Resisting Rebellion

The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency

Anthony James Joes

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780813191706, 9780813123394
• eBook ISBN: 9780813138060
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In Resisting Rebellion, Anthony James Joes's discussion of insurgencies ranges across five continents and spans more than two centuries. Analyzing examples from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, he identifies recurrent patterns and offers useful lessons for future policymakers. Insurgencies arise from many sources of discontent, including foreign occupation, fraudulent elections, and religious persecution, but they also stem from ethnic hostilities, the aspirations of would-be elites, and traditions of political violence. Because insurgency is as much a political phenomenon as a military one, effective counterinsurgency requires a thorough understanding of the insurgents' motives and sources of support. Clear political aims must guide military action if a counterinsurgency is to be successful and establish a lasting reconciliation within a deeply fragmented society.

CHAPTER 1

GUERRILLA STRATEGY AND TACTICS

This chapter reviews the fundamental strategic and tactical aspects of successful guerrilla insurgency. Extreme asymmetries in physical power characterize most contests between insurgents and almost any state. Therefore a victory of guerrilla insurgents indicates either that they have employed excellent strategy and/or tactics, or that the regime has displayed unusual incompetence—or both.

GUERRILLA STRATEGY

Guerrilla warfare is not a phenomenon peculiar to a particular ideology, century, or culture. It is, rather, a method employed by those seeking to force a militarily superior opponent to accept their political objectives. In the ideal, guerrillas are those who fight against ostensibly more powerful forces by unexpected attacks against vulnerable targets, and who are sustained by popular support, high morale, good intelligence, secure bases, and foreign assistance.

One of the most notable aspects of guerrilla warfare is the lack of symmetry regarding the military power of the two sides, with the regime always having the advantage at the beginning. But another, and profound, asymmetry affects the strategic tasks of the antagonists. The regime (of whatever nature) usually believes it must destroy the insurgents, or at least reduce them to unimportance. In contrast, the insurgents need merely to survive, at least for the intermediate term. Guerrilla war is a kind of attrition against the regime. For guerrillas, exhausting or outlasting the enemy will produce victory. “Tactics favor the regular army while strategy favors the enemy [guerrillas].”¹ Thus, the “basic winning formula for an insurgency is as follows: if an insurgent movement can, at a cost which is indefinitely acceptable, impose costs on a government which are not indefinitely acceptable, then, while losing every battle, it is winning the war.”² The longer the guerrilla insurgency lasts, the worse it is for the regime.³ This is an inestimable advantage to the guerrillas, because they have the power to protract the conflict. They do this by avoiding contact with their enemies while and where the latter are strong or alert, and then carrying out spectacular operations against attention-getting targets.⁴ From Vietnam to Somalia, the American public has shown particular vulnerability to such dramatic actions.

Guerrillas tend to do best when they operate in a symbiotic relationship with elements of a friendly regular army.⁵ This scenario most commonly arises when guerrillas are supporting the government of their own country against a foreign invasion or occupation. Guerrilla victories can be ephemeral unless assisted or consolidated by allied regular forces. But more immediately, the presence of regular troops hostile to the counterinsurgent forces will usually prevent the latter from dividing into small units, for fear of meeting equal or larger units of hostile regular troops; they therefore will be able neither to pursue guerrilla bands nor to occupy important points nor to control the population. At the same time, well-led guerrillas will distract or exhaust enemy troops, making them unavailable to concentrate against the regular forces that the guerrillas are supporting. This pattern was clearly visible in South Carolina during the American War of Independence, in Napoleonic Spain, and in Vietnam.⁶

Thus guerrillas contribute to overall victory both by inflicting losses on the enemy and by drawing elements of his forces away from the main battlefields. If a guerrilla movement is not supporting and supported by regular forces, then it must inflict more damage on the enemy (and for a longer time) than the enemy inflicts on it—or lose. Nevertheless, in some instances guerrillas have in fact succeeded without the help of regular forces. Perhaps the most notable examples are the Cuban Fidelistas and the Afghan Mujahideen, both cases that will be considered later in this work.

