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The Evolution of Irregular War

Holding down the fort: in Chilas, British India, 1898. (Getty Images / Hulton Archive). Pundits and the press too of ten treat terrorism and guerrilla tactics as something new, a departure f rom oldf ashioned ways of war. But nothing could be f urther f rom the truth. T hroughout most of our species' long and bloody slog, warf are has primarily been carried out by bands of loosely organized, ill-disciplined, and lightly armed volunteers who disdained open battle in f avor of stealthy raids and ambushes: the strategies of both tribal warriors and modern guerrillas and terrorists. In f act, conventional warf are is the relatively recent invention. It was f irst made possible af ter 10,000 BC by the development of agricultural societies, which produced enough surplus wealth and population to allow f or the creation of specially designed f ortif ications and weapons (and the prof essionals to operate them). T he f irst genuine armies -commanded by a strict hierarchy, composed of trained soldiers, disciplined with threats of punishment -arose af ter 3100 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia. But the process of state f ormation and, with it, army f ormation took considerably longer in most of the world. In some places, states emerged only in the past century, and their ability to carry out such basic f unctions as maintaining an army remains tenuous at best. Considering how long humans have been roaming the earth, the era of what we now think of as conventional conf lict represents the mere blink of an eye. Nonetheless, since at least the days of the Greeks and the Romans, observers have belittled irregular warf are. Western soldiers and scholars have tended to view it as unmanly, even barbaric. It's not hard to see why: guerillas, in the words of the British historian John Keegan, are "cruel to the weak and cowardly in the f ace of the brave" -- precisely the opposite of what prof essional soldiers are taught to be. Many scholars have even claimed that guerrilla raids are not true warf are. T his view comes to seem a bit ironic when one considers the f act that throughout history, irregular warf are has been consistently deadlier than its conventional cousin -- not in total numbers killed, since tribal societies are tiny compared with urban civilizations, but in the percentage killed. T he average tribal society loses 0.5 percent of its population in combat every year. In the United States, that would translate into 1.5 million deaths, or 500 September 11 attacks a year. Archaeological evidence conf irms that such losses are not a modern anomaly. By manuf acturing and distributing countless weapons, the Europeans ensured that their twentiethcentury opponents were f ar better armed than their predecessors had been. T he origins of guerilla warf are are lost in the swamps of prehistory, but the kinds of f oes that guerrillas have f aced have changed over the centuries. Bef ore about 3000 BC, tribal guerrillas f ought exclusively against other tribal guerrillas. Although that type of f ighting continued af ter 3000 BC, it was supplemented and sometimes supplanted by warf are pitting tribes and rebels against newly f ormed states. T hese conf licts were, in a sense, the world's f irst insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. Every great empire of antiquity, starting with the f irst on record, the Akkadian empire, in ancient Mesopotamia,

was deviled by nomadic guerrillas, although the term "guerrilla" would not be coined f or millennia to come. ("Guerrilla," literally meaning "small war," dates to the Spanish resistance against Napoleon, f rom 1808 to 1814.) In modern times, the same old guerrilla tactics have been married to ideological agendas, something that was utterly lacking among the apolitical (and illiterate) tribal warriors of old. Of course, the precise nature of the ideological agendas being f ought f or has changed over the years, f rom liberalism and nationalism (the cri de coeur of guerrilla f ighters f rom the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century), to socialism and nationalism (which inspired guerrillas between the late nineteenth century and the late twentieth century), to jihadist extremism today. All the while, guerrilla and terrorist warf are have remained as ubiquitous and deadly as ever. T HE GUERRILLA PARADOX T he success of various raiders in attacking and conquering states f rom ancient Rome to medieval China gave rise to what one historian has called "the nomad paradox." "In the history of warf are, it has generally been the case that military superiority lies with the wealthiest states and those with the most developed administrations," the historian Hugh Kennedy wrote in Mongols, Huns, and Vikings. Yet going back to the days of Mesopotamia, nomads of ten managed to bring down f ar richer and more advanced empires. Kennedy explains this seeming contradiction by citing all the