Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (4 page)

The irregular warfare strategist, knowing this, seeks to exploit the opportunity to force his adversary to spread his troops widely across the theater of operations, thus further enhancing his own side’s ability to move stealthily. In some respects this is a photonegative version of the conventional military concept of the force multiplier, the notion that some tactics or technologies make one’s troops far more efficient against an enemy that does not enjoy similar capabilities. For irregulars, the stealth advantage has some of this multiplier effect, but the real payoff comes in the form of what I would call a “force divisor” effect. That is, not knowing where and when a strike may occur, conventional forces must be dispersed to cover many points, making them more vulnerable to the irregulars’ attack.

Among irregular planners, mastery may consist of integrating unconventional and conventional operations. In these hybrid campaigns, one side has both irregular and regular forces that operate simultaneously or sequentially. During the American Revolutionary campaign in the south, especially the period 1780–1781, Nathanael Greene had both types of forces operating at once against the British, almost completely confusing the Redcoats and exhausting them as they dashed from one crisis to another, finally compelling them to fall back on Yorktown, where they were trapped. Alternately, Vietnam’s Vo Nguyen Giap provided an example of the use of the two types of forces in sequence, with periods of purely guerrilla operations giving way to conventional offensives in 1954 (against the French at Dienbienphu), 1968 (Tet), 1972 (the Easter offensive), and the final overrun of the South in 1975. Interestingly, Greene never won a conventional battle but ultimately triumphed. Giap lost two of his four major attempts to fight in traditional fashion, once against a primarily American force in 1968 but also to South Vietnamese forces, backed by U.S. airpower, in 1972.

But Greene and Giap seem to be exceptional, as most commanders of irregular forces have not had the option of going toe-to-toe with their more numerous and well-armed foes. Sometimes they have benefited from the looming presence of friendly conventional forces, as Lawrence did in the Arabian desert during World War I. The fact that General Allenby was engaging the Turks in a full-blown conventional campaign in Palestine no doubt diminished their ability to focus on Lawrence’s tribal irregulars. And before Lawrence, the Confederate cavalry leader Forrest enjoyed being able to operate widely and freely, with substantial friendly conventional formations serving to absorb most of the Union forces’ attention and efforts. Although, at one point, the depredations against General William Tecumseh Sherman’s supply lines grew so pernicious in their effects that about 80,000 of the 180,000 Union troops in the field during the drive to Atlanta in 1864 had to be diverted to thwart Forrest and his fellow raiders—a telling example of the “force divisor” phenomenon.

On balance, then, the mastery of irregular warfare relies upon some modification of the classical principles of war, particularly with regard to the notion of “massing at the decisive point.” There must also be a willingness to recognize both the mixed nature of many military campaigns and, frequently, the just-off-stage presence of substantial conventional forces

The twenty-first century already shows clear signs that it will be a time replete with, if not dominated by, irregular warfare. Of the few dozen conflicts ongoing around the world as this book is being written, almost all feature insurgents and terrorists posed against harried militaries trying to learn the ways of irregular warfare to counter them. But even as the soldiers catch up conceptually, the insurgents and terrorists make new advances. In short, the age-old pattern of action and reaction in military affairs persists, placing a premium on those with the greatest aptitude for the unconventional. The chapters that follow recount the stories of many of the great masters of irregular warfare. The lessons to be derived from their campaigns retain a signal value in this new age of conflict.

FRONTIERSMAN:
ROBERT ROGERS

Artist unknown

What Winston Churchill once described as the true “first world war”
1
was at its height some 250 years ago. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) featured major field operations in Europe, where Britain’s hard-pressed ally, Frederick of Prussia, strove to fend off Austrian, French, and Russian armies. In India, French and British forces vied for control of the subcontinent, each side augmented by large—and surprisingly well-armed—indigenous fighters. In each of these theaters the battles were for the most part traditional, with serried ranks on both sides standing to and unleashing massed volleys of musketry at each other, punctuated by artillery barrages that cut gaping, bloody holes in the ranks. It was war as it had been known for some centuries since the advent of firearms. But in North America, where British and French regulars squared off yet again, and each side also had colonial levies and Indian allies, something else happened to warfare: it became highly irregular. While there were some pitched battles and sieges, there were also countless small engagements across a wilderness land the size of Western Europe. An army operating here had to master bush fighting.

This meant, in the main, learning to move swiftly and stealthily over great distances through near-trackless forests, and by means of canoes and bateaux along lakes and rivers. In battle it meant setting ambushes and taking careful aim from covered positions, and staging lightning hit-and-run raids. How different this was from the set-piece massed field formations and the formal drill that attended the synchronized volley fire of proper European armies. Each side faced the challenge of this new mode of conflict, knowing from early on that mastery of the wilderness would decide the outcome of the war; but each met the challenge in different ways.

