The American experience in irregular war: from practice to policy, and back again

America has a lengthy history with irregular warfare. The nation was born of an insurgency and remained committed to such conflict over the centuries, from the American Revolution in the eighteenth century, the Indian Wars in the nineteenth century, the Philippines in the twentieth century, and Iraq and Afghanistan in the twentieth-first century. Although the U.S. has learned a great deal from centuries of fighting irregular war, the lessons were continuously learned and forgotten, indicating America‘s distaste of such conflict. Yet, as America continues to fight irregular wars, doctrine and policy have taken shape. However, whereas doctrine and policy may exist, our practices remain very similar to the past, often involving inconsistent and ad hoc measures. Yet, new methodology emerged which takes ?best practices? from centuries of irregular war. This methodology calls for a fundamental change in how the U.S. approaches irregular war, illustrating the need to focus on local level instability and conflict drivers. Further, this methodology not only can be employed in the field of conflict, but also can help mitigate conflict before it becomes war. In order to learn from America‘s history in irregular war, and embrace methodology based on historical ?best practices,? America must move from merely changing its policy to changing how it practices irregular conflict. Dedicated to my wife, Hamida Alexander, for enduring my days and nights away while she tirelessly performed the bulk of the parenting.

THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN IRREGULAR WAR: FROM PRACTICE TO POLICY, AND BACK AGAIN by Jason Smith Alexander A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Middle East Studies / Political Science Department of Languages and Literature The University of Utah August 2011 Copyright © Jason Smith Alexander 2011 All Rights Reserved Th e Uni v e r s i t y o f Ut a h Gr a dua t e S cho o l STATEMENT OF THESIS APPROVAL The thesis of Jason Smith Alexander has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: M. Hakan Yavuz , Chair 5 May 2011 Date Approved Eric Davis , Member 5 May 2011 Date Approved James Mayfield , Member 5 May 2011 Date Approved and by Johanna Watzinger-Tharp , Chair of the Department of Middle East Center and by Charles A. Wight, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT America has a lengthy history with irregular warfare. The nation was born of an insurgency and remained committed to such conflict over the centuries, from the American Revolution in the eighteenth century, the Indian Wars in the nineteenth century, the Philippines in the twentieth century, and Iraq and Afghanistan in the twentieth-first century. Although the U.S. has learned a great deal from centuries of fighting irregular war, the lessons were continuously learned and forgotten, indicating America‘s distaste of such conflict. Yet, as America continues to fight irregular wars, doctrine and policy have taken shape. However, whereas doctrine and policy may exist, our practices remain very similar to the past, often involving inconsistent and ad hoc measures. Yet, new methodology emerged which takes -best practices‖ from centuries of irregular war. This methodology calls for a fundamental change in how the U.S. approaches irregular war, illustrating the need to focus on local level instability and conflict drivers. Further, this methodology not only can be employed in the field of conflict, but also can help mitigate conflict before it becomes war. In order to learn from America‘s history in irregular war, and embrace methodology based on historical -best practices,‖ America must move from merely changing its policy to changing how it practices irregular conflict. Dedicated to my wife, Hamida Alexander, for enduring my days and nights away while she tirelessly performed the bulk of the parenting. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 Framing the Challenges of Irregular Conflict ............................................................. 1 Frequency and Relevance of Irregular Conflict: the American Perspective ............... 4 Applicability and Effectiveness of Irregular Conflict ................................................. 5 The Value of -Human Terrain‖ ................................................................................... 8 Why Insurgency? ...................................................................................................... 10 The Importance of Learning and Adaptation ............................................................ 16 I THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN IRREGULAR WAR ..................................... 19 1775-1883: An American Insurgency ....................................................................... 20 The -Hard War‖ Years: The American Civil War .................................................... 25 The Indian Wars ........................................................................................................ 29 Lessons of a Long and Brutal War ............................................................................ 30 Betwixt and Between: The Civil War, the Indian Wars, and Modernity .................. 38 The Small Wars Years ............................................................................................... 46 III STABILITY OPERATIONS: FROM POLICY TO PRACTICE ............................. 62 Conducting Effective Stability Operations ................................................................ 63 Stability Operations Programming ............................................................................ 66 The District Stabilization Framework (DSF) ............................................................ 69 Collection and Situational Awareness ....................................................................... 70 Analysis ..................................................................................................................... 71 Design ........................................................................................................................ 72 Implementation .......................................................................................................... 73 Monitoring and Evaluation ........................................................................................ 73 Criticism of District Stabilization Framework .......................................................... 75 Benefits of DSF ......................................................................................................... 80 Summary.................................................................................................................... 82 CIVIL-MILITARY TEAMS: STILL WAITING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS ........... 84 Civilian-Military Teams in Vietnam ......................................................................... 86 Civilian-Military Teams Today ................................................................................. 90 The District Stability Framework .............................................................................. 93 The District Stability Framework: Four Phases ........................................................ 94 Fostering Effective Civil-Military Integration .......................................................... 95 Overcoming the Challenges with the DSF ................................................................ 96 Fostering Civ-Mil Integration Across the Intervention Spectrum ............................. 98 Obstacles to DSF Implementation ........................................................................... 100 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 101 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 103 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 105 vi INTRODUCTION Framing the Challenges of Irregular Conflict While these units function as guerrillas, they may be compared to innumerable gnats, which, by biting a giant both in front and in the rear, ultimately exhaust him. They make themselves as unendurable as a group of cruel and hateful devils, and as they grow and attain gigantic proportions, they will find their victim is not only exhausted but practically perishing.-Mao Tse-tung, 1937 America has a long history with irregular war with historical involvement in dozens of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. America‘s very existence is rooted in insurgency warfare and this form of conflict has never completely disappeared throughout America‘s two and a half centuries-long history, seeing only ebbs in prominence and national attention. The American people‘s first national experience with insurgency and counterinsurgency was the American Revolution as a struggle for independence from the colonial hegemony of the British Empire. The American war for independence was in essence a political war fought amongst the people for deeply political reasons-making it an archetypical insurgency by current American standards.1 Yet, this was merely one American experience dealing with insurgency and counterinsurgency, contemporarily referred to as irregular warfare. As we will see, 1 The current military doctrine, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency states: -Political power is the central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies; each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate. Insurgents use all available tools-political (including diplomatic), informational (including appeals to religious, ethnic, or ideological beliefs), military, and economic-to overthrow the existing authority. This authority may be an established government or an interim governing body. Counterinsurgents, in turn, use all instruments of national power to sustain the established or emerging government and reduce the likelihood of another crisis emerging.‖ See Department of the Army, FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency (Washington D.C.: Department of the Army, 2009). 2 America‘s experience in this form of conflict, whether as insurgents or counterinsurgents, is lengthy and complex. Aside from America‘s formative years rooted in insurgency, America also has a lengthy history in which the United States was a primary actor in counterinsurgency warfare. In fact, America‘s history as being the counterinsurgent force is more extensive than often acknowledged. By modern definition, counterinsurgency is essentially the antithesis of insurgency warfare, being as deeply political and nuanced as the insurgencies they seek to counter. To illustrate these many nuances, the U.S. Army describes the population-based intricacies of counterinsurgency: At its heart, counterinsurgency is an armed struggle for the support of the population. This support can be achieved or lost through information engagement, strong representative government, access to goods and services, fear, or violence. This armed struggle also involves eliminating insurgents who threaten the safety and security of the population. However, military units alone cannot defeat an insurgency. Most of the work involves discovering and solving the population‘s underlying issues, that is, the root causes of their dissatisfaction with the current arrangement of political power. Dealing with diverse issues such as land reform, underemployment, oppressive leadership, or ethnical tensions places a premium on tactical leaders who can not only close with the enemy, but also negotiate agreements, operate with nonmilitary agencies and other nations, restore basic services, speak the native (a foreign) language, orchestrate political deals, and get -the word‖ on the street.2 Among the most salient points this paragraph highlights is that insurgency and counterinsurgency (i.e., the armed struggle between the two) are extraordinarily complex and the tactics and strategies are timeless. In short, although these conflicts have become more complex and the tactics and strategies more sophisticated, the concept itself is nothing new. 2 Department of the Army, FM 3-24.2, Tactics in Counterinsurgency (Washington D.C.: Department of the Army, 2009). ix. 3 Despite new doctrine, policy, and theory, governments and those competing for or against the government in power have always been concerned with gaining popular support and evoking group sentiments within the target population, regardless of methods utilized to win or defeat peoples. A clear distinction should be made, however, that whereas the concept of population-based irregular war is timeless, the tactics and strategies have evolved substantially. Over the past few decades, insurgencies have evolved from merely guerrilla warfare, devoid of a political base, to that of sophisticated political warfare utilizing violence as well as using the leverage of public support as the key tools in winning power. The U.S. Army manual goes on to point out a particularly salient issue in political warfare that insurgencies and counterinsurgencies focus the majority of their attention on the population, rather than merely the enemy. Stated more formally, these types of conflicts are more frequently -population-centric‖ rather than merely -enemy-centric.‖ For the successful insurgent or counterinsurgent, simply killing the enemy cannot be the top priority. Popular support must be drained from the enemy. This is of course what makes such forms of warfare deeply political. To illustrate, -enemy-centric‖ conflicts tend to be more conventional conflicts, such as WWII where population sentiment was dealt with as a byproduct of larger conventional military efforts. In other words, soldiers viewed population sentiment as relatively irrelevant while undertaking the task of fighting major battles. These important points-that irregular war is primarily about gaining political support and that such warfare tends to be focused on the population-set irregular war apart from conventional war. 4 Irregular warfare, such as counterinsurgency and insurgency, is not a rarity in either contemporary or historical periods of conflict. Historically, irregular conflict is far more statistically prominent when compared to conventional forms of conflict. Despite the overwhelming amount of attention on conventional wars, where armies fight through traditional forms of combat (e.g., battle for air superiority, centralized command and control, uniformed armies fighting for terrain, large naval sea battles, etc.), conventional war has not been predominant statistically since formal tracking began. Over the previous two and a half centuries, -small wars‖ have been at least as important, if not more so, than well-known larger conventional wars (e.g., examples of conventional war include the American Civil War and the Great World Wars). What should be clear is that irregular war has been and will likely remain a vital part of the American war experience. Frequency and Relevance of Irregular Conflict: The American Perspective The United States has engaged frequently in irregular conflict. Studies of conflict analysis that quantify the numbers of conventional versus nonconventional wars highlight that counterinsurgency and insurgency warfare is in fact much more -typical‖ than widely-known larger conventional wars. Many conflict scholars point out that over the past sixty years, irregular warfare-including insurgency and counterinsurgency-has actually become the dominant form of war, not only in terms of frequency but also in terms of long-range political relevance and consequence. Conflict scholars highlight: -Within the 464 conflicts recorded on the Correlates of War database since 1815, we can 5 identify 385 in which a state was fighting a non-state actor.