Applying the lessons of late 19th/early 20th century asymmetrical warfare
I was thinking earlier in the week looking at the current engagments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the way these conflicts are being controversially compared to Vietnam both in the public sphere and in other areas like the policy one at least in the US. However, I feel late 19th/early 20th Century conflicts like the Boer Wars that occured in South Africa, the Philippine–American War, or even some aspects of the First World War would offer comparisons and lessons also due to many of the dynamics of those conflicts and the way they were fought in some ways by all sides involved.
So I was wondering if these wars hold lessons that can be applied to modern day small wars and if so what are they?
Postbipolar world vs the golden age of colonialism
I think the title says it all. Think about how national liberation wars (say 1946-1975), Declaration of human rights /1948/, Weapons of mass destruction, the holocaust, and globalisítion etc. has changed our views on warfare, on combatants and non-combatants on casualties and so on.
Edit
One more thing. The 'white men's' technology was so superior (and was used with such ruthlessness) that the natives did not see a chance for succesful resistance. In the west it is an often overlooked fact that the japanese victories in 1941-42 shattered the myth of the 'white men's' superiority. It was the first time (THE precedent) that ingenious forces can prevail on the long run (ie not in 1-2 battles).
IMHO This is the main difference between victorian and postbipolar world.
Time changes the observations / history
Kevin23,
You will need to be careful at the sources for your research. The lessons learnt I expect change over time. Using the Boer War(s) as the example, what did the contemporary histories / foriegn mission reports etc say and what later works like Pakenham and others said?
Secondly, IIRC John Fishel made a comment here on El Salvador, a successful COIN campaign, but thirty years later the main opponent is elected to power. That makes the earlier campaign look different: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=8499.
davidbfpo
The plot thickens, it seems...
First we have this...
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Originally Posted by
Bob's World
One significant differnce is that Gorbachav made the conscious decision not to counter these popular uprisings. The West, faced with a similar loss of control over populaces of the Middle East chose a differnt route... So the Soviet puppets were tumbled, the Western puppets still sit; pretty fascinating stuff actually.
And then this...
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Originally Posted by
Bob's World
This is not how the populaces of the region see it, and it is their perception that matters in the current conflict. The U.S. must target that perception to prevail
So what do we face here, a perception that needs to be addressed or a policy that needs to be changed? There is a difference. Are you saying that the perception is accurate, or that we need to counter its inaccuracy? If the former, I think that claim needs to be supported with evidence and reasoning.
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Originally Posted by
Bob's World
nor even be perceived as merely building the capacity of those governments we have helped establish and sustain to continue their reigns over their populaces by crushing popular uprisings in the name of "counterterrorism."
Again I have to ask; which governments are we talking about? What governments did the US help establish? Where have we crushed popular uprisings in the name of "counterterrorism"?
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Originally Posted by
Bob's World
Take your own home. The people of the Philippines don't believe there is excessive US meddling in their governnance?
In general, no, they don't. A few loud voices on the left do, but if any significant portion of the populace agreed with them the demonstrations outside the embassy wouldn't be made up of the same 200 mantra-chanting leftists that have been rallying there for the last 30 years, and they wouldn't be outnumbered 10 to 1 by the horde of visa-seekers. The NPA leaders don't like the US, but they represent a tiny fraction of the populace; most NPA fighters are fighting over personal grievances with the Government or its representatives, and have little concern with US "meddling". The MILF is actively seeking a US role at peace negotiations: they know the US wants a deal made and they know the US can pressure the Philippine government.
All of this illustrates some problems I see with the reasoning you suggest.
It is simply impossible to speak in any relevant terms about what "a populace" or "the populace" wants or believes. No populace is monolithic, some think some things and some think other things. We often grant far too much importance to the views of small numbers of people who have very loud voices, are allied with influential groups of foreign ideologues, or are willing to use violence. Just because a group is loud does not mean it represents a populace.
If there is an active insurgency in a nation, that does certainly suggest that a large portion of a populace or sub-populace is disaffected. The existence of a terrorist group does not have to mean the same thing: many terrorist groups do not represent popular sentiment, only the opinions of a highly disaffected fringe. For example, if Al Qaeda had sufficient support in Saudi Arabia to generate an insurgency, they would certainly do it. They haven't done it because they simply don't have the support. Saudis may support AQ as long as they are fighting someone else, somewhere far away, but they don't want AQ taking over their country.