French army regulars never developed much capacity for irregular warfare, retaining to the end their reliance on conventional fighting. This served them well in early battles and sieges but quite ill in the crucially important defense of Quebec (1759), where the Marquis de Montcalm chose a stand-up fight and lost both the city and his life. When it came to irregular operations, the French relied on the efforts of their numerous Native American allies and, to a lesser extent, on their own colonists—who were few in number, compared to the British settlers,
2
but better schooled in the ways of the forests. Despite these skills, many French-Canadian settlers were siphoned off to augment the conventional forces as “colonial regulars.”

Thus a kind of divided force structure emerged, in which the irregulars engaged in reconnaissance and terroristic raids, and also served as protectors and guides for the regulars as they moved about the wilderness, among and between the line of forts that defended New France, and out from them on offensives against the British settlements. In pitched battles their Indian allies and colonial woodsmen were sometimes used in a manner that accentuated their unconventional strengths; but on some occasions they were employed in conventional fashion and performed not as well. Montcalm’s most grievous error was to deploy these troops to fight in the open at his last battle on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec, where they simply could not volley as well as the Redcoats. And this misuse occurred after they had begun the battle from hidden positions and had done serious damage in sniping at the British regulars.

Early on in this bitter conflict, the French had made much better use of their irregular capabilities. Indeed, their bush tactics had worked spectacularly well. In one early action, a hundred or so French colonial regulars, augmented by perhaps six hundred Indian allies, inflicted a crushing defeat on a British column in brigade strength—just over two thousand troops when they set out, but down by several hundred after a month on the march, due largely to sickness. The Redcoats were joined by just a few hundred colonists and a half-dozen Indians, giving them little capacity for bush tactics. All were under the command of General Edward Braddock, slowly marching through the forest toward the key strategic point, Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh). When ambushed by the French and Indian force, Braddock tried to employ traditional field formations—all that he knew to do—massing his troops for volley fire, but this only made them more compact targets. The resulting slaughter saw Braddock mortally wounded and more than two-thirds of his force killed or wounded. The general’s last words, however, foreshadowed a more supple strategic approach to war in the wilderness: “We shall know better how to deal with them another time.”
3
Braddock would prove to be prophetic. But for the moment, complete catastrophe was barely headed off by the steady courage of the American colonial officer George Washington, who had come along on the expedition.

Other defeats would soon follow for the British as Montcalm continually exploited his ability to move conventional forces under the protection of a ring of irregulars during the campaigns of 1757 and 1758. His most notable success came with the capture of Fort William Henry, at the southern end of Lake George in New York, though it was tarnished by the atrocities committed by his Indian irregulars in the wake of the siege; the awful episode that has come down to us vividly through James Fenimore Cooper’s account in
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS.

At this point in the war it was hard to see how the French could be beaten, given their seemingly winning mix of conventional and irregular methods, and the far greater number of Native Americans who flocked to their side. But the British had learned from Braddock’s defeat and other reverses, and if they had fewer Indian allies, they had far more colonists, many of whom were more inclined toward bush fighting than open-field battles. These were the men who would populate the ranks of the ranger companies, described by the historian Fred Anderson as “whole battalions of little wiry men able to move quickly through the woods.”
4
They would eventually go well beyond merely providing security for the Redcoat regulars. Under the leadership of one of their own and of a British general of receptive mind, they would transform a field army and win control of a continent.

*

Robert Rogers was a New Hampshireman who loved the wilderness world and felt most truly alive there. In his youth he picked up Indian bush craft and almost certainly put it to use as a border smuggler, bringing in illicit goods to the British colonies from French Canada.
5
Some evidence indicates that when he was a child his family homestead was burned out by marauding Abenaki Indians, kindling an anger toward them that would never leave him. Aside from smuggling, Rogers is thought to have involved himself in other dubious activities, including forgery and counterfeiting. Francis Parkman summed up Rogers simply: “His character leaves much to be desired.”
6
Nevertheless he became a folk hero for his exploits during the French and Indian War (as the struggle was known in America), as a leader of high-risk raids and countless long-range reconnaissance patrols deep in enemy territory. In an age when campaigning was limited to milder seasons, he and his small companies operated year-round, on snowshoes and ice skates in winter. He is still lionized today as the father of the U.S. Army Rangers, all of whom know virtually by heart the twenty-eight rules of his famous “plan of discipline” for irregular warfare.
7
Many of them instruct how to move in rough country without being detected, or how to react when ambushed.

The Seven Years’ War in North America

But for all his codification of the rules of bush fighting, Rogers did not actually initiate the practice of “ranging” the colonial frontier to protect settlers from Indian and French-Canadian terror attacks upon the innocent. Ranger units had been forming and operating for many decades before Rogers, in a growing effort to curtail the increasingly bloody depredations that reflected a calculated French effort to deter the westward expansion of the British colonists. Indeed, from 1690 on, French policy in North America was driven by an effort to “scourge the borders and embroil the savages with the English.”
8