Guerrilla or Low Intensity Warfare4
Guerrilla war is a raiding strategy (Chapter 13). It is not new, is a favored strategy of the weak against the strong, is not limited to a particular ideology or culture, can coordinate with a traditional campaign, and is not always successful.
David fought a guerrilla war against his own King, Saul. The Scythians used guerrilla tactics against the Persian Empire; the Bactrians used them against Alexander the Great. The Roman legions defeated guerrillas in Spain. Skanderbeg in Albania and Vlad III Dracula in Wallachia led guerrilla resistance to the Ottomans. The Dutch used guerrilla tactics as one element in their successful sixteenth century revolt against Spain. Shivaji’s seventeenth century guerrilla war against the Mughals established Maratha, the last native empire in pre-British India.American Indians used guerrilla tactics against the British, defeating Brad-dock’s expedition during the French and Indian War. British troops did poorly against Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion during the American Revolution but defeated Welsh, Boer, and Malaysian guerrillas in other wars. Catholic royalists fought an unsuccessful guerrilla war in the Vendee to restore the church and monarchy during the French Revolution. Napoleon’s armies fought unsuccessfully against combined guerrillas and Wellington’s regular British troops on the Iberian Peninsula. American Indian tribes frequently used guerrilla tactics against the US Army, but seldom won battles and never won a war.
The Finns combined regular and guerrilla tactics against the Soviets in World War II. The Soviets used guerrilla tactics combined with others such as “scorched earth” against the Germans. The Indonesians defeated Dar-ul-Islam but were less successful in Timor. Afghan guerrillas defeated the Soviets, a major factor in the collapse of the USSR itself. Mao Tse-tung used guerrilla tactics against the Japanese and in the civil war against Chiang Kai Chek.
Fidel Castro used them successfully in Cuba, but Che Guevara failed trying to spread revolution in Latin America, and Peru defeated the Shining Path. The Americans defeated guerrillas in the Philippines in 1898 and in Haiti and Nicaragua between World Wars I and II. They destroyed the Vietcong guerrillas only to see South Vietnam fall to the regular North Vietnamese army after the US Congress refused to carry out US obligations to help in the event of continuing attack.In theory, guerrilla success requires a relatively small number of soldiers in a large geographic area characterized by difficult terrain that facilitates ambush and retreat, high mobility relative to regular forces, a secure base, and support in the form of supplies and intelligence from the local population. It also requires charismatic leaders who can maintain morale for a drawn out campaign that depends on the long process of wearing the enemy down, and who with the growth of mass media are skilled propagandists.
Three men are particularly important in developing guerrilla strategy and tactics during the twentieth century. The first, the most original, and the best writer of the three, T. E. Lawrence (1929, Chapter 33 1935) worked out the theory of guerrilla war and its application to the circumstances he faced given the irrelevance of traditional military doctrine to Arabia. His strategy was to ignore Turkish manpower, which Turkey viewed as expendable, and from safe bases to assail their logistical system, which was hard to maintain, vulnerable, and vital. Famously, he did so by blowing up enough railways and bridges (ideally with trains on them) to immobilize the Ottoman army but not enough to force them to retreat, effectively capturing without having to feed them. The British Army provided the conventional forces for the final defeat of the Turks while the Arab irregulars guarded their open desert flank.
The most influential of the three, Mao Tse-tung's On Guerrilla War (2000) was not as revolutionary as his admirers claim, as he draws heavily on Sun Tzu’s On War and makes many of the same points as Lawrence.