It is all too easy for us to project our own desires or sentiments onto a foreign populace, and assume that they want what we would want in their place and that they want us to help them get it. This is not necessarily the case. Many populace in the Middle East may want more self-determination, but their idea of how that would look is likely to differ radically from ours, and they certainly don't want us trying to meddle in their struggle to attain what they desire. Any involvement on our part will be interpreted as self-interested interference. We can't cure past meddling by meddling more.
We also need to understand that our capacity to exert pressure on Middle East governments (except perhaps that of Israel) is limited. If we're talking about the oil-producing governments, other than that of Iraq, our influence is practically non-existent. These governments don't need us, they don't depend on us, we don't sustain them. Anything we do for them they can get elsewhere, anything we sell them they can buy elsewhere, anything we buy from them can be sold elsewhere. The Saudis, Kuwaitis, Qataris, Emiratis etc have far more leverage over us than we have over them.
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Originally Posted by
Bob's World
My position is that the US must update its engagement for the current world order rather than the last one, and thereby disempower the messages of many of these resistance movements by becoming a leader for self-determination and freedom for all peoples. And that requires relinquishing control of what those outcomes will look like. By controlling less, I believe we will influence more.
I'd agree that we have to update our methods of engagement, but I suspect that this needs to mean less meddling, not an effort at counter-meddling. I'd also be curious to know which resistance movements you see in the picture that are arguing for self-determination and freedom. Certainly Al Qaeda, which is (or should be) our primary antagonist at this point, is not arguing for either; quite the opposite.
Value of Late 19th/Early 20th-Century Small Wars
A lot of professional historians have said that the proper model for understanding at least US actions in the current messes is the Phil. insurrection, but that is even an overdrawn historical parallel IMHO.
The real problem with trying to "use" history for these issues is the cherry picking that goes on. Looking at any "small war" in history can lead one to find the Eureka! moment: "We should do X because Y did it and they won in Z." One of the great tropes is that history repeats itself. People repeat themselves, often to inimical effect. Remember, history not an exercise in lessons learned and case studies like the military's pathetic attempts at PME suggest (remember, PME is to education what air guitar is to music).
I just had a student in the Norwich MA in Mil Hist program write his end-of-program (we don't call it a thesis because it is not) on why the US military continues to conflate the terms UW, FID, revolutionary, guerrilla, COIN, LIC, IW, spec ops, etc. His argument fell partly on the point that the people responsible for writing the doctrine for those operations do not have the proper training in history. Instead, they cherry pick and think reading some stuff on the web will do the trick. Alas, it ain't so.
There is an anti-intellectual bias held by many but it isn't total.
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Originally Posted by
John Grenier
... but on the whole, folks in the military don't listen to them because of the anti-intellectual bias of the military. The good stuff is out there, but it takes a long time to master it.
I think rather than bias, your last clause better explains the failure to listen...
Underwhelmed by Linn's arguments
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Originally Posted by
John Grenier
Brian Linn for one.
I liked Linn's book on the Philippine War, but the alleged similarities to Iraq leave me unmoved. The parallels do seem superficially compelling, especially to an audience with little knowledge of the Philippine conflict, but each is slightly stretched, and the cumulative stretch approaches the breaking point. The lessons to be deduced, IMO, go rather beyond the breaking point, and the rather more compelling differences between the conflicts don't seem to get much attention.
For example, there's a huge difference in the fundamental objective of the wars being looked at. The Philippine War was an outright war of conquest; the objective was to annex the Philippines and govern it directly as a colony. The objective in Iraq and Afghanistan is quite different: we're trying to develop an indigenous governing capacity, not to govern these states ourselves. This policies Linn cites as things the Americans did right in the Philippines generally involved the effective exercise of direct governance functions by Americans. This makes perfect sense in an environment we propose to directly govern. If the objective is to develop indigenous government, it makes no sense at all: if Americans directly exercise governance functions they are competing with and undermining the governance structure we are trying to create. Experience with imposing direct governance simply doesn't translate to an effort to cultivate independent governance.
There are other differences as well, many of them: the political and social context, the capacities and constraints of American forces, the capacities and constraints of opposing forces, and many others. In the context of the differences, the parallels, and the lessons deduced from them, grow rather pale.
I realize that academics with niche expertise have excellent reasons for drawing parallels between their niche and current conditions, but the rest of us would be well advised to crank up the skepticism before accepting the conclusions emerging from the process.