military advantages nomads enjoyed: they were more mobile, every adult male was a warrior, and their leaders were selected primarily f or their war-making prowess. By contrast, he notes, settled societies appointed commanders based on political considerations and draf ted as soldiers f armers with scant martial skills. Nomads' military advantages seem to have persisted among guerrillas in the modern world; even in the last two centuries, during which states became f ar more powerf ul than in the ancient or the medieval period, guerrillas of ten managed to humble them. T hink of the tribes of Af ghanistan, which f rustrated the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Kennedy's "nomad paradox" is really a guerrilla paradox, and it asks how and why the weak seem to so f requently def eat the strong. T he answer lies largely in the use of hit-and-run tactics, taking advantage of mobility and surprise to make it dif f icult f or the stronger state to bring its f ull weight to bear. Guerrillas of ten present a f urther paradox: even the most successf ul raiders have been prone to switch to conventional tactics once they achieve great military success. T he Mongols eventually turned into a semiregular army under Genghis Khan, and the Arabs underwent a similar transf ormation. T hey f ought in traditional Bedouin style while spreading Islam across the Middle East in the century af ter Muhammad's death, in 632. But their conquests led to the creation of the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates, two of the greatest states of the medieval world, which were def ended by conventional f orces. T he Turkish empire, too, arose out of the raiding culture of the steppes but built a f ormidable conventional army, complete with highly disciplined slave-soldiers, the janissaries. T he new Ottoman army conquered Constantinople in a f amous siege in 1453 and, within less than a century, advanced to the gates of Vienna. Why did nomads so adept at guerrilla tactics resort to conventional warf are? For one thing, their targets became bigger, requiring a shif t in tactics. Mounted archers could not have taken Constantinople; that f eat required the mechanics of a proper military, including a battery of 69 cannons, two of which were 27 f eet long and f ired stone balls that weighed more than half a ton. Nor were f ast-moving tribal f ighters of much use in def ending, administering, and policing newly conquered states. T hose tasks, too, required a prof essional standing army. A f urther f actor dictated the transf ormation of nomads into regulars: the style of f ighting practiced by mounted archers was so dif f icult and demanding that it required constant practice f rom childhood on f or an archer to maintain prof iciency. Once nomads began living among more sedentary people, they "easily lost their superior individual talents and unit cohesion," write the historians Mesut Uyar and Edward Erickson in A Military History of the Ottomans. T his was a tradeof f that most of them were happy to make. A settled lif e was much easier -- and saf er. T he nomads' achievements, although great, were mostly f leeting: with the exception of the Arabs, the Turks, the Moguls, and the Manchu, who blended into settled societies, nomads could not build lasting

institutions. Nomadic empires generally crumbled af ter a generation or two. Former nomads who settled down f ound themselves, somewhat ironically, beset by f resh waves of nomads and other guerrillas. Such was the f ate of the Manchu, who, as the rulers of China, f ought of f the Dzungar (or western Mongols) in the eighteenth century and tried to f ight of f the Taiping rebels in the deadliest war of the nineteenth century. T he Taipings, in turn, tried to develop more powerf ul armies of their own, blurring the distinction between regular and irregular conf lict. Since then, many civil wars, including the one the United States f ought between 1861 and 1865, have f eatured both kinds of combat. IRREGULARS IN T HE AGE OF REASON T he dividing line between regular and irregular warf are grew more distinct with the spread of standing national armies af ter the T hirty Years' War. T hat process, which went hand in hand with the growth of nation-states, came to a head in the second half of the seventeenth century. T he period saw the prolif eration of barracks to house soldiers, drillmasters to train them, prof essional of f icers to lead them, logistical services to supply them, f actories to clothe and equip them, and hospitals and retirement homes to take care of them. Democratic governments can f ight insurgents ef f ectively if they pay attention to what the U.S. military calls "inf ormation operations." By the eighteenth century, Western warf are had reached stylized heights seldom seen bef ore or since, with monarchical armies f ighting in roughly similar styles and abiding by roughly similar rules of conduct. No change was more important than the adoption of standardized unif orms, which