‖3 By definition, irregular warfare is characterized by states fighting nonstate entities. Thus, statistically, conventional wars (i.e., conflict predominantly being state on state) reflect approximately only one-quarter of global conflicts since 1815. America has followed a similar pattern as the global community, engaging more frequently in irregular conflict. As counterinsurgents, the U.S. has fought, to varying degrees of success, a wide array of such conflicts, including wars against Native Americans, Mexican guerrillas, Islamist insurgents, and even our own insurgents-such as during the Whiskey Rebellion and again during the Civil War against secessionist guerrillas (e.g., -Mosby‘s Rangers‖). As the insurgents and guerrillas, both sanctioned and otherwise, Americans have fought against the British, Native Americans, and our own-to name only a few. Further, we have also assisted on frequent occasion foreign counterinsurgents and insurgents via Special Forces (i.e., Foreign Internal Defense or FID) and similar classified and covert operations. Thus, America is no stranger to irregular conflict. Applicability and Effectiveness of Irregular Conflict The phenomenon of irregular war occurs for a primary overarching reason-that given the right environment and circumstances, irregular war affords the best chance of success when a weaker foe comes into armed conflict with a more conventionally powerful adversary. To illustrate, U.S. military doctrine states: The contest of internal war is not -fair‖; many of the -rules‖ favor insurgents. That is why insurgency has been a common approach used by the weak against 3 Sebastian Gorka and David Kilcullen, -The Actor-Centric Theory of War,‖ in Joint Forces Quarterly 60 (2011): 17. 6 the strong. At the beginning of a conflict, insurgents typically hold the strategic initiative. Though they may resort to violence because of regime changes or government actions, insurgents generally initiate the conflict. Clever insurgents strive to disguise their intentions. When these insurgents are successful at such deception, potential counterinsurgents are at a disadvantage. A coordinated reaction requires political and military leaders to recognize that an insurgency exists and to determine its makeup and characteristics. While the government prepares to respond, the insurgents gain strength and foster increasing disruption throughout the state or region. The government normally has an initial advantage in resources; however, that edge is counterbalanced by the requirement to maintain order and protect the population and critical resources. Insurgents succeed by sowing chaos and disorder anywhere; the government fails unless it maintains a degree of order everywhere.4 As illustrated in the previous paragraph, paradoxically, a well-organized and determined insurgency has several distinct advantages when confronting a conventionally superior opponent. Equally important for the counterinsurgent, therefore, is a keen understanding of the population as the knowledge of the human scene now becomes the determining -terrain‖ for achieving victory. Physical terrain is of distant importance following human terrain. As highlighted, the frequency of such conflict trending toward irregular conflict is not the result of a mere accident of fate or without reason and thought. Rather, this trend is reflective of a deeper change in overall strategy by state and nonstate conflict actors. Both state and nonstate actors now realize that they need not meet in battle conducted according to historical conventions -such as traditional -force on force‖ in open battlefields. Further, the insurgents need not have the most advanced fleet of naval ships or stealth fighters. Such weaponry and technology are expensive, time consuming to acquire and be trained on, and outright unachievable for almost all insurgents. Of most importance, however, are also unnecessary in order to win in insurgent warfare. 4 Department of the Army, FM 3-24, 1-2. 7 Therefore, armed with the knowledge of contemporary case studies and evolving literature, innovative and sophisticated approaches to irregular conflict continue to emerge. With the old adages of conventional conflict thrown aside often in favor of irregular approaches to war, the focus has shifted to winning via irregular means against often conventionally superior adversaries. To illustrate, despite common convention, frequently a successful insurgent seeks to turn the opponent‘s -strengths‖ against their adversary, while simultaneously attempting to turn their own -weaknesses‖ into strengths. Although a nuanced concept like something from the pages of Sun Tzu, it is a commonly held principle among historical and contemporary insurgents. Translated into practical applicability, it simply says to turn large powerful armies into slow, reactive, and confused organizations while maintaining the advantage of surprise and deceit. Regarding technology, it seeks to bait the counterinsurgents into overreacting to insurgent attacks, ultimately alienating them from the human terrain and resulting in the shift of popular support to the insurgents. As a starting point, the insurgent can accomplish his strategy only by -winning‖ the population, perhaps slowly at first but consistently over time. Ultimately there are two choices in how this is accomplished: the utilization of terror or other forms of coercion (often referred to as the -kinetic‖ approach, using harsh methods), or persuading the population to join their effort, often performed by building rapport and distributing propaganda (nonkinetic approach, by establishing trust and kinship with the population). Similarly, the counterinsurgent force utilizes similar approaches and choices, essentially attempting to outperform the insurgents at this game, utilizing a mixture of kinetic and nonkinetic approaches. 8 The Value of -Human Terrain‖ As mentioned, -human terrain‖ is the critical terrain in insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare. As often attributed to the highly successful Chinese insurgent leader, Mao Tse-tung, the population becomes the battlefield that must be captured. In Mao‘s case, he spared no expense in building rapport with the population, illustrated by his dictate to -…aid the popular masses…help them to gather the harvest or cultivate their lands and send our army doctors to prevent their epidemics or treat the peoples‘ ailments…hold joint entertainment sessions for the soldiers and the people…smooth over any feelings of alienation between the army and the people.‖5 This approach is in stark contrast to conventional thinking of war which focuses on capturing and holding physical terrain. In conventional conflict, the population is merely a single ancillary factor when capturing physical terrain and receives relatively little attention. In contrast, within the doctrine and common practice of irregular conflict, physical terrain can be seen as a negative factor if the captured physical terrain serves only to extend the reach of counterinsurgent forces beyond their means to properly defend themselves, the captured terrain, and the population. This is further pronounced in hostile space which is influenced by the opposition, the very type an insurgency seeks to expand with the goal of captured terrain serving as new points of attack and alienation between the population and the counterinsurgents. To illustrate, U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine writes: …maintaining security in an unstable environment requires vast resources, whether host nation, U.S., or multinational. In contrast, a small number of highly motivated insurgents with simple weapons, good operations security, and even limited mobility can undermine security over a large area. Thus, successful COIN 5 Stuart Schram and Mao Tse-Tung, Basic Tactics (New York: Praeger, 1961) 134. 9 operations often require a high ratio of security forces to the protected population.6 To further illustrate the value of human terrain, in modern counterinsurgency doctrine the -human terrain‖ becomes the focus in an attempt to willingly -capture,‖ or at the very least to influence the population into joining their side of the conflict. Ordinarily, both sides compete for the human terrain, be it through nonviolent persuasion or forcible coercion. Once a side captures or influences the population, the opposing side becomes significantly weakened and their legitimacy undermined. This reduced capability is due to the reduced capability to easily conduct offensive or defensive operations -that is, kinetic operations to kill and capture adversaries, now protected by the local population. Further examples of reduced capability through the loss of popular support may often include diminished intelligence from the population on the adversary‘s operations, an inability to travel without fear of attack, difficulty maintaining supply lines, and general population hostility affecting overall operations in unforeseen ways. U.S. Army doctrine discusses the importance of such -human terrain‖ support for both insurgents and counterinsurgents, stating: …insurgents rely on friendly elements within the population to provide supplies and intelligence…Insurgent camps are also chosen with a view toward easy access to the target population, access to a friendly or neutral border, prepared escape routes, and good observation of counterinsurgency force approach routes…Like COIN [counterinsurgency] in urban areas, rural counterinsurgency operations must focus on both locating and killing the guerrilla and on severing the supportive element of the population, such as the mass base and auxiliary, from providing supplies and intelligence.7 These many small but significant shifts in approaches to conflict add up to significant theoretical, doctrinal, and operational changes. With common conventional 6 Department of the Army, FM 3-24, 1-2. 7 Department of the Army, FM 3-24.2, 3-12. 10 concepts of war replaced by new structures and goals of irregular war, the rules of war changed holistically. The more common understanding of Clausewitzian theory of war involving overwhelming force application, attrition of the opposition, and superior fire and maneuver do not reign supreme in irregular warfare. Yet, a distinctly different yet equally important argument by Clausewitz became prominent in irregular war, which asserts that -War is a continuation of ‗policy‘-or of ‗politics‘-by other means.‖8 This concept, while originally written as part of his study on conventional war, takes on new undertones in irregular conflict. In irregular conflict, politics is the foundation of the conflict; not only does irregular conflict perpetuate politics in a more violent framework-in irregular war often politics is the origin of the conflict-but also political change serves as the end-game. It is politics that are the conflict-driving grievances, that cause populations to support (or become) militants, that give rise to new insurgent leaders, and that provide the rallying cry of the insurgent and counterinsurgent. In irregular war, politics are of paramount importance. Why Insurgency? As in most forms of conflict, comparative advantages matter. The side with the most strategic and tactical advantages is usually the victor. Such advantages might include, but not be limited to, the greatest firepower, the stealthiest planes, the largest armies, the strongest armor, the most disciplined and trained units, and so on. But paradoxically irregular warfare‘s focus is distinctly different from that of conventional warfare. The normal advantages in conventional war can be turned on their head. While 8 Christopher Bassford, -Clausewitz and His Works,‖ in The Clausewitz Homepage, www.clausewitz.com (last accessed March 15, 2011). 11 advanced technology, large and powerful armies, and overwhelming concentrated firepower matter even in irregular warfare, they are not the primary focus. The insurgent quickly learns that their forces have little chance of achieving success against a more powerful and established counterinsurgency force. In fact, insurgencies are often forced into guerrilla warfare due to their distinct conventional disadvantages (e.g., lack of conventional military power) that would normally prove fatal when matched in conventional battle. When this is the case, insurgents often turn to irregular conflict for the specific reason of leveraging their irregular advantages against their stronger adversary. The way in which this irregular war is conducted is what turns conventional notions of strength on its head. In guerrilla warfare, a subset of irregular conflict, guerrilla fighting is often pursued as a means for the insurgency to fight covertly as well as to arm themselves with weaponry and supplies. A few common guerrilla tactics include ambushes, assassinations, propaganda, and other methods of tactical and larger strategic utilization of key terrain and population support. The concept behind this form of warfare is that it utilizes conventional strengths as weaknesses. To illustrate, if a large army knows little about the area and population which it occupies, it is easy for local insurgents to turn the population against the -occupiers,‖ painting them as exploiting the country and the people. Such an approach is the norm for insurgent clandestine propaganda. To further these gains, the insurgent may attack from population centers, hoping for an overreaction by the counterinsurgent force leading to civilian casualties. In turn, this further alienates the counterinsurgents from the population and often lends additional support to the insurgents. The overall insurgent methodology seeks to use the adversary‘s strength and 12 overwhelming force to benefit the insurgents. These small -victories‖ (i.e., counterinsurgency mistakes) amount to strategic success through slow attrition and growing popular support for the insurgents. Once a critical mass of the population turns against the counterinsurgents, it becomes enormously costly in all forms of resources to maintain operations. As one author highlights, -Conceptually, it was similar to the technique of a judo wrestler who throws his opponent using not his own strength but the gross weight and power of his adversary.‖9 It is also noteworthy that these rules of irregular conflict apply to both sides. The counterinsurgents are seeking many of the same strategic goals the insurgents are seeking, and thus similar methods are used, albeit usually with the use of far greater resources. As noted, the focus in irregular conflict is the population, political ideology, local grievances, and the exploitation of social and military weaknesses in the adversary. But to win in any conflict there must be a military victory to accompany political victory. But this is no small task if an insurgency begins from little in terms of leadership, fighters, infrastructure, and logistics. Such victory requires phases of growth, moving from small units of untrained and ill-equipped fighters, to battle-tested and field-hardened guerrillas and militants with a strong sense of commitment to the cause (i.e., the political reason for the insurgency). Thus, an insurgent victory requires skilled fighters, nuanced knowledge of irregular tactics and strategy, and a strong determination for the overall cause. In other words, this is a deeply complex form of war in the establishment phase, not just for purposes of strategic politics, but also at the tactical level of the individual fighters, small unit leaders, and grass-roots population support. 9 John Mackinlay, The Insurgent Archipelago (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) 23. 