the french library

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James S. Corum and Wray R. Johnson. Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. xvi + 506 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. , ISBN 978-0-7006-1240-6.

Reviewed by: Russell Parkin, Senior Research Fellow, Australian Army Land Warfare Studies Centre.

Published by: H-War (January, 2006)

Books about air power frequently fall into two broad categories. They are either general histories, such as Robin Higham's excellent Air Power: A Concise History (1972) and more recently, Stephen Budiansky's Air Power (2003), or specialist studies, such as the two superb volumes edited by Benjamin Franklin Cooling of the United States Air Force Center for Air Force History, Case Studies in the Development of Close Air Support (1990) and Case Studies in Achievement of Air Superiority (1991). Corum and Johnson's Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists is definitely in the second category. The work is a detailed study of nine conflicts in which airpower was employed to combat a range of foes including bandits, insurgents and terrorists. The obvious benefit of this approach is the use of a comparative methodology not possible in other specialist works on the subject, such as David Omissi's Air Power and Colonial Control (1990).

Methodology is indeed one of this book's great strengths, allowing the authors to provide the reader with a broad picture of how air power, ground forces, diplomacy, aid and other factors have been employed to combat insurgents. Creating this picture is made easier by the use of a similar format for each of the chapters, which provide the reader with the political and strategic background to the conflict and then assess tactics employed and the lessons learned or not learned by the air forces involved. The nine case studies span the twentieth century from the period of World War I, to the use of air control techniques between the two world wars, and then to the post-World War II campaigns in Greece, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, Vietnam, southern Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Extensive notes that provide a wealth of detail have been placed at the end of the book. There is also a short bibliographical essay as a guide to further reading. Both of these features are worthwhile additions to the work.

While the scope of the book is ambitious, the authors succeed in their aim of providing "military officers [and] policy makers … with a useful analysis of the historical experience of airpower in conflicts less than general war" (p. xi). The success of the study is largely due to the fact that both authors are experienced military professionals, historians and teachers. Corum is a U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant colonel, currently teaching at the U.S. Army War College, while Johnson is a retired U.S. Air Force (USAF) colonel with a background in special operations and now a professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University. This book grew out of their mutual frustration at the lack of suitable material for their students when they were teaching a course entitled, "Airpower in Small Wars" at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies (SAAS), part of the USAF's Air University.

The final chapter is a list of eleven specific lessons that have been drawn from the case studies. These lessons range from the need for a comprehensive strategy to outlining the best roles for air power in small wars: reconnaissance and transport. The authors also stress the requirement to employ both high- and low-tech air assets, the need for effective joint operations, and the need for specific training for this type of mission. However, in the current context of asymmetric operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, the two most important lessons would seem to be the need for a comprehensive strategy and recognition of the fact that small wars are protracted affairs, involving extensive use of a variety of intelligence assets. Importantly, the work ends with a plea for the U.S. military education system to devote more time to the study of small wars and counterinsurgency operations that would enable the U.S. forces to arrive at doctrines and procedures more suitable to these operations than the current conventional strategies.

Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists is both a very valuable professional text and a wide-ranging history that outlines the evolution of this highly specialized use of air power. For this reviewer, Corum and Johnson's study strongly underlines the requirement for a comprehensive strategy--what Australian security planners now refer to as a whole-of-government approach--to deal with the problems posed by asymmetric operations. The case studies and lessons discussed in this book are reinforced by Australia's recent experience in the Solomon Islands. The first step to resolving the security situation in the Solomons did not require a conventional military response, but rather intelligent policies supported by a range of military assets.

 

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DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook. They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. xiii + 277 pp. Appendix, bibliography, notes, index., ISBN 978-0-8071-2806-0.

Reviewed by: Janet Leigh Bucklew, The National Museum of Civil War Medicine.

Published by: H-Minerva (July, 2005)

The recent military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown the strengths and contributions of women in combat. As we celebrate their bravery and sacrifice in the field, we are reminded that many of these women have left behind more than their civilian responsibilities. They have been separated from their children and significant others. However, we forget that in the past women served their country in a war where they had to resort to subterfuge in order to fulfill their desire to fight for the beliefs and the individuals they held dear. They also fought for a country that extended no rights or privileges to them regardless of their service and sacrifice.

During the American Civil War, many determined women enlisted in the Confederate and Union armies. Strong-minded and strong-willed women chose not to remain at home, weep, and wait for their absent loved ones. They joined the military. As DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook point out, these women enlisted for many reasons. They enlisted for the adventure, a steady paycheck, to be with their loved ones, and for countless other reasons. They cut their hair, put on men's clothing and were able to slip past the enlistment officers. These women then embarked on the adventure of their lives.

Blanton and Cook have meticulously researched women who fought during the war in the uniform of a male soldier. Their research has brought to light the stories of an incredible number of women who were determined not to stay at home and remain passive bystanders during the war. A few of the women are well-known to students of nineteenth-century women's history. Due to notoriety they might have received in the press and through pension records, some have detailed stories of their experiences. A few, like Sara Edmonds and Loreta Janeta Velaquez, wrote of their exploits and became well-known even while the war was in progress. Others may have told their family members, while many never spoke of their service.

In today's rigorous enlistment process, it is difficult to understand how women could have passed the physical examination and still maintain the secrecy of their gender. The authors have been diligent in describing the military and cultural loopholes that occurred that made female service possible. What may come as a surprise to readers is the response of the many male soldiers who discovered there was a woman in their ranks. These comrades-in-arms often helped hide the identity of the women and supported their desire to serve.

Blanton and Cook have combined the true story of these remarkable women without making excuses for them or attempting to cover their sins and mishaps. When possible, they have followed the women through their lives and given us a conclusion to their stories. The authors have ensured that these remarkable individuals are not left in the purgatory of history. Their stories have a beginning and an end. This information is important. We can now compare their Civil War experiences with those of women who have served and are currently serving in the military. Issues such as reentry into civilian culture and post-traumatic syndrome can be discussed.

It is important for military historians and Civil War buffs to acknowledge the presence and contributions of the female soldier during the Civil War. In the past, it has been possible to visit a Civil War battlefield and never hear the story of the many women who stepped outside the threshold of nineteenth-century decorum and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their male comrades in the regiment. As battlefield interpretation changes, this book will be a great resource for interpreters and visitors alike.

Women historians and individuals interested in women's history have had to search many avenues to find the information compiled in this one volume. Researchers everywhere are indebted to Blanton and Cook for their painstaking work. They have done more than just present their research in a readable format. They have created a wonderful reference work that has already been compared to Bell Wiley's Billy Yank and Johnny Reb. In doing so, they have honored the military service of these women warriors and dismissed the myths surrounding the motives that led them to enlist. No higher complement can be paid to the female soldiers of the Civil War.

 

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Kevin Dougherty. Civil War Leadership and Mexican War Experience. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. xi + 207 pp. Illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index. , ISBN 978-1-57806-968-2.

Reviewed by: John C. Waugh, Independent Scholar.



Learning about War in Mexico

The fact that most of the great generals in the Civil War on both sides apprenticed for high command in the U.S.-Mexican War is well known, but little written about. Kevin Dougherty has stepped into that gap with this admirable effort.

"The reach of the Mexican War experience into the Civil War is undeniably powerful" Dougherty writes (p. viii). However, he is aware that the "reach" is not necessarily easy to document. It is often difficult to prove that a tactic or characteristic of a commander in the Civil War tracks directly to his Mexican War experience, was intrinsic to his character to begin with, or was learned somewhere else.

Dougherty makes a pioneering effort to sort it out. Picking thirteen commanders each from the Union and Confederate sides, he attempts to tie their behavior in the Civil War directly to their Mexican War experience. In some cases the parallels and carry-overs are persuasive and apt, and in some cases they are themselves something of a "reach."

West Pointer after West Pointer flocked to the Mexican War when it broke out in 1846. Most were young subalterns then--some of them fresh out of the academy--and when they went to Mexico, they in effect went to postgraduate school in how to wage--or not wage--war on a large scale. Serving under two great mentors, Generals Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor, they saw how those two commanders engineered their long uninterrupted string of victories against much larger Mexican armies and strikingly adverse odds.

Dougherty notes that all of these young subalterns saw how it was done, what worked and did not work. Many carried what they saw and learned into the Civil War, for better or for worse, when they themselves were suddenly elevated to high command over armies of unprecedented size a decade and a half later. Some applied what they had learned successfully. Some did not. Some profited from their Mexican War experience. Some did not.

One of those who did, Ulysses S. Grant, believed perhaps the most important legacy of the Mexican War was what these officers-cum-generals learned about one another. He told the journalist John Russell Young years later, "The Mexican War made the officers of the old regular armies more or less acquainted, and when we knew the name of the general opposing we knew enough about him to make our plans accordingly. What determined my attack on [Fort] Donelson was as much the knowledge I had gained of its commanders in Mexico as anything else."[1]

But again some used what they knew about one another to their advantage in the Civil War, some did not. Those who did more often than not succeeded. Those who did not more often than not failed.

Among the commanders Dougherty showcases are four of the most famous--Union generals George B. McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, all of whom distinguished themselves as subalterns in the Mexican War.

McClellan for a time commanded all of the Union armies. The most notable lesson he carried over from his Mexican War experience was a fondness for sieges, rooted in an admiration of the one Winfield Scott clamped on Vera Cruz prior to his march up the National Road to Mexico City. This fondness, coupled with a natural conservatism in battle, did not serve McClellan well. In his Peninsula Campaign in the Civil War in 1862 he mounted a month-long siege of Yorktown against inferior Confederate numbers when he should have boldly attacked.

What Lee, who served on Scott's staff with McClellan, brought to the Civil War from his Mexican War experience was entirely different. From Scott, Lee learned the enormous value of intelligent reconnaissance and the dramatic effect of a well-executed swift-striking flanking movement. In his storied career in the Civil War, Lee banked heavily on thorough reconnaissance. And his flanking movement at Chancellorsville against the Union army of Joseph Hooker is a classic of its kind, as telling as Scott's at Cerro Gordo.

In Mexico, Ulysses S. Grant, as a regimental supply officer, learned how to supply armies and twin logistics with maneuver to striking effect. From Scott he learned to shake free of ponderous multi-wagon supply trains when necessary and supply his armies off the land instead. It was a strategy he practiced in his victories before Vicksburg and passed on to his lieutenant, William Tecumseh Sherman, who applied it in his famed march from Atlanta to the sea in the final year of the Civil War.

Dougherty argues that what Jackson learned in the Mexican War had to be unlearned in the Civil War. A heroic young gunnery officer, Jackson learned to use artillery as an attack weapon in Mexico. But in the face of the Civil War's more lethal weaponry, that no longer worked. By then artillery had become largely a defensive weapon. There were lessons Jackson, a quick study, learned in the Mexican War that Dougherty could have better used. Like Lee, Jackson learned the priceless value of a swift-striking flanking movement and applied that lesson brilliantly in his electric Shenandoah Valley campaign, and in commanding the great flanking movement under Lee at Chancellorsville.

Among the other Union commanders whom Dougherty cites as having learned lessons in Mexico--and makes a good case for--are Navy Admiral Samuel Du Pont, and generals William T. Sherman, John Pope, Gordon Meade, Joseph Hooker, Henry Halleck, Henry Hunt, and George Thomas.

Dupont, Dougherty argues, was among the sea captains who conducted a limited naval blockade of Mexican ports, which he carried over, expanded, and used to effect in the Union blockade of Southern ports in the Civil War.

Sherman learned during the Mexican War how much he did not know and acted on that lesson in the Civil War. He was stationed in California and saw no fighting in the Mexican War. Lacking seasoning by fire, he wisely, unlike many of his fellow officers, opted for a lower rank at the beginning of the Civil War, knowing he was not fully ready for higher command.

Pope in Mexico saw and rather admired the hard-handed policy toward civilians that Taylor's rather lax discipline permitted, and found to his grief that it did not work when he tried to apply it to Virginians in the Civil War. It turned out to be the wrong lesson learned.

Meade watched Zachary Taylor fail to follow up and destroy the enemy after his hard and exhausting victory at Monterey in the Mexican War and embraced the example after his own exhausting victory at Gettysburg in the Civil War. This outraged President Lincoln just as Taylor's pulling back had enraged President James Polk a decade and a half earlier.

Hooker learned military management in Mexico and used it to great effect to reorganize the Union armies before Chancellorsville in 1863. But at Chancellorsville his army fell victim to what Lee and Jackson remembered and Hooker forgot about swift flanking movements.

Halleck also mastered military management in the Mexican War, a talent he applied as chief of staff--with somewhat mixed results--in support of Lincoln and later Grant in the Civil War.

Hunt served an artillery apprenticeship in the Mexican War and parlayed a talent for commanding massed artillery to great effect in the Union Army of the Potomac in the Civil War.

Thomas learned stoicism under fire as "Old Reliable" in the Mexican War and parlayed it into fame as the "Rock of Chickamauga" in the Civil War. But whether this had to do with anything he learned, rather than who he was, is debatable. Thomas had also seen that Taylor, an otherwise successful general, left too much to chance. Thomas would leave nothing to chance in the Civil War (even though it earned him the nickname "Old Slow Trot").

In two other of Dougherty's Union examples, the parallels are less clear. He argues that Philip Kearney learned his fearless, reckless approach to war in Mexico. But it can be argued that reckless and fearless was simply Kearney's nature--he was born that way. Dougherty argues that Winfield Scott learned and waged outdated limited war in Mexico and wrong-headedly wanted to wage it again in the Civil War with his Anaconda Plan of surrounding and squeezing the Confederacy into submission. Scott was one of the most brilliant generals in American history. It could be argued that Mexico or no Mexico Scott would have arrived at that strategy. It was indeed a plan similar to his that in the end won the war for the Union.

Dougherty's Confederate cases are also a mixture of the persuasive and not so persuasive. James Longstreet endured a heavy dose of costly offensive warfare in Mexico, and was seriously wounded in the charge at Chapultepec. Dougherty argues that it turned him into a strong advocate of defensive warfare in the Civil War, famously employing it at Fredericksburg and unsuccessfully urging it on Lee at Gettysburg.

George Pickett, leading charges alongside Longstreet in Mexico, brought to the Civil War just the opposite impulse. Unwounded at Chapultepec, he became, unlike his friend, enamored of the heroic charge in which he could plant the flag on enemy works. His fate at Gettysburg was to lead perhaps the most famously disastrous charge of the Civil War.

Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, a West Pointer, learned overconfidence in his own military ability as a colonel of Mississippi Rifles under Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War. It became a liability for the Confederacy in the Civil War. But whether it was something learned in Mexico, as Dougherty argues, or was just his nature, is arguable.

Braxton Bragg learned to be a strict disciplinarian in Mexico and found it did not work with the volunteer Confederate armies in the Civil War. So he became one of the most noted failures in the War of Brothers.

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, unlike most who fought in Mexico, was not a fan of flanking movements, believing they worked in the Mexican War only because of an inept enemy. Instead he carried his deeply instilled preference for the traditional massed frontal attack into the Civil War.

John Pemberton, serving as an aide to General William Jenkins Worth in Mexico, a commander noted in part for his inflexibility, borrowed that trait in his defense of Vicksburg against Grant in the Civil War.Because of his inflexibility, Dougherty believes, Pemberton "failed to shift his main effort from defending Vicksburg to defeating Grant when the situation required" (p. 172).

A. P. Hill, hot-headed and flash-tempered, criticized his fellow officers unsparingly as a lieutenant in the Mexican War and did the same thing as a lieutenant general in the Civil War. But whether that was learned in Mexico or was just the way Hill was is also debatable.

Gideon Pillow, a political general in the Mexican War, learned nothing from it and carried his ignorance into the Civil War as a Confederate general with disastrous results. John Slidell endured failed diplomacy in Mexico, and endured it again as the Confederate envoy to France in the Civil War. Why Dougherty includes them in his study is somewhat puzzling. Pillow, it seems, had congenital military ineptness having nothing to do with Mexico, and Slidell faced two hopeless missions.

But these caveats do not downgrade Dougherty's accomplishment. He claims the book's aim is merely to argue the importance and usefulness of the Mexican War in understanding the Civil War and show that different men took different lessons from one war into the other. He has done that very nicely.

Note

[1]. John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant, ed. Michael Fellman (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 391.

 

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Alexander Antonovich Liakhovsky. "Inside the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the Seizure of Kabul, December 1979." Trans. Gary Goldberg and Artemy Kalinovsky. CWIHP Working Paper 51, January 2007.



Reviewed by Tom Nichols, Naval War College [1]


This working paper (a small book, really, at 76 single-spaced pages) from the Cold War International History Project is a solid example of why the CWIHP has become an indispensable source of material and analysis for scholars of the Cold War. Until the late 1980s, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was often the source of guesswork and controversy, and even now there are significant gaps in our knowledge of this history-changing moment. In this study, a senior veteran and scholar of the Soviet Armed Forces presents, in great detail, events ranging from top secret discussions in the Kremlin to firefights in the streets of Kabul.


It is not a complete account, but that is probably impossible at this point in history, and it will no doubt be some time before such a synoptic volume might be written about even the first part of the war. But Liakhovsky's paper-which draws on his own books and primary research on the subject-manages to clarify some pressing questions, and particularly the question of how this disastrous decision was made.

Liakhovsky's study is really a two-part project. In the first part, he examines the cascade of anxieties, misinformation, fears, and eventual decisions that led to Soviet troops receiving their orders to Kabul. In the second part, he takes the reader to a ground-level, operational excursion, replete with dramatic and very human first-accounts, into the taking of Kabul and the toppling of the Afghan regime.


This latter half of the study is likely to be of more use to military historians, particularly those interested in reconstructing the combat operations of Soviet special forces during the invasion. But the first half of Liakhovsky's paper contains rich material and analysis for students of politics and international relations, and sheds light on questions beyond the invasion itself (such as the nature of Soviet civil-military relations, to name but one).


One of the most important realizations to be found in the Liakhovsky study is the degree to which the invasion was driven by internal Soviet political dynamics, and far less by actual events in the international sphere. The closed circles of decision making, the conspiratorial nature of Politburo politics, the poor flow of information, and the rejection of expert advice in favor of preconceptions (often ideologically constructed) reveal a completely dysfunctional policymaking environment in Moscow, one that had already shown itself incapable of dealing with far less complicated problems than Afghanistan.


Some might argue that there are obvious parallels here with American decisions regarding intervention in Iraq (and maybe even Vietnam). And there is, unfortunately, a certain uncomfortable symmetry to be seen, particularly in the filtering out of uncongenial information and the lack of planning for "the morning after." But the parallels between a drama that drew the world's democracies into open debate with each other, and a quiet conspiracy that involved perhaps only a few dozen men in Moscow and Kabul, should not be overdrawn.


One major difference here is that the Soviet Union was intervening against a friend, not a sworn enemy, and that was part of the Kremlin's dilemma. Moscow's "ally" in Afghanistan, Hafizullah Amin, was himself responsible for creating violent fissures in his own country, and Liakhovsky is unsparing in his depiction of Amin as little more than a thug. By late 1979, for example, Liakhovsky estimates that Amin's attempts to use repeated purges to stay in power probably cost 50,000 lives or more, which horrified even the Soviets. (3) When a fundamentally repressive organization like the Soviet Communist Party starts sending urgent appeals to "stop the repressions" and obey "the rule of law," it is a sure sign that things have gone awry.


Amin's brutality placed the Soviets in a bind, as it made his continued rule impossible. (Liakhovsky even quotes a note from the U.S. Embassy, written as bystanders who "have been observing for 18 months how this Marxist party [the PDPA] has been destroying itself.") But Amin's answer to the deterioration in the situation was to exercise yet more brutality, arguing for "entire tribes" to be bombed into dust: "You don't know our people," he tells the Soviets. "The only solution is to destroy them all, from big to small!" (4)


Worse, while Soviet leaders were quite right to see Amin as "unreliable"-his grip on the country was slipping away, no matter how many people he killed-they also somehow got it into their heads that he might have some sort of association with the Central Intelligence Agency, and that he could "realign" himself at "at any moment" with the West. The provenance of this charge is unclear, and Liakhovsky seems mostly unconvinced of its truth. While he does not reach an unequivocal judgment on it, he notes that if Amin were in fact a CIA asset, he did not admit to it or use it to try to save himself, even in the last hours of his life during the battle to remove and kill him. (61)


In any case, it is clear that by early autumn of 1979, a small circle of Soviet leaders had made the decision that Amin had to go. Not only did they distrust and dislike him (and Brezhnev in particular was angered by Amin's murder of his predecessor, Taraki), but as a practical matter Afghanistan was collapsing into civil war. Liakhovsky identifies KGB chief Yuri Andropov as the prime mover behind the idea that Amin could be struck quickly and replaced with Moscow's new favorite, Babrak Karmal. There were apparently assassination plots-Liakhovsky mentions that the KGB claimed to have a plan to "counteract" Amin-and there is a reference to, but no explanation of, the mysterious suicide of Soviet Lt. Gen. Paputin after a mission of some sort to Kabul in November 1979. (8) Whatever the KGB's plans, however, by December Amin was still alive and Andropov was pushing harder for a military-that is, KGB-led-solution, leading Defense Minister Dmitrii Ustinov to note wryly: "You're quite the adventurist, Yura." (12 )

Liakhovsky is careful to take the reader through the complicated dance of Soviet memo-writing, explaining why certain leaders would sign particular reports, and so on. What emerges from the documents is that Soviet policy on the crisis in Afghanistan was the work of a cabal of three or four men-Andropov, Ustinov, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and a few others-who were carefully managing the decisions of the now-ill Leonid Brezhnev.

