Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (review)

This collection is both important and timely. Insurgency (or guerrilla warfare or low-intensity operations or whatever label du jour is applied) is the oldest form of warfare on the planet – the natural response of those who cannot, for whatever reason, directly confront the forces of their enemies. Despite this fact, regular armies have rarely been prepared to deal with irregular foes and usually begin by first stigmatizing them as outlaws, bandits, and/or terrorists and then making the fateful assumption that soldiers prepared to fight and win conventional battles will have little difficulty in defeating such opponents. Only after applying inappropriate tactics and, all too often, inflicting self-defeating brutalities on circumambient civilians, have a few armies realized that new approaches are needed. Even fewer have actually succeeded after years of effort in eradicating or reducing to nuisance level the insurgencies they had so blithely assumed would be easily crushed. A more common dénouement is bloody and expensive failure. The sequence has repeated itself so often that it raises the question of whether there is something in the DNA of regular armies that predisposes them to fail repeatedly in the face of the irregular – and poses as well the related question of whether and how the cycle can be broken.

Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian, who have both studied insurgencies as scholars and advised British and American units on counterinsurgency issues, have taken an historical approach, assembling a team of contributors to profile counterinsurgency campaigns from the U.S. effort in the Philippines after we had assumed the "White Man's Burden" in 1898 (analyzed by Anthony Joes) to the on-going struggles in Iraq (Malkasian) and Afghanistan (Marston). It is common in works with multiple authors – and this has thirteen – to note some (and often quite considerable) variability between chapters . This collection, however, is both individually strong and quite consistent, doubtless because of careful work by the editors, and thus allows certain themes to be followed for a century and more. As case study succeeds case study, those themes are continually underlined: the almost universal initial failure to understand the nature of the problem, which is that firepower may be necessary but is never sufficient; if willingness to shoot was the sole criteria for success, the German counterinsurgency effort in Russia (Peter Lieb), would have been a dazzling triumph. Far more important are two other recurring themes: the inescapable political dimension to counterinsurgency and the central role played by police work and intelligence gathering. All of this makes the management of such a campaign both very complex and exceedingly difficult – perhaps that is why there have been so few successes. It is worth being reminded that the two British campaigns that did end successfully – Malaya (Richard Stubbs) and the thirty- year war in Ireland recently,one hopes, concluded (Richard Iron) – both involved a great deal of trial and error before a winning formula was found, and that success in one counterinsurgency campaign does not mean that an army (or a nation) will win the next. It was less than a decade after the end of the Malayan Emergency – the classic victory over insurgents – that the British had a complete failure in Aden (Jonathan Walker). Another key theme illustrated over and over in this collection – and one that answers both the question about the repetition of failure and that about how to break the cycle – is that political and military institutions never remember unless they carefully arrange to remember. Even well-crafted manuals will not necessarily prevail against the forces of institutional inertia – or self-interested amnesia.

This fine collection, handsomely produced by a publisher who understands that to study military history one needs maps, ought to be widely read by students of war, soldiers, politicians – and the pontificators of the op-ed page and Sunday morning television.