meant that the dif f erence between soldiers and civilians could be glimpsed in an instant. Fighters who insisted on making war without unif orms theref ore became more easily distinguished. T hey were subject to prosecution as bandits rather than treated as soldiers entitled to the protections of the emerging laws of war. But irregulars soon returned to prominence, during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), a conf lict pitting Austria, Great Britain, Hanover, Hesse, and the Netherlands against Bavaria, France, Prussia, Saxony, and Spain. Austria lost the war's early battles, allowing f oreign troops to occupy a substantial portion of its territory. But Austria managed a comeback thanks to so-called wild men it mustered f rom the f ringes of its empire: hussars f rom Hungary, pandours f rom Croatia, and other Christians f rom the Balkans who had been f ighting the Turks f or centuries. Frederick the Great and other generals at f irst denounced the raiders as "savages." But as soon as they saw the irregulars' ef f ectiveness, they copied the Austrian example. By the 1770s, light troops (skirmishers lacking heavy weapons and armor who did not stand in the main battle line) made up 20 percent of most European armies. In North America, the British army came increasingly to rely on a variety of light inf antry. Precursors to today's special f orces -- troops trained in guerrilla tactics who are nonetheless still more disciplined than stateless f ighters -- these "rangers" were raised f or "wood service," or irregular combat, against French colonial troops and their native allies. One of the cherished myths of American history is that plucky Yankees won independence f rom Great Britain by picking of f bef uddled redcoats too dense to deviate f rom ritualistic parade-ground warf are. T hat is an exaggeration. By the time the Revolution broke out, in 1775, the British were well versed in irregular warf are and were countering it in Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. Redcoats certainly knew enough to break ranks and seek cover in battle when possible, rather than, in the words of one historian, "remaining inert and vulnerable to enemy f ire." T he British army had a dif f erent problem: much like the modern U.S. Army pre-Iraq, it had f orgotten most of the lessons of irregular war learned a generation bef ore. And the American rebels used a more sophisticated f orm of irregular warf are than the French backwoodsmen and Native American warriors whom the redcoats had gotten used to f ighting. T he spread of literacy and printed books allowed the American insurgents to appeal f or popular support, thereby elevating the role of propaganda and psychological warf are. It is appropriate that the term "public opinion" f irst appeared in print in 1776, f or the American rebels won independence in large part by appealing to the British electorate with documents such as T homas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence. In f act, the outcome of the Revolution was really decided in 1782, when the British House of Commons voted by a narrow margin to discontinue of f ensive operations. T he

British could have kept f ighting af ter that date; they could have raised f resh armies even af ter the def eat at Yorktown in 1781. But not af ter they had lost the support of parliament. Most of the revolutionaries who f ollowed were more extreme in their methods and belief s than the American rebels, but, whether lef t or right, many of them copied the Americans' skillf ul manipulation of public opinion. T he Greeks in the 1820s, the Cubans in the 1890s, and the Algerians in the 1950s all enjoyed notable success mobilizing f oreign opinion to help win their independence. In Greece and Cuba, the anti-imperialists won by highlighting the colonies' suf f ering to spur what would today be called humanitarian interventions by Western powers. Liberal insurgents scored their most impressive victories in the New World. With a f ew exceptions, by 1825, the European colonial powers had been def eated in the Americas. European revolts at home, such as that of the Chartists in the United Kingdom and that of the Decembrists in Russia, were less successf ul. Still, by the turn of the twentieth century, most of Europe and North America was moving in a more liberal direction -- even those absolute monarchies, such as Austria, Germany, and Russia, that remained as such were making greater ef f orts to appease and direct popular sentiment. WARS T HAT WEREN'T At the same time, Western states were extending their rule across much of the rest of the world in a decidedly illiberal f ashion. T he process of colonization and resistance would do much to shape the modern world and would give rise to the most inf luential counterinsurgency doctrine of all time: the "oil spot" theory, coined by the French marshal Hubert Lyautey, who in f in-de-sicle Indochina, Madagascar, and Morocco anticipated the "population-centric" doctrine that U.S. f