Colonial Violence by Walter Dierk;

Author:Walter, Dierk;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Learning

However, for a long time, knowledge was distributed asymmetrically, and at least the imperial actors gave little sign of having any incentive to change this. In light of this, it is astonishing that any lessons at all were learnt from imperial wars or for imperial wars—if we understand learning to be a conscious collective acquisition of knowledge that transcends the immediate instance of application, in other words that amounts to more than simple adaptation to present circumstances.365 Learning of this kind required two cognitive preconditions on the part of empires: the recognition that wars on the periphery had something in common that distinguished them from European warfare, namely that they were sui generis; and secondly the admission that this particularity demanded that a military which had been trained to fight large-scale European wars should genuinely undergo a process of adjustment. Both of these preconditions were anything but self-evident. Indeed, for a long spell, two opposing views hampered learning on the periphery: on the one hand, the idea that in each case the local conditions were so different that no useful generalizations could be drawn from them366 (assuming it was necessary at all to find out anything about such inferior enemies), while on the other, and more importantly, the widespread natural assumption that the small-scale was automatically contained within the larger entity, in other words that a regular army employing methods that were valid in Europe was also ideally equipped to fight ‘small’ wars on the periphery.367

This latter assumption was in line with the ‘big war mentality’ that has been postulated for a variety of modern armies, first and foremost the armed forces of the USA, which despite the frontier war against the Indians—virtually their only assignment during the nineteenth century—and despite their experiences in the Philippines and Vietnam (and latterly Afghanistan and Iraq) still doggedly maintained, and continue to this day to do so, that conventional means of warfare such as concentrated deployment and firepower are the answer to every military challenge.368 There are, of course, good reasons for this inertia of the big war doctrine: the greater security relevance of conventional threats to the mother country compared to irregular conflicts on the periphery;369 the instructional, technological and psychological advantages of a unified doctrine, reinforced by the institutional weight of traditional conceptions in a thoroughly hierarchical institution such as the military, which rewards conformity and hence concentrates orthodox thinking at its head;370 and last but not least (and related to the previous point) the idea of a hierarchy of types of conflict, in which ‘small wars’ are seen as irregular and relatively uncomplicated and technically and operationally primitive, as well as being political and therefore ‘unmilitary’ and unworthy of any particular intellectual attention.371 Quite the opposite, in fact: concerning oneself with such aberrations can even be regarded as positively harmful to institutional cohesion and defence policy, given that the primary internal impulse is always to lobby for procurement of the most up-to-date and expensive armaments for waging a conventional war

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