In most cases, civilized soldiers have defeated primitive warriors only when they adopted the latter’s tactics. In the history of European expansion, soldiers repeatedly had to abandon their civilized techniques and weaphons to win against even the more primitive opponents. The unorthodox techniques adopted were smaller, more mobile units; abandonment of artillery and use of lighter smaller arms; open formations and skirmishing tactics; increased reliance on ambushes, raids, and surprise attacks on settlements; destruction of the enemy’s economic infrastructure (habitations, foodstores, livestock, and means of transport); a strategy of attrition against the enemy manpower; relentless pursuit to take advantage of civilization’s superior logistics; and extensive use of natives as scouts and auxiliaries.
This is from Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, published in 1996, as quoted in Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety. Turchin goes on to write,
There is no question that civilized states almost always prevail against tribal warriors in the end, but they do so primarily because they are large-scale societies fighting small-scale societies. . .guerrillas simply avoid battles against the numerically and technologically superior government forces.
Both primitive warriors and modern guerrillas rely not on brute force but on mobility, stealth, and surprise.
And a few pages later,
The distinguishing characteristic of human combat is the ability to strike from a distance coupled with mobility.
Actually, on the topic of defeating ISIS, I confess to being to the dovish side of President Obama at this point. I think that an actual war to defeat ISIS would be bloody and brutal. Meanwhile, it strikes me as wrong to be engaging in acts of war with no formal declaration of war and at best a vague commitment to winning.
If the point of not sending in our people (I hate the term “boots on the ground”–as if we were talking about inanimate leather artifacts) is that this is someone else’s war, then I think that is an argument for staying out of it altogether. The counter-argument is that ISIS are really bad people, they could get worse before they get better, and some of their badness spills over into this country. Maybe the counter-argument is right, and I could see myself making it at some point. But as of this moment, I think that on balance the better policy is to avoid involvement altogether.
Separately, Amar Bhide arrives at the same conclusion, but by a slightly different route, stressing the evils of colonialism. I think Bhide assigns too much blame to colonial history, when there are also other sources of problems in the region. For example, I doubt that anyone would try to trace the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict to western imperialism.
“In most cases, civilized soldiers have defeated primitive warriors only when they adopted the latter’s tactics.”
Statements like these always concern me, though my lack of historical knowledge makes it hard to present an empirical case, because of selection bias.
1. A war only occurs (gets recorded) if there is significant resistance. The tactics of subjugated groups isn’t noted if it isn’t noteworthy.
2. If two groups are using the same tactics the larger one almost always wins, and usually pretty easily. Which leads to
3. The conflicts that are most likely to make it into history books are ones where two groups are using different tactics, and were the smaller/weaker group is doing surprisingly well. This forces the larger group to alter its tactics to make decisive gains.
The conclusion could well be the opposite of the conclusion above (though I am not stating that it is) and the distinguishing characteristic is brute force with the occasional circumstances that force a tactical change.
But it is also not suprising that when fighting small wars against tribes a power needs to use smaller units and looser formations. The big formations of civilised evolved in a competition with other, similar opponents one-upping each other. Fight tribals that faced no such evolution and the tradeoffs are different.
The modern trend though is towards individual remote targeting which reverses the tactics. Another approach is oblique, gathering local intelligence, assisting local opposition, remote targeting, and extended attrition, the problem knowing when to quit. Without local intelligence or opposition, it is probably best to stay out.
1. Louis L’Amour claimed that he really studied real history of the west and claimed that the native Americans killed more settlers than settlers killed native Americans but that there were much more settlers and they kept coming.
2. I think that it might be good to go into ISIS held territory with ground troops and get all the non-Muslims to safety maybe to Assad held territory and then leave and let and any captured ISIS soldiers go but I would never truest any of our politicians to do that so I say we should just get out completely.
In hindsight, I’m not convinced we had to militarily confront communism. Perhaps one of the most effective strategies against them (and ISIS) is to just give ground and let them fail.
A recent Planet Money story discussed some detailed ISIS budgets and they are basically unsustainable leeches dependent on plundering. I suspect it isn’t that scalable.
No argument about ISIS–they seem pretty wimpy in the greater scale of things, don’t they?
For the note on Communism, I always thought of the U.S. following more of a containment strategy there, too. People behind the Iron Curtian died by the tens of millions, and the ones that lived, lived in poverty. America kept its hands relatively clean while all this went on.
