The hunt for the al Duri doctrine, Part I

Guerrilla warfare is not new—it is in fact the original form of warfare. The insurgents' use of it in Iraq and the American counter-insurgency operations there continue a long pedigree with a variable record of success

by William Kay

click here for part II

In June 2003, a controversy swirled around whether to define what was going on in Iraq as a “guerilla war.” De facto Commander-in-Chief, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, didn't think the 25 attacks per day the insurgency was inflicting on Multinational Forces constituted a “guerrilla war.” He believed the attacks were the dying kicks of former regime “dead-enders.” Not to worry, the war was over. Rumsfeld found support for his view from field commanders who, while acknowledging the ominous growth of the attacks, claimed the attack campaign lacked evidence of central command and as such was unworthy of the term “guerrilla warfare.”

There's nothing new about guerrilla war. People fought in small groups before they fought in large ones. They fought out of uniform long before they fought in uniform. People fought with crude improvised weapons before they fought with mass produced high quality ones. Guerrilla warfare is a temporary and voluntary sliding back to a simpler, more primitive form of warfare.

Conventional warfare has varied little since the pre-Bronze Age city states of Mesopotamia. In conventional warfare, one adversary amasses as many soldiers as possible, spends highly on their arms, armor and training, before dispatching them to capture the enemy's capital city. The defending adversary had few options. One was to amass a powerful army of their own and head the barbarians off at the pass, usually leading to a winner-take-all battle. Another option was to hole up in the walled city and deploy a variant of guerrilla warfare involving sorties. Another option was to resort to scorched-earth and all out guerrilla warfare.

Guerrilla warfare can be just as deadly and effective as conventional warfare. Remember Napoleons' fiasco in Russia. Armies move on their stomachs. It is easier to march 100,000 troops into a far away land than it is to feed them once they're there. Invading armies need constant re-supply of food, ammunition, and fuel. The large army is at risk of annihilation if its convoys are interrupted. As well, the large army must be protected by sentries and patrols requiring that vulnerable small units be sent into hostile territory.

Guerrilla warfare shuns amassing strength in one spot in favor of using many small groups that hide by day and ambush by night. These clandestine bands can ambush sentries and patrols and can throttle a large army by raiding its supply convoys. The guerrilla hits and runs. They hide in remote, difficult to access, regions like bogs, jungle ravines, deserts, bombed-out parts of cities, urban ghettos and farmhouses. Large conventional-style army sweeps through these terrains can spell disaster for the army, particularly if the guerrillas effectively use booby-traps.

Importantly, the guerrilla war-plan is always to graduate up to conventional level and defeat the adversary on those terms. The plan is never to remain a guerrilla forever; rather it is to dislodge the adversary and takeover the territory. The guerrilla seeks to weaken his adversary through a thousand cuts while secretly amassing recruits and weaponry for conventional combat victory and seizure of power.

Alexander the Great conducted counter-insurgency operations during his march eastward and knew well the importance of winning the hearts and minds of the rural masses. The Romans used guerrilla warfare successfully against Hannibal and went on to apply counter-insurgency doctrine on the natives of Mediterranean Spain for two centuries before Caesar applied the doctrine to the Gauls of France. William of Normandy was bedeviled by Irish guerrillas who used dense bogs as sanctuaries. Edward I had similar problems with the Welsh and an even worse time attempting to subdue Scottish irregulars under Robert Bruce.

The original Crusaders fought anti-guerrilla warfare operations a few hundred kilometers east of the Sunni triangle. Guerrilla warfare drove the English from France near the end of the Hundred Years War. The Duke of Wellington's successful use of irregular bands of civilian-clad locals to harass Napoleon's Army in Spain gave birth to the term “guerrilla”; as in “little war.” The Boer War was a rewarding achievement in British counter-insurgency, as was T E Lawrence's campaign using Arab insurgents to hold down the Turk armies in Syria. His subsequent writings on the topic presage Mao by a generation.