13 To illustrate these complexities, let us examine a common scenario in irregular warfare. Over the past century most developed nations have been overwhelmingly focused on technology-driven conventional war. While perhaps understandable given common strategic design and interests, such technology assets in small wars can quickly shift into a disadvantage. This occurs for a number of reasons, including but not limited to, ease of technology can -soften‖ conventional soldiers making them less accustomed to rigorous field craft (e.g., mountain warfare). Such an overreliance on technology also backfires when it fails, and technology is often highly specialized and not flexible enough to be of value in irregular conflicts environments, thus often leading to undesirable results. Conversely, a guerrilla in rural environments spends days and nights in austere environments, including soggy fields or in frozen mountain caves, honing small unit guerrilla tactics and living off the land and with the support of local civilians. But most importantly, by living amongst the people, the insurgent cultivates supportive relationships with local villagers and tribesmen, providing the insurgent with important information the counterinsurgent usually does not have access to. The insurgent quickly realizes that it is their superior knowledge of both the physical terrain and the human terrain (the local people) that shifts the advantage toward them, while the technology heavy and more conventionally powerful counterinsurgents quickly become bogged down, reactionary, and confounded in the absence of understanding of the local environment. In urban environments, the insurgent also has the additional advantage of blending into the masses. In urban environments, the insurgent looks like the average city dwelling citizen, providing them with the ability to hide and plan in plain sight. This 14 effect is even more pronounced when dealing with a foreign counterinsurgency force. Urban insurgencies also present unique opportunities for the insurgent, particularly when attempting a coercive approach to insurgency through the use of urban-based terrorism in order to delegitimize the counterinsurgency force and the government in which the insurgents seek to overthrow (e.g., the French in Algeria). Thus, the advantage in irregular wars, whether urban or rural-based, does not favor the more powerful side; rather the advantage most often favors the side prepared and equipped to understand, leverage, and overcome the nuanced challenges and paradoxes of irregular war. These paradoxical dynamics also lend themselves in shaping how irregular conflict is conducted. Irregular war is just that: Irregular and even arcane, because it is a unique form of conflict, irregular war can fool the professional soldier into approaching the conflict as they might a conventional war, by using overwhelming firepower, advanced technology, and strong offensive action. Yet, it is only natural to perform what one knows best, and thus if the counterinsurgent understands best how to employ conventional methods, it is highly likely that the counterinsurgent will use these conventional methods. Experienced insurgents are often fully aware of such tendencies which are illustrated throughout contemporary and modern history.10 Thus insurgent leaders often play to such approaches, luring the stronger foe to make mistakes with their superior strength, tempting them into clumsily wielding force when striking at insurgents. A common example includes shooting from population centers in hopes of provoking strikes that result in innocent victims. Another example is distribution of propaganda, 10 A few examples include the French in Algeria, The British in India, and the U.S. in Vietnam, all which demonstrate the ineffectual approach of using overwhelming force to destroy an insurgency. The results of these insurgencies demonstrated that although they did cause considerable, even enormous, losses to the insurgents, the long-term outcome required a political settlement rather than purely a military solution. 15 aimed at winning support in population centers and casting blame for misdeeds on -occupiers.‖ Such tactics, of which there are many, are common, effective, and of little or no cost to the insurgent. Likewise, the counterinsurgents attempt to lure the insurgents to make miscalculations and alienate them against the population. Common approaches include information operations (propaganda) and campaigns targeting the local population (e.g., illustrating how the insurgents are -terrorists‖ and -murderers‖). The primary point is that successful irregular wars are fought primarily with population support in mind, and not strictly through the barrel of a gun. In fact, the use of extreme violence often undermines the overall effort, ending with both blaming unnecessary violence on the other, both sides alienating themselves against the population, and often creating a stalemate. Regardless, the side that invariably wins in the long-run is the side with population support-and is able to maintain that support over the duration of the conflict. Such an assertion is what American interagency irregular war policy is based upon. The U.S Government Counterinsurgency Guide illustrates this concept: American counterinsurgency practice rests on a number of assumptions: that the decisive effort is rarely military (although security is the essential prerequisite for success); that our efforts must be directed to the creation of local and national governmental structures that will serve their populations, and, over time, replace the efforts of foreign partners; that superior knowledge, and in particular, understanding of the ‗human terrain‘ is essential; and that we must have the patience to persevere in what will necessarily prove long struggles.11 11 U.S. Government, U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide (Washington D.C.: Bureau of Pol-Mil Affairs, 2009), Preface. 16 The Importance of Learning and Adaptation Irregular warfare is also a competition of who learns and adapts the most rapidly. This dynamic is perhaps even more important than conventional tactical and strategic prowess or even the forms of weaponry used. The weapon of most value in an insurgency is the human mind and the ability to think quickly and shift tactics quickly and seamlessly. Irregular warfare highlights the -learning‖ aspects of war in order to rapidly adjust to the adversary‘s actions, just as conventional war highlights tactical prowess and the effective use of technology. While the military academies are the school houses of professional armies, the battlefield is the school house of the insurgent. Insurgency is most effective when it is a field-driven learning environment. While few theories can teach how to effectively defeat more powerful enemies, the true value of insurgent strategy is that it mitigates advanced technology from a position of weakness and places a heavy focus on the role and support by the relatively -powerless‖ population. To do this, the insurgent must have basic knowledge of the adversaries‘ technological capabilities while simultaneously reducing warfare down to its most rudimentary elements, such as flexibility, mobility, and superior intelligence. In other words, the insurgent must know what technology can and cannot do and then exploit it at the point of weakness. To illustrate, despite extraordinary surveillance capabilities from satellites and spy drones, these technologies cannot discern the difference between an insurgent and a common villager in similar dress, speaking the same language. Rather, it is usually only the local villager who can distinguish between the two as only they know the names and faces of everyone residing in the village, and are able to discern between slight differences of dialect. Thus, the capabilities needed are rarely simply technological 17 (although they can assist when employed intelligently); rather obtaining population support, and derive critical information as a result, is critical. But just as insurgents learn and adapt to their enemies, counterinsurgents also seek to rapidly learn and adapt to the insurgents‘ tactics and strategies. To the learning insurgent and counterinsurgent, being "defeated" in an operation is an opportunity to learn and redevelop tactics. The side that learns the quickest and rapidly applies -lessons learned‖ in the field will have the advantage. In a war based on who learns and adjusts the most rapidly, an important distinction to be made is the type of lessons learned and applied. For both insurgents and counterinsurgents, a tactical lesson from the battlefield is of less significance than strategic lessons that guide the overall strategic effort such as how to communicate better with the local population. Certainly, conflict field tradecraft (e.g. firing a weapon effectively) is important but such tactics are a function of practice and repetition. In contrast, learning to win over a population is a mixture of complex politics, psychology, sociology, and conflict tradecraft. As the U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guidance document highlights: [Insurgency] is primarily a political struggle, in which both sides use armed force to create space for their political, economic and influence activities to be effective. Insurgency is not always conducted by a single group with a centralized, military-style command structure, but may involve a complex matrix of different actors with various aims, loosely connected in dynamic and non-hierarchical networks. To be successful, insurgencies require charismatic leadership, supporters, recruits, supplies, safe havens and funding (often from illicit activities). They only need the active support of a few enabling individuals, but the passive acquiescence of a large proportion of the contested population will give a higher probability of success. This is best achieved when the political cause of the insurgency has strong appeal, manipulating religious, tribal or local identity to exploit common societal grievances or needs. Insurgents seek to gain control of populations through a combination of persuasion, subversion and coercion while using guerrilla tactics to offset the strengths of government security forces. Their intent is usually to protract the struggle, exhaust the government and win sufficient popular support to force capitulation or political 18 accommodation. Consequently, insurgencies evolve through a series of stages, though the progression and outcome will be different in almost every case.12 In conclusion, irregular warfare, including both insurgency and counterinsurgency, is a unique form of conflict. Irregular war does not ascribe to traditional or conventional rules for a variety of reasons. First, irregular conflict is primarily political on all levels-from the high-level strategy to the grass-roots tactics of the individual fighter. Secondly, irregular warfare‘s focus is on very different types of -terrain.‖ While conventional war places great emphasis on capturing physical terrain, it is the human terrain that matters most in irregular war. In wars among populations, it matters not if the geographic terrain captured amounts to unsustainable losses in resources over time as well as extending forces beyond capability opening it up to constant insurgent harassment. Third, conventional strength means little in irregular war. The skills required for victory in irregular war are often distinct from the skills required to win in conventional conflict. In irregular war, greater focus is placed upon winning the -hearts and minds‖ of the population rather than on individual tactics. The philosophy in irregular war is premised on the notion that whoever achieves the population‘s support-lending the advantages of time, space, and will-achieves overwhelming advantages. Such a philosophy is reflected in the Afghan proverb, -You [the invaders] have the watches, but we [the opposition] have the time.‖13 12 Ibid., 2. 13 John D. McHugh, Ben Summers, Catherine Arend, Michael Tait, and Lindsay Poulton, -You have the watches, but we have the time,‖ in The Guardian, October 14, 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/oct/13/afghanistan-taliban-us-army (accessed April 9, 2011). CHAPTER I THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN IRREGULAR WAR That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate. -Thomas Jefferson, 1774 In viewing insurgency and counterinsurgency through the lens of success and the ability to apply lessons learned, America‘s results are historically mixed. In earlier periods, America achieved extraordinary success fighting as insurgents (-patriots‖) during the American Revolution, but fared less successfully in the modern age of counterinsurgency, particularly in contemporary times, such as in Vietnam, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Yet, despite the controversial nature of irregular warfare America performed successfully in the Indian Wars and the Philippines, countering strong albeit flawed insurgent movements. Other counterinsurgency efforts remain difficult to determine regarding America‘s level of success, including current efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. This chapter comprehensively discusses America‘s experience in irregular conflict, both insurgency and counterinsurgency, highlighting those conflicts with long-term American involvement. Finally, this chapter seeks to analyze what went right and/or wrong and distill what lessons can be drawn from successes and failures. 20 1775-1883: An American Insurgency America is the product of a revolutionary birth, born of insurgency. It is well documented that American colonists fought a prolonged bloody war against British counterinsurgents seeking to maintain America in the British Empire. Many scholars of the Revolutionary War agree that the British forces were superior in terms of military professionalism, technology, proficiency, and even discipline regarding conventional tactics and strategy. To overcome these deficits, the American militants utilized an array of irregular tactics to make up for what would have been failure in conventional success. To illustrate, scholars argue that some of the most impactful military victories carried out by George Washington‘s fighters often utilized guerrilla style military tactics, such as the Battle of Trenton, a post-Christmas raid that led to an overwhelming victory against the Hessian mercenaries, an ambush in inclement weather as the Hessians recovered from the previous evening‘s festivities. Individual battles aside, within the larger strategic aspect of the American Revolutionary War, American insurgents used a wide array of contemporary insurgent tactics, utilizing such methods as hit and run ambush attacks, covert smuggling of weaponry and resources, assassination, psychological operations, and collecting intelligence from citizens, to name but a few. In fact, the American campaign against the Hessian units serves to epitomize modern irregular warfare, such as the attempt to propagandize the Hessians into joining the American ranks with the enticement of free land and citizenship.14 This was in stark contrast to the traditional style of British warfare which was characterized as large unit tactics accustomed to major battles in open spaces. In British custom, guerrilla warfare was an abomination and not 14 Everett C. Wilkie, Jr., -Franklin and 'The Sale of the Hessians': The Growth of a Myth,‖ in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 127, No. 3 (Jun. 16, 1983), pp. 202-212. 