"African Way of War" ...
or, is there a more generalized principle here:
if, for a moment in considering this, we leave aside Carl's implicit caveat re: whether "mass murder of civilians [can ever be] a legitimate tactic."Kill each others civilians while avoiding direct military to military action - unless you have overwhelming odds.
The rest of the equation (..."avoiding direct military to military action - unless you have overwhelming odds.") seems the first rule of warfare - Nathan Bedford Forrest:
who actually said: "Ma'am, I got there first with the most men." (true scoop; "git thar fustest with the mostest" was a NYT concoction). In either phraseology, we see Momentum (Mass times Velocity) as the key concept.
No doubt Forrest was one of the brightest bulbs in the Confederate marquee (Stonewall Jackson was another), but Forrest (like so many other bright bulbs) sometimes went to the dark side - e.g.,
and then there was Fort Pillow - which brings us back to the issues of massacres (whether murdering civilians or captured soldiers seems not an important distinction).
Most mass killings today are reported as "senseless slaughters of innocent civilians without purpose." Very few people today have actually studied massacres, with a dispassionate eye, and questioned whether those killings are indeed "senseless" and "without purpose" - and, indeed, looking objectively at whether those killings were effective (sometimes "yes", sometimes "no").
The principal researcher in this area over the last couple of decades has been Stathis Kalyvas. This post, Selective Violence By Kalyvas, in the Rhodesian COIN thread, lists most of his online publications (9 at the time). Kalyvas is going to satisfy no one's political correctness; e.g., this snip from his 2009 book chapter (p.20 pdf):
and, in emphasizing that the all-important factor of control cannot be approached simplistically (p.21-22 pdf):To begin with, had I relied on historical data, it is highly likely that I would have undercounted two key variables: the level of selective violence (which turns out to reach 50.48% of all homicides) and the level of insurgent violence (which accounts for 51.31% of the fatalities). The reason is that the historical record has preserved the more visible large indiscriminate massacres rather than the individualized targeted killings. Furthermore, it has also privileged [JMM: "emphasized"] the more visible (and politically more blameworthy) violence of the incumbents rather than the violence of the insurgents. Last, I would have been completely unable to distinguish between selective and indiscriminate violence or to disaggregate violence by time period.
What Kalyvas' various studies (most outside Africa) prove is that, in many cases (just over 50% per above), the civilian killings are selective, which implicates a rational process which has some expectation of success in reducing the opponent's measure of control by selectively killing the opponent's civilian supporters in the key geographical area.Such an example is contained in a recent paper by Humphreys and Weinstein (2006) that uses survey data from Sierra Leone to estimate a model of civilian abuse by armed groups. Having coded no variable for control, they rely on a substitute called “dominance,” which records the estimated size of a unit relative to the estimated total number of troops in the zone. This measure, however, is highly problematic as any student of insurgency and counterinsurgency would easily surmise: the ability of an armed group to control a particular locality is only partly a function of the raw numbers of combatants.
Control is a function of the distribution of these troops across an area with specific geographical features, combined with the number, commitment, and distribution of civilian supporters across the same area.[7]
7. This paper also fails to distinguish between selective and indiscriminate violence. Again, lack of appropriate coding is justified by a dubious argument whereby this distinction is “blurred” (Humphreys and Weinstein 2006, 444). The entire exercise is quite problematic as the type of abuse described in the paper is clearly of an indiscriminate nature, thus rendering its test of theories of selective violence pointless.
In short, when it comes to coding territorial control there is no easy alternative to either direct and careful data collection using all available sources, or prior coding by the insurgents or counterinsurgents themselves, when they do leave extensive archival material behind.
I suspect that, even in the area of "indiscriminate" killings, there is more rationality in the minds of the killers than the politically correct "historical" studies will admit. For example, Village A seems to the insurgent to support the incumbent, but the insurgent lacks specific intel as to which villagers are key incumbent supporters (thus, excluding for the moment, targeted killings by the insurgent). A rational (though more risky than targeted killing) plan is to kill all the villagers, or a randomly-selected percentage of them, etc.
In fact, one could find rationality even in events such as the Rwandan genocide. In those cases, Population Group A takes the place of Village A. Of course, in Rwanda, the genocide was kicked off by targeted killings of those people who seemed to the killers to be key opponents.
The Mongols were certainly a very well organized, strictly disciplined and rational military force; but also ruthlessly genocidal for solid, practical reasons. See, Passing the Mongol Wheel Test; and the some 5K hits from Googling "mongol massacres"
John Gisogod's "Massacres" is no longer in original form online, but its text is still here; and is attached below. His conclusions about why the Mongols did what they did seem valid to me:
Since carnage bothers me, I don't know whether I could have done what Subotai did. I do understand his rationale in military necessity for doing what he did.When Genghis Khan attempts the conquest of the world (1209), the Mongol population numbers between 400 000 and 600 000 inhabitants, among which 200 000 are warriors. Together, all the countries targeted for conquest can muster a global population of more than 200 millions inhabitants (which is then 400 times the total number of inhabitants in Mongolia). The Mongols are a tiny minority and their army is almost always outnumbered when facing the various enemies on countless battlefields.
The fact that their enemies are much more numerous triggers an inferiority complex among the Mongols, and the panic fear that their armies may be drowned some day in the multitude of the conquered populations. The only solution to make these conquered populations less dangerous, would be to decrease their numbers; and the only way to achieve that would be to massacre an important part of each of them.
...
If one asks: why all those massacres?, the only answer that comes to mind is military necessity. The coming of the Mongol horsemen was generally not followed by rebellion (except in the Khwarezm and especially the Khorassan), because the revolts were crushed beforehand by a terror without precedent. Such massacres, when 98% of the population of certain regions is exterminated, leave a lasting impression. When only 2% of the population is left alive, terror works and the survivors have no inclination to revolt anymore.
Furthermore, during a military campaign, depopulation is sometimes the most convenient means of securing the rear. There is no need to leave behind an occupation army in a depopulated land. The great novelty is to be able to control a territory without ever having to occupy it.
Partisan war against the occupier is impossible. You cannot harass the occupier, then there is no occupation. This kind of remote control (the Mongol armies are stationed far away from the rare conquered cities that have been left intact) renders all modern techniques of urban guerrilla warfare or jungle warfare completely inefficient against the Mongols.
And so it went in our first European military classic:
From one of R.J. Rummel's many pages on "Democide" - which only considers the carnage wracked up by governments, saying nothing of their opponents.Agamemnon: "My dear Menelaus, why are you so chary of taking men's lives? Did the Trojans treat you as handsomely as that when they stayed in your house? No; we are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their mothers' wombs--not even they must live. The whole people must be wiped out of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear."
----Homer, Iliad
So, agreed that "it" marks the African Way of War, but "we" should be aware that "we" are not far removed from that jungle and its tipping point.
Regards
Mike
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