The Soviet high command, for its part, could see an intervention looming, and General Staff chief Gen. Nikolai Ogarkov in particular is depicted as making a last-ditch effort to persuade the Defense Minister to derail the plan in the Politburo. This finally led to a dressing down from Ustinov, who imperiously shouted at Ogarkov: "Are you going to teach the Politburo? You must carry out orders. You're always building intrigues! You're systematically sabotaging my decisions...What gets decided in the Politburo is none of your business." Later, Andropov piled on. When Ogarkov warned that all of eastern Islam could turn against the USSR over the invasion, Andropov interrupted him: "Mind your own business! Politics will be taken care of by us, the party, [and] Leonid Illyich [Brezhnev]!" (18)


This episode is at odds with previous images of the Soviet civil-military relationship as more harmonious or coordinated. (I am forced to include my own work on Soviet civil-military relations here, in which I asserted that senior Soviet military leaders were far more powerful than Liakhovsky's account suggests.) Indeed, the Soviet military overall comes out quite well in Liakhovsky's telling; whether this is a bias on Liakhovsky's part (himself a military professional) is hard to know. But if his portrait of the Soviet leadership as resistant to military advice is accurate, it would explain a lot not only about the decisions leading up to the invasion but also about some of the personnel shuffles that came after it, some of which were puzzling to Sovietologists of the time, such as Ogarkov's eventual demotion in 1984 (which Liakhovsky claims is traceable back to the debates of late 1979).


While there is much more in this article, especially for historians trying to reconstruct the inner workings of the Soviet elite, a few other points emerge from Liakhovsky's study that are worth further reflection.


First, there is the distorting role of ideology in the Kremlin's decision making. Liakhovsky shows how the political importance of Afghanistan grew to meet the military resources that were being devoted to the operation, especially once the Soviet leadership decided, against all logic and evidence, that "events in [Afghanistan] had become part of a world
revolutionary process." (13) Liakhovsky-rightly, in my view-rejects the criticism that Brezhnev and his circle were "fools." Rather, trapped by their own ideological beliefs, they "were simply placed in conditions where they could not fail to support a 'fraternal' Party; our allies, the other Communist parties, would not have understood this." (A similar explanation could be made for Soviet involvement in Vietnam, as the work of Russian historian Ilya Gaiduk suggests.)[2] "For a long time," Liakhovsky writes, "the foreign security policy [sic] of the USSR was constructed to a considerable degree on the basis of ideological dogmas." (29) This is an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the influence of ideology on foreign policy, particularly in the Soviet Union.


A second and related point is how idiosyncratically the isolated leaders of the Kremlin perceived and processed external events. Liakhovsky tells us, for example, that Brezhnev and his circle saw the late 1979 NATO decision to deploy Pershing intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe as the final event tipping the situation in Afghanistan toward intervention; the Kremlin felt it had "nothing left to lose," and Soviet leaders were gripped by bizarre fears of U.S. Pershing deployments in Afghanistan that would in turn threaten assets like the Baikonur cosmodrome (as though somehow a spaceport in Central Asia would be a major target during a Soviet-American nuclear exchange). (17)


There is an irony here, in that the inner Kremlin circle-by 1979 quite used to exercising Soviet power unhindered by foreign or domestic constraints-seemed to have had no concept of how their actions would be interpreted beyond the bubble of the Moscow Ring Road. More important, they did not seem to grasp how their own actions could bring about the very Western reactions they feared most. Many former Soviet officials,
including Georgii Arbatov and even Mikhail Gorbachev himself, later ruminated on the short-sightedness of Soviet leaders in the 1970s, with the SS-20 deployments and the invasion of Afghanistan the worst examples of such myopia.


Perhaps the most poignant observation Liakhovsky makes us when he notes that the Politburo, on the eve of the invasion, never asked themselves the most important question: "[W]hat revolution had they gathered to defend?" (23)


While there are some distracting lapses in the editing, including what seems to be a few awkwardly translated passages, and a fair number of typographical errors, this article is engrossing, especially in the first half, and will be of interest to specialists and general readers alike, although the latter part will be of more interest to those with a particular interest in Soviet military operations. A. A. Liakhovsky's study is a major addition to our knowledge on the subject, and should be read by anyone trying to understand the decision that proved to be one of the crucial turning points along the Soviet Union's road to
self-destruction.

Thomas M. Nichols is a Professor of National Security Affairs at the United States Naval War College in Newport, RI, where he holds the Forrest Sherman Chair in Public Diplomacy. He is also a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City. His most recent book, Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War was published in February 2008 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. During the 2008/09 academic year he will be a Fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, holding a joint appointment in both the International Security Program and Harvard's "Project on Managing the Atom," a program related to issues of nuclear weapons and nonproliferation.

 

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The Quranic Concept of War

JOSEPH C. MYERS



“The universalism of Islam, in its all-embracing creed, is imposed on the believers as a continuous process of warfare, psychological and political, if not strictly military. . . . The Jihad, accordingly, may be stated as a doctrine of a permanent state of war, not continuous fighting.”2
— Majid Khadduri

Political and military leaders are notoriously averse to theory, but if there is a theorist about war who matters, it remains Carl von Clausewitz, whose Vom Kriege (On War) has shaped Western views about war since the middle of the nineteenth century.”3 Both points are likely true and problematic since we find ourselves engaged in war with people not solely imbued with western ideas and values or followers of western military theorists. The Hoover Institution’s Paul Sperry recently stated, “Four years into the war on terror, US intelligence officials tell me there are no baseline studies of the Muslim prophet Muhammad or his ideological or military doctrine found at either the CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency, or even the war colleges.”4

Would this be surprising? When it comes to warfighting military audiences tend to focus on the military and power aspects of warfare; the tangibles of terrain, enemy, weather, leadership, and troops; quantifiables such as the number of tanks and artillery tubes—the correlation of forces. Analysts steer toward the familiar rather than the unfamiliar; people tend to think in their comfort zones. The study of ideology or philosophy is often brushed aside, it’s not the “stuff of muddy boots;” it is more cerebral than physical and not action oriented. Planners do not assess the “correlation of ideas.” The practitioners are too busy.

Dr. Antulio Echevarria recently argued the US military does not have a doctrine for war as much as it has a doctrine for operations and battles.5 The military has a deficit of strategic, and, one could add, philosophic thinking. In the war against Islamist terrorism, how many have heard of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Project”?6 Is the political philosophy of Ayatollah Khomeini, who was in fact well-grounded in western political theory and rigorously rejected it, studied in our military schools? Are there any implications to his statement in 1981 that “Iran . . . is determined to propagate Islam to the whole world”?7

To understand war, one has to study its philosophy; the grammar and logic of your opponent. Only then are you approaching strategic comprehension. To understand the war against Islamist terrorism one must begin to understand the Islamic way of war, its philosophy and doctrine, the meanings of jihad in Islam—and one needs to understand that those meanings are highly varied and utilitarian depending on the source.

With respect to the war against the global jihad and its associated terror groups, individual terrorists, and clandestine adherents, one should ask if there is a unique method or attitude to their approach to war. Is there a philosophy, or treatise such as Clausewitz’s On War that attempts to form their thinking about war? Is there a document that can be reviewed and understood in such a manner that we may begin to think strategically about our opponent. There is one work that stands out from the many.

The Quranic Concept of War

The Quranic Concept of War, by Brigadier General S. K. Malik of the Pakistani Army provides readers with unequalled insight. Originally published in Pakistan in 1979, most available copies are found in India, or in small non-descript Muslim bookstores.8 One major point to ponder, when thinking about The Quranic Concept of War, is the title itself. The Quran is presumed to be the revealed word of God as spoken through his chosen prophet, Mohammed. According to Malik, the Quran places warfighting doctrine and its theory in a much different category than western thinkers are accustomed to, because it is not a theory of war derived by man, but of God. This is God’s warfighting principles and commandments revealed. Malik’s attempts to distill God’s doctrine for war through the examples of the Prophet. By contrast, the closest that Clausewitz comes to divine presentation is in his discussion of the trinity: the people, the state, and the military. In the Islamic context, the discussion of war is at the level of revealed truth and example, well above theory—God has no need to theorize. Malik notes, “As a complete Code of Life, the Holy Quran gives us a philosophy of war as well. . . . This divine philosophy is an integral part of the total Quranic ideology.”9

Historiography

In The Quranic Concept of War, Malik seeks to instruct readers in the uniquely important doctrinal aspects of Quranic warfare. The Quranic approach to war is “infinitely supreme and effective . . . [and] points towards the realization of universal peace and justice . . . and makes maximum allowance to its adversaries to co-operate [with Islam] in a combined search for a just and peaceful order.”10 For purposes of this review, the term “doctrine” refers to both religious and broad strategic approaches, not methods and procedures. Malik’s work is a treatise with historical, political, legalistic, and moralistic ramifications on Islamic warfare. It seemingly is without parallel in the western sense of warfare since the “Quran is a source of eternal guidance for mankind.”11

The approach is not new to Islamists and other jihad theorists fighting according to the “Method of Mohammed” or hadith. The lessons learned are recorded and form an important part of Quranic surah and jihadist’s scholarship.12 Islamic scholars both Muslim and non-Muslim will find much to debate in terms of Malik’s view of jihad doctrine and Quranic warfare. Malik’s work is essentially modern scholarship; although he does acknowledge the classical views of jihad in many respects.13

Malik’s arguments are clearly parochial, often more editorial than scholarly, and his tone is decidedly confident and occasionally supremacist. The reach and influence of the author’s work is not clear although one might believe that given the idealism of his treatise, his approaches to warfare, and the role and ends of “terror” his text may resonate with extremist and radicals prone to use terroristic violence to accomplish their ends. For that reason alone, the book is worth studying.

Introduction

The preface by Allah Bukhsh K. Brohi, the former Pakistani ambassador to India, offers important insights into Malik’s exposition. In fact, Brohi’s 13-page preface lays the foundation for the books ten chapters. Malik places Quranic warfare in an academic context relative to that used by western theorists. He analyzes the causes and objects of war, as well as war’s nature and dimensions. He then turns attention to the ethics and strategy of warfare. Toward the end of the book he reviews the exercise of Quranic warfare based on the examples of the Prophet Mohammed’s military campaigns and concludes with summary observations. There are important jus en bellum and jus ad bellum implications in the author’s writings, as well as in his controversial ideas related to the means and objectives of war. It is these concepts that warrant the attention of planners and strategist.

Zia-Ul-Haq (1924-88), the former President of Pakistan and Pakistani Army Chief of Staff, opens the book by focusing on the concept of jihad within Islam and explaining it is not simply the domain of the military:

Jehad fi sabilallah is not the exclusive domain of the professional soldier, nor is it restricted to the application of military force alone.

This book brings out with simplicity, clarity and precision the Quranic philosophy on the application of military force within the context of the totality that is JEHAD. The professional soldier in a Muslim army, pursuing the goals of a Muslim state, cannot become ‘professional’ if in all his activities he does not take the ‘colour of Allah,’ The nonmilitary citizen of a Muslin state must, likewise, be aware of the kind of soldier that his country must produce and the only pattern of war that his country’s armed forces may wage.14

General Zia states that all Muslims play a role in jihad, a mainstream concept of the Quran, that jihad in terms of warfare is a collective responsibility of the Muslim ummah, and is not restricted to soldiers. General Zia emphasizes how the concept of Islamic military professionalism requires “godly character” in order to be fully achieved. Zia then endorses Malik’s thesis as the “only pattern of war,” or approach to war that an Islamic state may wage.

Battling Counter-initiatory Forces

In the preface Ambassador Brohi details what might be startling to many readers. He states that Malik has made “a valuable contribution to Islamic jurisprudence” or Islamic law, and an “analytic restatement of the Quranic wisdom on the subject of war and peace.” Brohi implies that Malik’s discussion, though a valuable new version, is an approach to a theme already well developed.15

Brohi then defines jihad, “The most glorious word in the Vocabulary of Islam is Jehad, a word which is untranslatable in English but, broadly speaking, means ‘striving’, ‘struggling’, ‘trying’ to advance the Divine causes or purposes.” He introduces a somewhat cryptic concept when he explains man’s role in a “Quranic setting” as energetically combating forces of evil or what may be called, “counter-initiatory” forces which are at war with the harmony and the purpose of life on earth.16 For the true Muslin the harmony and purpose in life are only possible through man’s ultimate submission to God’s will, that all will come to know, recognize, and profess Mohammed as the Prophet of God. Man must recognize the last days and acknowledge tawhid, the oneness of God.17

Brohi recounts the classic dualisms of Islamic theology; that the world is a place of struggle between good and evil, between right and wrong, between Haq and Na-Haq (truth and untruth), and between halal and haram (legitimate and forbidden). According to Brohi, it is the duty of man to opt for goodness and reject evil. Brohi appeals to the “greater jihad,” a post-classical jihad doctrine developed by the mystical Sufi order and other Shia scholars.18

Brohi places jihad in the context of communal if not imperial obligation; both controversial formulations:

When a believer sees that someone is trying to obstruct another believer from traveling the road that leads to God, spirit of Jehad requires that such a man who is imposing obstacles should be prevented from doing so and the obstacles placed by him should also be removed, so that mankind may be freely able to negotiate its own path that leads to Heaven.” To do otherwise, “by not striving to clear or straighten the path we [Muslims] become passive spectators of the counter-initiatory forces imposing a blockade in the way of those who mean to keep their faith with God.19

This viewpoint appears to reflect the classic, collective duty within jihad doctrine, to defend the Islamic community from threats—the concept of defensive jihad. Brohi is saying much more than that; however, he is attempting to delineate the duty—the proactive duty—to clear the path for Islam. It is necessary not only to defend the individual believer if he is being hindered in his faith, but also to remove the obstacles of those counter-initiatory forces hindering his Islamic development. This begs the question of what is actually meant by the initiatory forces. The answer is clear to Brohi; the force of initiative is Islam and its Muslim members. “It is the duty of a believer to carry forward the Message of God and to bring it to notice of his fellow-men in handsome ways. But if someone attempts to obstruct him from doing so he is entitled as a matter of defense, to retaliate.”20

This formulation would appear to turn the concept of defense on its head. To the extent that a Muslim may proclaim Islam and proselytize, or Islam, as a faith, seeks to extend its invitation and reach—initiate its advance—but is unable to do so, then that represents an overt threat justifying—a defensive jihad. According to Brohi, this does not result in the “ordinary wars which mankind has been fighting for the sake of either revenge or for securing . . . more land or more booty . . . [this] striving must be [is] for the sake of God. Wars in the theory of Islam are . . . to advance God’s purposes on earth, and invariably they are defensive in character.” In other words, everywhere the message of God and Islam is or can be hindered from expansion, resisted or opposed by some “obstruction” (a term not clearly defined) Islam is intrinsically entitled to defend its manifest destiny.21

While his logic is controversial, Brohi is not unique in his extrapolation. His theory in fact reflects the argument of Rashid Rida, a conservative disciple of the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh. In 1913 Abduh published an article evaluating Islam’s early military campaigns and determined that Islam’s early neighbors “prevented the proclamation of truth” engendering the defense of Islam. “Our religion is not like others that defend themselves . . . but our defense of our religion is the proclamation of truth and the removal of distortion and misrepresentation of it.”22

No Nation is Sovereign

The exegesis of the term jihad is often debated. Some apologists make clear that nowhere in the Quran does the term “Holy War” exist; that is true, but it is also irrelevant. War in Islam is either just or unjust and that justness depends on the ends of war. Brohi, and later Malik, make clear that the ends of war in Islam or jihad are to fulfill God’s divine purpose. Not only should that be a holy purpose, it must be a just war in order to be “Holy War.”23

The next dualism Brohi presents is that of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the house of submission and the house of war. He describes the latter, as “perpetuating defiance of the Lord.” While explaining that conditions for war in Islam are limited (a constrained set of circumstances) he notes that “in Islam war is waged to establish supremacy of the Lord only when every other argument has failed to convince those who reject His will and work against the very purpose of the creation of mankind.”24 Brohi quotes the Quranic manuscript Surah, al-Tawba:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.25

Acknowledging western critics who believe that Islam is in a state of perpetual struggle with the non-Islamic world, Brohi counters in a clearly dismissive tone by explaining that man is the slave to God, and defying God is treason under Islamic law. Those who defy God should be removed from humanity like a cancerous growth. Islam requires believers “to invite non-believers to the fold of Islam” by using “persuasion” and “beautiful methods.” He continues, “the first duty” of a Muslim is dawa, a proclamation to conversion by “handsome ways.” It is only after refusing dawa and the invitation to Islam that “believers have no option but in self-defense to wage a war against those threatening aggression.”

Obviously, much turns on how threats and aggression are characterized. It is difficult to understand, however, based on the structure of his argument, that Brohi views non-believers and their states as requiring conversion over time by peaceful means; and when that fails, by force. He is echoing the doctrine of Abd al-Salam Faraj, author of Al-Farida al-Ghaibah, better known as The Neglected Duty, a work that is widely read throughout the Muslim world.26

Finally, Brohi examines the concept of the ummah and the international system. “The idea of Ummah of Mohammad, the Prophet of Islam, is incapable of being realized within the framework of territorial states.” This is a consistent view that underpins many works on the concept of the Islamic state.27 For Muslims, the ummah is a transcendent religious and cultural society united and reflecting the unity (tawhid) of Islam; the idea of one God, indivisible, one community, one belief, and one duty to live and become godly. According to the Prophet, “Ummah participates in this heritage by a set pattern of thought, belief and practice . . . and supplies the spiritual principle of integration of mankind—a principle which is supra-national, supra-racial, supra-linguistic and supra-territorial.”28

With respect to the “law of war and peace in Islam” Brohi writes it “is as old as the Quran itself. . . . ” In his analysis of the law of nations and their international dealings, he emphasizes that in “Islamic international law this conduct [war and peace] is, strictly speaking, regulated between Muslims and non-Muslims, there being, from Islamic perspective, no other nation. . . . ” In other words, war is between Muslims and non-Muslims and not in actuality between states. It is transnational. He adds, “In Islam, of course, no nation is sovereign since Allah alone is the only sovereign in Whom all authority vests.”29 Here Brohi is echoing what Islamic scholars such as Majid Khadduri have described as the “dualism of the universal religion and universal state that is Islam.”30

The Divine Philosophy on War

General Malik begins by categorizing human beings into three archetypes: those who fear Allah and profess the Faith; those who reject the Faith; and those who profess, but are treacherous in their hearts. Examples of the Prophet and the instructions to him by God in his early campaigns should be studied to fully understand these three examples in practice. The author highlights the fact that the “divine philosophy on war” was revealed gradually over a 12 year period, its earliest guidance dealing with the causes and objects of war, while later guidance focused on Quranic strategy, the conduct of war, and the ethical dimensions of warfare.31

In Chapter Three, Malik reviews several key thoughts espoused by western scholars related to the causes of war. He examines the ideologies of Lenin, Geoffery Blainey, Quincy Wright, and Frederick H. Hartman each of whom spoke about war in a historical or material context with respect to the nature of the state system. Malik finds these explanations wanting and turns to the Quran for explanation, “war could only be waged for the sake of justice, truth, law, and preservation of human society. . . . The central theme behind the causes of war . . . [in] the Holy Quran, was the cause of Allah.”32

The author recounts the progression of revelations by God to the Prophet that “granted the Muslims the permission to fight . . . .” Ultimately, God would compel and command Muslims to fight: “Fight in the cause of Allah.” In his analysis of this surah Malik highlights the fact that “new elements” were added to the causes of war: that in order to fight, Muslims must be “fought first;” Muslims are not to “transgress God’s limits” in the conduct of war; and everyone should understand that God views “tumult and oppression” of Muslims as “worse than slaughter.”33 This oppression was exemplified by the denial of Muslim’s right to worship at the Sacred Mosque by the early Arab Koraish, people of Mecca. Malik describes the situation in detail, “. . . the tiny Muslim community in Mecca was the object of the Koraish tyranny and oppression since the proclamation of Islam. . . . The enemy repression reached its zenith when the Koraish denied the Muslims access to the Sacred Mosque (the Ka’aba) to fulfill their religious obligations. This sacrilegious act amounted to an open declaration of war upon Islam. These actions eventually compelling the Muslims to migrate to Medina twelve years later, in 622 AD. . . .”34

Malik argues that the pagan Koraish tribe had no reason to prohibit Muslim worship, since the Muslims did not impede their form of worship. This historical example helps to further define the concept that “tumult and oppression is worse than slaughter” and as the Quran repeats, “graver is it in the sight of Allah to prevent access to the path of Allah, to deny Him, to prevent access to the Sacred Mosque, and drive out its members.” Malik also notes the Quran distinguishes those who fight “in the cause of Allah and those who reject Faith and fight in the cause of evil.”35 In terms of Quranic just war theory, war must be waged “only to fight the forces of tyranny and oppression.”36

Challenging Clausewitz’s notion that “policy” provides the context and boundary of war; Malik says it is the reverse, “‘war’ forced policy to define and determine its own parameters” and since that discussion focuses on parochial issues such as national interests, and the vagaries of state to state relations it is a lesser perspective. In the divine context of the Quran war orients on the spread of “justice and faith in Allah altogether and everywhere.” According to the author war is to be fought aggressively, slaughter is not the worst evil. In the course of war every opportunity for peace should be pursued and reciprocated. That is every remonstrance of peace by the enemies of Islam, but only as prescribed by the Quran’s “clear-cut philosophy and methodology” for preserving peace.37

Understanding the context in which the Quran describes and defines “justice and peace” is important. Malik refers the reader to the battle of Badr to elucidate these principles. There is peace with those pagans who cease hostilities, and war continues with those who refuse. He cites the following surah, “as long as these stand true to you, stand ye true to them, for Allah doth love the righteous.”38 Referring to the precedent setting Hodaibayya treaty in the ninth year of the hijra, or pilgrimages to Mecca, Malik outlines how Allah and the Prophet abrogated those treaties with the pagan Meccans.