A student of guerrilla insurgency once wrote that the Vietnamese Communist strategy for making war “is a strategy for which there is no known proven counterstrategy.”⁷ That statement needs considerable refining. Hanoi got its way in the end, at enormous cost, but the vaunted guerrilla strategy called People’s War was defeated. The famous 1968 Tet Offensive “was the end of People’s War, and essentially of any strategy built on guerrilla warfare and a politically inspired insurgency.”⁸ U.S. firepower had reduced the Viet Cong to secondary importance. That is why the fall of Saigon in 1975 required one of the largest conventional military operations since the end of World War II.

GUERRILLA TACTICS

Mao Tse-tung wrote that the strategy of the guerrillas is to pit one man against ten, but the tactics are to pit ten men against one. He meant that strategically—in terms of the conflict viewed as a whole—guerrillas are by definition the inferior force. But tactically—in terms of particular combats—guerrillas must strive to be the superior force at the point of contact with the enemy.⁹ The constant guerrilla aim will therefore be to concentrate strength against weakness by carrying out surprise attacks.¹⁰ Surprise is a true force multiplier, compensating for inferiority of numbers. It is the primary and decisive weapon of successful guerrillas. And not only of guerrillas; surprise has been the “master-key of all the great captains of history.”¹¹

Effective guerrillas attack the enemy’s flanks and rear. They interrupt his lines of communication by ambushing convoys; mining or damaging roads; blowing up railroad tracks, trains, and bridges; and isolating small enemy military units. They strike at night, or in the rain, or when the enemy troops are eating or have just finished a march.¹² The favorite tactical operation of guerrillas is the ambush; guerrillas will often attack a particular place in order to lure a relief force into an ambush.¹³ All these activities create casualties and anxieties among the enemy, undermining morale. To destroy, or even to attack, one government outpost is to make all such places feel vulnerable. This is not a new phenomenon. During the Gallic wars, Caesar observed: “If I wanted the business finished off and the criminals [Gallic rebels] rooted out and killed, I had to divide my troops into a number of small detachments and send them out in different directions. If I wanted to follow the established practice of the Roman army and keep the companies in regular formation, then the terrain itself acted as a protection for the enemy, who were, as individuals, quite bold enough to lay an ambush and surround any of our men who strayed from the main body of our army.”¹⁴

The great Boer guerrilla chief Jacobus De La Rey “masked his essentially offensive plan in continual retreats until at last his unwary enemy was lulled into a false sense of security and would think he was no longer worth much care or watchfulness; and then he would pull his forces together at a suitable opportunity and like a tiger make a terrific spring at his enemy.”¹⁵ De La Rey thus anticipated Mao’s tactic of “luring the enemy in deep.”

Surprise attack requires mobility, that is, quickly bringing sufficient numbers of guerrillas together and dispersing as soon as the attack is over.¹⁶ Surprise also requires intelligence, that is, knowing how many of the enemy are in a particular place, with what weapons and what morale. Without mobility and intelligence, surprise attack—and guerrilla warfare—will be nearly impossible. Guerrillas are mobile by definition: they lack the heavy weapons and equipment that slow the movement of conventional forces. (The revealing Roman word for the equipment and baggage that a conventional army must transport is impedimenta.) As for reliable and timely intelligence, the most important source will be the civilian population. Mao said that the guerrillas must move among the people as fish move in the water. This statement has several meanings: a vital one is that to get good intelligence it is essential to establish and maintain rapport with the local population. An excellent method for establishing good relations with the civilians is for guerrilla units to operate in their native districts. During the Greek civil war, Communist-led guerrillas systematically violated this principle of good relations with the civilian population, to their eventual serious cost.

Guerrillas can also gather valuable intelligence, and create dissension among the foe at the same time, by sending selected members of their group to join the army, the police, the civil administration, the press, pro-regime political parties, labor unions, and so on. By such methods guerrillas and their sympathizers thoroughly penetrated the army and government of both South Vietnam and Soviet Afghanistan.¹⁷

Properly led guerrillas will also treat their prisoners well. Mao Tse-tung taught that “the most effective method of propaganda directed at the enemy forces is to release captured soldiers and give the wounded medical treatment.”¹⁸ Such a policy will not only produce excellent intelligence but will also undermine the willingness of the enemy to fight to the death. Castro’s guerrillas released large numbers of captured Batista soldiers outright, an “expression of utter contempt for their fighting potential.”¹⁹

TO WAGE GUERRILLA WAR

Clearly, to be effective—indeed to survive—guerrillas must rely on surprise, which in turn derives from mobility and intelligence. But they also need good morale, a well-organized infrastructure, effective leadership, assistance from outside the country, and, ideally, a secure base inside it. Under these conditions, a guerrilla insurgency can flourish indefinitely.