Mao saw three phases to guerrilla war. In the first, he had to arouse the people, organize secure bases, and initiate military operations to train his fighters and build their morale. In the second, he expanded military operations to include assassination, sabotage, and targets of opportunity as much to expand the skills of his soldiers as to damage the enemy. In the third phase, he converted his guerrillas into a conventional army capable of traditional battle, often combined with sham negotiations to gain time and frustrate the enemy (Joy 1955). In each phase, Mao was concerned with increasing the territory and population he controlled and unifying them politically, increasing the number of secure bases, and training and equipping his soldiers.The third, Vo Nguyen Giap (2001), adapted Mao’s strategy to Vietnam. He too envisioned a war in three phases, also beginning with organizing his forces and conducing limited raids. As did Lawrence and Mao, he attacked primarily to gain popular support so only if success was certain. His second phase aimed at undermining the enemy’s will to fight both on the battlefield and in the enemy homeland—first France then the US—while conventional units exploited the gains of the guerrillas by taking and holding territory. In the last phase, he switched entirely to conventional war, and negotiations were used tactically to reach political goals more than to reach a mutually acceptable settlement (Churchman 1995). Things went largely according to plan against the French, but Giap had to do it all over again when the Americans intervened after the French defeat. Resistance to the war in the United States, tough negotiating tactics in Paris, Nixon’s resignation, and the fecklessness of the Congress turned the tide in his favor despite massive casualties and never winning a battle, which he once correctly pointed out in personal conversation with a former American officer did not matter (Lind 1999, Sorley 1999).
In theory, defeating guerrillas requires eliminating the conditions they need to succeed.
This leads to three goals. One is isolating the guerrillas from local or foreign help and supplies, perhaps the most, important factor in modern guerrilla success. The Americans in the Philippines, the British in Malaya, and the French in Algeria were sufficiently successful in this. In contrast, the Americans in Vietnam never effectively cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Soviets were unable to prevent American and Iranian weapons reaching the Afghan mujahideen.The second goal is preventing the local civilian population from providing a logistical base, an intelligence apparatus, and a sanctuary allowing insurgents to blend into the population. In Vietnam, General Westmoreland’s “search and destroy” proved less successful in doing so than General Abrams’s “clear and hold.” The latter requires clearing the guerrillas out of an area, setting up local militia units and a few regular troops in each village backed by mobile reserves who must respond quickly, decisively, and successfully to any attack, then expanding the area under government control and reducing that in which the guerrillas can operate.
The third goal is “winning hearts and minds” by addressing the economic, medical, political, and social needs of the local population. Echoing Lawrence in the quote heading this chapter, Field Marshal Walter Templer said that “the shooting side of the business is only 25 percent…the other 75 percent lies in getting the people of [British Malaya] behind us.” At the local level, the regulars must become a welcome presence by developing personal relationships, learning the language, respecting the culture, providing medical care, and helping to improve the local infrastructure, At the national level, it means identifying and working to reduce any grievances against the government that make the population sympathetic to guerrilla promises, and winning the propaganda battle. Apart from the practical difficulties of carrying out the strategy, it assumes, sometimes wrongly, that the population will turn against the insurgents for economic incentives.
Some values, such as nationalism and religion, are very real, and insurgents often have close relatives among the general population.These three goals are pursued simultaneously, not sequentially. As the campaign progresses, the troops can take further steps in each area. Among them are preventing food and weapons getting into guerrilla hands, obtaining intelligence on the location of guerrilla units, and identifying their agents and sympathizers, leading in turn to effective attacks and arrests. Once guerrillas are forced onto the defensive, the government can further weaken the insurgents with amnesty, education, and resettlement programs while offering rewards for information leading to the arrest of guerrilla leaders accused of crimes such as arson and murder. These methods are manpower intensive, success requiring ratios of troops to guerrillas ranging from 10:1 for the French in Algeria to 30:1 for the British in Malaya.
The level of effort a particular anti-guerrilla war requires is, to paraphrase French Premier Clemenceau, too important to leave to the generals. That decision goes beyond whether victory is likely to what tactics and at what cost in lives and money. The national leadership must dispassionately assess such additional issues as the impact of war on national interests and obligations, geostrategic considerations, what other threats the military will have to meet elsewhere at the same time, and foreseeable unintended consequences of intervention.