Pagans who accepted terms voluntarily without a treaty were respected. Those who refused, the Quran directed, were to be slain wherever found. This precedent and “revelations commanded the Muslims to fulfill their treaty commitments for the contracted period but put them under no obligations to renew them.”39 It also established the precedent that Muslims may conclude treaties with non-believers, but only for a temporary period.40 Commenting on western approaches to peace, Malik views such approaches as not standing the “test of time” with no worthwhile role to play even in the future.41 The author’s point is that peace between states has only secular, not divine ends; and peace in an Islamic context is achieved only for the promotion of Islam.

As the Prophet gained control of Mecca he decreed that non-believers could assemble or watch over the Sacred Mosque. He later consolidated power over Arabia and many who had not yet accepted Islam, “including Christians and Jew, [they] were given the option to choose between war and submission.” These non-believers were required to pay a poll-tax or jizya and accept the status of dhimmitude [servitude to Islam] in order to continue practicing their faith. According to Malik the taxes were merely symbolic and insignificant. In summarizing this relationship the author states, “the object of war is to obtain conditions of peace, justice, and faith. To do so it is essential to destroy the forces of oppression and persecution.”42 This view is in keeping with that outlined by Khadduri, “The jihad, it will be recalled, regarded war as Islam’s instrument to transform the dar al-harb into dar al-Islam . . . in Islamic legal theory, the ultimate objective of Islam is not war per se, but the ultimate establishment of peace.”43

The Nature of War

Malik argues that the “nature and dimension of war” is the greatest single characteristic of Quranic warfare and distinguishes it from all other doctrines. He acknowledges Clausewitz’s contribution to the understanding of warfare in its moral and spiritual context. The moral forces of war, as Clausewitz declared, are perhaps the most important aspects in war. Reiterating that Muslims are required to wage war “with the spirit of religious duty and obligation,” the author makes it clear that in return for fighting in the way of Allah, divine, angelic assistance will be rendered to jihad warriors and armies. At this point The Quranic Concept of War moves beyond the metaphysical to the supernatural element, unlike anything found in western doctrine. Malik highlights the fact that divine assistance requires “divine standards” on the part of the warrior mujahideen for the promise of Allah’s aid to be met.44

The author then builds upon the jihad warrior’s role in the realms of divine cause, purpose, and support, to argue that in order for the Muslim warrior to be unmatched, to be the bravest and the most fearless; he can only do so through the correct spiritual preparation, beginning with total submission to God’s will. The Quran reveals that the moral forces are the “real issues involved in the planning and conduct of war.”45 Malik quotes the Quran: “Fighting is prescribed for you . . . and ye dislike a thing which is good for you and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.”

The Quran instructs the jihad warrior “to fight . . . with total devotion and never contemplate a flight from the battlefield for fear of death.” The jihad warrior, who dies in the way of Allah, does not really die but lives on in heaven. Malik emphasizes this in several Quranic verses. “Think not of those who are slain in Allah’s way as dead. . . . Nay, they live finding their sustenance in the Presence of the Lord.” Malik also notes that “Not equal are those Believers . . . Allah has granted a higher grade to those who strive and fight . . . .”46

The Quranic dimensions of war are “revolutionary,” conferring on the jihad warrior a “personality so strong and overbearing as to prove themselves equal to, indeed dominate, every contingency in war.”47 This theme of spiritual preparation and pure belief has appeared in the prolific jihad writings of Usaman Dan Fodio in the early 1800s and repeated by the Saudi writer Abdallah al-Qadiri in 1992, both emphasizing the role of the “greater jihad.” Becoming a purer and more disciplined Muslim serves the cause of Islam better in peace and war.48

Malik, like Brohi, acknowledges critics who say that Islam has been “spread by the sword,” but he responds that Islam is spread through restraint in war and in “the use of force [that] have no parallel.” He then argues that restraint in warfare is a “two-sided affair.” Where the enemy (not defined) fails to exercise restraints and commits “excesses” (not defined) then “the very injunction of preserving and promoting peace and justice demands the use of limited force . . . . Islam permits the use of the sword for such purpose.”49 Since Malik is speaking in the context of active war and response to the “excesses of war” it is unclear what he means by “limited force” or response.

The author expands on the earlier ideas that moral and spiritual forces are predominate in war. He contrasts Islamic strategic approaches with western theories of warfare oriented toward the application of force, primarily in the military domain, as opposed to Islam where the focus is on a broader application of power. Power in Malik’s context is the power of jihad, which is total, both in the conduct of total war and in its supporting strategy; referred to as “total or grand strategy.” Malik provides the following definition, “Jehad is a continuous and never-ending struggle waged on all fronts including political, economic, social, psychological, domestic, moral and spiritual to attain the objectives of policy.”50 The power of jihad brings with it the power of God.

The Quranic concept of strategy is therefore divine theory. The examples and lessons to be derived from it may be found in the study of the classics, inspired by such events as the battles of the Prophet, e.g., Badr, Khandaq, Tabuk, and Hudaibiyya. Malik again references the divine assistance of Allah and the aid of angelic hosts. He refers to the battles of Hunain and Ohad as instances where seeming defeat was reversed and Allah “sent down Tranquility into the hearts of believers, that they may add Faith to their Faith.” Malik argues that divine providence steels the jihadi in war, “strengthens the hearts of Believers.” Calmness of faith, “assurance, hope, and tranquility” in the face of danger is the divine standard.51

Strike Terror into their Hearts

Malik uses examples to demonstrate that Allah will strike “terror into the hearts of Unbelievers.”52 At this point he begins to develop his most controversial and conjectural Quranic theory related to warfare—the role of terror. Readers need to understand that the author is thinking and writing in strategic terms, not in the vernacular of battles or engagements. Malik continues, “when God wishes to impose His will on his enemies, He chooses to do so by casting terror into their hearts.”53 He cites another verse, “against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts) of the enemies of Allah . . . .” Malik’s strategic synthesis is specific: “the Quranic military strategy thus enjoins us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost in order to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies, known or hidden, while guarding ourselves from being terror-stricken by the enemy.”54 Terror is an effect; the end-state.

Malik identifies the center of gravity in war as the “human heart, [man’s] soul, spirit, and Faith.” Note that Faith is capitalized, meaning more than simple moral courage or fortitude. Faith in this sense is in the domain of religious and spiritual faith; this is the center of gravity in war. The main weapon against this Islamic concept of center of gravity is “the strength of our own souls . . . [keeping] terror away from our own hearts.” In terms of achieving decisive and direct decisions preparing for this type of battlefield first requires “creating a wholesome respect for our Cause”—the cause of Islam. This “respect” must be seeded in advance of war and conflict in the minds of the enemies. Malik then introduces the informational, psychological, or perception management concepts of warfare. Echoing Sun Tzu, he states, that if properly prepared, the “war of muscle,” the physical war, will already be won by “the war of will.”55 “Respect” therefore is achieved psychologically by, as Brohi suggested earlier, “beautiful” and “handsome ways” or by the strategic application of terror.

When examining the theme of the preparatory stage of war, Malik talks of the “war of preparation being waged . . . in peace,” meaning that peacetime preparatory activities are in fact part of any war and “vastly more important than the active war.” This statement should not be taken lightly, it essentially means that Islam is in a perpetual state of war while peace can only be defined as the absence of active war. Malik argues that peace-time training efforts should be oriented on the active war(s) to come, in order to develop the Quranic and divine “Will” in the mujahid. When armies and soldiers find limited physical resources they should continue and emphasize the development of the “spiritual resources” as these are complimentary factors and create synergy for future military action.

Malik’s most controversial dictum is summarized in the following manner: in war, “the point where the means and the end meet” is in terror. He formulates terror as an objective principal of war; once terror is achieved the enemy reaches his culminating point. “Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose . . . .” Malik’s divine principal of Islamic warfare may be restated as “strike terror; never feel terror.” The ultimate objective of this form of warfare “revolves around the human heart, [the enemies] soul, spirit, and Faith.”56 Terror “can be instilled only if the opponent’s Faith is destroyed . . . . It is essential in the ultimate analysis, to dislocate [the enemies] Faith.” Those who are firm in their religious conviction are immune to terror, “a weak Faith offers inroads to terror.” Therefore, as part of preparations for jihad, actions will be oriented on weakening the non-Islamic’s “Faith,” while strengthening the Islamic’s. What that weakening or “dislocation” entails in practice remains ambiguous. Malik concludes, “Psychological dislocation is temporary; spiritual dislocation is permanent.” The soul of man can only be touched by terror.57

Malik then moves to a more academic discussion of ten general categories inherent in the conduct of Islamic warfare. These categories are easily translatable and recognizable to most western theorists; planning, organization, and conduct of military operations. In this regard, the author offers no unique insight. His last chapter is used to restate his major conclusions, stressing that “The Holy Quran lays the highest emphasis on the preparation for war. It wants us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost. The test . . . lies in our capability to instill terror into the hearts of our enemies.”58

Evaluation of The Quranic Concept of War

While the extent and reach of Malik’s thesis cannot be confirmed in the Islamic world neither can it be discounted. Though controversial, his citations are accurately drawn from Islamic sources and consistent with classical Islamic jurisprudence.59 As Malik notes, “Quranic military thought is an integral and inseparable part of the total Quranic message.”60 Policy planners and strategists striving to understand the nature of the “Long War” should consider Malik’s writings in that light.

Malik makes clear that the Quran provides the doctrine, guidance, and examples for the conduct of Quranic or Islamic warfare. “It gives a strategy of war that penetrates deep down to destroy the opponents’ faith and render his physical and mental faculties totally ineffective.”61 Malik’s thesis focuses on the fact that the primary reason for studying the Quran is to gain a greater understanding of these concepts and insights. The Prophet Mohammed, as the Quran attests, changed the intent and objective of war—raising the sphere of war to a Godly plane and purpose; the global proclamation and spread of Islam. This obviously rejects the Clausewitizian politics and policy dyad: that war is simply policy of the state.

Quranic warfare is “just war.” It is jus en bellum and jus ad bellum if fought “in the way of Allah” for divine purposes and the ends of Islam. This contradicts the western philosophy of just war theory. Another important connotation is that jihad is a continuum, across peace and war. It is a constant and covers the spectrum from grand strategy to tactical; collective to the individual; from the preparatory to the execution phases of war.

Malik highlights the fact that the preservation of life is not the ultimate end or greatest good in Quranic warfare. Ending “tumult and oppression,” achieving the war aims of Islam through jihad is the desired end. Dying in this cause brings direct reward in heaven for the mujahid, sacrifice is sacred. It naturally follows that death is not feared in Quranic warfare; indeed, “tranquility” invites God’s divine aid and assistance. The “Base” of the Quranic military strategy is spiritual preparation and “guarding ourselves against terror.”62 Readers may surmise that the training camps of al Qaeda (The Base) were designed as much for spiritual preparation as military. One needs only to recall the example of Mohammed Atta’s “last night” preparations.63

The battleground of Quranic war is the human soul—it is religious warfare. The object of war is to dislocate and destroy the [religious] “Faith” of the enemy. These principals are consistent with objectives of al Qaeda and other radical Islamic organizations. “Wars in the theory of Islam are . . . to advance God’s purposes on earth, and invariably they are defensive in character.”64 Peace treaties in theory are temporary, pragmatic protocols. This treatise acknowledges Islam’s manifest destiny and the approach to achieving it.

General Malik’s thesis in The Quranic Concept of War can be fundamentally described as “Islam is the answer.” He makes a case for war and the revitalization of Islam. This is a martial exegesis of the Quran. Malik like other modern Islamists are, at root, romantics. They focus on the Quran for jihad a doctrine that harkens back to the time of the Prophet and the classical-jihadist period when Islam enjoyed its most successful military campaigns and rapid growth.

The book’s metaphysical content borders on the supernatural and renders “assured expectations” that cannot be evaluated or tested in the arena of military experience. Incorporating “divine intervention” into military campaigns, while possibly advantageous, cannot be calculated as an overt force multiplier. Critics may also point to the ahistorical aspect of Malik’s thesis; that Islam is in a state of constant struggle with the non-Islamic world. There are examples of Muslim armies serving side by side with Christian armies in combat and campaigns are numerous, with Iraq being but a recent example.65

Malik’s appraisal of the Quran as a source of divine revelation for victory in war can likewise be criticized by historical example. Were it fully true and operationalized then the 1,400 years of Islamic military history might demonstrate something beyond its present state. War and peace in Islam has ebbed and flowed as has the conduct of war across all civilizations, ancient and modern. Islam as an independent military force has been in recession since 1492, although the latest jihadist’s threat of terror against the international system is, at least in part, a possible reaction to this long recession. Malik’s thesis essentially recognizes this historical pattern; indeed, Malik’s book may be an attempt to reverse this trend. The events of 9/11 may be seen as a validation of Malik’s thesis regarding the spiritual preparation and the use of terror. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were intended to seed “respect” (fear) in the minds of Islam’s enemies. These acts were not only directed at Western non-believers, but also the Muslim leaders who “profess the faith but are treacherous in their hearts” (allies and supporters of the United States). The barbarity of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and others in Iraq reflect a focus on extreme terror designed to wilt the will of Islam’s enemies.

Malik and Brohi both emphasize the defensive nature of jihad in Islam, but this position appears to be more a defense of a manifest destiny inevitably resulting in conflict. In their rendering of jihad both, not surprisingly, owe an intellectual debt to the Pakistani Islamist theorist, Abu al-Ala al-Mawdudi. Al-Mawdudi is an important intellectual precursor to the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, and other modern Islamic revivalists. As al-Mawdudi notes, “Islamic jihad is both offensive and defensive” oriented on liberating man from humanistic tyranny.66

The author’s most controversial and, perhaps, most noteworthy assertion, is the distinction of “terror” as an ends rather than as a means to an end. The soul can only be touched by terror. Malik’s divine principal of war may be summarized in the dictum “strike terror; never feel terror.” Yet, he does not describe any specific method of delivering terror into the heart of Islam’s enemies. His view of terror seems to conflict with his earlier, limited, discussion of the concept of restraint in warfare and what actually constitutes “excesses” on the part of an enemy. It also conflicts with the character and nature of response that the author says is demanded. Malik leaves many of these pertinent issues undefined under a veneer of legitimating theory.

In spite of certain ambiguities and theoretical weaknesses, this work should be studied and valued for its insight and analysis relate to jihadists’ concepts and the asymmetric approach to war that radical Muslims may adapt and execute. With respect to global jihad terrorism, as the events of 9/11 so vividly demonstrated, there are those who believe and will exercise the tenets of The Quranic Concept of War.

NOTES

1. Brigadier S. K. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War (Lahore, Pakistan: Associated Printers, 1979). Quranic War or Quranic Warfare refers to Malik’s treatment in his book.

2. Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins Press, 1955), p. 64.

3. R. D. Hooker, “Beyond Vom Kriege: The Character and Conduct of Modern War,” Parameters, 35 (Summer 2005), 4.

4. Paul Sperry, “The Pentagon Breaks the Islam Taboo,” FrontPage Magazine, 14 December 2005, http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20539.

5. Antulio Echevarria, Towards an American Way of War (Carlisle, Pa.: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, March 2004).

6. Patrick Poole, “The Muslim Brotherhood ‘Project,’” FrontPage Magazine, 11 May 2006, http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22415.

7. Farhand Rajaee, Islamic Values and World View: Khomeyni on Man the State and International Politics,” (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), p 71.

8. Irfan Yusuf, “Theories on Islamic Books You Wouldn’t Read About,” Canberra Times, 21 July 2005, http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=your say&subclass=general&category=editorial opinion&story_id=410105&y=2005&m=7.

9. Malik, pp. I-ii.

10. Ibid., p. 1.

11. Ibid., pp. I-ii.

12. See for example the discussion by Dr. Mary R. Habeck, “Jihadist Strategies in the War on Terrorism,” The Heritage Foundation, 8 November 2004, http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/hl855.cfm.

13. David Cook, Understanding Jihad, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2005). There is approximately 1,400 years of jihad scholarship beginning with Mohammed and his military campaigns. Classical approaches to jihad as described by Mohammed’s successors, Abu Bakr for example, and the challenges presented by the struggles of succession to Mohammed.

14. Malik “Forward.”

15. Ibid., “Preface,” p. I.

16. Ibid., p. I. Note the Christian concept of the Trinity contained in the Nicene Creed is considered polytheistic according to Islam. The Trinity is not tawhid.

17. John Esposito, Islam, the Straight Path (3d ed.; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 12-14, 89.

18. Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 72; Khadduri, pp. 65, 70-72; Cook, Understanding Jihad, pp. 35-39.

19. Brohi, “Preface,” p. ii.

20. Ibid., p. iii.

21. Ibid., p. iii.

22. Cook, pp. 95-96. Cook places these concepts of jihad doctrine in the lineage of contemporary and radical theory.

23. The indexed term for jihad is redirected to the term “Holy War” in this classic book of Islamic law or sharia by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller, ed. and trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Beltsville, Md.: Amana Publication, 1997).

24. Malik, “Preface,” p. v.

25. Ibid., p. vii.

26. Cook, p. 107; Christoper Henzel, “The Origins of al Qaeda’s Ideology: Implications for US Strategy,” Parameters, 35 (Spring 2005), 69-80.

27. Ishtiaq Ahmed, The Concept of an Islamic State: An Analysis of the Ideological Controversy in Pakistan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).

28. Malik, “Preface,” p. x. While in the Western tradition the state is viewed as a territorial and political body, based on “temporal elements such as shared memory, language, race, or the mere choice of its members.” Khomeini rejected this view, seeing the secular, political state and nationalism as Western constructs of imperialistic design to damage the cohesion of the ummah and impede the “advancement of Islam.” Rajaee, pp. 7, 67-71.

29. Ibid., p. x.

30. Khadduri, p. 63.

31. Malik, p. 6.

32. Ibid., p. 20.

33. Ibid., pp. 20-21. (Baqara: 190).

34. Malik, p. 11.

35. Ibid., p. 22. (Baqara: 217) and (Nissaa: 76).

36. Ibid., p. 23.

37. Ibid., p. 29.

38. Malik, p. 29. (Tauba: 7).

39. Ibid., p. 31.

40. Khadduri, p. 212. Jurists disagree on the allowable duration of treaties, the operative concept is that the dar al-Harb must be reduced to dar al-Islam over time.

41. Malik, p. 27.

42. Ibid., pp. 33-34.

43. Khadduri, p. 141.

44. Malik, p. 40

45. Ibid., pp. 37-38. (Baqara: 216).

46. Ibid., pp. 42-44. (Al-I-Imran: 169-70) and (Nissa: 95).

47. Ibid., pp. 42-44.

48. Cook, pp. 77, 124.

49. Malik, p. 49.

50. Ibid., p. 54.

51. Ibid., p. 57.

52. Malik, p. 57.

53. Ibid., p. 57.

54. Ibid., p. 58.

55. Ibid., p. 58.

56. Ibid., pp. 58-59.

57. Ibid., p. 60.

58. Ibid., p. 144.

59. Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Weiner Publishers, 1996), pp. 44-51, 128.

60. Malik, p. 3.

61. Ibid., p. 146.

62. Ibid., p.58.

63. “In Hijacker’s Bags, a Call to Planning, Prayer and Death,” Washington Post, 28 September 2001.

64. Malik, “Preface,” p. iii.

65. Four notable examples are the Crimean War where French, British and Ottoman Forces allied against the Russians; Fuad Pasha of the Ottoman Army served as a coalition partner with French Army during the 1860 Rebellion in Syria; more recently Muslim Arab and Kabyle soldiers served in the Harkis of the French Army in the French-Algerian War; and, of course, today in Iraq. Malik would address some of these events as alliances of convenience serving Islam’s interests in accord with the Quran and Sharia Law, others as takfir or treason.

66. Cook, pp. 99-103. Peters, p. 130.

The Reviewer: Lieutenant Colonel Joseph C. Myers is the Senior Army Advisor to the Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. A graduate of the US Military Academy he holds a Master of Arts from Tulane University. In 2004 he completed a Senior Army Fellowship at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. Previous assignments include Army Section Chief, US Military Group, Argentina. He also served as Chief of the South America Division and Senior Military Analyst for Colombia at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

 

[archade]

With Friends Like These: Grievance, Governance, and Capacity-Building in COIN
ROBERT M. CHAMBERLAIN

From Parameters,

A consensus is emerging in the Army about the standard template for counterinsurgency: first clear an area of insurgent fighters; then implement population control measures to ensure the insurgents do not come back; and finally focus efforts on building governmental capacity so the population embraces the state and rejects the insurgents. This template makes a critical assumption about the government being restored—namely, that enhancing the power of the state will make the population less likely to support insurgents. This article questions that assumption by applying the doctrine outlined in Field Manual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency, to the 1980-91 insurgency in El Salvador. While the Salvadoran insurgency ended 17 years ago, its lessons are a valuable guide for leaders attempting to make sense of the contradictions inherent in fighting the Long War.