21 worthy of gentlemanly conduct in war. However, after a few disastrous outings against the British, the American militants quickly came to terms with the realization that they could not be victorious in the early stages of the revolution if they fought according to British rules of warfare. However, as we will see later, much like Mao‘s notion of moving toward conventional force in the late stages of insurgency (i.e., the -strategic offensive‖ stage), the Americans eventually defeated the British on conventional terms and with conventional armies. Yet, to survive the early stages of the insurgency, the Americans‘ success came largely as a result of guerrilla style fighting amongst a sympathetic population. In the early stages of the insurrection, guerrilla warfare was a primary tool in the tactics that were employed by the American insurgents. However, the overall strategy was one of strategic patience and constant harassment in a territory that sympathized with patriots. The long-term effect of this strategy was the slow attrition of the British as guerrilla fighters, often common citizens, attacked seemingly randomly, only to dissolve back into the population centers or the countryside, leaving the British with the weary realization that they were unable to respond effectively. Therefore, the strategy was two-fold. First, the strategy sought the destruction of military morale by sowing frustration, confusion, and helplessness. Secondly, the strategy attempted to utilize civilian popular support in order to attrite the British in men and materiel. Although a heavy-handed British strategy targeting civilians was never implemented throughout the American colony, the involvement of the population was inevitable. The presence of large numbers of -Loyalists,‖ those loyal to the King and British Empire, presented challenges for the British in attempting not to isolate the 22 Loyalists and push them toward support of the insurgents. Due to the interest in retaining Loyalist sympathizers, the British chose not to make a concerted effort to harshly suppress the overall civilian population. However, when the British overreached in their attempt to keep civilian population hubs under control, due in large part to a vast array of grievances including taxation, it inevitably led to anger and resentment against British occupation. In short, the Americans wanted their liberty and nothing assuaged that growing momentum. As the situation continued to develop over time, the British attempts at enforcing laws, targeting militants and propagandists, and billeting within cities further diminished support for the British presence. The ever-growing colonialist grievances played into the hands of revolutionary leaders. Such grievances provided easy themes for propaganda which individuals such as Thomas Paine frequently seized upon. In response, as the revolutionary support base grew, due in large part to growing grievances and revolutionary sympathy, counterproductive British practices pushed Loyalist to support revolutionary causes. One such issue that caused contention was that the use of the Hessian mercenaries, sent to put down the insurrection, rather than the King using British soldiers exclusively, was seen as an insult.15 Furthermore, the more protracted the war became, and the more frequently the British targeted population centers to purge insurgents and their sympathizers, the more their efforts appeared to fail in the eyes of the American population. Thus, as the conflict escalated without an apparent British victory 15Evidence of American colonialists‘ anger can be found within Thomas Paine‘s pamphlet, -The Rights of Man.‖ See, Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (NuVision Publications, LLC, 2007), http://books.google.com/books?id=- zVAXNTwgD8C&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109&dq=Thomas+Paine%2BHessians&source=bl&ots=PdHKXU MPUs&sig=GoDFnKTkzZD4dR1BTtS1jRAHdlM&hl=en&ei=2gaiTZqIHY2LhQeR6_GLBQ&sa=X&oi= book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CE4Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed April 10, 2011). 23 at hand, the more inclined the population became to support the local American insurgents. The long-term successful American strategy, whether by design, accident, or a combination, effectively separated British forces from popular support. The American revolutionary strategy was based first and foremost on swaying popular support toward the revolutionary cause and then defeating the British forces on the battlefield through protracted warfare. To illustrate the value of propaganda on this front, revolutionary propaganda issued throughout the colony is well documented and the propaganda pamphlets written at the time still sell well today. A few of these propagandists are now known as American -founding fathers,‖ reflecting the level of influence they had during the war. These two efforts-issuing propaganda to sway the population and the strategy of protracted warfare-were conducted in tandem as General Washington well understood that effective propaganda and defeating the British on the battlefield by whatever means necessary roused further popular support for his insurgent army. Additionally, the prolonging of the war resulted in wearing down the British forces in both lives and treasure, while seeking to deteriorate the lines of public support from the British homeland for the continuation of the war. The strategy‘s success was observable as by 1780, immediately following General Cornwallis‘s surrender to George Washington, the British government fell to the opposition group, the Peace Party, due largely to lack of political will for the war‘s continuation.16 This political turn of events effectively ended the war in 1781, though it was not formally concluded until 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. Following Cornwallis‘s surrender and the subsequent 16 Piers Mackesy, The War for America: 1775-1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993) 435. 24 change of the British government, no major battles ensued and the British forces remained largely garrisoned until the official end of the war. Several lessons can be garnered from the American Revolution for both insurgency and counterinsurgency. Looking first at counterinsurgency lessons, the British learned that finding the right balance between coercion and leniency is extraordinarily difficult. While the British military tried hard not to terrorize the American population with excessive force, the politicians in London failed to understand that taxation and political dominance did not play well in the American colony and allowed colonial propagandists easy opportunities to develop sympathy through pamphleteering in the public. Secondly, the British likely learned that perceptions of the local population are critical. When the British made the decision to bring in outside mercenaries to fight Britain‘s fight, this further alienated the British from the American population. Also, while the Boston massacre might not have been a massacre by most standards, the Boston Gazette made it appear as premeditated murder by British soldiers.17 Such propaganda is critical in building sympathy for and against an insurgency. In the case of the American Revolution, the British stood by idly as propaganda spread from city to city and into the countryside. This challenge of understanding the population was worsened by the fact that while Britain maintained strength in the cities, they had little presence and authority in the countryside.18 In looking at the American insurgency, several lessons can also be distilled. First, the American strategy of protraction worked well, eroding British military morale while 17 -Account of the Boston Massacre,‖ in The Boston Gazette and Country Journal, March 12, 1770, http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/winter96/massacre/massacrepage1.htm (accessed April 10, 2011). 18 T.H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010) 18. 25 having a similar effect in the British homeland. Secondly, the American strategy of shifting from guerrilla warfare to conventional warfare at the right phase of the insurgency also worked well, allowing the American army to perform the necessary coup de grace with conventional armies and providing the Americans with international legitimacy following victory. Finally, perhaps the most important lesson of the American Revolution is the value of highly effective propaganda, by word-of-mouth or traditional media to both exaggerate and build upon grievances, raise public awareness, and communicate with sympathizers. In short, the American Revolution carries nearly all the hallmarks of modern insurgency and provided one of the earliest examples of contemporary irregular warfare. The -Hard War‖ Years: The American Civil War The American experience in irregular conflict certainly did not end following the attainment of American sovereignty. Several wars were waged by the Americans throughout the nineteenth century, including the War of 1812 (1812-1815); the American Civil War (1861-1865); the Constabulary Years, including Pacification and the Indian Wars (1865-1898); and the Cuban and Philippines campaigns (1898-1902). With some minor exceptions, roughly the first sixty years of the nineteenth century composed of conventionally fought conflicts. Other than the ongoing Indian Wars, the first major irregular operation against the U.S. Army was during the American Civil War. The Civil War saw a limited degree of concerted population focused activity as the majority of the fighting was focused on conventional warfare, defining the war by large well-known battles that resonate even today, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Battle of Bull Run, the Battle of 26 Fredericksburg, and many others. However, the story of major land and sea battles during the Civil War misses the larger picture. During the Civil War some of the most studied guerrilla fighters emerged, not least of whom was John Mosby, nicknamed the -Grey Ghost,‖ who led the Confederate unit Mosby‘s Rangers. What occurred between Mosby‘s Rangers and the Union falls within the definition of guerrilla warfare, pitting Confederate guerrillas against Union counter-guerrillas. Due to the Confederate's military effort to secede from an internationally recognized nation-state, Mosby‘s Rangers should be defined as part of a larger Confederate insurgency, albeit in the style of guerrilla warfare often associated with modern insurgency. As we will examine, Mosby was indeed successful enough that it changed the way America fought in irregular conflict, bringing to the fore a harsher approach to counterinsurgency which played out later in the Indian Wars and the Philippines. In relation to the scale of conventional forces in the Civil War, the use of guerrillas was miniscule. Further, the peripheral attention that guerrilla tactics received from scholars makes it difficult to conclude exactly how successful the guerrilla approach was to the end result of the Civil War. There is even little agreement amongst Civil War scholars as to whether or not Confederate guerrillas were an intended part of the primary Confederate strategy. For example, a highly regarded Confederate General disparaged Mosby‘s tactics and even requested General Robert E. Lee to disband Mosby‘s Rangers.19 Some of these negative perceptions were likely the result of a lack of consistency among the guerrillas. While there were professional soldiers serving as guerrillas, such as 19 Hugh C. Keen and Horace Mewborn, 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry Mosby's Command (Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, Inc., 1993) 105. 27 Mosby‘s Rangers, others were little more than criminals in the business of savagery. As one author writes of the Confederate guerrillas: The complexity surrounding the term guerrilla makes it difficult to establish exact definitions of every Southerner who conducted irregular warfare against the Union Army…Those who conducted guerrilla warfare against the invading Union Army fit many different definitions. There were Confederate cavalrymen, such as Nathan Bedford Forest and John Hunt Morgan, who practiced evasive hit-and- run-style tactics as part of organized and sanctioned Confederate raid operations. So-called partisan rangers, who often wore Confederate uniforms but enjoyed complete autonomy from the conventional force, preyed on Federal railroads, telegraph lines, and supply wagons. There were bushwhackers who, in the guise of innocent civilians, waylaid Union pickets for the mere purpose of robbery or murder. Perhaps the most difficult class of guerrilla to define, although quite prevalent, was that which attacked simply for the sake of resisting the Union invaders.20 Several prominent Union generals concluded that when dealing with successful Confederate guerrillas, the larger reality was that they were facing a hostile population rather than merely hostile fighters. The Union soon realized that the Confederate militants were being protected by the population. As the war continued, the Confederate guerrillas took their toll on the Union, placing enormous pressure on their logistical lines and causing substantial losses to the Union ranks. In response, and out of growing desperation to defeat the demoralizing and formidable Confederate guerrillas, the Union formulated the policy of -hard war,‖ targeting strategic population centers in order to punish and instill fear within the population supporting the Confederate guerrillas. Thus, the Union sought to use fear as the ultimate disincentive to stop popular support for guerrilla fighters.21 This strategy sought to divide the population from the insurgents and thus remove the life-lines which sustained them both logistically and morally. Andrew 20 Clay Montcastle, Punitive War: Confederate Guerrillas and Union Reprisals (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003) 3. 21 Andrew Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine 1860-1941 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1998) 37. 28 Birtle, a military historian, summarizes the counter-guerrilla strategy employed by the Union: The extent to which the policy of destruction was successful in rooting out the guerrillas varied depending upon the circumstances. Nevertheless, commanders had enough success that by 1865 devastation rather than moderation had become the guiding principle of federal armies in suppressing the insurrection. This did not mean that the Army had abandoned moderation entirely. Many officers felt uncomfortable about denying quarter and burning farms and crops, and even those who endorsed the harshest measures endeavored to prevent their soldiers from degenerating into the kind of lawlessness that they so despised in the guerrillas. Indeed, many of the same officers who declared a -war of extermination‖ against the guerrillas offered generous terms of amnesty to those who voluntarily laid down their arms. Nor did the Army action indiscriminately, for while excesses did occur, for the most part federal actions represented what one historian has described as a -directed severity‖ that was aimed at specific targets (most notably upper-class secessionists, guerrillas, and military resources) than at Southern society as a whole.22 While the Confederate effort with guerrilla warfare did not succeed in winning the war, it was not a result of the failure of the guerrilla approach itself, but rather the larger strategy employed by the South. Looking specifically at the guerrilla aspects employed by the Confederacy, it had enough effect to force new approaches by the Union military. Therefore, what came as a result of the Confederate guerrilla tactics was the development of a new approach to how America viewed effective counterinsurgency (and thus a major subset of counterinsurgency being counter-guerrilla operations). Sherman‘s -March to the Sea,‖ leaving in its wake massive infrastructure devastation, decimated private property, and ultimately weakened Confederate resolve, was among the first of many campaigns illustrating America‘s emerging -hard war‖ military philosophy. The military strategic decision to target population centers perceived as supporting insurgents is a significant landmark in American counterinsurgency doctrine. 