You could argue that Korea and Vietnam were wars against Communism, but those were smaller scale proxy wars, not a head-on confrontation. A head-on confrontation would likely have been the scale of World War II.
Coming back to ISIS: ISIS is killing by the thousands. That’s a lot in an sense, but it seems pretty tiny on a global scale.
In 1943, for instance, about three million people starved to death in Bengal.
Argh. From Wikipedia:
The winter 1942 ‘aman’ rice crop, which was already expected to be poor or indifferent,[13] was hit by a cyclone and three tidal waves in October. 450 square miles were swept by tidal waves, 400 square miles affected by floods and 3200 square miles damaged by wind and torrential rain. Reserve stocks in the hands of cultivators, consumers and dealers were destroyed. This killed 14,500 people and 190,000 cattle.[14] ‘The homes, livelihood and property of nearly 2.5 million Bengalis were ruined or damaged.’[15] A fungus causing the disease known as “brown spot”, hit the rice crop and this was reported to have had an even greater effect on yield than the cyclone.[16] The fungus, Helminthosporium oryzae, destroyed 50% to 90% of some rice varieties.[17]
Bengal had been a food importer for the last decade. Calcutta was normally supplied by Burma. The British Empire had suffered a disastrous defeat at Singapore in 1942 against the Japanese military, which then proceeded to invade Burma in the same year. Burma was the world’s largest exporter of rice in the inter-war period.[19] By 1940 15% of India’s rice overall came from Burma, while in Bengal the proportion was slightly higher given the province’s proximity to Burma.[20] After the Japanese occupation of Burma in March 1942, Bengal and the other parts of India and Ceylon, normally supplied by Burma, had to find food elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
Speaking of colonialism, I have read some rumors that Erdogan’s long term goal is to resurrect the Ottoman Empire. Seems like a reasonable way to handle the ISIS situation, if you ask me.
It would sure be nice of Erdogan to help us “handle the ISIS situation,” since he helped to get them started in the first place.
I see the US as the global cop, much like England before us. Without our role as cop, chaos will reign. We allowed ISIS to take over when we abandoned our cop role by leaving Iraq. Thus, we do need to commit ground troops, go back into Iraq, expand into Syria, and impose order in those nations, among others.
The world economy depends on the order created and enforced by the US. If we don’t do it, no one will.
The world economy depends on the order created and enforced by the US.
Then the thing just needs to burn.
Counterfactuals are always tricky. Jeff R’s long Wikipedia quote is intended to imply (i presume) the counterfactual that regardless of who was ruling India approximately the same number of people would have perished because there would have been the same dependence on Burmese rice, the same lack of alternative emergency alternative supplies, the same incapacity to provide the purchasing power in famine relief and so on. Lets say that beggars belief. Miraculously after the British left famines ceased — and long before there was a green revolution. (Amartya Sen has written a lot about this).
Re: Arnolds counterfactual — that the middle east would have been the same mess without western imperialism. Who knows? The point which I apparently did not make clearly enough is that in the absence of British and French colonialism there would not have been a pool of disgruntled second generation immigrants for the Indian subcontinent and North Africa respectively. Can i prove this counterfactual? No but its hard to imagine otherwise.
In a piece condemning European colonialism, this offhanded, one-sentence mention of the 1943 famine leaves the distinct impression in the minds of readers unfamiliar with the episode that it was entirely the fault of the European colonialists (presumably the British, although they aren’t actually named). Three million people dying slow, agonizing deaths is a sickening thought, whatever your politics, and so the people responsible must be absolute monsters, no?
Well, as those Wikipedia quotes were intended to demonstrate, the reality of the situation is just slightly more complicated than that, is it not?
I understand the general point you are trying to make: after centuries under the rule of the British monarchy, Britain itself was quite rich but its colonies were quite poor, due to the exploitative nature of their relationship. Fair enough. I just think the example you picked to demonstrate this point was something of a stretch.
I believe not. There is a considerable body of scholarly opinion (nothing is ever proven in these matters) that while the shock was exogenous (as per your Wikipedia quote) the absence of institutional buffers was not. Nor were the short term choices: Churchill is plausibly cast at the villain of the piece, which you must surely be aware of since its in the wikipedia entry you quoted:
By August 1943 Churchill refused to release shipping to send food to India.Initially during the famine he was more concerned with the civilians of Nazi-occupied Greece (who were also suffering from a famine) compared with the Bengalis,noting that the “starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks”
I think we should draft up the flowchart of hypothetical ISIS success and intervene at at all the points that don’t result in peaceful voice and exit.