orces implemented in Af ghanistan and Iraq in the twenty-f irst century. It involved slowly extending army posts and settlements, like a spreading oil spot, until indigenous resistance was crushed, while also trying to address locals' political and economic concerns. T he people of Asia and Af rica resisted the colonists' advance as best they could. Sometimes, they were able to f orce serious setbacks; a f amous example was the 1842 British retreat f rom Kabul. But these were only temporary reversals in the inexorable westernization of the world. By 1914, Europeans and their of f spring controlled 84 percent of the world's landmass, up f rom 35 percent in 1800. T hat non-Europeans did not have more success in preserving their independence was due in large measure to Europe's growing advantages in military technology and technique. But it also owed something to the f act that most non-Europeans did not adopt strategies that made the best use of their limited resources. Instead of attempting to engage in guerrilla warf are -- which, even if unsuccessf ul, might have staved of f ultimate def eat f or years, if not decades, and inf licted considerable costs on the invaders -- most non-Europeans f ought precisely as the Europeans wanted them to, that is to say, in conventional f ashion. Westerners thought that most of the areas they conquered were "primitive" and "backward," but in a sense, they were too advanced f or their own good. By the time Europeans marched into Asia and Af rica, much of those continents had f allen under the sway of native regimes with standing armies, such as the Z ulu empire in southern Af rica and the Maratha empire in India. T heir rulers naturally looked to those standing armies f or protection, typically eschewing the sort of tribal tactics (a primitive f orm of guerrilla warf are) practiced by their ancestors. In most cases, the decisions quickly backf ired. When native rulers did try to correct course, their impulse was usually to make their armies even more conventional by hiring European advisers and buying European arms. T he reproductions were seldom as good as the originals, however, and their inf eriority was brutally exposed in battle. Why did so f ew indigenous regimes resort to guerrilla tactics? In part, because non-Westerners had little idea of the combat power of Western armies until it was too late. Too many indigenous empire builders in the developing world imagined that the tactics they had used to conquer local tribes would work against the white invaders as well. Even if those rulers had wanted to ignite insurgencies, moreover, the ideological f uel was generally lacking, save in Algeria, Chechnya and Dagestan, and a f ew other areas where Muslim rebels waged prolonged wars of resistance against European colonists. Of ten, the subjects of these regimes resented the indigenous rulers as much as, if not more than, the European

subjects of these regimes resented the indigenous rulers as much as, if not more than, the European invaders. Nationalism, a relatively recent invention, had not yet spread to those lands. European soldiers in "small wars" were helped by the f act that most of the f ighting occurred on the periphery of their empires in Asia and Af rica against enemies that were considered "uncivilized" and theref ore, under the European code of conduct, could be f ought with unrestrained f erocity. As late as the 1930s, the British of f icer and novelist John Masters wrote that on the northwest f rontier of India (today's Pakistan), Pashtun warriors "would usually castrate and behead" captives, whereas the British "took f ew prisoners at any time, and very f ew indeed if there was no Political Agent about" -- they simply killed those they captured. T he very success of the imperial armies meant that f uture battles would take place within imperial boundaries, however, and that they would be, as the historian T homas Mockaitis wrote in British Counterinsurgency, "considered civil unrest rather than war." Accordingly, imperial troops in the f uture would f ind their actions circumscribed by law and public opinion in ways that they had not been in the nineteenth century. T he civil unrest of the twentieth century was harder to deal with f or other reasons as well. By setting up schools and newspapers that promulgated Western ideas such as nationalism and Marxism, Western administrators eventually spurred widespread resistance to their own rule. And by manuf acturing and distributing countless weapons, f rom T NT to the AK-47, all over the world, the Europeans ensured that their twentieth-century opponents were f ar better armed than their predecessors had been. T HE SUN SET S ON T HE BRIT ISH EMPIRE To understand why decolonization swept the world in the late 1940s and why anti-Western guerrillas and terrorists f ared so well during that period, it is vital to underscore how weak the two biggest colonial powers were by then. Even if France and the United Kingdom had been determined to hold on