22 Ibid., 39-40. 29 For the Union, what started as an attempt to destroy bushwhackers, bandits and common criminals quickly escalated into a full-fledged effort to remove popular support for an army of insurgents set upon picking apart Union armies through irregular warfare. As the confederate insurgents demonstrated their capability to wreak havoc upon the Union, the Union decided the only way to stop them was to target the sources of their support-the sympathetic population. Leading the effort in this shift in Union policy was General Tecumseh Sherman, seen by some scholars as the architect of this campaign of violence and destruction against the Confederate population centers, referred to as the -hard war‖ approach. Because of the violence targeting civilians, including the burning of crops, property and homes, scholars often refer to this as a form of -punitive war,‖23 or -hard war,‖ similar in many respects to past military campaigns resulting in large civilian casualties in a strategy to break the will of opposition, be it passive or active support from the population. However, this shift had a long-term impact on future American counterinsurgency operations, as it was codified in the U.S. Military Academy, the training grounds for future military officers, that such tactics were to be taught as best practices meriting future replication. As Birtle writes, -Indeed, the greatest contribution of the Civil War to the development of Army doctrine was not in the charting of new ideas but in the validation and sanctification of old ones.‖24 The Indian Wars A strong lineage of counter-guerrilla and counterinsurgency warfare was transmitted from centuries of fighting between American colonists (later the American 23 Mountcastle, Punitive War, introduction. 24 Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency, 48. 30 army) and the Native American Indians. Open warfare between Native Americans and the American colonists began in 1634 with the Pequot War in present-day Southern New England. Conflicts of varying size and intensity occurred until approximately 1918 with the surrender of a band of Yaquis Indians in the State of Arizona. Within those centuries the American Indian Wars resulted in enormous loss of life and treasure for all sides. In the end, the Native Americans emerged devastated as a people, with almost everything about their way of life, culture, and sense of history altered. The following is an overview of what occurred throughout these irregular conflicts and what lessons can be taken from the long and costly civilizational war. The last Indian threat of expulsion of the settlers occurred in 1763-1766 with Pontiac‘s Rebellion. After Pontiac‘s near victory, Native American offensive efforts gave way to defensive efforts as colonialist militias and armies focused on Native American population centers, pushing ever further into Indian Territory. The only period of relative calm between settlers and Western powers occurred during various outbreaks of war between Western nations, such as the American Revolution and the Civil War, but even these periods witnessed violence between the two sides. Contributing to further hardship of the native tribes was continuous warfare among the Native American tribes. Thus, over the course of centuries of conflict the Native populations faced enormous strain across much of the American expanse. Lessons of a Long and Brutal War The way the Native Americans fought was very different from the way in which traditional European armies fought. Europeans employed large forces to fight in open terrain, while Native Americans employed guerrilla fighting techniques, employing quick 31 strike and retreat tactics and thus seeking the element of surprise. While European military tradition was familiar with irregular warfare, dating to at least the Thirty Years‘ War,25 it was never seen as a preferable way in which to fight and was usually only undertaken when main-force units had been destroyed and pushed to desperation, or employed as a distraction operation (e.g., to harass and demoralize enemy units with the goal of setting up future larger-scale conventional battles). To add to the Americans‘ challenges, the Native American guerrilla tactics were often conducted masterfully. What is certain is that the Native Americans were proficient guerrilla fighters with extensive experience and capability in such forms of warfare, having practiced and perfected the techniques over millennia. Military scholars also often conclude that the average native fighter was a more agile and often more skilled fighter than the average American soldier. However, effective guerrilla tactics did not lead to victory for a variety of reasons. Why the American Indians fared so poorly during the Indian Wars had much more to do with social structure than military capability and capacity. Critical vulnerabilities of the American Indians existed throughout the duration of the Indian Wars. One critical strategic difference between the two was that Native American societies never shifted from loose tribal bands toward the pursuit of some aspects of modern usages of large defensive alliances. As one U.S. Naval Academy historian summarized, -they [Native Americans] remained a pre-modern people.‖26 The vulnerability of Native American premodernity is that institutional culture and social 25 Walter Laqueur, -The Origins of Guerrilla Doctrine,‖ in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.10, No.3 (July 1975) 341. 26 Wayne Hsieh, -The U.S. Interagency Experience on Stabilization during the Indian Wars,‖ in USAID, Washington, D.C., November 18, 2010. 32 structures matter, particularly in a conflict in which the population support and sustainment is of strategic importance. To further illustrate, this lack of political and military modernity left native populations vulnerable to large and well-supplied national armies which were able to attrite the American Indians over time, from large populations to a total annihilation of several tribes. While disease was also a factor outside of conflict, the means in which the conflict was fought was dictated by the structure and values of both civilizations. For the Indians, rapid mobility was favored, while the Americans favored strong well supplied armies, tactically linking outposts deep into the heart of Indian Territory. Only the Americans had the luxury of shifting tactics and strategies after hard lessons were learned fighting the Indians. In contrast, the American Indians were hemmed in by a strong sense of immutable culture, resource cultivation and use, and social structure. While the Native Americans made the war protracted, bloody, and deeply frustrating for the Americans, they did not win ultimately due to these strong structural and cultural constraints. In looking at some of these constraints, the Native Americans placed strong emphasis on -warrior culture‖ and in many aspects were arguably superior warriors. As one author noted, the Seminole War in Florida -cost the lives of ten soldiers and approximately ten thousand dollars for every Seminole either killed or captured.‖27 Despite these individual-level advantages, the native warriors lacked large scale organizational tactics and a political tradition of large and frequent military alliances. In contrast, the Americans inherited both traditions from European military tradition and doctrine, effectively employing these strategies against the British during the American 27 Jr. John J. Tierney, Chasing Ghosts: Unconventional Warfare in American History (Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), 90. 33 Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and all of the major wars that followed. For a short time, and in limited scale, the Native Americans attempted to form limited military alliances, but European and American forces were frequently able to turn the tribes against one another with relative ease. One such example was the use of Crow scouts against Sioux tribes in the American West. In this case, the Americans capitalized on hard feelings from past conflicts between the two. What this permitted was the weakening of enemy tribes through the use of neighboring tribes far more familiar with American Indian tribal and warfare customs than was obtainable from within the U.S. Army.28 It is noteworthy that due to its effectiveness, practitioners still use this approach today. However, the Native Americans held a unique advantage that caused considerable consternation amongst the Americans. This key advantage was that the Native Americans understood guerrilla warfare far better than the settlers and soldiers and rejected defined Western constraints in their style of warfare, often striking at civilians and outposts and quickly dissolving back into the countryside, forests, and swamps. While it has been argued that this approach caused the war to become more existential, drawing both into -total war,‖ the very fact the natives conducted effective guerrilla warfare illustrated that native tribes understood the strategy of -shaping‖ population sentiment with long-term strategy. Similar to the American Civil War and the strategy of attacking insurgent-sympathizing populations, native tribes hoped to raise the stakes of expansion to a level the settlers were not willing to pay. In this sense, the Native 28 Ibid. 34 Americans were practicing what the U.S. Army termed the -hard war‖ approach, learned in past insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. Today, we commonly refer to such tactics against civilians as -terrorism‖ and even -war crimes.‖ But such tactics were familiar to Western armies, and were often employed as a legitimate form of warfare (e.g., WWII‘s frequent bombing of cities just twenty years following the last Indian conflict). Just as in the Civil War, such tactics were designed to weaken the resolve of the population, destroy infrastructure, and raise the cost of warfare to an unsustainable level. Yet, in the case of the Indian Wars, rather than capitulation, such tactics led to far bloodier conflicts and caused elevated levels of hatred on both sides. To illustrate, Captain Randolph Marcy, a frontier U.S. Army officer, quoted a soldier which demonstrated the level of hatred toward the Natives. -They are the most onsartainest varmints in all creation, and I reckon tha‘r not mor‘n half human; for you never seed a human, arter you‘d fed and treated him to the best fixins in your lodge, jist turn round and steal all your horses, or ary other thing he could lay his hands on. No, not adzackly. He would feel kinder grateful, and ask you to spread a blanket in his lodge ef you ever passed that a-way. But the Injun he don‘t care shucks for you, and is rady to do you a heap of mischief as soon as he quits your feed. No, Cap.,‖ he continued, -it‘s not the right way to give um presents to buy peace; but ef I war governor of these yeer United States, I‘ll tell you what I‘d do. I‘d invite um all to a big feast, and make b‘lieve I wanted to have a big talk; and as soon as I got um all together, I‘d pitch in and sculp about half of um, and then t‘other half would be mighty glad to make peace that would stick. That‘s the way I‘d make a treaty with the dog‘ond, red-bellied varmints; and as sure as you‘re born, Cap., that‘s the only way.‖ I suggested to him the idea that there would be a lack of good faith and honor in such a proceeding, and that it would be much more in accordance with my notions of fair dealing to meet openly in the field, and there endeavor to punish them if they deserve it. To this he replied, -taint no use to talk about honor with them, Cap.; they hain‘t got no such thing in um; and they won‘t show fair fight, any way you can fix it. Don‘t they kill and sculp a white man when-ar they get the better on him? The mean varmints, they‘ll never behave themselves until you give um a clean out and out licking. They can‘t onderstand white folks‘ ways, and they won‘t learn um; and ef you treat um decently, they think you ar afeard. You may 35 depend on‘t, Cap., the only way to treat Injuns is to thrash them well at first, then the balance will sorter take to you and behave themselves.‖29 As war between the U.S. Army, citizen militias, and the native warriors continued, American soldiers and militias became more adept at Indian forms of guerrilla warfare. In the historical case of the Indian Wars, prolonged warfare allowed time for learning and adjustment by the U.S. as well as the development of understanding of American Indian culture and vulnerabilities. Once these vulnerabilities were understood, they were exploited by the development of new forms of counter-guerrilla tactics by the Americans. Many of these new tactics targeted the American Indian population centers in an attempt to -draw out‖ the Indian fighter who was more accustomed to ambush and rapid withdrawal tactics. A typical approach by the U.S. was to destroy Indian food infrastructure and crops, thereby reducing the capability of even the most ardent Native American resistance. As one scholar writes, The end of the war [the Seminole War] came under the strategy devised by Col. William J. Worth. He refused to continue the six-year-long wild goose chase after an enemy that could seldom be found and, even when found, rarely gave battle. Worthy went directly for the jugular of every guerrilla‘s strategy; his support. Using summer campaigns for the first time (the summer had always been considered too hot), Worth led his men directly against the settlements and crops of the Seminoles, destroying their means of subsistence and preventing them from raising and harvesting further crops. His troops suffered greatly from sickness, but their method worked. Without subsistence, even the fierce resistance of the Indians could not be maintained.30 As will be illustrated, the Indian Wars escalated from the destruction of food infrastructure to attacks at the very heart of Indian life, the population centers. 29 Randolph B. Marcy, The Prairie Traveler: The 1859 Handbook for Westbound Pioneers (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2006) 211-212. 30 Tierney, Chasing Ghosts, 90. 36 While never formally documented, many lessons from the early years of the Indian Wars were transmitted to and from the Union in putting down the Confederate guerrillas. Just as confederate guerrillas lived among and sought support from local populations, so too did the Indian fighters live and receive support from their villages. An early lesson from the Indian Wars was that the population was the source of strength for the Indian warriors, and thus had to be dealt with in order to remove civilian support from the calculation of the conflict. After years of mutual attacks on civilians, -total war‖ was brought to bear, both sides showing little interest in limiting the war to the fighters. Through total war strategy, the Americans sought to raise the cost of war to a level too high for the Native Americans to absorb, and thus encouraged their relocation to -reservations.