Counterinsurgency: Theory and Reality

By Daniel Whittingham and Stuart Mitchell

An overview of modern Western militaries’ response to armed rebellion, from Indochina to Northern Ireland to Iraq.
 
Counterinsurgency—or efforts to defeat and confine a rebellion against a constituted authority—has become a buzzword in recent times, but the term is as old as society itself. This concise history covers the development of modern counterinsurgency over the last two hundred years, from the concept of “small wars” and colonial warfare to the ideas of early insurgents like Clausewitz and the theories of Lawrence of Arabia to the methods of twentieth-century insurgents including Mao and Che Guevara.
 
It also examines a number of post-1945 insurgencies and how Western armies have tried to counter them, in particular the French in Indochina and Algeria, as well as the United States in Vietnam and the reaction to the American experience there. This is compared with the British approach in the years after World War II, particularly in Malaya, but also in Kenya and Northern Ireland. Against this backdrop, there is an investigation of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of COIN literature, and the subsequent backlash against that literature—and finally, a discussion of the future of COIN.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Casemate Publishers
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781612009490

Daniel Whittingham

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.

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CHAPTER

1

The Roots of Counterinsurgency

The Origins of ‘Small War’

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