to all their overseas possessions af ter 1945, they would have been hard-pressed to do so. Both were essentially bankrupt and could not comf ortably f ight a prolonged counterinsurgency -- especially not in the f ace of hostility f rom the rising superpowers. T he Soviets, and later the Chinese, were always ready to provide arms, training, and f inancing to national liberation movements of a Marxist bent. Most of the decolonization process was relatively peacef ul. Where the British did f ace determined opposition, as in India and Palestine, it did not take much to persuade them to leave. London generally only f ought to hold on to a f ew bases, such as Cyprus and Aden, that it deemed to be of strategic signif icance or, as in Malaya and Kenya, to prevent a takeover by Communists or other extremists. When the British did choose to f ight, they did so skillf ully and successf ully; their counterinsurgency record is better than that of the French during the same period, and some of their campaigns, notably that in Malaya, are still studied by military strategists. T he incidence of guerrilla warf are and terrorism did not decline with the demise of the European empires. On the contrary, the years between 1959 and 1979 -- f rom Fidel Castro's takeover in Cuba to the Sandinistas' takeover in Nicaragua -- were, if anything, the golden age of lef tist insurgency. T here remained a f ew colonial wars and a larger number of essentially ethnic wars (in Congo, East Timor, and Nigeria's Biaf ra region) f ought to determine the nature of postcolonial states, but the primary driver was socialist ideology. Radicals who styled themselves as the next Mao, Ho, Fidel, or Che took up Kalashnikovs to wage rural guerrilla warf are and urban terrorism. Never bef ore or since has the glamour and prestige of irregular warriors been higher, as seen in the ubiquity of the artist Alberto Korda's f amous photograph of Che Guevara, which still adorns T-shirts and posters. T he success of revolutionaries abroad resounded among the Western radicals of the 1960s, who were discontented with their own societies and imagined that they, too, could overthrow the establishment. Tom Wolf e captured the moment in his f amous 1970 essay "Radical Chic," which described in excruciating detail a party thrown by the composer Leonard Bernstein in his swank New York apartment f or a group of Black Panthers, one of myriad terrorist groups of a period whose f ame f ar exceeded its ability to achieve its goals. Some governments had considerable success in suppressing insurgent movements. T he 1960s saw the publication of inf luential manuals such as Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, by the French of f icer (and Algeria veteran) David Galula, and Defeating Communist Insurgency, by the British of f icial Sir

Robert T hompson, a suave veteran of Malaya and Vietnam. Galula, T hompson, and other experts reached a remarkable degree of agreement that insurgencies could not be f ought like conventional wars. T he f undamental principle that set counterinsurgency apart was the use of "the minimum of f ire." Meanwhile, a "soldier must be prepared to become a propagandist, a social worker, a civil engineer, a schoolteacher, a nurse, a boy scout," Galula wrote. It was one thing to generate such hard-won lessons. Altogether more dif f icult was to get them accepted by military of f icers whose ideal remained the armored blitzkrieg and who had nothing but contempt f or lightly armed ragtag f ighters. Western militaries marched into the next f ew decades still f ocused on f ighting a mirror-image f oe. When the United States had to conf ront a guerrilla threat in Vietnam, William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. operations there, f ormulated an overwhelmingly conventional response that expended lots of f irepower and destroyed lives on both sides but did not produce victory. LEFT OUT Like everyone else, guerrillas and terrorists are subject to popular moods and intellectual f ads. By the 1980s, as memories of colonialism f aded, as the excesses of postcolonial rulers became more apparent, and as the desirability of capitalism was revived under U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret T hatcher, lef tist movements went into eclipse and the guerrilla mystique f aded. Few but the most purblind ideologues could imagine that the f uture was being born in impoverished and oppressed Cambodia or Cuba. T he end of the old regime in Moscow and the gradual opening in Beijing had a more direct impact on insurgent groups, too, by cutting of f valuable sources of subsidies, arms, and training. T he Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s, such as the Italian Red Brigades and the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, were never able to generate signif icant support bases of their own and languished along with their f oreign backers. Nationalist movements, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Irish Republican