Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits

INSURGENTS, RAIDERS,
AND BANDITS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

WORST ENEMY

THE REAGAN IMPRINT

FROM TROY TO ENTEBBE

IN ATHENA’S CAMP

NETWORKS AND NETWARS

INSURGENTS, RAIDERS, AND BANDITS

How Masters of Irregular
Warfare Have Shaped Our World

JOHN ARQUILLA

IVAN R. DEE

Chicago

Ivan R. Dee

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

www.ivanrdee.com

Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Distributed by National Book Network Copyright © 2011 by John Arquilla

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Arquilla, John.

Insurgents, raiders, and bandits : how masters of irregular warfare have shaped our world / John Arquilla.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-56663-832-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-56663-908-8 (electronic) 1. Irregular warfare—History. 2. Asymmetric warfare—History. 3. Guerrilla warfare—History. 4. Military history, Modern. I. Title.

U167.5.I8A77 2011

355.02'18—dc22

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

FOR HY ROTHSTEIN

(COLONEL, U.S. ARMY SPECIAL FORCES, RET.)

ONE OF THE MODERN MASTERS

F
or all the hope of peaceful progress that accompanied the turn of the new millennium, its first decade ended with more than thirty armed conflicts still in progress. Most were civil wars, but some involved the presence of foreign troops, like the lingering American intervention in Afghanistan. Yet the salient fact about the ongoing conflicts of our time is that
ALL
are irregular in nature. That is, they are primarily conducted through acts of terrorism or more classic guerrilla hit-and-run tactics. Those who face insurgents and terrorists have learned—as the Americans did in Iraq—that conventional responses will not suffice. Thus the forces of order and stability have been ineluctably drawn to mount irregular small-unit raids of their own, and have often found themselves teaming up with local tribesmen and a range of other groups in all manner of unusual field operations.

In the conventional realm of warfare the best strategies are generally gleaned from the careers of the so-called great captains, such as Julius Caesar, Frederick of Prussia, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Choosing the most effective of the moderns usually sparks a lively discourse, one that often ends with heads nodding in George Patton’s direction. But even insights that might be drawn from the near great who ended in defeat, like the Confederacy’s noble Robert E. Lee or Germany’s Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” are closely studied. The literature is large indeed.

Yet when it comes to the great captains of irregular warfare, the same can hardly be said. While there are many accounts of daring commando raids, and more thoughtful works that explore the complex relationships between elite military advisors and friendly indigenous fighters, there is precious little study of the principles that might be distilled from the stories of those whose campaigns have proved exemplary. To be sure, the memoirs of Mao Zedong, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Che Guevara provide important general insights. But they only begin to poke holes in the darkness. In order to understand the strategic implications of this new age of insurgency, terrorism, and other forms of irregular warfare, we must look closely at the earlier “masters.”

I have sought to fill this gap by telling the stories of some of the greatest guerrillas, raiders, and counterinsurgent experts of the past 250 years. This period coincides roughly with the span of the Industrial Age and also covers the heydays of both modern imperialism and nationalism. The era of post–World War II rebellion against colonial rule and the conflicts that raged around the edges of the Cold War also come under close scrutiny. The survey ends in the near present, a time when rising networks of nonstate actors have come into bitter conflict with leading nations, with no apparent end in sight.

The action itself ranges across the world, beginning in the eighteenth-century North American wilderness. There the opening markers are the deaths of British general Edward Braddock and more than a thousand of his troops in 1755, ambushed by a very small Franco-Indian force, and the formation of a colonial ranger unit better able to wage such wilderness warfare. The narrative crosses to Europe during the Napoleonic era, and from there branches out to Africa, South America, Arabia, Asia, and eventually encompasses the wide reaches of the Pacific during World War II. The masters whose stories drive the principal action come from many cultures: American, Spanish, Russian, Arab, Italian, Boer, British, German, Croat, Vietnamese, and Chechen.

The death in 2005 of the Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov—who a decade earlier had beaten the Russians using an irregular swarming concept of operations—frames the near end of this survey. But between Braddock’s death and Maskhadov’s are the stories of many remarkable individuals. Their fighting skills aside, they are often obsessed with the importance of “branding,” especially in their manner of dress.

Despite their origins in so many different cultures, and style issues aside, the masters of the irregular have a great deal in common, most conspicuously their sheer indomitability. Robert Rogers led his rangers through unimaginable hardships in the wilderness war in North America. A generation later during the Revolution, Nathanael Greene lost virtually every pitched battle he fought, yet he kept coming at Lord Cornwallis and his Redcoats to distract them and create new and better opportunities for his dispersed guerrilla forces.

Rogers and Greene were hardly alone in overcoming adversity. The leader of irregular resistance to Napoleon’s occupation of Spain, Francisco Espoz y Mina, had his main force wiped out on no less than three occasions by his tough, smart French opponents. Yet he was able to reconstitute his insurgent forces again and again, finally prevailing.

