Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits by John Arquilla

Author:John Arquilla
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

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Emir Dynamite:

T. E. Lawrence

© Bettmann/Corbis

The idea of sending off a handful of one’s own soldiers to train, guide, and sometimes lead far off but friendly forces into battle is both relatively new and quite old. This advisory concept lies at the heart of the U.S. Army Special Forces, which were created in the early 1950s to guide guerrilla groups fighting behind the lines in the wake of an envisioned Soviet invasion of Western Europe. That war never came, but the Green Berets were soon employed in leading Montagnard, Meo, and Hmong tribesmen in tip-and-run fighting against the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army. More recently Special Forces have played pivotal roles in the terror war, notably in working with Afghan and Iraqi tribes in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates. But the roots of this particular approach to military affairs go far back, at least as far as the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.E.), when the Spartans sent an adviser named Gylippus to Sicily to help the Syracusans defeat a large Athenian expeditionary force. His success in turning that campaign around spoke—and still speaks—to the powerful possibility of achieving major results with a minimal investment in resources and manpower.

Yet for all the obvious value of seeking this sort of military “leverage,” there have been few notable instances of the practice in conflicts during the more than two millennia that have passed between the fight against the Athenians and the campaigns against al Qaeda. In his biography of Nicias, the general whom Gylippus defeated, Plutarch noted that the Spartan adviser “showed what it is to be a man of experience; for with the same arms, the same horses, and on the same spot of ground, only employing them otherwise [than the Syracusans had], he overcame the Athenians.”1 Similarly, in the fall of 2001 commanders of just eleven U.S. Special Forces “A-teams” led the very same Northern Alliance fighters who had recently lost 95 percent of Afghan territory to the Taliban and al Qaeda to a resounding victory over them.2 But where are the military advisers between Gylippus and the Special Forces groups?

For many long centuries there were precious few. The phenomenon of military advisory begins to reemerge from its dormancy only after the Enlightenment. A case can be made that the Frenchmen who goaded some of the Native American tribes to mount terror raids on English settlements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and who sometimes accompanied them—were acting as advisers. But the fact is that the Indians had little need of advice from the French on waging wilderness warfare. What they received was therefore not military but rather hortatory in nature.

Denis Davydov, who suggested mounting a behind-the-lines campaign of deep strikes against Napoleon’s supply lines in Russia, looks a bit more like an adviser in that he offered guidance to villagers looking to resist the French. But after Davydov another gap opens up, as it is a full century from his field operations to those of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck who,

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