Army, f ared better, although they were also hobbled by a decline in outside support. Although lef tist insurgencies were on the wane, however, guerrilla warf are and terrorism hardly disappeared. T hey simply assumed dif f erent f orms as new militants motivated by the oldest grievances of all -- race and religion -- shot their way into the headlines. T he transition f rom politically motivated to religiously motivated insurgencies was the product of decades, even centuries, of development. It could be traced back to, among other things, the writings of the Egyptian agitator Sayyid Qutb in the 1950s and 1960s; the activities of Hasan al-Banna, who f ounded Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood in 1928; and the proselytizing of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who in the eighteenth century created the puritanical movement that would one day become the of f icial theology of Saudi Arabia. But the epochal consequences of these religious leaders' ideas did not seize the world's attention until the f atef ul f all of 1979, when protesters occupied the U.S. embassy in Tehran. T he embassy takeover had been organized by radical university students, including the f uture Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who wanted to strike a blow at "the Great Satan" and domestic secularists. It was f ollowed by the militant takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest shrine in Islam, and the burning of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. And then, on December 24, 1979, the Soviets marched into Af ghanistan, thus inspiring the mobilization of a f ormidable f orce of holy guerrillas: the mujahideen. T he threat f rom Islamist extremists, which had been building sub rosa f or decades, burst into bloody view on September 11, 2001, when al Qaeda staged the deadliest terrorist attack of all time. Previous terrorist organizations, f rom the PLO to various anarchist groups, had limited the scale of their violence. As the terrorism analyst Brian Jenkins wrote in the 1970s, "Terrorism is theater. . . . Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead." Al Qaeda and its ilk rewrote that playbook in the United States and Iraq. To def end itself , the United States and its allies erected a variety of def enses. Mostly, this involved improved security, police work, and intelligence gathering. Militaries played an important role, too, although seldom as central as in Af ghanistan and Iraq -- countries whose governments were toppled by American invasions. In states with f unctioning or semi-f unctioning governments, such as the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. role was limited to providing training, weapons, intelligence, and other assistance to help those governments f ight the extremists.

Beyond the West's ef f orts against al Qaeda, popular protests in the Middle East have dealt terrorist organizations another blow. T he Arab Spring has proved to be f ar more potent an instrument of change than suicide bombings. Even bef ore the death of Osama bin Laden, in 2011, the Pew Global Attitudes Project had recorded a sharp drop in those expressing "conf idence" in him: between 2003 and 2010, the f igure f ell f rom 46 percent to 18 percent in Pakistan, f rom 59 percent to 25 percent in Indonesia, and f rom 56 percent to 14 percent in Jordan. Even a small minority is enough to sustain a terrorist group, however, and al Qaeda has shown an impressive capacity to regenerate itself . Its af f iliates still operate f rom the Middle East to Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, other Islamist groups continue to show considerable strength in Af ghanistan and Pakistan, Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah holds sway in Lebanon, al Shabab bids f or power in Somalia, Boko Haram advances in Nigeria, and two newer groups, Ansar Dine and the Movement f or Unity and Jihad in West Af rica, have taken control of northern Mali. Notwithstanding bin Laden's death and other setbacks to al Qaeda central, the war against Islamist terrorism is f ar f rom won. T he 9/11 attacks serve as a reminder that seeming security against an invisible army can turn to vulnerability with shocking suddenness and that, unlike the more geographically restricted insurgents of the past, international terrorist groups, such as al Qaeda, can strike almost anywhere. SMALL WARS, BIG LESSONS T he long history of low-intensity conf lict reveals not only how ubiquitous guerrilla warf are has been but also how of ten its importance has been ignored, thus setting the stage f or f uture humiliations at the hands of determined irregulars. T he U.S. Army has a particularly dismaying record of f ailing to adapt to "small wars," despite its considerable experience f ighting Native Americans, Philippine insurrectos, the Vietcong, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and numerous other irregulars. To avoid similar calamities in the f uture, today's soldiers and policymakers