America and Guerrilla Warfare, and: Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency (review)

Some thirty years after the departure of U.S. troops from Southeast Asia, a new group of U.S. soldiers and policymakers find themselves embroiled in a series of nasty little wars across the globe. In Afghanistan, U.S. and allied forces battle Taliban fighters and al Qaeda remnants, while in Iraq U.S. soldiers continue to face sectarian guerrillas and foreign jihadists. With the insurgency-counterinsurgency dialectic firmly back on America’s strategic agenda, nothing could be better timed than this dual offering from Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, who seeks to investigate the complexities of conducting—and countering—irregular warfare.

Joes offers no overarching theoretical framework in the first of these books, America and Guerrilla Warfare, and relies instead on a historical “lessons learned” format to explore America’s past small-war successes and failures. Unfortunately, this softcover edition is unchanged from its earlier (2000) cloth release, and numerous technical problems, including cursory chapter introductions, a near-exclusive reliance on secondary and sometimes dated sources, and problematic endnotes that often do not follow first-use conventions, all remain unaddressed.

Still, the basic premise of the book remains sound: “Americans need to deepen and sharpen their understanding of what guerrilla war has meant and will mean” (p. 3). This issue, as Joes points out, will remain critical because the United States and other Western countries will continue to face enemies adept at irregular warfare and because the U.S. armed forces and the “political class(es), the electorate, and the media” in the United States are still not well-prepared “psychologically or organizationally” for this kind of conflict (p. 2). The recent warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ongoing struggle against radical Islamists—a new hostis humani generis—have highlighted Americas’s “big war culture” and shown that Joes was disquietingly prescient.

Joes offers nine case studies broken into four specific groupings: (1) Americans as guerrillas (in the Revolutionary and Civil wars); (2) Americans as counter-guerrillas/counterinsurgents (in the Philippines against Emilio Aguinaldo’s forces, Nicaragua against Augusto Sandino’s fighters, and Vietnam); (3) U.S. support of counterinsurgent regimes (Greece during its civil war, the Philippines during the Huk rebellion, and El Salvador in the 1980s); and (4) U.S. support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Army. Joes begins with two rather unpropitious segments in which Americans found themselves in the role of guerrillas. In chapters totaling nearly 100 pages, almost one-third of the book’s entire narrative, less than a dozen pages are devoted to examining—and even then only superficially—guerrilla leadership, operations, and impact.

When discussing the War of Independence, Joes offers only brief vignettes of Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, and, to a much lesser degree, Nathanael Greene, providing only incidental understanding of the pivotal role played by Greene and the southern guerrillas in the Revolutionary War. A far more compelling analysis of this issue can be found in John Morgan Dederer’s Making Bricks without Straw: Nathanael Greene’s Southern Campaign and Mao Tse-Tung’s Mobile War (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1983), a sharply argued monograph that compares Greene’s southern campaign to the unconventional warfare strategies of Mao Zedong and Vo Nguyen Giap. Dederer convincingly argues in his book (p. 57) that, “operating in coordination with local guerrillas and revolutionary civilian leadership, Greene liberated North and South Carolina and Georgia, except for British coastal enclaves, using a style of warfare Mao would call mobile and Greene described as ‘making bricks without straw.’” Yet Joes only hints at this critical relationship, offering no more than a few brief paragraphs on how this “symbiotic cooperation between regular forces and guerrillas can generate tremendous power” (p. 42).

Even less convincing is Joes’s treatment of the Civil...