El Salvador’s Insurgency

To understand the war in El Salvador, it is necessary to explore the structure of Salvadoran society. The interwoven structures of economic, political, and military power and their human consequences are critical to understanding the motivations of the insurgents of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the government response, and the overall progression of the war.

FM 3-24 identifies a wide variety of grievances that may be exploited by insurgents in their attempt to mobilize the population.1 At least three of these conditions—lack of popular participation, class exploitation and repression, and economic inequality—existed in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s. The Salvadoran economy was built around agricultural exports, with land and wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. Within this insular community, the largest 36 landlords controlled 66 percent of the capital of the 1,429 largest firms.2 At the other end of the spectrum, the percentage of rural workers who were temporary day laborers grew from 28 to 38 percent during the 1960s.3 These trends continued, and by 1980, three-quarters of campesinos (peasants) lived in poverty, and more than half were so poor that they couldn’t consistently afford food.4

The Salvadoran campesinos were kept in line by a robust state security apparatus and the historical precedent of the matanza (massacre). The matanza is indicative of class relationships in El Salvador; in January 1932, Communist peasants, primarily from indigenous communities, rose up and seized several small towns in the western part of the country, killing about 35 civilians and local police. Their rebellion was short-lived, as the Salvadoran Army crushed the movement in a mere three days. Over the next several weeks, the state killed between 8,000 and 25,000 individuals, roughly two percent of El Salvador’s population. The violence was especially concentrated in the rebellious communities, where up to two-thirds of the population died. This uprising and subsequent atrocity permanently marked Salvadoran politics with a violent anticommunism and suspicion of social reform as well as an expectation that the military could and should brutally suppress peasant insurrections.5

Completing the trifecta of grievances was the fact that, in the aftermath of the matanza, the Salvadoran military determined that as long as it was going to be responsible for protecting the country, it might as well run it too. Beginning with General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez in 1932 and continuing until the early 1990s, the military was politically preeminent—either supplying the President directly or heavily influencing the legislative process through threatened and actual coups.6

These horrific conditions eventually led to public outcry, and the 1970s saw the formation of a wide variety of protest groups, both violent and nonviolent. Unfortunately for the nonviolent activists, the government responded to their concerns with “blatant fraud and violent repression.”7 As the protests increased, the government passed the “Law of the Defense and Guarantee of Public Order,” which gave security forces “arbitrary arrest and detention powers against demonstrators, labor activists, and others suspected of ‘subversive’ speech.” Actual insurgents were much more difficult to find than nonviolent protestors, however, so “[r]ather than focusing on the guerrilla organizations, the security forces arrested and in many cases contributed to the disappearance of an increasingly broad range of labor, student, neighborhood, church, and Christian Democratic activists.”8 A particularly flagrant incident took place in November 1980, when the leadership of the nonviolent leftist reform parties held a press conference. Once the reformers were gathered, they were kidnapped in front of the assembled reporters, not to be seen again until their dismembered bodies were found scattered around San Salvador.9 As a consequence, dissent was militarized and driven underground, and El Salvador’s guerrilla organizations united under the banner of the FMLN.10

As guerrilla activity increased, the security forces and associated right-wing death squads responded by murdering tens of thousands of people.11 Operating on a scale eerily reminiscent of the matanza, the security forces killed more than 40,000 people between 1978 and 1983, close to one percent of the population.12 This was a truly cataclysmic level of violence, magnified by the fact that these killings were concentrated within the country’s young male population.

American counterinsurgency doctrine predicts that arbitrary, widespread, and indiscriminate violence such as practiced in El Salvador is likely to backfire.

Though firmness by security forces is often necessary to establish a secure government, a government that exceeds accepted local norms and abuses its people or is tyrannical generates resistance to its rule. People who have been maltreated or have had close friends or relatives killed by the government, particularly by the security forces, may strike back at their attackers. Security force abuses and the social upheaval caused by collateral damage from combat can be major escalating factors for insurgencies.13

As one would expect, such widespread brutality did little to quell the insurgency, and “y the end of 1983, the FMLN’s military capacity was sufficient to control almost a fifth of the national territory . . . [insurgents] generally moved at will during the day as well as the night . . . [and] had eliminated fixed government positions.”14 Fearing the collapse of the Salvadoran government, the United States dramatically increased foreign aid and bolstered the Salvadoran military by providing advisers and supplying helicopters and attack aircraft.15

After the integration of aircraft into Salvadoran counterguerrilla operations the FMLN was forced to adapt. Since the Salvadoran Army could employ spotter aircraft to find large insurgent formations and then strike them with attack aircraft and newly created rapid-deployment battalions, the FMLN “broke its battalion-sized forces into smaller units and dispersed them throughout the countryside.”16 This was deeply demoralizing to the organization, which had anticipated a culminating victory in 1983, and the number of active insurgents dropped from between 10,000 and 12,000 in 1984 to about half that by 1987.17 As the organization demonstrated its resilience, however, morale improved, and the FMLN gained enough strength that in 1989 it was able to launch a general campaign seizing neighborhoods in the capital and several other cities.18 This campaign was quickly suppressed, albeit with significant violence and collateral damage, demonstrating the government’s inability to stop the insurgency and the FMLN’s incapacity to put together a coalition broad enough to topple the government.

Soon thereafter, negotiations began to end El Salvador’s civil war. Begun under United Nations auspices in 1990, they culminated in a 1992 agreement wherein the government agreed to disband its internal security forces, reconstitute a police department that included former FMLN fighters, restrict the military to external defense, and strengthen the judicial and electoral systems.19 The FMLN agreed to disarm and demobilize its forces and enter the arena of electoral politics as an organized political party, as well as to set aside its demands for comprehensive land reform in favor of a more limited redistribution.20

Good Intentions and Death Squads

The United States contributed significantly to combating the insurgency in El Salvador, the reorientation of the counterinsurgency, and the eventual outcome of the war. It did so not merely through the contribution of money and equipment, but also through use of the counterinsurgency doctrine and expertise learned during Vietnam. Many of the principles employed in El Salvador remain in use today: enhance intelligence gathering capabilities, create local militias to work with security forces, build the capacity of host nation security forces, and develop a full-spectrum counterinsurgency plan. Yet the consistent application of these principles had wildly different outcomes at various times depending on the political context in which the aid was given; two examples are illustrative.

The National Democratic Republican Order, or ORDEN (the acronym itself means “order”), was founded in the 1960s under the auspices of President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. The program itself was designed to thwart emerging revolutionary trends in Latin America through a combination of development aid and security assistance. ORDEN fell in the latter category. American counterinsurgency specialists identified weaknesses in the Salvadoran intelligence system and began working with Salvadoran officers, most notably General Jose Alberto Medrano, on “the development of a countersubversion intelligence network, based on local informants and integrated at the national level.”21

Medrano first founded a small cadre of intelligence specialists that became known as the Salvadoran National Special Services Agency (ANSESAL), which in turn formed “the nationwide, grass-roots network of informants known as ORDEN.”22 Members of this group worked closely with local landowners and Salvadoran Army units to identify potential subversives, and were rewarded with preferential access to public agricultural, educational, and health programs. In principle this method is entirely in keeping with counterinsurgency best practices; it empowers the host nation, develops a robust human intelligence network, and rewards cooperation with the government.

In practice, however, ORDEN was something quite different. At the behest of economic elites and conservative elements within the Salvadoran military, ORDEN became progressively more public and militant, working first to violently disperse workers’ strikes before forming an integral component of the death squad infrastructure. In conjunction with elements under the leadership of Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a founding member of ANSESAL, ORDEN provided the intelligence and occasionally the labor to identify campesinos who would be captured, tortured, and killed before their bodies were dumped in highly trafficked areas. In an effort to stop the ongoing atrocities, a junta of young officers that seized power in a 1979 coup outlawed the organization, but by then the damage was done. “Although ORDEN was formally abolished, its networks and militants remained in place, the legal ‘cover’ for repression was steadily expanded throughout 1980, and the military continued to control key state institutions.”23 Ironically, the increase in counterinsurgency capacity during the 1960s created a robust system of repression controlled by oligarchs and conservative military officers who repeatedly thwarted political reforms that might have prevented the insurgency in the first place.24

By contrast, US aid in the mid- to late 1980s was instrumental in limiting the activities of the death squads. It is not coincidental that the bulk of the extrajudicial killings occurred between 1979 and 1983, while the vast majority of American assistance was delivered from 1984 onward. In fact, US aid was conditioned on the cessation of death squad activity, and both then-Vice President George H. W. Bush and Central Intelligence Agency Director William Casey personally conveyed that message to the Salvadoran government.

In addition, the United States slowly convinced the Salvadoran security forces to plan a counterinsurgency based on restoring governmental legitimacy and not the violent repression inherent in the rural communities. This plan included the combat operations mentioned earlier, as well as a classic civil-military campaign providing health and education services to underserved villages and gradually opening the political system to broader participation. The United States underscored this effort with “programs ranging from support for centrist labor organizations allied with the PDC [the Christian Democratic Party, a civilian political organization], financial contribution to the PDC’s electoral campaigns, military training, and economic assistance designed to underwrite the country’s faltering economy.”25 Unlike the development of ORDEN, which enhanced the repressive power of the elite, American aid was contingent upon significant changes in El Salvador’s political and military affairs; thus “n the reluctant view of the military, the ongoing insurgency made US assistance necessary, and as a result, political liberalization as well.”26

Finally, the United States was instrumental in bringing the conflict to a close. When President Alfredo Cristiani, backed by a coalition of emerging financiers and industrialists who lacked ties to rural agricultural businesses, began negotiations with the FMLN in 1990, he threatened the interests of both the agro-elite and right-wing elements within the military. Historical precedent in El Salvador suggested that Cristiani would quickly find himself replaced by a more pliant politician, and, indeed, there were rumblings about a possible coup. The United States, Mexico, and Venezuela, however, all made clear that any new military regime would find its oil supply cut off, and thus would almost certainly collapse. The rumblings came to nothing, the war was brought to a close, and civilian authorities were able to dismantle the repressive security apparatus that had defined Salvadoran politics for the past 30 years.27

The differences between these two examples should give any counterinsurgent pause: How is it that the same theory of counterinsurgency could both contribute to the creation of a human catastrophe and its eventual resolution? The answer lies in a flaw in the doctrine itself.

The Paradox of Security and Governance in COIN

Counterinsurgency writing is riddled with Zen-like proverbs and paradoxes—in fact, FM 3-24 lists nine of them.28 Perhaps it is time to add a tenth: to achieve victory, you must be prepared to accept instability. To put it differently, to achieve the operational and strategic aims of a counterinsurgency, the counterinsurgent is obligated to accept the possibility that those aims are not attainable through support of the host nation government in its current form. The counterinsurgent should be willing to permit host nation political leaders to be significantly imperiled, or perhaps even to fail, in an effort to motivate them to make the changes required to quell the insurgency.

While this seems like an extremely controversial assertion, it is rooted in two observations inherent in FM 3-24. First, “The primary objective of any COIN operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government.”29 The manual goes on to clarify: “All governments rule through a combination of consent and coercion. Governments described as ‘legitimate’ rule primarily with the consent of the governed; those described as ‘illegitimate’ tend to rely mainly or entirely on coercion.”30 Second, “the behavior of HN [host nation] security force personnel is often a primary cause of public dissatisfaction . . . In more ideological struggles, discrimination may be against members of other political parties, whether in a minority cultural group or not; they may even be a cause of the insurgency.”31 Doctrinally, then, “a comprehensive security force development plan identifies and addresses biases as well as improper or corrupt practices.”32 These two points are critical, because they explain the mechanism that focuses the broad grievances previously listed onto the state: namely, inequitable social, economic, and political structures that are violently supported by a coercive state and a discriminatory security force capable of armed protest against the government itself.

This claim is broadly supported by the sociological literature on counterinsurgency; the countries most likely to face and succumb to an insurgency are regimes with elites that exploit their control over the state security forces to enforce unfair economic systems, enriching their friends while consigning most of the population to unending misery. These states create no room for peaceful protests, making insurgency the only viable form of dissent. This mode was the case in Cuba under Batista, Nicaragua under Somoza, Uganda under Obote, Rhodesia under Smith, and El Salvador under the military. The fundamental problems facing a counterinsurgent are governance and social structure; they are the lenses that both focus popular dissent and refract well-intentioned security assistance measures.

The truth of this concept is readily apparent in the El Salvador experience. The state was structured to preserve the privileges of a few at the expense of the many. The massive inequality, repression, and lack of representation were all intertwined; rich oligarchs provided patronage and economic support for the military and political leaders, who in turn used force to ensure an abundance of cheap, available, and quiescent labor. Any outside security assistance provided to that arrangement that was not tied to massive reforms only served to make the military better at repressing the citizenry. In effect, it would only add to the grievances against the government and security forces described earlier, which would in turn increase both the likelihood and potency of any potential insurgency. Moreover, by strengthening the security apparatus one reinforces the government’s ability to suppress nonviolent dissent, which again limits the possibility of internal government reforms.

This is exactly what occurred with ORDEN. The United States provided security assistance that was entirely appropriate in theory but was disastrous given the social context. In effect, the United States made a concerted effort to create an intelligence apparatus that was both responsive to the demands of local oligarchs and controlled by a central military authority. This organization was then used by those elites to stifle dissent, prevent reform, and neutralize political opponents. Moreover, once created, ORDEN took on a life of its own. Even after it was outlawed along with ANSESAL, key members of the Salvadoran military intelligence community continued to employ their death squad infrastructure in contravention of Salvadoran governmental and US policy, resulting in thousands of additional deaths and significant domestic and international opposition to the Salvadoran regime. This outcome was entirely predictable—the Salvadoran security forces, since the matanza in 1932, were built around the violent oppression of the campesinos. Any aid given without reform, especially aid designed to help ward off Communist insurrection, would conveniently be exercised for that purpose.

ORDEN was created in the 1960s, when the Communist threat in El Salvador was minimal. Yet 20 years later, when El Salvador faced a robust insurgency that was capable of operating in battalion-sized formations and moving with impunity through 20 percent of the countryside, American aid came with significant strings attached. Not only did world leaders demand a halt to extrajudicial killings, the United States also supported political organizations that directly threatened Salvadoran elite interests. Thus, in contrast to the Alliance for Progress aid that created ORDEN, a massive infusion of American money, equipment, and personnel in the 1980s resulted in a reduction in death squad activity and an increase in political opportunity. Eventually, the return to civilian rule, the marginalization of right-wing militarists, and the creation of a new economic elite led to a negotiated settlement ending the conflict. In short, linking political conditions with security assistance worked.

Unfortunately, this approach is the opposite of the doctrinal sequence of events outlined in FM 3-24. In the manual, security comes first, and it is only when “civil security is assured” that “focus expands to include governance, provision of essential services, and stimulation of economic development.”33 In the Logical Lines of Operation so neatly illustrated on pages 5-3 and 5-5, and enshrined in PowerPoint briefings across the Army, governance, economic development, civil security, host nation security forces, and essential services all run in parallel (and are all contained within the giant “Information Operations” arrow). History has demonstrated that this approach is problematic.

Effective and legitimate governance or governmental reforms should always be a precondition for any other sort of operation. It is the necessary condition that must be established in order for the counterinsurgency to succeed. When a commitment to legitimate governance is missing, any other assistance will be unproductive, because it will fail to address the underlying causes of the insurgency; actually, it will be counterproductive, due to its reinforcement and deepening of the grievances that originally led to the insurgency. All assistance to the host nation—whether in the form of elimination of its enemies, assistance to its population, or improvements to its security forces—is refracted through its state structure. A repressive, illegitimate state will use the resources of the US counterinsurgency program to perpetuate itself and expand its capabilities unless good governance is a precondition for additional aid. The good counterinsurgent should be prepared to refuse requests for support by an illegitimate government, even if this means risking the collapse of that government and the prospect of an extended struggle against an even more powerful opponent. The alternative is to contribute to the very problem the counterinsurgency is meant to solve, and thereby commit to an endless war of attrition. Governance comes first, and all else follows.

ORDEN Again?

While they are two very different conflicts, the lessons that El Salvador has to teach about the primacy of legitimate governance are critical to analyzing the counterinsurgency in Iraq. The public discussion regarding Iraq up until now has been predicated on the idea that improvements in security will provide the space for political reconciliation to go forward. It is worth considering, however, the possibility that the opposite is true, that security gains without political reconciliation are at best transient and at worst inimical to political settlement. The short and unhappy history of the Iraqi National Police illustrates this point.

The National Police was created in April 2006 under the auspices of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. The abstract organizational rationale for doing so was quite reasonable; there had been an identified need for the Iraqi police to have a heavy paramilitary capability in order to effectively combat well-armed insurgents. Up until 2006, that capability was provided by a hodgepodge of organizations founded by both the Coalition and the government of Iraq. From a bureaucratic perspective, combining these units under a unified command would yield salutary benefits in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

Much like with ANSESAL and ORDEN, however, the question was never asked “effective according to whom?” During the formation of the organizations that were to become the National Police, the emphasis was on rapidly restoring security and building Iraqi capacity, rather than ensuring proportional representation.

“When we stood them up, we didn’t ask, ‘Are you Sunni or are you Shia?’” Major General Joseph F. Peterson, in charge of police training, said in an interview at a base in Taji, north of Baghdad, as he was visiting soldiers newly assigned to the Iraqi police. “They ended up being 99 percent Shia. Now, when we look at that, we say, ‘They do not reflect the population of Iraq.’”34

Coalition planners assumed that the Iraqi security forces would be a public institution that acted in the best interests of the entire population. The commanders of the National Police had other plans. The Ministry of the Interior was initially controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shia group that, as its name suggests, wishes to remold Iraq into a Shia republic along the Iranian model. Having experienced severe repression at the hands of the state security forces in the Saddam era, they viewed control of the police forces as an absolute necessity. The Iraqi police, and especially the Iraqi National Police, became a force created with Coalition resources and yet subverted to advance a violent sectarian agenda.

The result was predictable. Just as good intentions in El Salvador fueled the creation of ORDEN and the murder of thousands of campesinos, good intentions in Iraq created the National Police and resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad. National Police units facilitated the operation of Shia death squads in neighborhoods they were responsible for, ran their own network of secret prisons and torture chambers, and were implicated in repeated massacres of Sunni civilians. The situation became so bad that an entire Iraqi police commando brigade was taken off line for retraining, nine brigade and 17 battalion commanders were replaced, and the Coalition pressured Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki into naming a new, reformist Minister of the Interior.35

Unfortunately, the damage caused by the rush to achieve security through the creation of the National Police may be irreversible. Much like the structures of ORDEN that survived the formal dissolution of the organization in 1980, the Ministry of the Interior and the National Police have proven resistant to reform. Despite Coalition efforts, the force is still overwhelmingly Shia, and the government has ignored a recently created police training center in Anbar Province, according to its commander.36 Additionally, the National Police are widely reviled and have been so thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the population that General James Jones’s commission on Iraqi Security Forces recommended it be entirely disbanded.37

The National Police, like ORDEN, was a spectacular failure because, rather than make security assistance contingent upon necessary political reforms and a nonsectarian ideology, it rapidly developed a coercive capability in the hopes that a space for political progress could be created. This challenge holds important lessons for the future of Iraq, as well as American security policy generally. Much ado has been made about the rapid reduction of violence in Iraq since the creation of the Sons of Iraq (SOI), also known as Concerned Local Citizens or Awakening groups, throughout the country. Research indicates that those security gains may be largely illusory.

While SOI groups are eventually to be integrated into the Iraqi Security Forces, there has been a consistent refusal on the part of the Ministry of the Interior to allow widespread recruitment of SOI members in Sunni areas. Moreover, rifts and violent clashes with the central government have already occurred in Diyala, where SOI groups ominously walked off the job with weapons in-hand in response to a police killing that involved a local family. All of this disruption occurs in a larger political context in which the largest Sunni parties continue to boycott Parliament in protest of what they perceive to be sectarian policies implemented at the expense of their communities. It is entirely possible that the SOI program will simply result in the armament and organization of Sunni tribal militias throughout the country, who, while happy to eject al Qaeda, will be less sanguine about the imposition of central government authority in their communities. Thus, the security gains occurring now contain within them the seeds of their own demise.

Conclusion

While the American military has made great strides in the tactical and operational aspects of counterinsurgency, it still faces challenges in the realm of strategy. National objectives are articulated in a political vocabulary; the desired outcome in El Salvador and in Iraq was a stable, secure, US-friendly, democratic regime. The reflexive response to instability, insecurity, or nondemocratic hostility is a rush to augment internal security forces. Ostensibly once the security situation is assured, necessary political reforms can proceed. Unfortunately, it would appear that this is seldom the case; the attempt to provide security strengthens elements within the state that have the capability to contribute to future instability. Further, by reinforcing violent, repressive organizations in the name of expediency, political positions harden and the underlying problems only become more intractable.