‖ An illustration of these -total war‖ strategies are well summarized by a U.S. Army participant in the Bad Axe Massacres in 1832, an incident which left numerous Native women and children dead and injured as soldiers tried to capture Native population centers: During the engagement we killed some of the squaws through mistake. It was a great misfortune to those miserable squaws and children, that they did not carry into execution [the plan] they had formed on the morning of the battle -- that was, to come and meet us, and surrender themselves prisoners of war. It was a horrid sight to witness little children, wounded and suffering the most excruciating pain, although they were of the savage enemy, and the common enemy of the country.31 Despite the controversial nature of such tactics, many lessons were learned and transferred for future engagements as a result of this new style of warfare on the frontier of American expansion. During the Civil War, the Union tapped into these earlier 31 John Allen Wakefield and Frank Everett Stevens, eds. History of the War between the United States and the Sac and Fox Nations of Indians, and Parts of Other Disaffected Tribes of Indians, in the Years Eighteen Hundred and Twenty-Seven, Thirty-One, and Thirty-Two; Reprinted as: Wakefield's History of the Black Hawk War, Original Publication: Jacksonville, Ill.: Calvin Goudy, 1834. Reprint Publication: Chicago: The Caxton Club, 1908, Chapter 7: Section 133, and Chapter 8: Section 144. Retrieved 22 October 2007 37 experiences of -total war,‖ similarly punishing secessionist populations with -hard war‖ tactics, resulting in the utter destruction of the Southern economy. However, just as the lessons from the early Indian Wars were utilized during the Civil War, likewise the Civil War experience also transferred and reinforced its own lessons against Indian tribes during the later westward expansion, which resumed in full-force following the Civil War. While the post-Antebellum U.S. Army never formally codified these -lessons learned‖ from the early Indian Wars, many lessons were retained due to the fact that several prominent Civil War leaders, known for developing the -hard war‖ strategy against the Confederate population, saw action once again in the frontier Indian Wars.32 To illustrate this transfer of experience and knowledge from the Civil War to the application in Indian Wars, Andrew Birtle writes: Mahan‘s [Dennis Hart Mahan first introduced Indian warfare into West Point‘s curriculum in 1835] approach to Indian warfare was reinforced in the minds of officers by the Army‘s experience in the Civil War. Many soldiers emerged from the rebellion convinced that the best way to win a -peoples‖ war was to strike at the foundation of resistance-the enemy population. Now, with the rebellion crushed, the officers were prepared to apply the same strategy of destruction to undermine the American Indians physical and moral ability to resist.33 While many military officers were pleased with transferring from the Reconstruction Era South following the Civil War, hoping to depart the politics of governing, the frontier would prove to be no less political, far lengthier, and yet more controversial. Birtle summarizes the breadth of the challenge standing before the U.S. Army in the frontier, writing: By the mid-century the Native American population west of the Mississippi numbered about 270,000 people divided into over 125 distinct tribal, linguistic, and cultural groups. Although the Army tried to shield the Indians from illegal 32 Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency, 60. 33 Ibid. 38 white encroachment, its primary mission was to pursue Indian raiders, punish recalcitrant tribes, and confine the indigenous population to an ever-dwindling area -reserved‖ for their use. Conflict was an inevitable result of this process. From the signing of a flurry of abortive peace treaties in October 1865 until the suppression of the last Indian uprising at Leech Lake, Minnesota, in October 1898, the Army engaged in over a thousand combats as part of its forcible pacification of the Western Indians.34 Betwixt and Between: The Civil War, the Indian Wars, and Modernity Despite the large number of counter-guerrilla and counterinsurgency wars in which the American armies were engaged throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the era of small wars was not yet truly upon America. While no war rivaled the collective length of the Indian Wars, and casualties were never as great as in America‘s conventional wars, -small wars,‖ an earlier term for irregular wars, were prolific throughout the early twentieth century and continue to this day. The first of these small wars in the twentieth century was the Philippines, which remarkably has yet to be fully resolved now over a hundred years after America‘s first intervention into the country. Nevertheless, the Philippines campaign remains among the most important early counterinsurgency campaigns in American military history. The Philippines campaign of 1899-1902 was both similar and different from past counter-guerrilla and counterinsurgency operations in America‘s history. Similarities include the policy of -chastisement,‖ while a difference includes the policy -attraction.‖ Until Mao Tse-tung arrived on the global scene in the mid-twentieth century, giving rise to future American counterinsurgency campaigns (e.g., Vietnam), the Philippines insurgency represents the closest case-study to modern insurgency that the Americans faced. The insurgency used a sophisticated albeit brutal approach to 34 Ibid., 58. 39 population control and coercion as well as modern insurgent concepts of the erosion of political will on the domestic base of the invading military force. It was in many ways very similar to Mao‘s approach a half-century later. One scholar summarizes the Filipino insurgent strategy: …military victory was never the aim of Filipino leaders after 1899. Instead, they hoped to undermine America‘s will to continue the struggle by harassing U.S. military forces. The Filipinos were well aware that many Americans opposed the government‘s adventure in imperialism, and they consciously played to this audience, timing their offensives to coincide with the presidential election of November 1900 in the hope that a disenchanted electorate would replace McKinley with the avowed anti-imperialist, William Jennings Bryan…the U.S. Army faced a formidable challenge in the Filipino resistance movement, incorporating as it did many of the characteristics of a modern guerrilla movement, including a politico-military organization, military and paramilitary units, and a strategy of political and guerrilla warfare.35 In order to defeat this sophisticated mixture of political and military savvy, America was forced to rapidly adjust many elements of military doctrine, policy, and practice, devised from the past one hundred and twenty-five years of insurgency and counter-guerrilla warfare. Essentially, America was moving in the direction of truly modern counterinsurgency and away from merely counter-guerrilla fighting, an approach more devoid of political and revolutionary zeal as an ideological foundation. While not fully developed, the modern age of irregular warfare was an important part of the American military establishment, forcing it to move in many new unfamiliar and unconventional directions. While many tactical modifications were developed during the Philippines campaign (e.g., an adaptation to jungle warfare), perhaps the most unique innovation was the strategic policy of -attraction‖ as a parallel effort to practicing -chastisement‖ (i.e., 35 Ibid., 112. 40 the -hard war‖ approach). What this strategic policy shift meant was that the U.S. Army now understood the evolving nature of a -people‘s war,‖ and the challenges of fighting such a war outside the American homeland and in a distinctly different cultural environment. This is of profound importance, as the rules of domestic counterinsurgency are distinctly different from those of foreign counterinsurgency (e.g., understand of the culture, terrain, and population sentiments). Additionally, the stakes were different from fighting on the American home front. The difference was that when fighting in foreign lands, the American people had less tolerance for sustained casualties, while fighting on the home front meant the people on all sides had little choice but to endure larger casualties due to an often perceived -existential‖ struggle. In order to adjust to these new constraints of domestic support, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps developed new socially-driven concepts to more rapidly -win over‖ populations rather than continue the fight endlessly, which would have been intolerable to the voting American public now aware of overseas activities due to the emerging modern media. Thus, the concept of -attraction‖ was developed not merely by the U.S. Army, but by the administration of President McKinley itself, himself interested in maintain voter support. President McKinley personally ordered the contingency commander, General Otis, to -win the confidence, respect, and admiration of the inhabitants of the Philippines.‖36 The author goes on to describe General Otis: As the Army spread out over the Philippine archipelago, Otis and his commanders in the field followed these precepts closely. Ordering their men to respect the people and their customs, they imposed strict discipline, forbidding looting and wanton destruction and punishing those who committed such crimes. They paid in cash for supplies requisitioned from the populace, in an effort to win its favor and counter the mistrust engendered by insurgent propaganda. They opened schools 36 Ibid, 119. 41 staffed with soldier volunteers, built roads, refurbished markets and other public facilities. Finally, the Army established municipal governments under native officials that were largely based upon Spanish traditions, both to provide basic governmental services to the community and to demonstrate America‘s commitment to political autonomy for the Philippines at the local level.37 President McKinley, feeling strongly about the policy of -attraction,‖ sent the future U.S. President William Howard Taft to -supervise the transition from military to civilian rule in pacified areas.‖38 But Taft resided far from the insurgent conflict zones, and therefore held only limited credibility amongst the military leadership despite presidential backing by the Administration. Yet, this partnership between senior U.S. representatives and the U.S. military serves as the first major example of civil-military approaches in counterinsurgency. Although there were unmistakable personality and operational differences between Taft and the military commanders, many aspects worked well, given the popularity of Taft amongst Filipinos residing in the secure cities. As one author writes, -they effectively pursued a complementary two-pronged approach. Taft emphasized the policy of ‗attraction‘ that, from the very beginning, had been an integral part of the army‘s occupation strategy.‖39 Yet, as the war became prolonged, the policy of attraction became of less an interest to soldiers and their commanders who were on the front lines of a violent and deeply personal counterinsurgency effort. Once General MacArthur assumed command from General Otis, he resolved to step up the more coercive efforts of the counterinsurgency. MacArthur viewed General Otis‘s policies as too lenient, creating little strategic need for the insurgents to fold or at least compromise with the governing 37 Ibid., 119-120. 38 Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Perseus Books, 2002) 114. 39 Ibid., 115. 42 authorities. In many ways, lessons on -chastisement‖ of insurgent-supporting population were resurrected from the Civil War and Indian Wars in hopes of raising the stakes to a degree that the population and the insurgency decided the costs were too high. In turn, the hope was that this would motivate the insurgency to come to the negotiation table. Max Boot writes of the changing strategic dynamics: General Arthur MacArthur gave official sanction to policies designed to punish the insurrectos and their sympathizers, for he saw no other way to end the war quickly. On December 20, 1900, he declared martial law over the islands and invoked General Orders 100 (GO 100). Issued by President Lincoln in 1863 and widely imitated by other countries since, this landmark document envisioned war as a social contract: An occupying army had a duty to be humane in its dealings with civilians; to do otherwise would be stupid as well as immoral, for it would turn potential friends into foes. But likewise civilians had a duty not to resist; if they violated this duty, they would be dealt with harshly. GO 100 held that combatants not in uniform would be treated like -highway robbers and pirates‖ and, along with civilians who aided them, they could be subject to the death penalty…General William Tecumseh Sherman had invoked this order as he cut a swath of destruction through the South, and now MacArthur wanted to do the same in the Philippines. His intent was to force the civilian population, especially the prominent families, to choose sides; neutrality would be considered akin to resistance and punished accordingly.40 Unfortunately for some Filipinos, GO 100 was interpreted in more extreme ways by several commanders, leading to very coercive measures against the population. In fact, unlawful violence in the conduct of counterinsurgency required that senior commanders, as well as Congress, step in and hold commanders more accountable for their actions, particularly due to growing public outrage of the conflict. Toward the end of the Philippines campaign, in January 1902, -the Senate committee had begun hearings on atrocities…witnesses testified about the -water cure‖ [a torture method designed to extract confessions, even more severe than the modern -water boarding‖ technique], 40 Ibid, 116. 43 about villages being burned, and about other extreme steps that had become part of this dirty little war.‖41 To finally end the conflict, the military turned to a -tried and true‖ method of separating the insurgents from the population: the use of protected and military supplied camps for civilians residing in the region (a strategy used with success by the British in Malaya, and to a limited degree by General Petraeus in Iraq). The tactic is designed to cut off the insurgents from those in the population who may pay taxes or supply food to the insurgents. Essentially, it removed logistical support from the insurgency and made it easier for armies to distinguish the enemy from the civilian. But like most endeavors in war, the camps created additional suffering and even death, primarily due to increased disease due to the large numbers of people in crowded and unsanitary conditions. Boot elaborates: Setting up -concentration camps‖ (not to be confused with death camps) was a traditional counterinsurgency tactics, then being used by the British South Africa and previously employed by the U.S. Army in its campaigns against the Indians, where the camps had been called -reservations.‖ The goal was to separate the insurgent from the population base, for as Mao Tse-tung later explained, -the guerrilla moves among the people as the fish through the water.‖ With more than 300,000 people clustering in his -zones of protection,‖ Bell [Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell, tasked with this policy of separating of the insurgents and the civilian] succeeded in drying up the guerrillas‘ water. To finish off the insurgency, he sent 4,000 soldiers to search -each ravine, valley, and mountain peak for insurgents and for food,‖ destroying all foodstuffs and capturing or killing all able-bodied men. This unrelenting pressure quickly paid off. On April 16, 1902, Miguel Malvar became the last major guerrilla commander to surrender.42 In sum, the Philippines insurgency was a modern insurgency in that it blended population-based tactics to win the -hearts and minds‖ of the locals with sophisticated 41 Ibid., 122. 