Another kind of indomitability was reflected in a key campaign of the famous American Indian fighter George Crook. Instead of taking thousands of troopers into the Sonoran desert to chase after Geronimo, Crook ventured forth with just a few hundred, most of them “friendly” Apaches. He tracked Geronimo relentlessly, then walked into the enemy camp alone one day and talked the great warrior into giving himself up.

Similar panache was shown by the German commander in East Africa during World War I, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Beset on all sides by vastly superior enemy forces, he nonetheless launched a multipronged irregular offensive and continued raiding right up to the armistice. The list of such achievements goes on and on, as the masters of the irregular all seem to have been imbued with this sort of daring.

Beyond the great captains of irregular warfare, a few key supporting characters make recurring guest appearances in the pages that follow. The most frequent is Winston Churchill, who appears on the scene at the outset of the Boer War in 1899, returns to support T. E. Lawrence’s pan-Arab policy goals after World War I, develops a friendship with Tito, the Yugoslav partisan leader during World War II, and exits only after lobbying President Dwight Eisenhower not to come to the aid of the French as they were losing to Vietnam’s gifted insurgent leader Vo Nguyen Giap at Dienbienphu in 1954.

Another supporting character who comes close to Churchill’s half-century-plus of involvement in irregular matters is Jan Smuts, who started out as a Boer insurgent but later ran the British East African campaign against von Lettow-Vorbeck during World War I. He reappears again during World War II as a bureaucratic thorn in the side of Britain’s master of “deep penetration” tactics, the military mystic Orde Wingate, who is rescued from oblivion by—no surprise—Churchill.

Churchill, Smuts, and other characters like Louis Napoleon of mid-nineteenth-century France—a captor of the great Arab insurgent Abd el-Kader and a principal opponent of the Italian nation builder Giuseppe Garibaldi—help connect the individual stories to larger themes and tides of global events that influenced, and were in turn influenced by, the various masters. In this respect a sort of alternate history of the past two-and-a-half centuries is told, as seen both through the eyes of these larger players and through the lens of the irregular.

Yet another kind of service is performed by some of the great adversaries who opposed the masters. For example, Nathanael Greene’s contribution to the winning of American independence, and the skill he showed in doing so, cannot be fully appreciated without knowing that his main opponent, Lord Cornwallis, was exceedingly able, probably the best general the British had in the field. Thirty years later the Spanish guerrilla leader Mina had to face off against Marshal Louis-Gabriel Suchet, considered by Napoleon Bonaparte to be the most skillful of all his commanders. George Crook, America’s premier Indian fighter, had his mettle tested by Sitting Bull as well as Geronimo.

And so on. This is a book filled with hard-fought and fascinating duels, played out over raids, ambushes, and cordon-and-sweep counters to them. The stories are replete with evidence that irregular warfare operations often proved crucial to the outcomes of the larger wars of which they formed component parts—far more so than general military histories tend to suggest.

If a few individuals with a turn of mind toward the irregular have had profound effects on world events, the same is also true of the less epochal undertakings. Garibaldi, using his “Thousand” in swarming style, led Italy to unity over and against the desires and forces of France, Austria, and the Pope. And even those who strove in similar fashion in the cause of nationhood and failed, from Abd el-Kader of Algeria to the great Boer leader of insurgents, Christiaan de Wet, demonstrated the profound power of “the few” when skillfully employed against regular forces. Where most nineteenth-century anticolonial rebellions failed, the great lessons provided by leaders like Abd el-Kader and de Wet lived on, helping guide independence-minded fighters to victory again and again in a powerful wave of twentieth-century insurgencies.

Another important theme highlighted by the lives and campaigns of the masters of irregular warfare is their ever-deepening encounter with advanced technology. Conventional armies have always prized the possession of the latest weapons and the swiftest transports and means of communication. But irregulars have realized that the greater reliance of conventional troops on these advanced systems makes them highly vulnerable to disruption; and some masters have aimed at achieving just such an effect.

Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Confederacy was perhaps the first to realize just how significant a strategic impact could be achieved by disrupting railroad links and telegraph lines during the American Civil War. T. E. Lawrence, as much as he is associated with the importance of having deep cultural expertise, was most successful in leading the Arab revolt during World War I because he blew up so many Turkish troop trains. Indeed, the tribesmen he led into battle came to call him “Emir Dynamite.” And the great Vietnamese leader Vo Nguyen Giap created a whole new concept of irregular operations based on exploiting the limitations imposed on the American military doctrine of heliborne “air assault” by the rough terrain of Southeast Asia. In short, conventional warriors are greatly nourished by technical advances; irregulars often concentrate their efforts on exploiting mass armies’ deep dependencies on such sustenance.