There is a better way. While it seems counterintuitive, instability can be essential to a counterinsurgency because it forces a change in the status quo. A politician threatened with his imminent demise is much more likely to undertake the deep structural reforms necessary to address the underlying dynamics of the conflict. Conditional security aid can be extremely helpful in this regard. The Leahy Amendment, which forbids US funding of organizations implicated in human rights abuses, and high-level pressure, such as George Bush’s vice presidential visit to El Salvador, have historically had a significant effect. But conditionality is key.

A successful counterinsurgency campaign has to carry within it a credible threat of withdrawal. Rather than a security plan that will be implemented regardless of political change, security aid should be tied to political benchmarks. Consistent failure to achieve those benchmarks can result in the continual drawdown and eventual elimination of US support. In one sense this is brinksmanship—the host nation government’s fear of revolution versus the US government’s discomfort with instability. But in another, it’s just common sense; without political reform, American forces will be mired in and contributing to the perpetuation of an unending conflict. Feckless, self-interested, sectarian politicians do not deserve the sacrifices in blood and treasure required to prop up their regimes.

NOTES

1. Department of the Army, Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency (Washington: Headquarters Department of the Army, 2006), para. 1-50.

2. Elisabeth Jean Wood, Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 39.

3. Ibid., 35.

4. Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 24.

5. Jeffery M. Paige, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), 120.

6. See Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (2d ed.; New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993).

7. Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 154.

8. William Stanley, The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War in El Salvador (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1996), 114.

9. Cynthia J. Arnson, “Window on the Past: A Declassified History of Death Squads in El Salvador” in Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability, eds., Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner (New York: Palgrave Macmillin, 2000), 85.

10. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, 24.

11. “Murdered” was the word used by then-Ambassador Thomas Pickering to describe the Salvadoran government’s actions.

12. Stanley, 3.

13. FM 3-24, para. 1-45.

14. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, 131.

15. Ibid., 134.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 135.

18. Ibid., 29.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Stanley, 81.

22. Ibid.

23. Wood, Forging Democracy from Below, 46.

24. Stanley, 83.

25. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, 48.

26. Ibid.

27. Stanley, 8.

28. FM 3-24, paras. 1-149 through 1-158.

29. Ibid., para. 1-113.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., para. 6-10.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., para. 5-5.

34. Edward Wong, “U.S. is Seeking Better Balance in Iraqi Police,” The New York Times, 7 March 2006.

35. David Cloud, “Panel Will Urge Broad Overhaul of Iraqi Police,” The New York Times, 31 August 2007.

36. See Michael Gordon, “Iraq Hampers US Bid to Widen Sunni Police Role,” The New York Times, 28 October 2007.

37. James Jones, The Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, 6 September 2007.

Captain Robert M. Chamberlain is a Truman and Rhodes Scholar who specializes in theories of violence, substate actors, and collective identity. He was a battalion military transition team senior maneuver adviser in Iraq and is conducting background research on theories and histories of revolutionary movements.

 

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Urban Guerrilla Warfare. By Anthony James Joes. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007. 232 pages.

Reviewed by Frank L. Jones, Professor of Security Studies, US Army War College.

“The worst policy is to attack cities,” admonished the ancient Chinese theorist of war, Sun Tzu, “attack cities only when there is no alternative.” Urban warfare in all its varieties is as brutish and nasty as any other terrain in which to fight. As Anthony Joes, author of several books on insurgency, points out, urban guerrilla warfare can be especially pernicious. The urban guerrilla does not wear a uniform, but blends in with the city’s population to attain secrecy and anonymity; he matches his tactics to the topography of brick and mortar: every doorway becomes a firing point and every sewer a line of communication. For the government’s security forces to win, they must adapt more rapidly than the guerrilla and overcome conventional thinking and bureaucratic repertoires. Accurate intelligence becomes the coin of the realm, and as Joes points out, soldiers sometimes willingly cast aside their scruples and risk dishonor to obtain it. His instructive book tells the story of these fighters, their obsessions and passions, and much more.

Joes examines seven case studies of urban guerrilla warfare beginning with the battle between Polish partisans, German soldiers, and the SS during the Warsaw Uprising, in the declining days of the short-lived 1,000-year Reich. It ends with the Russian and Chechen guerrillas’ battle over Grozny, a city that the Russians besieged with infantry, artillery, tanks, and reported indiscriminate killing. As the author accurately describes, by the end of the fighting, the city’s inhabitants knew all four horsemen of the Apocalypse intimately.

A virtue of this book is that Joes introduces each case with explanatory information so the reader can appreciate the parties and triggering events. This approach is particularly helpful for lesser-known guerrilla actions of South American cities, as well as Northern Ireland where “The Troubles” lasted nearly three decades. All of the chapters are quite interesting and informative, but two are noteworthy.

Forty years ago, on 30 January 1968, the Vietnamese ushered in their New Year, Tet, during a holiday ceasefire agreed to by the warring parties, the South Vietnamese and their US allies, and the Communist regime in North Vietnam. A few hours after midnight, the Communist regime broke the pledge, directing its Viet Cong guerrillas in the south to attack the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon as well as 38 of the 44 province capitals. In this chapter, Joes has produced what is arguably the best succinct scholarly treatment of that offensive. He covers all the major points—the events leading to the attack, the failure of intelligence on both sides, and the fighting. Joes describes how the US press reacted to the event, which then ran like an electric current through the American body politic. Although the United States and South Vietnam’s counterattack in Saigon and elsewhere mauled the Viet Cong, it was a psychological victory for the Communists.

The other striking chapter concerns the Battle of Algiers. Joes uses the standard sources such as Alistair Horne, but has added to the discourse, incorporating such recent publications as the memoirs of General Paul Aussaresses, head of French intelligence efforts against the terrorists, and several other scholarly articles. This well-crafted chapter covers important issues such as the politico-military environment in which the French army found itself at home and abroad, the insurgents’ turn to urban terror tactics, the use of torture by the French, and the sad fate of the Algerian Muslims who remained loyal to France.

Ultimately, this book is a story of failures—operational and theoretical. Joes captures the latter deftly in his discussion of Carlos Marighella, a 1960s leftist intellectual smitten by Castro’s revolutionary success. As Joes demonstrates, Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla proved to be an impractical gospel for disciples and himself—Brazilian security forces shot him in the streets of Sao Paulo.

Some may criticize Joes’s analysis as too laden with Communist examples, referring to his discussion of Mao in the introduction. But just as it is unthinkable for artists not to study the old masters, it is no less true for those who seek to study the strategic art. Mao’s theory is crucial to a basic understanding of guerrilla warfare. The value of Joes’s book is his evenhanded selection of cases, from which students of insurgency and conventional warfare will benefit, as well as professors searching for a text to enrich their students’ understanding.

 

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David J. Silbey. A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902. New York: Hill & Wang, 2007. 272 pp., ISBN 978-0-8090-7187-6; (paper), ISBN 978-0-8090-9661-9.

Reviewed by Edgar F. Raines Jr.
Published on H-War (August, 2008)

Scholar in the Sun

A War of Frontier and Empire is a short (219 pages of text) overview of the Philippine-American War. The author, David J. Silbey, a young historian at Alvernia College in Reading, Pennsylvania, argues that the conflict represented a culminating point for one of nineteenth-century America's dominant social movements--manifest destiny. By 1898 the North American continent appeared too confining for American ambitions. The creation of an overseas empire was one of the major consequences of the war with Spain, but at least some contemporaries saw other more appealing choices about how the United States might interact with the world in the dawning twentieth century. In the author's words, these conflicting currents of opinion made the United States's destiny in 1898 "less manifest and more ambiguous" (p. xiii). In slightly more than three years the conflict in the Philippines--particularly the last two years of guerrilla warfare--put paid to any hopes in American imperialist circles for further territorial expansion by shrinking popular support for such a policy. Somehow, this point eludes the author, despite the fact that he lays the groundwork for such an argument in his opening chapter.

The war became the defining national event for Filipinos, but only long after the fact. At the time, the Filipino war effort consisted of a shifting coalition of regions and groups. Although some Filipino historians have tried to read a collective national consciousness into the behavior of the revolutionaries (insurgents to the Spanish and the Americans), Silbey argues that most of them had no sense of a larger nation. Hailing for the most part from isolated villages, most of the Filipino soldiers gathered outside Manila had never before been more than twenty-five miles from home. Their primary allegiances were local and ethnic rather than national. Silbey extends this argument to explain the behavior of the Filipino army in combat. The glue that held that force together was the social ties that the soldiers brought with them from home into a military environment. The officer class was drawn from local notables while the soldiers came from the peasantry. Acts of good soldiership thus became ways that young men raised in a profoundly class-conscious and deferential society could demonstrate their loyalty to their patrons. Silbey goes even further to argue that the poor showing of the Filipinos in the first major engagement of the war, the battle of Manila (February 4-5, 1899), was due to the absence of officers, who were attending fiestas. Without their patrons available to see their behavior under fire, the peasant soldiers were inclined to decamp at critical moments in the fighting.

Silbey's linking of social structure, national consciousness (or lack thereof), and military performance is a stunning insight, one that opens up interesting lines for future research. Granted that the Filipinos came out of very isolated local backgrounds; yet we know that the experience of military service in the American Revolution, particularly in the Continental Army, was a profoundly nationalizing event for people from similarly isolated backgrounds.[1] Might something similar be occurring among the Filipinos? If so, might there be more than a germ of truth in the general thrust (if not all the particulars) of the arguments of the Filipino national historians whose work Silbey so easily dismisses? A survey of the type that Silbey has written cannot answer these questions, only raise them. That, Silbey has done in a very provocative fashion. On this issue, Silbey is probably more right than wrong, but a more definitive conclusion will require more work--if, that is, the surviving sources will permit the kind of detailed examination needed.

Admirable as Silbey's exposition of Filipino social structure is, he over relies on this analysis in explaining the Filipino army's battlefield performance. Community based military units have shown great esprit de corps and resilience in other wars (witness the volunteer regiments of the American Civil War), but those organizations drew upon existing military organization, tradition, and doctrine. At the sharp end, the hard military realities determine outcomes--decent equipment, adequate supply, proficiency at arms, realistic doctrine, hard training, and experienced noncommissioned and junior commissioned officers determine whether troops can hold their position or maneuver under fire. These were the attributes that the Filipino Army lacked and whose absence put it at a severe disadvantage when faced by a force that possessed such characteristics. Silbey is quite right to point out that many Filipino officers were absent from their units attending fiestas when fighting first broke out on the evening of February 4, 1899, but there is nothing to suggest that they were absent during the fighting on February 5, when the decisive American attack occurred--which rather undermines the author's argument.

Silbey, whose previous work has been in English social history, is obviously a quick study--perhaps too quick. His research is grounded in published primary and secondary sources; although, he has made good use also of the Spanish-American War veterans' survey in manuscript conducted by the U.S. Army Military History Institute in the 1960s and 1970s. In the process, however, he overlooks several valuable works, including Edith Moses's charming Unofficial Letters of an Officer's Wife (1908); James A. Le Roy's scholarly but incomplete The Americans in the Philippines: A History of the Conquest and First Years of Occupation, with an Introductory Account of the Spanish Rule (2 vols., 1914); James H. Blount's polemic, that includes snippets of memoir and a fair-minded discussion of some of his opponents, The American Occupation of the Philippines, 1898-1912 (1912); Heath Twichell's study of the founder of the Philippine Constabulary, Allen: The Biography of an Army Officer, 1859-1930(1974); and Ralph Minger's William Howard Taft and United States Foreign Policy: The Apprenticeship Years, 1900-1908 (1975), among others. This weakness extends into his discussion of one of his main protagonists, the U.S. Army. He depends heavily on Edward M. Coffman's The Old Army (1986), a wonderful social history of the peacetime Army, but not sufficient for Silbey's purposes, which is to indicate the combat readiness of the Army on the eve of conflict. His fascination with social structure leads him to ignore doctrine and training. He would have done well to consult recent works by Perry Jamieson and Andrew Birtle. Silbey does use Russell Gilmore's important 1974 article on marksmanship training, but only to provide the technical specifications of the Krag-Jorgensen Rifle. Had he also examined Gilmore's dissertation of the same year, he might have better discerned the thrust of Gilmore's argument and recognized its importance for his purposes.[2]

Although the title and introduction emphasize themes from U.S. history, the internal logic is determined largely by the Filipino perspective. Thus, Silbey's argument that Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo was justifiably concerned that reverting to guerrilla warfare would lead to a loss of control of the revolution--which he equated with a loss of sovereignty--leads the author to focus on the conventional phase of the war, with only a passing nod to the over two years of guerrilla war that followed. This is a brilliant insight into Aguinaldo's thinking, but whether the author should use it to structure his book is another question. One way to think about the Philippine-American War (or the Philippine Insurrection) is to look on it as a struggle for sovereignty. Before the outbreak of the fighting, the Americans under the international legal conventions of the time enjoyed de jure sovereignty over the entire archipelago but de facto sovereignty only over Manila, while the revolutionaries enjoyed de facto sovereignty over everything except Manila. The war determined who would exercise both over all. To win, the Filipinos had only not to lose, while the Americans actually had to achieve total victory. Given the disparities between the American and Filipino forces, there was no way that the Filipinos could reasonably anticipate not losing in conventional operations. So, for the U.S. high command, victory in the conventional phase was only the first and easiest stage. American forces had to prevail in counterinsurgency before achieving success. The great contribution of military historians of the past forty years has been to focus attention on this part of the war. By ignoring the importance of this phase, Silbey returns the historiography to the point it achieved with the publication of William T. Sexton's Soldiers in the Sun in 1939.

At the same time A War of Frontier and Empire enjoys the virtues of its defects. If the author puts too much emphasis on Filipino social structure, his description of that social structure and his linking of it to military organizations is very deft. Focusing on whole societies naturally leads him to examine domestic politics, policy formation, diplomacy, and their nexus with national strategy--and he does this very well for both the Filipinos and the Americans. If he overemphasizes the conventional phase, he has a very clear exposition of the competing campaign strategies of the two sides, including a good discussion of the logistics problem the Americans faced. In the process he continues the rehabilitation of Major General Elwell S. Otis's reputation as an insightful strategist with a hard-headed view of logistical realities. At the same time, Silbey integrates and encapsulates the historiography of a number of topics into the text. Over and above all this, he writes well. He combines clarity of exposition with graceful prose.

A War of Frontier and Empire will not replace Brian Linn's The Philippine War(2000) as the standard account of the conflict. Because it is both simpler and shorter than Linn's study, Frontier is a good undergraduate text, provided one keeps the reservations expressed above in mind. At the same time, because the author engages many of the most important historiographic disputes and, because as a Europeanist he brings a fresh perspective to these disagreements, senior scholars will find much to ponder. Finally, as this review suggests, the volume encourages readers to consider carefully the most basic issues involved in the Philippine-American War. This is, perhaps, the ultimate accolade for any book.

Notes

[1]. See Robert K. Wright Jr. and Morris J. MacGregor Jr., Soldier-Statesmen of the Constitution (Washington, D.C: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1992).

[2]. Perry D. Jamieson, Crossing the Deadly Ground: United States Army Tactics, 1865-1899 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994); Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860-1941 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1998); and Russell S. Gilmore, "'The New Courage': Rifles and Soldier Individualism, 1876-1918," Military Affairs 40 (October 1976): 97-102; and "The Crack Shots and Patriots: The National Rifle Association and America's Military Sporting Tradition, 1871 1929" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974).

 

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Luc Capdevila, Daniel Voldman. War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. xix + 200 pp., ISBN 978-0-7486-2297-9, ISBN 978-0-7486-2298-6.

Reviewed by Mark R. Hatlie
Published on H-War (July, 2008)

War and Memorial Culture

This study of the casualties of war offers a broad overview of the cultural meaning and impact of mass wartime death in the West over the past 150 years or more. "Did the brutality, the suddenness, the sheer numbers of those killed change the relationship with death in the West?" (p. xi). The period covered by the book is the same as that of other recent studies of modern war and memorial culture, extending from the French Revolution through the wars of the twentieth century, but emphasizing primarily the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries. These years were a period during which a tension arose between a greater political and social concern for the individual on the one hand and developments in military technology and practice which killed unprecedented numbers and, often, did so in such a way that the dead were also not only distant, but often physically obliterated, depriving the bereaved of bodies to mourn.

War Dead defines "Western societies" in a refreshingly broad manner, including not only western Europe and North America, but also South America, primarily the southern cone countries of Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. Indeed, these last cases promise to open up recent studies on wartime death and dying to a new cultural context. However, most of the examples and analysis are taken from France during and following the world wars, especially World War I. The authors include scattered examples from the Franco-Prussian War and the colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as from other countries such as Germany, Spain, and Britain and even one or two anecdotes from Soviet experience. South America gets, in the end, relatively little attention, however. Thus, this study remains rooted in western Europe and does not radically break with works such as those by George Mosse, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, or Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Jeismann. The other examples, however, serve to show that some patterns and conclusions are indeed more broadly applicable.

Chapters cover the struggle by individuals, families, armies, and states to cope with--that is, count, identify, and properly mourn--the unprecedented numbers of dead soldiers and, eventually, civilians as well. Expectations and cultural norms could hardly be reconciled with the extraordinary situation and the opening chapters systematically discuss the various tensions. After a chapter on enemy bodies, there are two final chapters on memory, rituals, and commemorations. Much of this material, especially the last two chapters, will be familiar to many scholars. As a general overview of the research in the field it covers not only the structural and institutional aspects of mass death in war, but trends such as the role played by war in the evolving sensibilities with regard to death, changes in the use of images of the dead, and changing cultural practices both on and off the battlefield.

The examples of public memorial culture from the Vichy and occupation period of 1941-44 represent one of the strengths of the book. They appear throughout, but especially in the final section, on ritualized mourning. Because of the particular circumstances, these examples show quite effectively the political dimension of public mourning in wartime.

A primary weakness of the work stems from some lack of familiarity with the American Civil War of 1861-65. If their work had been informed by the more recent work of Drew Gilpin Faust (This Republic of Suffering, 2008), for example, the authors would have begun their discussion of national cemeteries for war dead at Antietam and Gettysburg instead of starting later, in Europe. More trivially, Andersonville is a "great battle" instead of an infamous prisoner of war camp (p. 157). Also, the role of images of death, primarily photographs, gets a nod in War Dead. Students of the Civil War, citing the work of Mathew Brady and others, would presumably put more emphasis on the American experience in the history of wartime images of death. One can also make the case that the shock of mass death in the American Civil War--a proportion of the population equivalent to several million deaths in today's United States--marks a contrast to past experience just as stark as World War I did for Europe, the focus of this book and other recent literature.

Indeed, Faust's study of death and dying in the American Civil War makes a good contrast with War Dead for highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both. By focusing on one place and time, Faust can delve much more deeply into the culture, tracing such developments as American notions of domesticity and the "good death," the tension between religious and secular interpretations of death, dying and the conflict in general, and the roles of race and gender. She can also more closely test the relationship between democracy and the paternal treatment of fallen citizens in wartime. There is even a chapter on killing (although not as in depth and psychological as David Grossman's On Killing, 1995). Faust can offer vivid examples of such themes as the efforts of families to recover bodies and record in detail the practices and circumstances of their recovery efforts.

Capdevila and Voldman are more ambitious, covering much more ground in far fewer pages. The result is that larger patterns and contexts emerge, but the examples jump rapidly from place to place and time to time, often leaving the reader curious about the potential depth of the claim. Some themes are explored in more depth over a paragraph or several pages: the commemorative efforts of French Jews following World War I, for example, or the tombs of the Unknown Soldier in Europe and the Americas.

Both studies have chapters on the treatment of enemy bodies. Faust goes into great detail and explores the concrete circumstances and policies involved on both sides--for example, federal efforts to count, name and bury Union soldiers while intentionally leaving the rebels to rot in the open air. Capdevila and Voldman start by putting the subject into the context of developing international norms and laws, offering useful and highly relevant background material. They then proceed by themes centered on the practices and motives of the living with regard to dead bodies, showing practices ranging from respectful to horrific treatment. Some examples, however, are not drawn from wartime, but from the dictatorships of Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. Their practice of "disappearing" political enemies makes a good example for their case of how bodies can be used as a political weapon, but it is not a very convincing comparison to the mass disappearance of bodies in the artillery barrages of 1914-18 or swallowed up in improvised battlefield mass graves from Cold Harbor to Stalingrad. Both the scale and the circumstance differ appreciably and, hence, comparing the motives and practices becomes questionable. The coverage of the Chilean and Argentinean cases is all the more out of place because the reviewer was anticipating the Latin American cases to include more examples from, say, the Chaco War of the 1930s. But, it is mentioned only briefly in earlier contexts. The inclusion of the Holocaust in the section on enemy bodies is more convincing, although also is not about "combat" deaths.

Each chapter has end notes, and the book has a thematic bibliography. Most of the literature cited is in French, so the book gives the non-French reader an introduction to the state of the field in that country. The translation is easy to read quickly, despite a handful of awkward passages that may also be in the original. The book would make a good general survey for undergraduate use in classes on war and society, or Western cultural history.

 

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Timothy J. Henderson. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States. New York: Hill & Wang, 2007. xxii + 216 pp., ISBN 978-0-8090-6120-4.

Reviewed by Gregory S. Hospodor
Published on H-War (June, 2008)

Choosing Glorious Defeat

Historians confront a difficult question when they address the causes of the Mexican American War of 1846-48. That an expansionist impulse, most often referred to as Manifest Destiny, brought the United States into conflict with Mexico is a given, but what about Mexico? By any objective measure, Mexico stood little chance to triumph in a war with the United States--the economy of the United States was at least thirteen times larger; its population three times greater; its regular army, though smaller, was well trained and armed with modern weapons; its internal political scene appeared tranquil in comparison to Mexico's; and the list goes on. Yet, why did Mexico choose to fight a war it would almost certainly lose?