42 Ibid., 124. 44 modern communications aimed at U.S. domestic politics. By utilizing tactics aimed at influencing the American population, the Filipino insurgent leadership demonstrated what Mao would later coin as one of his three main elements of a successful insurgency, the use of popular -will.‖ What Mao realized and wrote about, and what the Philippines insurgency practiced several decades before Mao‘s book, was that an insurgency must have the support of the domestic population while simultaneously attempting to erode domestic support on the home-front of the invading army. However, the Filipino insurgent leadership failed to understand a critical requirement of eroding the American domestic political will-the need to prolong the war as long as possible. The Filipino leadership failed badly at protracted warfare. As it was, the insurgency was only able to carry out an ebb-and-flow insurgency of approximately four years. In an age of slow international communications, this was far too short for protracted warfare advantages to take hold. Secondly, the Filipino leadership understood the need to extend the invading army as much as possible. Mao also recognized this tactic decades later, seeking to weaken an army by thinning them out over large geographical terrain.43 In turn, this thinning along outposts stretched across a large region left armies more vulnerable to random ambushes that were difficult to predict in size and scope. While this worked to a degree, a major constraint which plagued the insurgent leadership was that their geographical terrain was limited to a series of small islands which were relatively easy to isolate, when compared to a large geographical landmass with transnational borders to slip across for protection. 43 Mao codified this lesson in his book, On Guerrilla Warfare, writing: -We must unite the strength of the army with that of the people; we must strike the weak spots in the enemy‘s flanks, in his front, in his rear. We must make war everywhere and cause dispersal of his forces and dissipation of his strength.‖ See, Mao Tse-Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, Samuel B. Griffith, trans. (Miami: BN Publishing, 2007) 68. 45 In addition, ethnic boundaries created a form of -social boundaries‖ similar to geographical boundaries in that it limited the insurgents‘ freedom of movement as well as popular support for the insurgents. Thus, many effective tactics were not easy to put into practice despite the relatively modest number of American soldiers in the Philippines. All these many important factors aside, the most significant weakness of the insurgency in the Philippines was that they lacked a deep popular-based ideology. In the modern age, insurgencies often utilize religion or revolutionary ideology to unite their followers. The only consistent message by the Filipino insurgent leadership to their people was that the Philippines should be sovereign, hardly a resounding war cry for the many Filipinos who either disagreed or saw no suitable local alternative to American governorship. Additionally, the sectarian and ethnic tensions fractured a unified vision of leadership. Thus, while the Philippines insurgency represents one of the first modern insurgencies in which the Americans were involved, a host of unique challenges prevented many of the required tactics from being effective. What can be concluded is that the Philippines insurgency was a harbinger of things to come, as it came to inform subsequent generations of the requirements to wage a successful politically-based insurgency against a conventionally more powerful adversary. While it lacked a large homogenously-driven ethnic and ideological base in which to build a support-base, it did bring to the fore the validity of using sophisticated strategic communications aimed at the adversary‘s domestic population. The insurgency also sought to utilize methods well ahead of its time: the very methods that Mao Tse-tung became famous for- the strategy of protracted warfare, stretching the opposition forces, propagandizing, and controlling 46 the population. Equally as impressive were the counterinsurgency adaptations, which utilized cutting edge approaches to working with local populations, including the employment of locals, weapons buy-back programs, and the study of culture among the U.S. Army-all of which then served as revolutionary -hearts and minds‖ tactics.44 Also noteworthy are the -hard‖ methods which were employed during the Philippines campaign, many that are now deemed war crimes by modern standards, particularly the use of the -water cure‖ and other related methods currently defined as torture. However, for the sake of a deeper understanding of the era, one should understand that ethics of warfare have advanced since the pre-Geneva Convention era. Furthermore, as scholars point out, many of these activities were taken from the pages of domestic American police operations against criminals in that era, which often used even harsher methods to extract confessions and mete out punishment.45 In short, the Philippines campaign at the turn of the twentieth century serves as an example of numerous successful and unsuccessful insurgency and counterinsurgency methods, making it an invaluable case-study. As will be examined, future insurgent leaders, such as Mao Tse-tung, seized upon these historical lessons, tailoring them to their own needs. The Small Wars Years Over the decades following the Philippines campaign, America was involved in an extensive series of small engagements, many to secure and stabilize America‘s overseas corporate interests. The overwhelming majority of these small wars were in Latin America and Asia, where the modern U.S. Marine Corps came of age and earned 44 Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency, 135-139. 45 Ibid., 127. 47 the nickname as the -State Department‘s troops.‖46 As one author noted about Nicaragua in 1909, -U.S. bankers ran the economy and American officials supervised elections. A Legation Guard of Marines, stationed in the capital city of Managua, kept internal peace.‖47 Such was the case due to the overwhelming number of these small wars being engaged for immediate political and commercial interests. These engagements, however, left an indelible mark on the U.S. Marine Corps, so much so that they wrote the first true U.S. military manual, and thus doctrine, on insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. The Marine Corps titled this manual Small Wars Manual.48 Printed in 1940, it was designed to draw -best practices‖ from the British version of a similar publication titled, Small Wars,49 printed in 1906 as Britain struggled to maintain its empire. Thus, as America dabbled in imperialism in the early 1900s, it sought to glean lessons from other past empires as they too struggled to maintain economic dominance through military force. But the age of the modern insurgency and counterinsurgency came in the era of China‘s Mao Tse-tung, after his successful effort to overthrow the Chinese government and install a Communist regime. For the first time a successful insurgent leader who specialized in insurgency as a primary means of warfare wrote a book and defined the requirements of insurgent warfare, albeit an approach focused on rural-based populations. Mao illustrated that although patriotic partisan resistance utilizing guerrilla warfare existed for thousands of years, more was needed to achieve success. As one scholar wrote, -The fundamental difference between patriotic partisan resistance and 46 Austin G. Long, Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence: The U.S. Military and Counterinsurgency (Santa Monica: RAND, 2008) 4. 47 Tierney, Chasing Ghosts, 179. 48 U.S. Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005). 49 C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (London, Harrison and Sons, 1914). 48 revolutionary guerrilla movements is that the first usually lacks the ideological content that always distinguishes the second.‖50 Because of Mao‘s success and -doctrine‖ that seized upon the combination of revolutionary fervor and guerrilla warfare, Maoist styled insurgencies began moving to the fore in modern warfare. What Mao successfully highlighted was that political ideology is an absolute requisite for any successful insurgency campaign. Essentially, it makes the common peasant feel part of a greater and more important whole. He also emphasized that guerrilla warfare tactics, conventional warfare tactics, and political ideology cannot be divorced from one another. They must be synergistic, and these elements of revolutionary warfare must complement each other and be brought to bear at the appropriate times (e.g., in phases). Mao articulated these differences in his landmark book, On Guerrilla Warfare. In one such passage, Mao writes: What is the guerrilla war of resistance against Japan? It is one aspect of the entire war, which, although alone incapable of producing the decision, attacks the enemy in every quarter, diminishes the extent of area under his control, increases our national strength, and assists our regular armies. It is one of the strategic instruments used to inflict defeat on our enemy. It is the one pure expression of anti-Japanese policy, that is to say, it is military strength organized by the active people and inseparable from them. It is a powerful special weapon with which we resist the Japanese and without which we cannot defeat them.51 Following the success of Mao in China, Maoist ideology grew in popularity and spread into many global regions. One of these areas was North Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap, the most prominent military commander under Ho Chi Minh, employed the strategy and tactics of Mao with tremendous success, first 50 Tse-Tung, On Guerrilla, 27. 51 Ibid., 50. 49 against the French and later against the Americans and South Vietnamese. Mirroring Mao‘s tactics of -space, time, and will,‖52 General Giap writes in almost identical style: In the resistance war, guerrilla activity played an extremely important role… this is the way of fighting a revolution. Guerrillas rely on heroic spirit to triumph over modern weapons…now scattering, now regrouping, now wearing out, now exterminating the enemy, they are determined to fight everywhere, so that wherever the enemy goes he is submerged in a sea of armed people who hit back at him, thus undermining his spirit and exhausting his forces.53 Like Mao, General Giap understood and articulated the need to mix guerrilla warfare tactics with strong political ideology, which served as its unifying base in garnering sustainable popular support. On this, General Giap writes, The People‘s Army was closely linked with the national liberation war, in the fire of which it was born and grew up… right at the founding of our army, the first armed groups and platoons had their Party groups and branches. The platoons had their political commissars. As soon as they were formed, the regiments had political commissars. The method of Party committee taking the lead and the commander allotting the work also took shape from the very first days. Officers were provided with handbooks, The Political Commissar‘s Book of Political Work in the Army.54 As is demonstrated by General Giap‘s writings, North Vietnam had an organized insurgency and a well articulated revolutionary political platform from which to operate by the time the Americans arrived in Vietnam. Further, the North Vietnamese had already defeated a strong Western power, the French, and strongly resisted Japanese forces during World War II. These experienced made the North Vietnamese some of the most practiced and capable insurgent fighters in the world at that time. To counter the North Vietnamese‘s considerable capacity, the Americans attempted to rapidly develop equally sophisticated approaches to counterinsurgency. 52 A concept frequently discussed and further articulated in Mao Tse-tung‘s On Guerrilla Warfare. 53 T. N. Greene, The Guerrilla-And How to Fight Him (New York: Praeger, 1962) 153. 54 Ibid., 163-164. 50 Among the most sophisticated approaches to counterinsurgency were the non-lethal approaches which ran often in parallel to the military‘s main effort of using overwhelming firepower. Among the earliest nonlethal counterinsurgency approach in Vietnam was the Rural Affairs program, beginning in 1961, heavily focused on the -Strategic Hamlets.‖ The Strategic Hamlets were considered strategically important villages in which to begin the displacement of the Viet Cong (VC) from southern Vietnam. The Strategic Hamlet program drew on an earlier counterinsurgency concept known as the -Oil Stain Theory‖55 which advocated clearing insurgents from a small geographical area, often a village or district, and showing quick yet meaningful results to the local population-such as better local government, enhanced local security, and reconstruction projects that improve the quality of life (e.g. clinics, schools, hospitals, markets, etc.). To provide these results to the local population, the Vietnamese government, in concert with the U.S., developed three overarching goals for the Strategic Hamlets. First, the government would tie the people in fortified hamlets into a communications network, providing them with local defense forces to ward off guerrilla raids and stationing reaction forces nearby in case of emergency. Second, the program would strive to unite the people and involve them in governmental affairs. Third, the program would improve living standards.56 Despite the historical success which the Strategic Hamlet program was drawn from, such as the British Malayan campaign, bureaucratic inertia and interagency quarrelling spelled its undoing. From the earliest days in Vietnam, several agencies 55 The -Oil Stain Theory‖ is often attributed to French counterinsurgency effort in Morocco. See Douglas Porch, -Bugeaud, Gallieni, Lyautey: The Development of French Colonial Warfare,‖ in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986). 56 Richard A. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam‘s Hearts and Minds (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995) 21. 51 failed to effectively partner, and in the case of the Strategic Hamlets, State Department and the Defense Department proved to be incompatible. Quite simply, ideological differences were insurmountable due to inflexibility and limited conceptual understanding by numerous agency leads. Richard Hunt, a scholar of Vietnam -Pacification,‖57 writes: Two of the main players, The Departments of State and Defense, proved unwilling to yield substantive control over their respective programs in South Vietnam. Furthermore, agencies disagreed as to whether political or military measures deserved an agencies, such as State and AID, argued that programs to win political loyalty and to ameliorate living conditions had to be first because they were prerequisites for establishing local security. Others countered that it was impossible to win the loyalty of people susceptible to communist taxation, terrorism, or levies. These disagreements reflected uncertainty within the administration as to the nature of the Viet Cong threat and the appropriate response.58 The Vietnam campaign was further plagued by an inability to agree upon a single strategy, a result of these agencies‘ differing ideological and technical approaches to counterinsurgency. From the earliest years of America‘s involvement in Vietnam, continuous conflicts occurred between those advocating a more military focused (-kinetic‖) approach to displace and demoralize the North Vietnamese guerrillas and regulars while others advocated an approach focused on winning popular support through nonviolent counterinsurgency approaches. Many of these nonviolent approaches involved such activities as partnering with village level counterinsurgent militias, building local infrastructure, and enhancing the governance capacity of local officials. All too often in the minds of military commanders and policy makers, a full understanding of how these two approaches complement one another was never 57 -Pacification‖ was the term used for counterinsurgency in Vietnam. 