The defining twin struggles of 18 th century North America, the War of Independence and the early Indian Wars, were largely “guerrilla wars.” Guerrillas resurfaced in a brief but brilliant fashion near the end of the Civil War, eventually dissolving down to the final shoot-outs of the James Gang in Minnesota. So annoyed was the Union Army by Confederate troops ducking in and out of civilian clothes to conduct raiding operations that on April 1863 Union Army Order No. 100 decreed that any Confederate found engaging in said practice would be afforded no prisoner of war rights. (i.e. the right not to be shot on sight).

Between 1866 and 1890 the US Army fought 1,000 small wars against natives of the US west. Usually these involved a quasi-conventional assaults, with overwhelming fire power (horse-drawn cannon and Gattling-gun) brought to bear against the natives' principal settlements. By the 1870s more was being done, particularly by the US Army's George Crook's work with the Apaches, on understanding native languages and culture as a means of better negotiating with non-combatants and better isolating the warriors.

The US Army fought extensive counter-insurgency operations in the Philippines from 1898 to 1902 and again during and after WWII. They have continued to apply and develop counter-insurgency doctrine in the Philippines through their indirect efforts to quash the Communist New People's Army and various Muslim insurgents. In the early 19 th century, the US Army conducted anti-guerrilla warfare operations in Cuba and in the suppression of Poncho Villa's network in Mexico. They followed Crook's advice on getting to know the locals and on developing small companies of fast horsemen that could catch the insurgents in the open.

The Cold War re-kindled interest in counter-guerrilla warfare in the US Army. A comprehensive study on the topic was commenced in the early 1950s drawing primarily on the experiences of the Allies in organizing resistance in France, Yugoslavia and Southeast Asia during WWII. A comprehensive US Army manual on counter-insurgency appeared in 1961 and has gone through many editions. As a result of these changes in planning, the US “Green Berets” were developed as a special anti-insurgency force. In the great test of the doctrine, Vietnam, suffered primarily from a lack of confidence among top Army brass. General Westmoreland derisively referred to the counter insurgency as “the other war.” The brass did not want highfalutin counter-insurgency theory hampering the “main-force” war.

The US Marine Corps has the most experience in counter-insurgency. From the Civil War to World War I, the Marines invaded Mainland China, Formosa, Korea, Japan, and Libya, not to mention countries of the Caribbean. (Haiti was treated to eight USMC invasions; Nicaragua, nine.) Each of these campaigns involved some measure of counter-guerrilla activity. The USMC overcame armed irregular opposition to form the de facto government of Haiti (1915 to 1934), Dominican Republic (1913 to 1925), and Nicaragua (1913 to 1933). (The Marines first experimented with rotary-blade aircraft to get troops and supplies to hard-to-get areas in the anti-Sandino campaign in 1932.) In each of these countries the Marines recruited a gendarmerie from local elites and organized elections. Power was then turned over to individuals rising to prominence during these processes.

Marine Corps literature on counter-insurgency dates to articles by Major Samuel Harrington for the Marine Corps Gazette in 1921. A course in counter insurgency was added to Marine curriculum at Quantico in 1924. A comprehensive USMC Small Wars Manual came out in 1935 (three years before Mao's treatise on Guerrilla [small war] strategy). The Manual was replaced in 1960 with “USMC Anti-Guerrilla Warfare”.

During the Vietnam War, the Marines formed “combined action platoons” consisting of 15 marines and 34 “South Vietnamese” soldiers. The Marines selected several dozen villages where “oil-spots” (i.e. combined action platoons) would be dropped with the hope they would spread their influence like in an oil droplet on a page. The platoons would hold country fair operations where they would buy produce and give away treats and free medical care. These fairs would also be used to “fleece” the local population of intelligence on the insurgents. By late 1966, nearly 50,000 persons were screened and interrogated at these fairs yielding valuable intelligence used later in conventional cordon-and-search operations. But the US Army was unimpressed and Marine resources were put to more conventional defensive operations. This left the operation in the hands of the “South Vietnamese Army” where it failed decisively.

They still debate whether the Vietnam War was conducted in not enough, or too much, of a conventional fashion, but then they still debate the utility of Sherman's March.

Part II of “The hunt of the al Duri doctrine” will appear in The Republic next issue, number 106.

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