Few historians have bothered to delve deeply into the Mexican side of the story. Historians from north of the Rio Grande have focused most often on the intricacies of American diplomacy and military operations. When they did consider causation from the Mexican point of view, they often got it wrong. An older generation, led most notably by Pulitzer Prize winner Justin Harvey Smith, assessed Mexican hubris as a primary cause of the war. Thus interpreted, Mexico welcomed a conflict that it naively thought it could win. In watered down form, echoes of this interpretation persist even today. In Mexico, the conflict has often been too painful an event to warrant close scrutiny. Yankee expansionism was the cause, which allowed Mexican scholars to focus on what appeared to be more pressing questions, those that revolved around and found resolution in the Mexican Revolution. Fortunately, the situation has begun to change during the last fifteen years or so. For example, Irving Levinson (2005) and Pedro Santoni (1996) have published important books that provide a more nuanced consideration of the Mexican side of the war. Timothy J. Henderson's A Glorious Defeat is a welcome addition to this trend.

Henderson's book is a synthetic introduction to the topic, which accounts for both its strengths and weaknesses. Look elsewhere for detailed mining and analysis of primary sources. Notes are few and confined to quotations from published sources, which will make it difficult for anyone who is not a Mexican specialist to follow where the author rests in current historiographical debates. Henderson does, however, provide a useful and comprehensive list of suggestions for further reading. Look elsewhere, too, for detailed coverage of the military aspects of the war. At times, the reader is also left wishing for more; clearly, depth was sacrificed in the interest of brevity. These quibbles, of course, come with the territory and do not detract materially from the book's value. The synthetic format's strength rests in its breadth of coverage chronologically and topically, and Henderson's chapters march relentlessly from independence in 1821 toward the denouement of the war itself. Those who teach the history of Mexico know that the tumultuous period between independence and La Reforma is especially tough on undergraduates. Henderson's treatment of the period is both approachable and sophisticated at the same time. I have yet to run across a better introduction to this period of Mexican history for the undergraduate or general reader. This said, the specialist will find little new here.

Henderson argues that chaotic domestic political conditions between 1821 and 1846 created a situation where the only option open to Mexico's leaders was war with the United States, a war that many recognized their country would lose. Endemic conflict, even civil war, between various groups of liberal federalists and conservative centralists undermined the rule of law; inhibited both economic development and the creation of a sense of national unity; and created opportunities for ambitious, unscrupulous, powerful risk takers to come to the fore, most notably Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Many of Mexico's politicos agreed on only one thing--that the lower classes, which constituted the vast bulk of the population, had to be suppressed. Indeed, the real fear of insurrection led to a situation that resembled men fighting over possession of a lifeboat: all need take care that their actions did not sink their very means of survival. Hobbled by domestic turmoil, Mexico confronted its northern neighbor's expansionism. The problem of holding on to the borderlands proved a Gordian knot. Good ideas and intentions abounded, but energy and focus were lacking. With Texas's de facto independence won in 1836, the related issues of bringing the breakaway province to heel and standing up to the United States became hobby horses in the internecine political struggle among factions in Mexico proper; the issues were used to attack a political opponent's courage and manhood. In this environment, calm realism was declaimed as cowardice, and the situation only worsened with the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1845. Moderate federalists, such as President Jose Joaquin de Herrera, recognized that Mexico was unprepared for war, but proved helpless to stop the rush toward it. Instead, "the desperate glory of death on the battlefield seemed preferable to the ignominy of compromise and surrender" (p. 191). The same divisions that brought Mexico to war contributed to its defeat and the disastrous consequences it entailed.

As well as providing a cogent introduction to the topic, Henderson's book serves as a pointed reminder of the powerful and baneful effect of bellicose political discourse. Drawing historical parallels is always dangerous, but the exercise, however inadequate, can prove illuminating. Like Henderson's Mexico, the American South in the 1840s and 1850s saw the creation of a political hobby horse, the defense of slavery, which squelched reasonable voices and eventually led to secession, war, and defeat. Similarly, the issue of Alsace-Lorraine contributed to France's welcoming of war in 1914. And, Cato the Elder's constant refrain that Carthage must be destroyed helped shape Rome's policy during the Punic Wars.

 

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By Lieutenant Colonel (ret) Thomas P. Odom, of

Special Operations and Strategy: From World War II to the War on Terrorism
By James D. Kiras
Published by Routledge

In Special Operations and Strategy: From World War II to the War on Terrorism, James D. Kiras offers a strategic framework for analyzing the use of special operations forces (SOF) and special operations (SO) to achieve strategic effects as part of a larger conventional war. In doing so, Kiras defines both SOF and SO in a limited sense, excluding elite but more conventional forces by requiring a selection process to decide what makes SOF and SO "special". His strategic framework for analysis is bipolar. On one extreme Kiras offers "annihilation" strategy and reviews it in its many forms. On the other he expounds attrition-based strategy, expanding it to the point where it becomes a near catch-all of strategic thought.

Understanding the differences between annihilation and attrition is central to this monograph. Simply put annihilation theory posits that an enemy can be forced to surrender if struck in a certain way that paralyzes his ability to make war. Think of it as the "silver bullet" or "brass ring" approach to strategy, one that has great attraction to military and political leaders alike. Shoot that silver bullet into an opponent or pull a particular brass ring controlling his war making capacity and his will to fight on will evaporate along with his capacity. Attrition, on the other hand, is not so elegant for attrition means that one accepts war as a contest of morals and materiel, inextricably woven together, that requires time, will power, and blood to achieve victory. Annihilation strategy is therefore seductively attractive, especially when tied to technological advances such as the tank or airpower or the use of SOF against particular vulnerabilities.

Kiras contends that SOF are best used to complement a measured strategy of attrition. He largely dismisses annihilation strategy's quest for strategic paralysis of the enemy as a paralysis of thought. His critical question is what does using SOF in a particular SO achieve in the larger context of an attrition-based war? Kiras uses two case studies to illustrate what he means in asking that critical question. The first is the British effort to collapse the German war-making capacity by "busting" the Ruhr Valley dams. Kiras classifies the dambusting effort by 617 Squadron as a great but costly raid that fell far short of its intended goal to bring the German war machine to a grinding halt. His second case study is the helter-skelter tactical employment of the Special Air Service (SAS) brigade in conjunction with the invasion and liberation of France. Kiras contends that while a coordinated SAS campaign could have greatly assisted and perhaps accelerated the liberation of France, convoluted command and control, personalities, and poor planning meant the SAS paid a heavy price in lives to achieve little in the greater scheme of things. Both case studies are therefore offered as examples of how not to use SOF or mount SO.

I would say Kiras' monograph has great strengths and a few weaknesses. First of all, for the reader looking for a quick review of strategic thought, this book is a real find. Annihilation theory comes across as a bumper-sticker approach to strategic thought. I found his discussion of John Warden's 5-ring model useful, fair, and ultimately damning when judged against the reality of war. Second Kiras offers a broader explanation of attrition-based strategy than one typically hears, especially today when bumper stickers are quite popular. Placing SOF and SO in the context of annihilation and attrition strategies was clearly Kiras' main goal and he did so quite effectively.

As for weaknesses, I would offer but a couple of comments. First of all I would say the book is British-centric in its case studies and in some ways its analysis. Operation Chastise and 617 Squadron were purely British efforts. The SAS brigade's effort in France went through British chains of command until it reached Eisenhower. Secondly and perhaps this is an extension of the first weakness, Kiras is more convincing when he discusses airpower-related subjects than he is on SAS operations. He rightfully criticizes the inflated claims concerning the dambusting effort. Then he makes what I would call inflated hypothetical claims of what might have happened in France had the SAS been properly used. I believe he would have been better served by letting a reader make such leaps alone.

Overall I believe this monograph has great value to policy makers and soldiers, conventional and unconventional. As the author rightly points out, policy makers and SOF warriors have often struggled with the issue of best use. Both have, on occasion, gotten it wrong. James D. Kiras rightly cautions that such use must be governed by a rule of sustained value added to the overall effort of an attrition-based strategy. That certainly is nothing new to students of conventional warfare. Kiras is, in my opinion, warning that SOF and SO must be used in a coherent, comprehensive, and strategic version of combined arms warfare. He is correct and that is what makes his book valuable.

----------

Colonel Odom retired in 1996. He was a Foreign Area Officer on the Middle East-North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa for 15 years. His last 30 months on active duty were as US Defense Attaché in Zaire and then Rwanda. A historian, Colonel Odom authored Journey Into Darkness: Genocide In Rwanda, Texas A&M University Press, 2005; Shaba II: the French and Belgian Military Intervention in Zaire in 1978, Combat Studies Institute, 1993; and Leavenworth Paper #14, Dragon Operations: Hostage Rescues in the Congo 1964-1965, CSI, 1989. Colonel Odom was also co-author of Certain Victory: the US Army in the Gulf War with then Brigadier General Robert H. Scales, Jr. and Lieutenant Colonel Terry Johnson.

 

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Igor Zhdarkin. We Did Not See It Even in Afghanistan. Moscow Memories Mockba, 2008. Translated by Tamara Reilly. 399 pp.

Reviewed by Elaine Windrich
Published on H-SAfrica (November, 2008)
Commissioned by Peter C. Limb

A Russian View of the Angolan War

This book is to be welcomed as an alternative to the usual accounts of the Angolan War by South African participants and their apologists. For here is a Russian version, by a military officer, Igor Zhdarkin, who served as an advisor/translator to the Angolan armed forces known as FAPLA (Forças Armadas Populares de Libertação de Angola), the military wing of the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). His account is published as part of a collection of memoirs in the series Oral History of Forgotten Wars by the Africa Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Unfortunately, in the introduction, Gennady Shubin, senior research fellow at the institute, does not indicate what other “forgotten wars” are to be included in the series or why they have been so labeled.

The English section of Zhdarkin's recollections (consisting of the final 150 pages of the 400-page book, the first part of which comprises the Russian version) consists of two major parts: a diary kept by Zhdarkin from October 10 to December 3, 1987, as military interpreter of the 2lst FAPLA brigade, and the author’s “oral narratives,” or tape-recorded memories, produced at the Africa institute since 2000-01. Unfortunately, the “Notebook-Diary” in part 1 is a great disappointment because the author’s daily “recollections” come to an abrupt end in December 1987, before the crucial battles for Cuito Cuanavale had even begun. As his final entry (dated December 3) reads, “our brigade is in its positions in the forest. We are awaiting a possible enemy attack and we have no idea of what will happen next” (p. 302). Nor does the reader know what happened next, since Zhdarkin disappears from the scene of battle, only to return to Cuito Cuanavale after the South African Defence Force’s (SADF) initial assaults on the “Tempo Triangle” have been rebuffed in 1988. None of these decisive battles, which are recorded in great detail in the South African accounts of the war (irrespective of their triumphant distortions), are mentioned by Zhdarkin. Only in a later commentary does he explain that he returned to Cuito Cuanavale on March 11, 1988 (after more than two months at the FAPLA base at Lobito), adding only that, “I cannot say why I returned. But I was summoned there” (p. 368). Then, from the final reading in the diary, the book leaps into the “author commentaries” recorded in Moscow from 2000, separated only by a song written by Zhdarkin in Cuito Cuanavale in December 1987.

Even with this abrupt ending of the diary, the daily entries should not to be underrated, since they contain a vivid account of the 1987 battles for the control of the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA) stronghold of Mavinga, which reached a climax at the crossing of the Lomba River toward the end of that year. For this is where FAPLA was forced to withdraw under heavy bombardment by the SADF, which had intervened to save their UNITA ally from annihilation. Once again, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi claimed the victory for his forces, and even his U.S. benefactor, President Ronald Reagan, intervened with a message of congratulations for the “heroes of the Lomba River.”

But none of these particular events are recalled in the book as the diary opens with the retreat from the Lomba River crossing. From there, Zhdarkin and the 2lst brigade began their long march to join the other FAPLA brigades, which were regrouping in the aftermath of the disastrous rout to prepare for the defense of their key base at Cuito Cuanavale. The retreat was indeed a harrowing experience, as the title of the book reveals, since FAPLA troops were under continual bombardment by the SADF, along with the sniping, mining, and other harassment by the UNITA forces on the ground. As the author relates, even the Russians who had served in Afghanistan had never experienced such “horrors” as the barrage of SADF artillery across the Lomba River. Under fire from the G-6 guns and the Mirage and Buccaneer aircraft, FAPLA brigades panicked and deserted the field in flight, leaving behind their Soviet equipment in a graveyard of tanks, trucks, ammunition, and other materiel. At one stage of the retreat (according to Zhdarkin), they were even bombed with “chemical weapons containing poisonous gas,” against which they had no gas masks for protection (p. 269). Finally, and after nearly two months of retreating under fire, the author was able to join the
Soviet advisors of the 59th and 16th brigades awaiting the defense of Cuito Cuanavale.

The commentaries that constitute the second part of the book contain a wide range of subjects, beginning with an account of the training and preparation of Soviet advisors for service in Angola and ending with an explanation for the Angolan defeat in 1987. In between, the author reveals his views of the participants in the conflict, including FAPLA, South Africans, and Cubans, and the Soviet advisors’ interactions with them. Some commentaries are in the form of questions to and answers from the author, including those that a tourist or visitor might ask, such as the prevalence of snakes (how many did you see?) and alcoholic beverages (how much did they drink?). But many more questions are concerned with the types of Soviet weapons used and their effectiveness for the Angolan terrain, which are shown in the photographs in the book.

The most revealing commentaries are those concerning the author’s opinion of the participants. On first impressions of Angola, he found Luanda “more horrible” than other places he had visited. “Just a pile of shit,” he described it, as he viewed “the dirty airport and the ragged women and children on the floor” (a scene also observed by this reviewer) and the piles of rubbish covering the streets of Luanda (p. 314). As for the Angolan soldiers, they were “unsuitable for war.” Not only were they “afraid to take part in combat actions,” they were also unwilling to follow the “reasonable advice” of their Soviet advisors (p. 341). Consequently, it was necessary for the advisors to tell the Angolans that they were wrong and beat them up accordingly. As the author explains, because many Soviet advisors were not familiar with “the peculiarities of the black Angolan mentality,” they often found it difficult to relate to them and obtain results (pp. 312-313).

In contrast, the author does not say anything “bad” about the South Africans. “They fought well and competently because they were whites, because I myself am white and because South Africa related to us as whites to whites” (p. 369). He was also impressed by the “ultimatum” delivered to Soviet soldiers inside the shells fired by the SADF artillery: “Soviets, leave Cuito Cuanavale. We don’t want to touch you--our so-called white brothers. We want to cut up the Angolans” (p. 363).

The most effusive praise was rightly reserved for the Cubans, without whom the author would not have survived to record these memoirs. It was the Cubans who had supplied them, fought and died for Angola, and forced South Africa to sue for peace after having allegedly destroyed most of their tanks and driven the SADF out of Angolan and back over the Namibian border. In effect, “the Cubans did everything of importance” to ensure that the defense of Cuito Cuanvale would succeed after the disastrous retreat from the Lomba River described in the diary (p. 379). Above all, they tried to persuade the Soviet advisors that they must “adapt” to the Angolan soldiers on whom they relied and not judge the situation in Angola as if it were the Soviet Union (p. 379).
The book ends with an addendum on the memoirs of South African Chief of Staff General Jannie Geldenhuys in which Zhdarkin doubts the accuracy of the general’s tally of South African gains and losses during the fighting in Angola in 1987-88. This is scarcely surprising since the purpose of the general’s account was to convey the impression that the SADF not only won the war but also brought “peace” by fighting it. This is followed by two appendices, one an extensive collection of photographs of participants and military equipment and the other a note recording the names of the Soviet military advisors who had served in Angola since November 1975, of whom there were thousands of servicemen and officers, including generals, admirals, and “civil specialists.”

 

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Robert M. Cassidy. Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War. Stanford Stanford University Press, 2008. 224 pp., ISBN 978-0-8047-5966-3.

Reviewed by John Reed
Published on H-War (December, 2008)
Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine

The Usual Suspects, the Standard Indictment

Three interrelated arguments structure Robert M. Cassidy's Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War_. First, Cassidy finds that the U.S. military is doctrinally ill-equipped to resolve the "paradoxes of asymmetric conflict" against global Islamic insurgencies in the post-9/11 world. Secondly, he conducts post mortems on a selection of twentieth-century counterinsurgency campaigns and traces their failed outcomes to defects in the counterinsurgent power's "military culture" and "preferred paradigm of war." And finally, he distills from these struggles the operational principle most essential to success in counterinsurgency: "leveraging partners and local forces to fight a protracted war" (p.127), anticipating General David H. Petraeus's 2007 embrace of the "Sunni Awakening" in Iraq's Anbar governorate. Cassidy's study is an excellent review of the _operational_ history of twentieth-century counterinsurgency based on a greater diversity of case studies than either John Nagl's _Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife_ (2002, reissued 2005) or Marc Galula's_Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice_(1964, reissued 2006).

Cassidy gives the Russian and U.S. armies low marks in counterinsurgency while praising the British for empirically distilling the principles now enshrined in Army Field Manual 3-24 _Counterinsurgency_ (December 15, 2006). Before 2003, however, the U.S. Army's senior leadership focused on force structures and doctrine, appropriate to high-intensity maneuver warfare to the exclusion of all forms of unconventional conflict. Cassidy identifies the usual suspects and arraigns them under the now standard
indictment issued by Andrew F. Krepinevich in his 1986 _The Army and Vietnam_. Harry Summers, Caspar Weinburger, Colin Powell, their contemporaries and successors said "never again" to guerrilla warfare and transformed the army under AirLand Battle doctrine to enable it to defeat the Soviet army short of the Rhine without the use of theater nuclear weapons in a war that never occurred.

However, Cassidy's thirty-year extension of Krepinevich's indictment entails two fundamental anachronisms. First, before 1991 the Group of Soviet Forces Germany posed a greater threat to national security than any combination of insurgent groups in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And secondly, no one in the U.S. Army's senior leadership could have anticipated receiving the mission to conquer, occupy, and administer Iraq in 2003 without the essential supporting elements of non-kinetic national power. Thus, no conceivable reallocation of resources within Training and Doctrine Command could have prepared the army for the _specific_ nonlinear environment it encountered in Iraq as a result of profound failures at the strategic level that deprived the army of coherent strategic direction, nonpoliticized intelligence, in-country interagency cooperation, and sufficient stabilization assets. In the aftermath of this crippling strategic failure, we have been presented with a succession of counterinsurgency techniques in search of achievable war aims no less troubling than the Vietnam War's "strategy of tactics."

This highlights a central limitation of security studies that discuss the strategic and operational levels of the Long War in isolation from each other. The impression one receives from Cassidy's text is that any counterinsurgency can be defeated through environmentally adaptive doctrinal innovations _alone_, which somehow "trickle up" to constitute strategic success. He dismisses Clausewitzian categories as mechanical and linear, irrelevant to the "age of information dominance and global insurgents" (p.150), revealing his unfamiliarity with Clausewitz's anticipation of nonlinearity, a concept essential to understanding the relationship between cause and effect in the global war on terror.[1] One of Clausewitz's key insights was that grave errors at the strategic level cannot be corrected by operational and tactical virtuosity, but must instead force the national leadership to modify or abandon its initial war aims. Thus, however adeptly the _army_ institutionalizes lessons learned from the Philippines, Nicaragua, Malaya, Algeria, Vietnam, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, the _nation_ will continue to risk failure in the future whenever it franchises out to its military the effort to achieve a political end state which cannot be achieved _operationally_ through application or non-application of state violence, the army's professional core competence. Cassidy criticizes the Vietnam era obsession with firepower and military technology, but he has reified counterinsurgency _technique_ in its place.

Cassidy has written an otherwise useful survey that implies that the army, operating autonomously at the operational level, can compensate for flawed, contradictory, or nonexistent strategic direction in the Long War. However, expanding the counterinsurgency playbook and criticizing previous generations of army leadership (safe enough when they're retired), no longer qualifies as "thinking outside the box." While officers in the field must try one thing after another until something works, security intellectuals (who are not dodging explosively formed penetrators and do not receive officer evaluation reports) must address all elements of the struggle that bear on national success or failure, to include the current reversal of the correct hierarchical relationship between civilian strategic direction and theater command. _That_ would assist the army out of its current morass. _Then_ we can begin a discussion critical to the post-Iraq "get well" period. For the present, the army will continue to "go after the bad guys" with predator drones or soccer balls, as situationally appropriate. However, in the near future it needs to learn how to protect itself, the nation it serves, and the Anglo-American tradition of civilian control, while simultaneously pushing back against war aims determined by domestic political considerations and chimerical "new realities."
Note

[1]. Alan Beyerchen, "Clausewitz, Nonlineraity, and the Unpredictability of War," _International Security_ 17 (1992-1993): 59-90.

Citation: John Reed. Review of Cassidy, Robert M., _Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War._. H-War, H-Net Reviews. December, 2008.

 

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Janice E. McKenney. Organizational History of Field Artillery, 1775-2003. Washington DC Center of Military History, United States Army, 2007. xviii + 394 pp., ISBN 978-0-16-077114-9, ISBN 978-0-16-077115-6.

