Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency

11: The Question of Sufficient Force Levels

The Question of Sufficient Force Levels 171 171 CHAPTER 11 THE QUESTION OF SUFFICIENT FORCE LEVELS Everyone knows that mere numbers do not win wars. Morale, training , leadership, discipline, weapons, supply, and finance are crucial. The Romans fielded armies small in size, generally about twenty thousand men, but excellent in training and discipline. Nevertheless, one cannot successfully wage counterinsurgency on the cheap, that is, without an appropriate commitment of ground forces. The record is replete with examples of disaster descending upon counterinsurgencies that would not or could not observe this fundamental principle. The ideal situation from the point of view of the counterinsurgents is for the civilian population to support their side; the next-best situation is for the civilian population to believe that the counterinsurgent side is going to win. Appearing to be the winning side is extremely important for both discouraging the enemy and obtaining civilian support and local recruits. Hence the counterinsurgents must give an impression of strength and permanency, and nothing accomplishes that aim quite like an abundance of well-turned-out troops. On the other hand, deploying inadequate numbers of soldiers and police against guerrillas can in fact be extremely expensive, because such parsimony may prolong the conflict and increase friendly casualties. False economy in this area may actually bring about disaster: the low British commitment of troops to the American War of Independence led to the defeat at Saratoga, which in turn magnified the myth of southern loyalism and produced the final blow at Yorktown.1 This cardinal error of the British in America in 1780 was repeated by, among others, the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1980. Numerous analysts of insurgency have suggested that, to be successful , the counterinsurgent side needs a ratio of ten-to-one over the guerrillas. The counterinsurgents require such a seemingly great preponderance of manpower for several reasons. First, while the guerrillas 172 RESISTING REBELLION are free to come and go, and to fight or not, as they please, the counterinsurgents must garrison cities and key installations and protect roads and railways. They also must set up and maintain patrols to hamper guerrilla movements, hunter units to target specific insurgent leaders or groups, militia groups for local defense, and mobile response forces to go to the aid of militia groups under attack. In the words of the U.S. Marines’ inimitable 1940 Small Wars Manual: “The occupying force must be strong enough to hold all the strategical points of the country, protect its communications, and at the same time furnish an operating force sufficient to overcome the opposition wherever it appears.”2 The Marines derived their concepts largely from their relatively unhappy experiences in Nicaragua, where between 1912 and 1925 their numbers usually consisted of no more than one hundred men, in a country with a population of seven hundred thousand and an area the size of Pennsylvania. Just over 3,300 Marines were in Nicaragua during 1926, down to 1,500 by the end of 1927. Their principal opponent , the guerrilla leader Augusto Sandino, never commanded a force equal to one-tenth of 1 percent of the Nicaraguan population at one time. Between 1928 and 1933, forty-seven Marines died in or as a result of fighting—less than one per month. INSTANCES OF ADEQUATE COMMITMENT Revolutionary France in the Vendée In the early 1790s the radical policies of the Terror provoked widespread popular rebellions across France, especially in the Vendée and Brittany. The regime responded with what amounted to genocide in the Vendée, complete with mass drownings and poison gas.3 The Revolutionary regime eventually committed great numbers to suppress the uprisings: in October 1794 it had 130,000 troops in the rebellious western provinces, compared to 180,000 fighting major European powers on the northern and eastern frontiers.4 In December 1795 the Paris regime sent General Lazare Hoche into Brittany with 140,000 soldiers, one for every seven civilian inhabitants of that unhappy province. The British in the BoerWar and Malaya From 1898 to 1902 the British Empire engaged in a war of conquest against the southern African Boer (Dutch) Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. To this effort Britain committed 366,000 The Question of Sufficient Force Levels 173 imperial and 83,000 colonial troops (including 17,000 Australians), along with 53,000 white South Africans. Against these approximately half a million troops, the entire white...