Morale

Filled with danger and deprivation, the life of the guerrilla is rarely romantic and never comfortable. Maintaining morale is essential if guerrillas are to sustain their commitment to the conflict. High morale comes primarily and abundantly from two principal sources: first, the belief that one’s cause is just,²⁰ and second, the feeling of invincibility generated by consistently winning small engagements.²¹ The justice of the guerrillas’ cause will be particularly apparent to them, and others, if their opponents are foreign and/or brutal. Under these circumstances, guerrillas will usually find it easy to obtain good intelligence from the civilian population. Religious faith has also sustained guerrilla insurgencies fighting against enormous odds, as in Napoleonic Spain and Soviet Afghanistan.

The certainty that the guerrilla will receive medical assistance if wounded will also be a major factor in maintaining morale. So will the practice of hostage-taking, to ensure that captured guerrillas will not be executed out of hand.²²

Infrastructure

A well-organized guerrilla movement will have an infrastructure, often quite elaborate, that consists of persons who do not normally bear arms but render vital assistance to the guerrillas. Living ostensibly peaceful lives in civilian society, members of the infrastructure furnish the fighting guerrillas with intelligence, supplies, and recruits. Such infrastructures can continue to function even in areas under hostile military occupation. Their contribution to the guerrilla movement is always important and often indispensable. For example, analysts have noted that “it was the VC [infrastructure], not the guerrillas or local forces, which was the foundation of the insurgency [in South Vietnam].”²³

Leadership

Talented guerrilla leaders repeatedly arise from the most unexpected places, recalling to us the lines of Thomas Gray:

Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood,

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.²⁴

Guerrilla annals are full of examples of this phenomenon. Consider Francisco Espoz y Mina. To all the world he would have seemed merely a semiliterate Basque bumpkin. Yet “underneath the simple and rustic peasant there lay dormant a complex and powerful individual.”²⁵ In the days of the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, he emerged as “the greatest guerrilla warrior of them all.”²⁶ Indeed, “his services were invaluable during [Wellington’s] campaign in Portugal, since he was wearing out a French force fives times his own strength in fruitless marches, under winter rains, and over roads that had become all but impassable.”²⁷ During the winter of 1811–1812, he actually led incursions into French territory. Eventually the king of Spain made him a field marshal. Espoz y Mina was unusual in his time because he discouraged camp followers, and most especially because he left the war no richer than when he took it up.

Frail and sickly as a youth, John Mosby was a young attorney, a reader of Plutarch and Byron,²⁸ when he became a leader of a Confederate guerrilla unit. As such “his exploits are not surpassed in daring and enterprise by those of petite guerre in any age.”²⁹ Confederate Secretary of War Seddon endorsed a paper by Mosby with these words: “A characteristic report from Col. Mosby, who has become so familiar with brave deeds as to consider them too tedious to treat unless when necessary to reflect glory on his gallant comrades.”³⁰ Mosby summed up his ideas of irre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue. Guerrilla Insurgency as a Political Problem
• 1. Guerrilla Strategy and Tactics
• 2. Some Wellsprings of Insurgency
• 3. Religion and Insurgency in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• 4. Religion and Insurgency in the Twentieth Century
• 5. Foreign Involvement with Insurgency
• 6. Establishing Civilian Security
• 7. Loyalists: Indigenous Anti-Insurgency
• 8. The Centrality of Intelligence
• 9. The Requirement of Rectitude
• 10. The Utility of Amnesty
• 11. The Question of Sufficient Force Levels
• 12. Deploying U.S. Troops in a Counterinsurgent Role
• 13. Guerrillas and Conventional Tactics
• 14. The Myth of Maoist People’s War
• 15. Two False Starts: Venezuela and Thailand
• 16. Comparing National Approaches to Counterinsurgency
• 17. Elements of a Counterinsurgent Strategy
• Epilogue. Conflict in Iraq
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index