Reviewed by Boyd L. Dastrup

Organized to Fight

Over the years, the U.S. Army's Field Artillery has played a critical role in combat. At the Battle of Trenton on December 25, 1776, during the American Revolution, Continental Army field cannons commanded by Captain Alexander Hamilton cleared the streets of Hessian soldiers. Two years later on June 28, 1778, American field guns drove the British from the field at the Battle of Monmouth. Almost sixty years afterward, at Palo Alto on May 8, 1846, American gunners under Major Samuel Ringgold and Captain James Duncan viciously repelled Mexican attacks at the outset of the Mexican War of 1846-48. In these battles and others, including those of Operation Desert Storm of 1991 and Operation Iraqi Freedom during the first years of the twenty-first century, American field artillery played a key role in defeating enemy ground forces. Such actions have attracted the attention of numerous historians. Frank E. Comparato's _Age of Great Guns: Cannon Kings and Cannoneers Who Forged the Firepower of Artillery_ (1965), Fairfax Downey's _Sound of the Guns: The Story of American Artillery from the Ancient and Honorable Company to the Atom Cannon and Guided Missile_ (1955), and Robert H. Scales's _Firepower in Limited Wars_ (1990), to name a few, focus on battles and leaders, and the accomplishments of field artillery in action.

Former Chief of the Organizational History Branch, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Janice E. McKenney approaches the history of field artillery from a different perspective. Rather than concentrating on battles, she examines the Field Artillery's organization since its creation in 1775, making her book a unique contribution to the literature that complements William E. Birkhimer's _Historical Sketch of the Organization, Administration, Materiel and Tactics of the Artillery, U.S. Army_ (1884), and Boyd L. Dastrup's _King of Battle: A Branch History of the U.S. Army's Field Artillery_ (1992). With this focus, McKenney takes the reader behind the scenes. She writes about staffing, training, organizing, and equipping field artillery units during peacetime and preparing them for battle. These activities, although unglamorous, provided the Field Artillery with the ability to supply effective fire support on the battlefield. The author concentrates on different people than the more traditional histories about field artillery in combat.

The author, therefore, discusses the contributions of Captain Alfred Mordecai who served on a board to examine foreign artillery during the early 1840s. The board's report, better known as the Mordecai report, detailed smoothbore artillery material with exact detail and specification, and divided American artillery into siege, coast, fortress, and field. His system was eventually approved for adoption by the secretary of war in 1849. Almost forty years later, the American army introduced its first steel field guns. Here, the author examines the work of Brigadier General Stephen V. Benét, the chief of the Ordnance Department. Under his direction, the Ordnance Department developed the M1885 3.2 inch steel field gun mounted on a steel carriage. Although it gave the American army a long-range, powerful cannon, the M1885 still failed to keep pace with smokeless powder steel breechloaders with on-carriage recoil systems being introduced by the Europeans.

McKenney discusses the evolution of equipment, including the adoption of nuclear field artillery cannons, rockets, and missiles in the 1950s; precision munitions in the 1990s; and automated fire control systems, such as the Field Artillery Digital Automated Computer, the Tactical Fire Direction System, and the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System. In addition, she writes about the creation of the Corps of Artillery in 1901, and the separation of the Coast Artillery from the Field Artillery in 1907 as advocated by Brigadier General Joseph P. Story, chief of Artillery. He saw the need for organizing the Field Artillery into battalions and regiments to bring it into line with the lessons learned from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. These actions placed the Field Artillery on equal footing with the Coast Artillery for the first time in American military history. Beginning in 1775, when McKenney begins her analysis, with few exceptions, the Coast Artillery received most of the attention and funding because it was the country's first line of defense against an enemy naval attack.

Other of her unsung heroes are Major Carlos Brewer, Major Orlando Ward, and Lieutenant Colonel H. L. C. Jones who were directors of the Gunnery Department at the Field Artillery School in the 1930s. With assistance from their instructors, these individuals' efforts led to the development of the fire direction center, a critical breakthrough that permitted shifting and massing fires effectively and responsively on the battlefields of World War II and after. Major General David E. Ott, the commandant of the Field Artillery School in the 1970s is another key figure. Under his supervision, the school developed the fire support team that revolutionized forward observation by making it organic to maneuver units for the first time.

By discussing the evolution of equipment, organization, training, and staffing through 2003, McKenney's book adds a critical dimension by going beyond reciting the story of field artillery in battle, and furnishes a much needed corrective to the history of the American army's Field Artillery. Equally as important, she examines the relationship between the Coast Artillery and the Field Artillery when they formed composite artillery regiments between 1775 and 1901.

In telling the history of artillery, McKenney takes the story from the days when small guns were attached to infantry brigades for close support to battalions or brigades, and concludes her analysis at the beginning of the twenty-first century when division and corps artilleries dominated field artillery organization, and when precision munitions were becoming more widespread to give the Field Artillery the ability to hit within six meters of a target to destroy it with a minimal amount of collateral damage. She also notes that the creation of brigade combat teams with their organic field artillery battalions replaced the division as the army's chief fighting organization, and, thus, decentralized Field Artillery operations.

McKenney does a solid job of describing how field artillery is organized to fight, how the fire direction center ties the firing batteries together into a team to facilitate massing fires on targets, and how the forward observer is tied to the fire direction center. This explanation certainly gives readers without any background in field artillery organization and operations a fundamental understanding of the branch and its role on the battlefield. Without a question, her book should occupy a spot on the bookshelf of any serious student of the Field Artillery.

 

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Jeremy Kuzmarov: Review of Michael Schwartz's War Without End: The Iraq
War in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008)

[Jeremy Kuzmarov is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell
University.]

The Iraq War has been among the greatest disasters in modern
American history. Michael Schwartz’ illuminating new book War
Without End: The Iraq War in Context provides a comprehensive
overview of the ideological roots of the war and its harrowing social
costs for the Iraqi people. He argues quite convincingly that rather than
it being purely a matter of administrative incompetence and
mismanagement, the ideological zealotry of leading neo-conservatives
was a principal cause of the American failure to establish political
legitimacy after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He shows how
neo-liberal policies and the rapid privatization of state resources backed
by a doctrine of massive force helped to exacerbate the suffering of
ordinary Iraqis who increasingly turned to resistance against U.S. power
and rule and remain disdainful of the occupation.
According to Schwartz, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook
University, America’s war aims were clear from the outset: to create a
strategic base for the establishment of control over the Middle East’s
prized energy reserves and to usher in an economic transition from the
“socialist dictatorship” of Saddam Hussein to an unfettered free-market
capitalist state capable of serving as a model for the region. In the
aftermath of the invasion, Lieutenant L. Paul Bremer and his staff
moved to rapidly privatize state resources, including the formerly
state-owned oil industry and all sectors of the economy including the
health and educational systems. They rewarded multinational
corporations like Haliburton and Bechtel with major contracts to help
rebuild the country’s infrastructure, which had been devastated during
the shock and awe campaign and previous wars and economic sanctions.
The consequences of these policies were profound: They confirmed for a
large number of Iraqis that America had invaded the country for
self-serving reasons. Furthermore, they caused a social and economic
crisis of epic proportions, which gave strength to the insurgency. The
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dismantling of state industries caused the loss of thousands of jobs,
which were replaced by foreign contractors. Local businesses were
bankrupted by the flooding of the country with cheap imports and by a
lack of regular electricity. Unemployment rates in the once prosperous
nation skyrocketed to over 60 percent. Massive corruption in the
rewarding of contracts and the dismissal of skilled local technicians
resulted in gross inefficiency. This trend was typified by a failed $70
million dollar Halliburton project to reconstruct an oil pipeline in Al
Fatah, which came to resemble, as one observer put it, “some
gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad.”
Most disconcerting was the decline in health and educational services
bred by the U.S. occupation and war. Schools damaged by the fighting
were never properly repaired and lacked basic textbooks and school
supplies. The U.S. military sometimes even used schools as a staging
base for military incursions. By 2007, UNICEF reported that only
one-sixth of Iraqi children were being educated at all. After dismantling
the state health-care system, which had been among the best in the Arab
world before Hussein’s ascent to power, occupation officials promised to
construct dozens of private clinics across the country. Most of these
never materialized, resulting in a decline in accessibility of basic
medicines and equipment. In the newly “liberated” Iraq, doctors would
fill out prescriptions that the pharmacies could not provide. Family
members of patients even had to serve as nurses and IVs and needles
had to be reused. Over time, doctor shortages and the imposition of
curfews in cities made the situation grow worse. The inability of
occupation officials to provide clean water throughout the country
resulted in outbreaks of cholera and other diseases which the hospitals
were ill-equipped to treat. The overflow of raw sewage into city streets
was another factor breeding disease in the teeming urban slums of Iraqi
cities which came to resemble something out of a Charles Dickens’
novel.
One of Schwartz’ important contributions is to show how the failure of
America’s privatization and “nation-building” programs contributed to
the rise of the insurgency in Iraq. Rather than being composed of “dead
enders,” in Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous words, or foreign jihadists
or ex-Bathists, he demonstrates how resistance was in fact driven by
“local factors that grew strength from deep grievances and a widespread
hostility to the presence of foreign troops,” as U.S. intelligence analysts
concluded. In the early phases, many Iraqis staged demonstrations
against the occupational authorities demanding basic social services and
jobs. Rather than seeking to respond to their demands, the authorities
instructed the military to greet any act of dissidence as suspicious and to
shoot at any perceived threat. U.S. soldiers consequently fired upon
peaceful crowds and killed and wounded civilians, thus stoking popular
anger. Many more innocent civilians were killed by fearful Marines at
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often poorly marked checkpoints throughout the country. The routine
raiding of homes designed in part to strike fear among the population
helped to further stoke popular anger and resentment, as did the
prevalence of deplorable prison conditions and the revelations of torture
as at Abu Ghraib. The U.S. construction of a gaudy multi-billion dollar
embassy made apparent America’s ambitions to remain in Iraq
indefinitely.
In order to try to maintain its grip on power, and in clear violation of
international law, the U.S. adopted a doctrine of collective punishment
designed to annihilate not only the insurgent fighters but anyone who
harbored and supported them. The consequence was the perpetration of
many massacres, such as the notorious incident at Haditha where 24
civilians, including women and children were slaughtered by Marines.
The doctrine of collective punishment was on display during the siege of
Fallujah where the U.S. military killed thousands of people and turned
the entire city into “a desolate world of skeletal buildings, tank-blasted
homes, weeping power lines and severed palm trees,” in the words of
New York Times journalist Erik Eckholm. A marine lieutenant
proclaimed afterwards: “This is what happens if you shelter terrorists.”
As these comments reveal, the siege of Fallujah was intended as a
warning sign to others that it would suffer the same fate if it defied U.S.
power.
Much like the Vietnamese in an earlier American failed colonial
intervention, the Iraqis refused to bow to U.S. pressure and thus paid a
high price in fighting for their sovereignty and independence. The
backbone of the resistance took root in Sunni as well as some Shia cities
like Sadr city where local warlord Muqtada Sadr gained in prestige not
only by defending Iraqi cities from attack but also by seeking to provide
basic social services that had been abandoned under the occupation. The
resistance in Iraq, however, was never unified and became factionalized
and ridden by sectarian tensions which culminated in the onset of
full-scale civil war. The war’s ugliness was compounded by the tactics of
many insurgent fighters - particularly the small number of Al Qaeda
operatives in Iraq whose agenda was to expel the U.S. from Iraq and
establish a caliphate through the Arab Middle East embodying the
principles of Salafi Islam. They adopted terror techniques such as
suicide and car bombings directed against supposed colonial
collaborators and Shia, which only intensified public suffering. Criminal
gangs seized upon the violence and chaos to carry out the looting of
public resources and facilities and to extort money for ransom.
According to Schwartz, the United States bears a large share of the
blame for creating a climate in which these trends emerged. In his view,
the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq resemble those of the U.S. in Fallujah with
the aim of inducing civilians to withdraw their support for the enemy
History News Network http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/56488.html
3 sur 7 15/12/08 11:01
once they experienced the agony of punishment. Contrary to the false
impression given by a majority of America’s mainstream media, through
the extensive air campaigns and search and destroy missions, U.S. forces
and their proxies bear responsibility for the majority of both civilian and
combat deaths, which scientific studies have placed at well over one
million. Schwartz estimates plausibly that the U.S. has been responsible
for at least 57 percent of the killings, many of which he attributes to a
hysterical use of firepower by American troops in urban combat zones.
The much vaunted “surge” strategy of President George W. Bush only
worsened the carnage and further inflamed Iraqis, which remains weary
of the American presence and continues to live in conditions of utter
destitution. The U.S. backed Maliki government and military,
meanwhile, remain predominantly powerless outside Baghdad’s Green
Zone due to the growing strength of the sectarian militias who control
many neighborhoods.
On the whole, while destined to create controversy, Schwartz has written
a very powerful book on the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its devastating
consequences for the country. He sheds great insight into the mindset of
American policy-elites and military officials and documents the stark
brutality of their programs. He demonstrates furthermore that the rise
of insurgency in Iraq was not irrational or driven exclusively by an
Islamicist agenda or hate but was rather a product of the arrogance of
American occupying officials and the failure of U.S. state-building
policies and neo-liberalism, which failed to guarantee basic social
services and thereby helped to facilitate Iraq’s social decay. Most of all,
Schwartz reminds us who the true victims of the war are. In order to
move forward the next administration needs to accept accountability
and not simply withdraw troops but provide reconstruction and
reparations aid so that Iraqis can rebuild their country on their own
terms.

 

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Donald P. Wright, Timothy R. Reese. On Point II: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003-January 2005: Transition to the New Campaign. Fort Leavenworth Combat Studies Institute > Press, 2008. xviii + 696 pp., ISBN 978-0-16-078197-1.

Reviewed by Gian Gentile
Published on H-War (December, 2008) Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine

A Starting Point

Writing "current history" is not an easy task for historians because it involves delving into topics that are often loaded with domestic political implications. It also involves writing about people who are still active in the topic of the current history. Yet, it is very important for professional historians to bring their expertise to the field of current history, if for no other reason than to provide an important corrective to other accounts of the recent past by pundits, so-called experts, journalists, and bloggers of various shapes and sizes.

The war in Iraq is a perfect case in point. Already, a very misleading narrative has been created by memoirists, journalists, and others. That narrative goes like this: because of the U.S. Army's lack of counterinsurgency doctrine and preparation prior to the start of the war it fumbled at counterinsurgency after the fall of Baghdad in spring 2003 until the end of 2006. But then, as a result of newly written counterinsurgency doctrine and inspired leadership, plus an additional five U.S. combat brigades that all entered into the mix in early 2007, Iraq and the American army were rescued. This flawed narrative puts the U.S. Army and U.S. foreign policy on a trajectory toward more Iraqs and Afghanistans.

The interlocutors of this flawed narrative are legion. But a few examples of the texts, articles, and blog entries that have built the matrix-cum-metanarrative include Tom Ricks's _Fiasco_, published in 2006 (and one can only assume Ricks will add more force to the matrix in his forthcoming _The Gamble_ [2009]); Steve Coll's recent lengthy and gushing article in the _New Yorker_ on General David H.Petraeus ("The General's Dilemma," September 8, 2008); and Pete Mansoor's, John Nagl's, and Fred Kagan's numerous writings arguing that prior to the surge the U.S. Army just didn't "get it."

Yet, a corrective is needed to these writings and the role that they have played in constructing this flawed narrative, a red-pill, so to speak, to jar folks out of the complacency of understanding created by the matrix.

A good--no, excellent--starting point to balance our understanding of the recent past in Iraq is the army's newly released history of the first eighteen months of the war, _On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign,_ written by Donald Wright and Timothy Reese. Both Wright and Reese are historians at the army's Combat Studies Institute (CSI) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Reese is an active-duty army colonel, and is currently serving as an advisor team leader for an Iraqi army division in Baghdad. Wright and Reese had the help of CSI's Contemporary Operations Study Team in writing the book.

_On Point II_ is a meticulously researched work that relies on extensive use of primary documents such as unit reports, operational orders, logs, briefings, and letters, along with observations made in popular media by journalists and experts. The book begins in May 2003 after the American invasion to remove the Saddam regime, and ends in January 2005 with the first Iraqi elections. (_On Point II_ is a follow-up history to the army's 2005 _On Point_, which covered the invasion and regime removal.) Reese and Wright cross many levels of command, and views, from the individual soldier to the highest political authority in Iraq. The picture presented to the reader is, thus, one of complexity, breadth, and nuance, written in a narrative style that is easily understood and followed. It is a must-read for historians, analysts, and others who are interested in developing a more balanced picture of the first eighteen months of the war in Iraq. (One assumes that more volumes will follow _On Point II_ as the United States continues operations in Iraq).

Instead of using a strict chronological format, _On Point II_'s fourteen chapters are divided into five thematic parts. Part 1, "Setting the Stage," provides an overview of Operation Iraqi Freedom, along with a chapter on the army's historical legacy of counterinsurgency. The key chapter in part 1 is an exploration into the causes of the rising Sunni insurgency in 2003 and 2004, with some descriptions of early insurgent tactics, and the U.S. Army's quick adaptation to it. Part 2, "Transition to a New Campaign," shows how the army adapted its tactical and operational systems from major combat operations to what the book calls full-spectrum, nation-building operations. Quick adaptation to counterinsurgency and nation-building by army units across the board in Iraq and _not_ hide-bound adherence to visions of fighting World War II all over again is a major point of part 2. Part 3, "Toward the Objective: Building a New Iraq," focuses on the army's efforts at reconstructing the Iraqi economy and infrastructure, the Iraqi security forces, and Iraqi governance. Part 4, "Sustaining the Campaign," concentrates on the army's internal logistics operations. The conclusion to_ On Point II_ comments on the implications of the army's first eighteen months in Iraq and prospects for the future. The book also has an extensive number of charts, statistics, briefing slides, and excerpts from orders and plans that scholars and analysts looking for unclassified, primary material on army operations in Iraq will find useful.

As the authors point out, "transition" is a central organizing theme of_ On Point II--_that is to say, army units (platoons, companies, battalions, brigades, and divisions) shifted from major combat operations to counterinsurgency and nation-building operations. And, after all was said and done, _On Point II_ concludes that across the board for the first eighteen months in Iraq, the American army (even without a formal doctrine in counterinsurgency and nation-building operations) quickly made the transition, and by the end of 2003 was conducting "best practices" in these types of operations.

This is not a conclusion that fits the standard narrative put forward by the matrix. But, as _On Point II_ makes clear, the U.S. Army actually adapted quickly and effectively to conditions in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Contrary to the caricature created by books like Ricks's _Fiasco_, during the first eighteen months the army was not a knuckle-dragging, conventional-minded force wanting only to kick in doors in the Sunni Triangle as a surrogate for its true desire for fighting Normandy all over again in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Instead, _On Point II_ argues the opposite: that a conventionally trained and minded army can quickly and effectively step in a different direction to engage in counterinsurgency and nation-building operations. Policymakers and soldiers considering the future organization and primary mission of the U.S. Army should pay attention to _On Point II_'s conclusions.

If there is one critical and overarching point of analysis that _On Point II_ drives home throughout the book, it is that even good tactical units practicing good counterinsurgency tactics and nation-building operations cannot make up for failed policies and strategies.

_On Point II_ is a very useful corrective to what has become conventional wisdom about the first eighteen months of the war. It is current history at its finest.

 

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Keith Yellin. Battle Exhortation: The Rhetoric of Combat Leadership. Columbia University of South Carolina Press, 2008. x + 191 pp., ISBN 978-1-57003-735-1.



Battling Talk
If you have ever wanted to know what military leaders say to their troops on the eve of battle, why they say what they say, and whether it makes any difference, then you should start your investigations using Keith Yellin's new book, _Battle Exhortation._ It is an unusual book on several accounts. First, it deals with a topic--pre-combat language--that few have analyzed properly, even though most of us have seen many examples on TV, in film, and perhaps in reality. Second, it deals with the topic in a serious scholarly way that avoids the temptation to lead the reader into an alley labeled "this is how you are supposed to do it." Instead, Yellin proceeds bytrawling through a vast arena of time and space to illustrate his arguments with a wide variety of cases. We get to understand how the Spartans approached battle, and why it differed from the Athenian approach; what it was like to follow Hernan Cortes into what is now Mexico; what Julius Caesar said to his cohorts; and what General George S. Patton and General Tommy Franks said. By definition there is not enough space to provide much in the way of context but Yellin does well to squeeze in just enough material to make better sense of such exhortations than books of speeches that merely list them. Indeed, one of the great strengths of the book is the way that the followers are brought into play so that their commanders' rhetoric only makes sense insofar as the followers are already socialized to expect certain forms of talk, and so that the followers play an active role in making sense of the words and actions.

The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1, "Bracing for Combat," differentiates the particular features of combat discourse from other forms of discourse, in particular the immediate need for reassurance or invigoration as the battle appears imminent. Chapter 2, "Indoctrination," looks at the efforts to socialize the listeners of such rhetoric--who are often a much wider audience than the group of troops listening directly to the speaker. Chapter 3, "Tensions," brings out the underlying aspects of combat that may weigh down the troops but are beyond the understanding of civilians: the role of pride and reputation that so often motivates soldiers far more than ideology, the naked violence of the battle itself, the social and physical distancing between leader and followers, and the love that holds together "brothers in arms" and now "brothers and sisters in arms." Chapter 4, "Evolutions," examines the changes across time of leaders' rhetoric, not just whether Caesar spoke differently than General Dwight D. Eisenhower, but whether (and why) General Norman Schwarzkopf and Franks wrote different messages to their troops on the eve of the first and the second war in Iraq.

