In Daniel Whittingham and Stuart Mitchell’s brand new history, Counterinsurgency: Theory and Reality, they trace the evolution of counterinsurgency over the last two hundred years.
Today, we’re giving you an exclusive glimpse at the first few pages. Scroll down to learn about the origins of ‘small wars’ and subsequent development of counterinsurgency from two experts in the field.
Guerrilla warfare, if understood as a set of tactics employed by the weak versus the strong, is as old as warfare itself. The same might be said of insurgency (and, thus, counterinsurgency). However, we also need to understand the context in which the phenomena of modern insurgency and counterinsurgency came into being; going back to ancient or medieval history in search of timeless principles of insurgency or counterinsurgency risks distorting our understanding of both.
In European history, the modern state, and the ‘regular’ armies with which states prosecuted their wars, emerged in the early modern period. However, European wars were not only fought by regular armies but also by partisans and light troops, in what was referred to as ‘small war’ (kleine kriege or petite guerre). As European armies increasingly conducted their wars overseas, the raising and employment of irregular forces (usually indigenous levies) increased. For example, in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), British and French irregulars fought each other in North America, while in Europe, Austrian and Russian irregular cavalry (most notably Cossacks in the latter case) fought against the Prussians. Irregular forces were also a common feature of the frontier warfare between the Austrian, Russian and Ottoman Empires.
Many historians have seen the late 18th and early 19th centuries as representing a sea change in the conduct of war in the Western world. In the American War of Independence (1775–83), the Continental Army of the nascent United States played a crucial role in securing victory. However, success also depended on the militia, which was able to harass British lines of communications. The operations of a ‘regular’ army, therefore, took place alongside a guerrilla conflict, with both forming part of the wider revolutionary struggle for independence. In the French Revolutionary War (1792–1802), France unleashed the full force of ‘people’s war’ in order to defend itself. The levée en masse (1793) used the language of total war to mobilise the people and resources of the French state.
In practice, the number of troops put into the field by France was not as impressive as the paper strength of over one million men in arms, but the importance of the levée en masse lay more in its rhetoric. Significantly, it applied to internal as much to external threats: an uprising in the Vendée (1793–94) was brutally crushed. During the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), the logic of people’s war would be turned against Napoleon’s empire. During the Peninsular War (1807–14), the Spanish launched La Guerrilla (small war) against the French occupation, from which the modern term ‘guerrilla’ is derived. The revolutionary wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were crucial in heralding the era of people’s war. However, it is important to note that alongside the guerrilla campaign, the Spanish war effort also involved semi-regular and regular Royal Army units, and the lines between the different elements were somewhat fluid.
The major conflicts of the 19th century demonstrated the power of the forces of nationalism and people’s war. The American Civil War (1861–65) was an insurgency, in which a total of 11 states seceded from the Union, forming a new nation that would safeguard slavery. It featured regular operations and large-scale pitched battles, as well as low-level guerrilla violence. As Daniel Sutherland has noted, a romanticised view of partisan activity in the War of Independence the roots of counterinsurgency played a central role in the way that guerrilla conflict was understood in 1861 (Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 2009, pp.9–11). The prominence of guerrilla warfare, the scale of the conflict and its increasing totality, and the demands of reoccupying the seceded states meant the Union was forced to define the differences between soldiers, partisans, brigands and civilians, and to establish rules of conduct. The result was General Orders (G.O.) No. 100, otherwise known as the Lieber Code (April 1863). Articles 81 and 82 noted:
Partisans are soldiers armed and wearing the uniform of their army, but belonging to a corps which acts detached from the main body for the purpose of making inroads into the territory occupied by the enemy. If captured, they are entitled to all the privileges of the prisoner of war. Men, or squads of men, who commit hostilities, whether by fighting, or inroads for destruction or plunder, or by raids of any kind, without commission, without being part and portion of the organized hostile army, and without sharing continuously in the war, but who do so with intermitting returns to their homes and avocations, or with the occasional assumption of the semblance of peaceful pursuits, divesting themselves of the character or appearance of soldiers – such men, or squads of men, are not public enemies, and, therefore, if captured, are not entitled to the privileges of prisoners of war, but shall be treated summarily as highway robbers or pirates.
The Union increasingly fought a ‘hard war’ against the Confederacy’s population, most notably in Union Major-General William T. Sherman’s march to the sea (November–December 1864) and through the Carolinas in 1865. Guerrilla warfare also exposed some of the cracks in Southern society: in many states, anti-war or pro-Union groups took up arms. The Confederate leadership – Robert E. Lee in particular – generally saw the guerrilla campaign as merely an adjunct to regular operations. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on 9 April 1865 was crucial: Confederate troops stood down, rather than melting into the countryside to fight an extended guerrilla war. In Europe, the largest conflict between 1815 and 1914 was them Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). Following the defeat of the regular French army in 1870, there was a second phase of ‘people’s war’, which saw a levée en masse of the French population and partisan activity by francs-tireurs against Prussian forces. The war, therefore, also demonstrated the powerful forces that could be unleashed within a nation at arms.
Daniel Whittingham and Stuart Mitchell, Counterinsurgency: Theory and Reality (Oxford: Casemate Publishing, 2021), p. 1 – 4.
Counterinsurgency: Theory and Reality
By Daniel Whittingham and Stuart Mitchell
Counterinsurgency has become a buzzword in the last twenty years, but it is as old as society itself. This concise history traces the development of counterinsurgency over the last two hundred years, beginning with the concept of ‘small wars’ and colonial warfare, through the theories of Lawrence of Arabia and early insurgents, to the methods of 20th-century insurgents such as Mao. The author then examines how western armies have famously tried to counter insurgencies post-WWII – France in Algeria, the US in Vietnam – and astutely compares this to the British approach, concluding with a discussion of the future of COIN.
9781612009483 | Hardback | Casemate | £20.00 | May 2021
SPECIAL OFFER: £16.00
Available to order through Casemate UK
Authors
Daniel Whittingham is Lecturer in the History of Warfare and Conflict at the Department of History, University of Birmingham. He is interested in all aspects of the conduct of war, but with a particular focus on British military history, military thought and strategy. His main research interests are British colonial warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, counterinsurgency, the First World War and the Second World War.
Stuart Mitchell is Senior Lecturer at the Department of War Studies, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He has taught counterinsurgency to the British Army for several years as well as to overseas personnel on diplomatic visits.
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