need to accurately appraise the strengths and weaknesses of insurgents. It is important neither to underestimate nor to overestimate the potency of guerrilla warf are. Bef ore 1945, since irregulars ref used to engage in f ace-to-f ace battle, they were routinely underestimated. Af ter 1945, however, popular sentiment swung too f ar in the other direction, enshrining guerrillas as superhuman f igures. T he truth lies somewhere in between: insurgents have honed their craf t since 1945, but they still lose most of the time. T heir growing success is due to the spread of communications technology and the increasing inf luence of public opinion. Both f actors have sapped the will of states to engage in protracted counterinsurgencies, especially outside their own territories, and have heightened the ability of insurgents to survive even af ter suf f ering military setbacks. In the f ight against insurgents, conventional tactics don't work. To def eat them, soldiers must f ocus not on chasing guerrillas but on securing the local population. Still, ef f ective population-centric counterinsurgency is not as touchy-f eely as commonly supposed. It involves much more than winning "hearts and minds" -- a phrase invented by Sir Henry Clinton, a British general during the American Revolution, and popularized by Sir Gerald Templer, a general during the Malayan Emergency, in the late 1940s and 1950s. T he only way to gain control is to garrison troops 24 hours a day, seven days a week, among the civilians; periodic "sweep" or "cordon and search" operations f ail, even when conducted by counterinsurgents as cruel as the Nazis, because civilians know that the rebels will return the moment the soldiers leave. Although control can be imposed at gunpoint, it can be maintained only if the security f orces have some degree of popular legitimacy. In years past, it was not hard f or f oreign empires to gain the necessary legitimacy. But now, with nationalist sentiment having spread to every corner of the world, f oreign counterinsurgents, such as the United States, f ace a tricky task, trying to buttress homegrown regimes that can win the support of their people and yet will still cooperate with the United States. What makes counterinsurgency all the more dif f icult is that there are f ew quick victories in this type of conf lict. Since 1775, the average insurgency has lasted seven years (and since 1945, it has lasted almost ten years). Attempts by either insurgents or counterinsurgents to short-circuit the process usually backf ire. T he United States tried to do just that in the early years of both the Vietnam War and the Iraq

war by using its conventional might to hunt down guerrillas in a push f or what John Paul Vann, a f amous U.S. military adviser in Vietnam, rightly decried as "f ast, superf icial results." It was only when the United States gave up hopes of a quick victory, ironically, that it started to get results, by implementing the triedand-true tenets of population-centric counterinsurgency. In Vietnam, it was already too late, but in Iraq, the patient provision of security came just in time to avert an all-out civil war. T he experiences of the United States in Iraq in 2007-8, Israel in the West Bank during the second intif ada, the British in Northern Ireland, and Colombia in its ongoing f ight against the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) show that it is possible f or democratic governments to f ight insurgents ef f ectively if they pay attention to what the U.S. military calls "inf ormation operations" (also known as "propaganda" and "public relations") and implement some version of a population-centric strategy. But these struggles also show that one should never enter into counterinsurgency lightly. Such wars are best avoided if possible. Even so, it is doubtf ul that the United States will be able to avoid them in the f uture any more than it has in the past. Given the United States' demonstrations of its mastery of conventional combat in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, f ew adversaries in the f uture will be f oolish enough to put tank armies in the desert against an American f orce. Future f oes are unlikely, in other words, to repeat the mistake of nineteenth-century Asians and Af ricans who f ought European invaders in the pref erred Western style. Guerrilla tactics, on the other hand, are proven ef f ective, even against superpowers. In the f uture, irregulars might become deadlier still if they can get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction, especially a nuclear bomb. If that were to happen, a small terrorist cell the size of a platoon might gain more killing capacity than the entire army of a nonnuclear state. T hat is a sobering thought. It suggests that in the f uture, low-intensity conf lict could pose even greater problems f or the world's leading powers than it has in the past -- and those problems were already vexing enough. View T his Article as Multiple Pages