The book is a well-written and well-illustrated journey through space and time on the world's battlefields. It is certainly worth a read for those interested in language and leadership generally, and combat leadership in particular. For non-American audiences, it is perhaps too firmly set in the American historical context, though there are lots of non-American examples. For academic audiences, there is,perhaps, too much taken on trust--for example, the role of Caesar in writing his own account of his extraordinarily effective combat rhetoric might be taken with a larger degree of skepticism. And, it might have been interesting to have considered more of the performative aspects of language--the role that words play in constituting rather than simply describing the world as we know it. But, given the breadth of audience that Yellin is clearly trying to reach, this may well have been a step too far. Moreover, his claim about the importance of combat rhetoric--and its strange omission from most military curricula--is surely well made.

 

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A. J. Birtle. U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942-1976. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 2006. xv + 570 pp, ISBN 978-0-16-072959-1, ISBN 978-0-16-072960-7.

Reviewed by Joseph Babb (U.S. Army Command and General Staff College)
Published on H-War (January, 2009)
Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine

Counterinsurgency and Stability Doctrine Déjà vu

Anyone who wants to understand the background of how the U.S. Army adapted its doctrine to better conduct operations in Iraq and Afghanistan should read this book. Not only will the reader learn about counterinsurgency theory and doctrinal development from the Second World War through the end of the Vietnam conflict, they will gain a broad, yet nuanced, understanding of this complex and dynamic form of warfare, and how it was, and is being, fought. This book is an outstanding follow-on to A.J. Birtle's U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860-1941 published in 2003. Both of these volumes are part of the curriculum at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Between 1942 and 1975, occupation duty and military government; dealing with Wars of National Liberation; understanding Mao's People's War methodology; and fighting numerous low intensity conflicts dominated military operations for the U.S. Army. Although the nuclear arms race, the Korean War, and the conventional force standoff in Europe are the more often studied Cold War events, counterinsurgency and contingency operations are more representative of what the military actually did during this period. Birtle, very successfully and very clearly, explains how the army adapted to and met the nation's need to conduct counterinsurgency and limited peacetime contingency operations. Readers will find themselves frustrated as they learn of a bureaucracy fighting necessary change, but also hopeful as they read of the people and processes that designed and implemented systematic change in a very large and diverse organization.

After an excellent stage-setting introduction the book is arranged chronologically. Birtle then describes the operations conducted during a specific period, assesses lessons learned or observed, and discusses how new doctrine was either written or adapted as the conflicts and missions progressed. Chapters 2 through 4 look at four advisory efforts (China, Greece, the Philippines, and Indochina) and at counterguerrilla operations in Korea to offer an analysis of the state of army doctrine on the eve of the Vietnam period. Chapter 5 highlights contingency operations and Cold War era interventions in Lebanon, Thailand, and the Dominican Republic. In perhaps the most interesting and enlightening chapter in the book, chapter 6 ("The Counterinsurgency Ferment, 1961-65"), Birtle paints a picture of an army in turmoil, trying to come to grips with a form of conflict it was not trained, organized, or prepared to fight on the scale demanded by the national leadership. This period is also highlighted in chapter 1 ("Brushfires on a Cold Dawn") and chapter 2 ("The Revolution That Failed") in Andrew Krepinevich's book, The Army in Vietnam (1986).

It is not hard to make comparisons of this period with the army's struggle to develop counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine for the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan after the successful initial operations. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued National Security Action Memorandum 131, directing counterinsurgency education and training for the appropriate government agencies. Similarly, President George W. Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 44 in December of 2005, directing very similar tasks and actions. Then, as now, both the army and the nation struggled to provide a comprehensive and consistent civilian-military approach to these complex political-military operations. Chapter 7, which looks at the military advisory efforts in Latin America and Asia from 1955-75, is also extremely relevant to ongoing operations. In June 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (in his National Defense Strategy document) discussed the critical importance of training and advising host nation military forces. The military is reconsidering doctrine, education, and training for U.S. forces as U.S. military advisors on various transition teams, deployed with both Iraqi and Afghani security forces, are taking on a more significant role.

The last three chapters delve into the Vietnam conflict, and how doctrine was written, applied, revised, and reapplied; they also examine changes that were made in training and educating the Army. Birtle rightly highlights the critical role played by the Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson, who from 1964 to1967, personally directed the research, writing, and updating of counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine to insure a workable and consistent approach to this type of warfare. Once again, the comparisons to recent efforts to update and write new doctrine stand out. Linda Robinson's recently published book Tell Me How This Ends: General Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq (2008) details David H. Petraeus's leading role. While General Petraeus commanded Fort Leavenworth--home of the U.S. Army's Combined Arms Center, and its Command and General Staff College--the army published Field Manual 3-24 Counterinsurgency Operations (December 2006), arguably the first comprehensive counterinsurgency manual since the Vietnam War era. In addition, the army recently published Field Manual 3-07 Stability Operations (October 2008), updating a manual first published under General Johnson's guidance in 1967.

In his final chapter, The Counterinsurgency Legacy" Birtle concludes with the insight that the core of Army counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine, although “revised and refined,” was "essentially unchanged" (p. 468). Looking at the long sweep of counterinsurgency and contingency doctrinal development from 1860 to 1970 detailed in Birtle's two books, we see evolution and revision, but no revolution, in military thought about this complex form of warfare, and the conduct of military operations in such an operational environment. If Birtle writes a third volume covering 1976 to 2008 the conclusion would probably be much the same--adaptation and evolutionary change. If our army has conducted so much of this type of warfare and our doctrine has really changed so little, why do we constantly have to relearn old lessons? Sadly, one has to ask the question: why is it that the army will not study its own history and read its own doctrine? Birtle has provided two excellent and well-documented volumes of history and analysis of counterinsurgency, and contingency doctrine and operations. This second volume, covering the period 1942 to 1975, is a must read for every military officer, student of military history, and citizen concerned about how the military is going to deal with terrorism, insurgency, and failed states in an era of persistent conflict, as well as for all those interested in studying change in large organizations.

 

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John Francis Guilmartin, Inc. NetLibrary. A very short war: the Mayaguez and the Battle of Koh Tang. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. xxi + 238 pp. ISBN 978-0-585-17507-2.

Reviewed by Adam B. Siegel (Center for Naval Analyses, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)


In A Very Short War, John Guilmartin provides a rich examination of the last episode of the U.S. war in Indochina--the multi-service operation to recover the merchant ship Mayaguez and her crew from the Khmer Rouge less than a month after the final U.S. evacuations from Phnom Penh and Saigon. Through a detailed operational-tactical study of this discrete political-military event, Guilmartin seeks to illuminate how the modern "communications revolution will create as many problems as it solves" (p. 29), rather than being an undiluted good as many may think.

In April and May 1975, the U.S. military conducted a series of three discrete military operations that put an end to the (U.S.) Vietnam War: Frequent Wind (the evacuation of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 12 April); Eagle Pull (the evacuation of Vietnamese and Americans from Saigon, South Vietnam, 29-30 April); and the Mayaguez recapture (12-15 May). Guilmartin opens the book with a discussion of Frequent Wind and Eagle Pull; then, after setting the scene, he turns to the events of the Mayaguez capture and the U.S. response to the Khmer actions. President Gerald Ford "quickly settled on three overlapping objectives: recover the ship and the crew; avoid...hostage negotiations; and mount a demonstrative use of US force to bolster America's international credibility" (p. 38). The interaction of these three objectives created a time imperative and determined the forces to be used: U.S. Air Force helicopters from Thailand to carry Marines airlifted from Okinawa to recapture the ship and rescue the crew; air support from Air Force aircraft operating from Thailand and Navy aircraft from the aircraft carrier Coral Sea conducting retaliatory strikes against the Cambodian mainland. In the intense operations over the next three days, U.S. forces killed perhaps a hundred Cambodians and bombed a variety of Khmer facilities. This came at a high price, with fifteen Americans killed in action, three more missing in action, and fifty wounded; four helicopters shot down; and another helicopter crashed with twenty-three killed (p. 28).

The Mayaguez operation raises many points to consider in regard to the "communications revolution" in a period when at least some in the U.S. military believe that the "information revolution" might allow total knowledge at higher command. President Ford and others in Washington certainly had reason to believe they had (nearly) perfect information for decision-making. As one of the earliest actions during the crisis, a U-2 strategic reconnaissance plane was put in the air to act as a communications relay between forces on the scene and higher headquarters. Despite (or because of) these efforts to have improved communications, White House attempts to control the tactical situation caused near disaster on at least two occasions during the operation.

-- At one point, the White House had issued orders to sink anything coming off Koh Tang Island. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger stalled for time, unsure of the propriety of this sort of tactical control. His delay perhaps prevented an attack on a Cambodian fishing boat carrying the Mayaguez crew from the island to the mainland (pp. 55-56).

-- As soon as the White House learned that the Mayaguez crew had been released, orders went out to cease all offensive operations and "to disengage and withdraw all forces...as soon as possible." This order almost prevented a reinforcement of the forces on the island that was crucial to ensure the withdrawal from Koh Tang (p. 107).

As these examples suggest, the realities of this Very Short War should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone expecting that the increased communications capabilities are an unadulterated good.

Within this book are many other fascinating insights into the U.S. military in the waning days of Vietnam involvement (and, perhaps, militaries in general). For example, Guilmartin discusses the changes occurring in the training and tactics of the helicopter squadrons as they moved from a wartime environment. Not surprisingly--but perhaps dismaying--even by 1975 USAF helicopter training was constrained by peacetime restrictions. Guilmartin's emphasis on the differences between specific units suggests the point that these differences might be opaque to higher headquarters and the civilian leadership not familiar with "tactical" details that are crucial for making tactical decisions.

Guilmartin, then a U.S. Air Force officer, was a "participant-observer" in this operation, handling maintenance for one of the two USAF helicopter squadrons. Although this book is published twenty years after the event, Guilmartin brings an immediacy to the work that only someone so close to it could. Guilmartin was not, however, simply a participant in the events discussed in this book. In 1975, he had just returned to the operating forces after three years at Princeton University completing his Ph.D. dissertation [1], followed by four years teaching at the Air Force Academy. Thus, Guilmartin was a trained historian and data gatherer, as well as a decorated rescue pilot with 119 combat missions in Southeast Asia. With his academic background, Guilmartin began gathering information as the operation proceeded and began interviewing with the idea of helping preserve (and, in part, create) a historical record of the operation that provides a key basis for this book.

This aspect of the work is one that fascinates. As Guilmartin phrased his approach, "Even before the smoke cleared, I was automatically trying to find out what had gone wrong and why" (p. xvi). This near-participation in the actual events allows him to provide a much richer context than archival material or (with more modern events) interviews alone can offer.

In a way, Guilmartin's strengths create the basis for some of the shortcomings of A Very Short War. After finishing the book, readers will feel confident that they have a deep understanding of the U.S. Air Force's helicopter forces involved in the Mayaguez affair, and a long appendix on the principal helicopter involved (the H-53) provides important technical background. When Guilmartin moves on to other USAF elements and other services, however, the depth of description and, therefore, understanding decrease. For example, Guilmartin describes the differences between the two involved helicopter squadrons--one a special operations and the other a rescue squadron--and how their H-53 helicopters were equipped, how their tactics differed, how peacetime training rules since the end of the war in Vietnam had affected their readiness, and their differing philosophies to life and combat.

In contrast to the treatment of the USAF helicopter forces, A Very Short War contains almost no similar details about the Marines who were, after all, the principal combat troops on the ground and who suffered the majority of the casualties. We learn little of their weapons, of their training background, or of how the Vietnam experience affected their approach to the battle on Koh Tang.[2] There is a table listing USAF tactical assets in Thailand (p. 49), but nothing similar for the other services. In a footnote, Guilmartin states that U.S. Navy aircraft did not provide air support to the battle on Koh Tang because "carrier-based A-7Es and A-6s were not equipped with radios capable of communicating with the Marines on the beach" (pp. 211-12, text on p. 99). In contrast to the detail on the H-53s, Guilmartin does not explain why U.S. Navy aircraft did not have the capability to support Marine Corps operations in 1975 when, after all, this had been a principal role for U.S. Navy aircraft during the Vietnam War and remained, at least on paper, one of the principal tasks for all naval aviators. In another example, while we learn the names of many of the H-53 pilots, almost none of the involved fighter or reconnaissance pilots receive the same attention. Somewhat in line with the focus on the rescue pilots, A Very Short War has only the briefest references to the strike missions into the Cambodian mainland that occurred in conjunction with the rescue operation.

Less applicable to the substance are some shortcomings in the notes and bibliography, some suggestive of editorial lapses. For example, several works cited in the footnotes never have full citations. Guilmartin refers to a General Accounting Office study on the Mayaguez published in 1976, yet cites it oly through another source and never directly.[3] In some cases, the citations are not strong. In addition to the detailed discussion of the Mayaguez incident, Guilmartin discusses other, frequently rather poorly known, U.S. military operations, such as Operation Babylift--an evacuation of orphans from Vietnam. The key study for "Babylift" (a Military Airlift Command monograph) does not make the footnotes.[4] For Operation Urgent Fury (the invasion of Grenada), the citation is to a 1990 Wall Street Journal article, rather than to any of the numerous books and monographs on the operation.[5]

Thus, A Very Short War is not a perfect work, but it is a very good one. In combination with Christopher Jon Lamb's Belief Systems and Decision Making in the Mayaguez Crisis (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1989), A Very Short War provides a history of the Mayaguez incident that should satisfy all but those with the most profound interest, and the footnotes and bibliography will provide the basis for further reading. In addition, Guilmartin provides enough detail and context for non-participants to gain an understanding into some of the complexities of modern warfare and how Clausewitz's nineteenth-century concept of friction can emerge in a twentieth-century battle.

A Very Short War should be on the reading list of those interested in the command and control of military operations, in the interaction of policy and tactical military activity, and in the modern U.S. military in general. Any library with a collection interest in the modern (U.S.) military should have this on their purchase list. John Guilmartin is an excellent writer with a keen insight into a crucial part of this operation--anyone with the slightest interest will find his book fascinating and worthwhile reading.

Notes

[1] John Francis Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleons: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1974). This study of naval developments in the sixteenth century remains one of the most impressive historical studies I have ever read.

[2] For a USMC-focused discussion of the operation, see Maj. George R. Dunham and Col. David A Quinlan, U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Bitter End, 1973-1975 (Washington, D.C.: History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1990), pp. 237-265.

[3] Comptroller General, "The Seizure of the Mayaguez: A Case Study of Crisis Management," a report to the Subcommittee on International Political and Military Affairs, House Committee on International Relations, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1976).

[4] Coy F. Cross II, MAC and Operation Babylift: Air Transport in Support of Noncombatant Evacuation Operations (Scott Air Force Base, Ill.: Military Airlift Command, Office of History, Nov. 1989).

[5] There is a wide range of literature on Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury), which I will not attempt to recreate here. In addition to the footnoting problem, Guilmartin comments on "Urgent Fury" that "Published accounts suggest that inadequate intelligence and the lack of adequate maps were--as with the MAYAGUEZ affair--a major cause of embarrassment" (p. 158). I think that this understates the importance of these problems, as one can point to the lack of adequate maps (for example, no joint maps with gridded squares) as one of the potential causes for some of the friendly fire incidents that occurred during "Urgent Fury."

 

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Ben Shepherd. War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. vi + 300 pp, ISBN 978-0-674-01296-7.

Reviewed by Lee Baker (Department of History, University of Cincinnati, Raymond Walters College)


German Security Divisions and Soviet "Partisans"

For the last several years the most interesting debates about the brutality of the Second World War on the Russian front have revolved around trying to explain the process by which seemingly ordinary men became embroiled in routinely murdering innocent civilians. Ever since the publication of Omer Bartov's seminal book, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare, it has been impossible to maintain that the Wehrmacht stood aloof from the mass murders which occurred after the invasion of the U.S.S.R.[1] This book adds a highly nuanced layer of understanding to the discussion by examining the anti-partisan operations of several security divisions operating in Army Group Center's rear.

The Wehrmacht faced an intractable partisan problem during its invasion of the U.S.S.R. during World War II. Historians' interpretations as to how the Germans dealt with it, beginning with Bartov, have spawned a rather large literature explaining the spiral into mass murder. The central question of this literature is generally the same: how and why does the repression of active and armed opposition shade into atrocity? This question is made more difficult when asked of German anti-partisan operations because it is difficult to separate what could be perceived as military necessity from those actions that flowed from the racist anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic philosophy that permeated parts of German society during the first few decades of the twentieth century. This book is a superb attempt to clarify how each of the pieces of the puzzle fit together and explain how the Germans fought their anti-partisan operations behind the eastern front, and why they ultimately failed.

The book begins, logically, by examining the evolution of German anti-partisan theory beginning with the Franco-Prussian War through the radical changes made after the invasion of Poland in 1939. It continues with an analysis of anti-partisan operations after the invasion of the U.S.S.R. through the end of the first year when partisan operations were embryonic and unorganized. The bulk of the book is spent on the field campaign of 1942-1943, when Army Group Center faced increasingly organized partisan operations in its rear. This, the core of the book, focuses on the ad hoc evolution of Wehrmacht policy, ultimately culminating with a confused, contradictory, and self-defeating mishmash of initiatives by mid-level officers.

The book focuses on the security divisions whose responsibilities included protecting the vital rear areas behind main operations at the front. It examines, in particular, the activities of the 221st Security Division. This unit served in the general area between Mogilev and Gomel, which today marks the approximate border between Belarus and Russia, and was one of the areas most plagued by partisan operations. Using the reports its officers wrote to document its activities, Shepherd follows the unit's activities from 1941 through the summer of 1943, after which records no longer exist.

Perhaps his most important conclusion is that the descent into murder began with the "systematic consideration of circumstances, more than ... preexisting personal inclinations" by the officers who led the various units of the 221st (p. 232). The key, according to Shepherd, is that the men who staffed the security divisions were too old, under-equipped, poorly trained, rarely reinforced, and in general provided with inadequate resources for their demanding tasks. The lack of any real ability to effectively combat the partisans led the units to adopt various expedients that, it was hoped, would counterbalance their material inadequacies. Thus extreme violence resulted from frustration, fear, and both perceptions of and actual material inferiority. Scared and angry soldiers killed because it was one of the few ways they could exercise control over their environment. Shepherd identifies further factors within the division that encouraged unbridled violence. Preexisting prejudice among the rank and file may have been only a secondary cause of unit violence, but the ideological and genuine anti-Semitism and anti-Slavism of the unit's leading officers, especially its commander and operations officer, were important factors. Shepherd adds to this underlying base several additional factors that depended upon particular circumstances, including the "criminal orders" issued by the supreme command just before Operation Barbarossa began. This created a permissive atmosphere in which an increasingly frustrated and fearful unit expressed itself in brutal behavior towards civilians.

These factors, which operated relatively separately during the first months of the war, combined and intensified during the fall of 1941 (especially during September) to radicalize the anti-partisan effort. The body count exploded during this period as the failure to defeat the U.S.S.R placed enormous pressures upon the 221st. This exacerbated its already less than ideal situation. It suffered from a lack of mobility due to fuel shortages and a lack of vehicles, the detachment of its best, and usually most mobile, units for action at the front, and the expansion of its territory as the front advanced eastwards. It was during this period that the unit began to equate Jews with Bolsheviks, Bolsheviks with partisans, and began the mass shootings of Jews whom it labeled partisans in its reports. But Shepherd shows that what intensified repression at this particular moment was not solely the ideological factors but cold pragmatism as well, as the increasing pressures felt by the division led it to lash out at not only actual enemies, of whom there were as yet few, but potential ones as well.

The rest of 1941 and 1942 witnessed a surge in partisan activity, as men sent specifically to organize a partisan movement joined Red Army stragglers and as the local population became disillusioned with German policy. Shepherd points to the failure of German agricultural reforms and the expansion of forced labor as key factors in this growth. In addition, both the division and Hitler issued directives which permitted the troops to cast restraint aside whenever they felt threatened. As the tasks assigned to the 221st increased in proportion to the territory it was assigned, the increasing intransigence of the population, combined with an increasingly permissive attitude towards repression, created a scenario wherein the 221st was bound to fail. These problems also led the 221st to attempt a less violent approach during 1942, when a concerted "hearts and minds" campaign was launched. This effort originated not with a desire by the Wehrmacht to be more civil in its treatment of civilians, but rather in the complete inability of the unit to maintain a high level of effective violence; a more benevolent policy was thus an expedient designed to overcome the unit's limitations. Shepherd shows that both violence and the lack of violence had the same essential root causes: German inadequacy.

Rather than trying to provide an overall, and therefore generally correct but specifically over-simplified view of anti-partisan operations, Shepherd provides us with a piece of the mosaic; the bigger picture could perhaps be filled in by other studies which focus on Army Group South (particularly its operations around Kiev) and Army Group North (especially in the Baltic countries). This book makes very important contributions to the debate about the nature of violence on the eastern front and should be read by all those who study that sector of the war.

Note

[1]. Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Several of his subsequent works have followed this trail.