58 Ibid., 18. 52 understood, failing to draw lessons from similar historical American experiences including the Civil War, the Indian Wars, the Philippines, and the Small Wars throughout Latin America. In short, lessons were lost, perpetuating the problem of developing a sound counterinsurgency strategy. To illustrate, Hunt writes, -As U.S. Army and Marine Corps units arrived in 1965, pacification became known as the -other war,‖ a patronizing usage that stigmatized the program‘s status as a noble but failing endeavor that was no longer the main event.‖59 While many modern counterinsurgency practitioners understand that sound counterinsurgency strategies cannot be comprised of an unbalanced proportion of kinetic tactics (raids, bombings, etc.) versus nonviolent tactics (reconstruction, mitigating local population grievances, etc.), many leaders in Vietnam failed to implement such a balanced approach. The series of nonlinear strategies leaned on one solution or the other, whether in pre-1965, focused on an under-resourced pacification approach or the emphasis on kinetic warfare post-1965. The end result was that the strategy debate raged as to whether or not to drop more bombs on North Vietnam or inversely, reduce the violence and focus on infrastructure and local institutional capacity. The debate did not argue for a balance of the two and failed to resolve how best to blend the lethal versus nonlethal approach and seize upon lessons learned and best practices. Achieving a well-developed and balanced approach required thought on how best to avoid undermining other agencies‘ efforts. In Vietnam, this challenge was never understood and certainly not overcome by U.S. leadership, with one agency feeding the problems of other agencies due to nonaligned strategies. Because of this, problems 59 Ibid., 31. 53 became so deeply cyclical and entrenched that solving them became nearly impossible. Examples of this phenomenon are numerous. Hunt discusses this problem demonstrating how nonaligned strategies perpetuated larger problems for other agencies (e.g., USAID, State Department, South Vietnamese government): Military operations of American and South Vietnamese forces also hampered pacification by generating refugees. In the judgment of a major study on war victims, allied operations were the principle cause of refugees in South Vietnam. This occurred in several ways. Artillery and air strikes in preparation for an operation frequently fell on populated areas, forcing people to flee…Chemical defoliation of suspected communist base areas also caused people to move when the drifting spray damaged crops. In the course of operations, friendly forces sometimes attacked inhabited villages in pursuit of the enemy. On other occasions, enemy soldiers hiding in settlements fired at friendly forces hoping to provoke retaliatory fire that might kill or wound or destroy property or crops and thus alienate people.60 The Vietnam civil-military model, called CORDS, was established in 1967, in an attempt to unify civil and military organizations to focus on counterinsurgency. For the first time, the nonlethal counterinsurgency organizations were placed under a single manager, more effectively and efficiently utilizing resources. However, by 1967, the nonlethal approach to counterinsurgency was no longer the driving strategy, as the desire for increased military force became dominant. Yet, CORDS achieved substantial gains in pacification, often touted as one of the few success stories from Vietnam. CORDS and the larger nonlethal approach remained merely a subtext to the larger Vietnam conflict. As the architect of the CORDS model noted, -Even after 1967, pacification remained a small tail to the very large conventional military dog.‖61 60 Ibid., 39-40. 61 Robert Komer, quoted in, Ross Coffey, -Revisiting CORDS: The Need for Unity of Effort to Secure Victory in Iraq‖ in Military Review (March-April 2006): 100. 54 Following Vietnam, America went through a period which avoided counterinsurgency as a primary means of warfare. Essentially, counterinsurgency became a highly specialized form of war kept as far from the front pages as possible. It became the raison d‘être of such organizations of the U.S. Special Forces and similar organizations. The focus of American foreign policy shifted instead to the Cold War and the emerging nuclear age of potentially large-scale catastrophic warfare. To illustrate, Robert W. Komer, the architect of the Vietnam CORDS program, shifted focus to conventional nuclear naval strategy. Following Vietnam, Komer rarely mentioned counterinsurgency warfare except during individual interviews. But despite this overwhelming focus on conventional war, particularly nuclear strategy driven by the Cold War mentality, the fact that insurgencies and counterinsurgencies still raged was well known to the foreign policy community. Many of these insurgencies and counterinsurgencies were driven by Cold War maneuvering, including proxy wars, utilizing insurgents and counterinsurgents as proxies in building satellite states and ever-shifting -footprints‖ of political influence. Examples of such irregular wars are numerous, including but not limited to, Nicaragua, Cuba, Congo, Columbia, and Afghanistan (Soviet era). While these insurgencies and counterinsurgencies did involve U.S. governmental organizations, the levels of support were characterized as much more limited in scale as well as having far less overt involvement than modern examples, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and historic examples of the Philippines and the Indian Wars. Furthermore, most of the Cold War insurgencies and counterinsurgencies were kept limited as the U.S. Government saw little strategic value in advertising their involvement in numerous -hot spots‖ around the world, serving 55 only to inflame the already troubled relationship with the Soviets. What was distinctly different between the Cold War periods of irregular conflict and today is that during the Cold War the U.S. sought to have limited U.S. involvement and much greater local leadership involvement. In other words, it was to have a -local face‖ on the conflict rather than a U.S. face. Today, the U.S. has leading roles in two major simultaneous counterinsurgencies while involved in other smaller-scale efforts, such as antipiracy off the coast of Somalia. The first major overt American counterinsurgency effort to follow after Vietnam was the campaign to oust the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Afghanistan in 2001. This effort initially began as a classic counterterrorism (CT) campaign as a response to September 11, 2001. The U.S. government had few other options to the CT approach as only a small number of civilian and military personnel were capable of irregular warfare tactics and strategy. This was a symptom of the lengthy Cold War with most resources applied to conventional warfare capability, an approach that refrained from using conventional forces for irregular war. Thus, such organization as the U.S. military‘s Special Forces (SF) and the CIA‘s paramilitary remained the few irregular warfare experts within the U.S. government. However, even these groups knew little about the larger aspects of counterinsurgency, such as the nonlethal aspects which Mao Tse-tung expounded upon. The DoD‘s Civil Affairs Units and civilian agencies such as USAID maintained the institutional knowledge on nonlethal approaches, but were out of practice having performed limited missions on par with Afghanistan and Iraq, yet did have experience from Kosovo and smaller-scale experience from Columbia. Further, despite experience gained in small hot-spots, SF and CIA paramilitary numbers were far too 56 small for such large geographical areas as Afghanistan to operate meaningfully.62 Once surgical and often highly violent counter-terrorism (CT) operations concluded, what remained was a dangerous void in governance and security, with no effective indigenous security forces or government in place. With such voids, militants and criminals quickly emerged on the streets causing new and unresolved conflict to reemerge, placing enormous strain on nascent governance structures. Thus, what inevitably began as CT quickly devolved into a much more intensive classic counterinsurgency campaign. The need for rapid change across the U.S. government to deal with the large-scale counterinsurgency conflicts was a seismic shift in the function and structure of the U.S. government. This restructuring rapidly began drawing in numerous governmental players into counterinsurgency, many which have never had a historical role in such efforts. The restructuring and realignment of responsibilities across the interagency, much as Vietnam did decades before, quickly escalated from being the Defense Department‘s problem to now deeply involving the Department of State (DoS), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Treasury, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Homeland Security (e.g., Customs and Border Patrol), and others. With these changes, the U.S. entered into the age of what has now become termed by some as the -Whole-of- Government‖ approach to counterinsurgency. To illustrate, on January 2009, the first ever U.S. Government-wide counterinsurgency manual was written, which emphasized the point that interagency and 62 John J. Lumpkin, -CIA, Pentagon Officials Fight Proposal to Merge Covert Forces,‖ in Army Times, August 30, 2004, http://www.armytimes.com/legacy/new/1-292925-327723.php (accessed April 15, 2011). 57 intergovernmental coordination was essential to achieve success in modern counterinsurgency environments. On this new and emerging issue, the manual highlighted the importance of interagency and international strategic coordination, writing: …the success of the USG in helping other nations to defeat insurgencies will often be dependent on its proficiency at coordinating all committed agencies and resources (including its own, those of the affected nation, and those of international partners) towards a common objective. The first requirement for the U.S. is that it must synchronize its own agencies in a ‗whole-of-government‘ understanding and approach. The second requirement is that it exercises sufficient diplomatic skill to coax, guide and assist the affected nation through the necessary steps of planning and execution to regain legitimacy and control. In situations where other coalition partners are involved, that diplomatic acumen must extend to maintaining the coalition and ensuring that partner efforts are woven as effectively as possible into the overall COIN strategy.63 In many ways, Afghanistan represents a shift in the American way of war. While history has demonstrated many examples of civilian agencies operating in conflict zones alongside the military, more often than not, these roles are outside of open conflict zones. Never before has there been such wide acceptance of noncombatant civilians serving routinely alongside soldiers in open conflict. This shift can be attributed largely to the Vietnam War, where civilians played a large part of the effort. Following the hard lessons from the Vietnam experience, the failure opened the eyes of many policy makers to the fact that a violence-based answer to counterinsurgency is often not the right approach. The result of these lessons was that when the Afghanistan front opened, immediately complex sociological, diplomatic, development, and military science concepts were embraced by international policy makers including the need to reevaluate interagency counterinsurgency approaches (e.g., doctrine and policy) on how the U.S. 63 U.S. Government, U.S. Government, 47. 58 and international community was to respond in Afghanistan. A few of the influential manuals that came to fruition include books and sources as FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency; FM 3-07, Stability Operations; the U.S Institute of Peace (USIP), and the U.S. Army Peace Keeping and Stability Operations Institute‘s (PKSOI) Guiding Principles for Reconstruction and Stabilization, U.S. Governments Counterinsurgency Guide, and a host of other journals and websites. Perhaps the most salient and palpable shift in doctrine and approach to complex counterinsurgencies is demonstrated in the Provincial Reconstruction Team concept, an organizational blend of soldiers and civilian agency personnel merged into one cohesive team. These teams represent and epitomize what has now become known as the -Whole-of- Government‖ approach to counterinsurgency and stabilization. To understand the Whole-of-Government, we must turn to the literature. This constantly growing body of literature provides evidence of conceptual changes by the military and civilian agencies over time. The most influential documents include the doctrinal and policy making literature covering interagency counterinsurgency approaches, something historically absent with the exception of traces existing in the early stages in Vietnam. One major exception was a handbook written by the United States Operations Mission to Vietnam (USOM), Office of Rural Affairs. 64 USOM‘s book was drafted for USAID‘s Rural Affairs effort, but the target audience was both USAID and interagency field officers arriving in theater in 1963 and after. This field guide essentially served as one of the first true interagency handbooks and mirrors much of what is written in today‘s PRT handbooks. The U.S. Army‘s Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) drafted the 64 USAID, Office of Rural Affairs, USOM Provincial Representative‘s Guide (Saigon, Vietnam: USOM, 1963). 59 Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Handbook,65 the latest version was heavily amended drawing on lessons learned from the field over the past decade. The handbook illustrates many of the numerous changes undertaken by the U.S. government in the attempt to blend and coordinate numerous organizations within the larger Afghanistan strategic framework. Perhaps the most salient issues found in this document and others are the distinctly articulated shifts in U.S. Government military doctrine. The handbook, in collaboration with such high profile military doctrines as FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency and FM 3-07, Stability Operations, serves as a formal and highly publicized DoD endorsement embracing the interagency in strategic and tactical decision making. While the DoD remains dominant in most circles in Afghanistan, if for no other reason than their sheer resources, this prointeragency shift by the DoD is largely unprecedented- certainly prior to Vietnam. While the Philippines and the early Vietnam experience provided foreshadowing of interagency cooperation and synchronization, never was the effort more clearly articulated and advocated than in Afghanistan with the formation of the PRTs and the creation of the doctrine that supports these interagency counterinsurgency teams. In Afghanistan, the PRTs serve a unique role in counterinsurgency. The PRT‘s primary mandate in Afghanistan is defined in the NATO PRT Handbook: The PRT mission statement, which has been incorporated into the ISAF Operational Plan, is as follows: Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) will assist The Islamic Republic of Af