capacity building, albeit not represented by Allied policy in Russia, though it arguably arose from it. One of the officers who served in Murmansk was Colin Gubbins.¹⁷ He would later serve in Ireland, and between the political warfare practised by the Bolsheviks and the irregular warfare of the Irish Republican Army he came to the conclusion that states could and should make effective use of irregular forces.¹⁸ Gubbins would eventually lead the SOE in the Second World War and through its successes cement the British view that covertly supporting partner capacity could offload political and financial risk.¹⁹ Thus, the final objective that is often pursued in partner force capacity building is to increase the cost to adversaries, or ensure the survival of allies, without publicly committing to a fight.

17 Brian Letts, SOE’s Mastermind: An Authorised Biography of Major General Sir Colin Gubbins KCMG, DSO, MC (London: Pen and Sword, 2016), chapter 5.

18 Giles Milton, Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Downfall (London: John Murray, 2016); Peter Wilkinson and Joan Bright Astley, Gubbins and SOE (London: Leo Cooper, 1993).

19 RichardJ Aldrich and Rory Cormac, The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers (London: William Collins, 2016), pp. 247–54.

The birth of political science as a discipline, the increasing professionalisation of military and security activity since the First World War, and the emergence of a rules-based international system through the League of Nations and, later, the UN,²⁰ have all led to the different objectives outlined above developing a complex set of traditions, associated methodologies and frameworks. While the core objectives in partner force capacity building may have remained fairly constant over time, the constraints that surround their pursuit and the methods for managing competing imperatives have evolved. The remainder of this chapter considers these evolutionary paths separately.

20 Susan Pedersen, The Guardian: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Building Military In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• I. Why Do Patrons Embark Upon Capacity Building?
• II. How Should Patrons Select Their Partners?
• III. What Training Should be Provided?
• IV. Who Should Deliver Training?
• V. What Equipment Should be Provided?
• VI. When Should Training End?
• VII. Conclusions