Guerrilla warfare

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Guerrilla War redirects here. See also Guerrilla War (arcade game).

Guerrilla (also called a partisan) is a term borrowed from Spanish ("guerra" meaning "war" and "guerrilla" meaning "little war") used to describe small combat groups. Guerrilla warfare operates with small, mobile and flexible combat groups called cells, without a front line. Guerrilla warfare is one of the oldest forms of asymmetric warfare. Primary contributors to modern theories of guerrilla war include Mao Zedong, Wendell Fertig, Regis Debray, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Che Guevara. Later students of guerrilla warfare included Swiss Major Hans von Dach who wrote the now widely available Swiss Army field manual "Total Resistance". While "asymmetric warfare" is the military term for guerrilla tactics, in present times when abhorent tactics are commonly used, it is often referred to in the pejorative as "terrorism".

Contents

Etymology

The term was invented in Spain to describe the tactics used to resist the French regime instituted by Napoleon Bonaparte (one should remember, however, that the tactics themselves were known and used even centuries earlier). The Spanish word means "little war". The Spanish word for guerrilla fighter is guerrillero. The change of usage from the tactics to the person implementing them is a late 19th century mistake. In most languages the word still denotes the style of warfare. However this is changing under the influence of the English usage.

Tactics

Guerrilla tactics are based on ambush, sabotage, and espionage, and their ultimate objective is usually to destabilize an authority through long, low-intensity confrontation. It can be quite successful against an unpopular foreign regime: a guerrilla army may increase the cost of maintaining an occupation or a colonial presence above what the foreign power may wish to bear.

However, guerrilla warfare has generally been unsuccessful against native regimes, which have nowhere to retreat to and are highly knowledgeable about their own people, their society and culture. The rare examples of successful guerrilla warfare against a native regime include the Cuban Revolution and the Chinese Civil War, as well as the Sandinista overthrow of a military dictatorship in Nicaragua. More common are the unsuccessful examples of guerrilla warfare, which include Malaysia, Bolivia, Argentina, and the Philippines. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), fighting for an independent homeland in the north and east of Sri Lanka, achieved significant military successes against the Sri Lankan military and the government itself for twenty years. It was even able to use these tactics effectively against the IPKF forces sent by India in the mid 1980s, which was later withdrawn due to varied reasons, primarily political. The mutual attrition on both sides in the island led to a ceasefire following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Guerrillas in wars against foreign powers do not principally direct their attacks at civilians, as they desire to obtain as much support as possible from the population as part of their tactics. Civilians are primarily attacked or assassinated as punishment for collaboration. Often such an attack will be officially sanctioned by guerrilla command or tribunal. An exception is in civil wars, where both guerrilla groups and organized armies have been known to commit atrocities against the civilian population.

Mao Zedong during the Chinese civil war, condensed guerrilla warfare into the following points for his troops;

The enemy advances, we retreat. The enemy camps, we harass. The enemy tires, we attack. The enemy retreats, we pursue.

Michael Collins of the IRA, who orchestrated the Anglo-Irish war of 1919-1921 had a more succinct principal behind his campaign of intelligence, assassination, and propaganda: create "bloody mayhem". Later assasinated by Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army forces.

Guerrillas are often characterised as terrorists by their opponents, as part of psychological warfare. Guerrillas are in danger of not being recognized as lawful combatants because they may not wear a uniform, (to mingle with the local population), or their uniform and distinctive emblems may not be recognised as such by their opponents. Article 44, sections 3 and 4 of the 1977 First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, "relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts", does recognise combatants who, due to the nature of the conflict, do not wear uniforms as long as they carry their weapons openly during military operations. This gives non-uniformed guerrillas lawful combatant status against countries that have ratified this convention.

Guerrilla warfare is classified into two main categories: urban guerrilla warfare and rural guerrilla warfare. In both cases, guerrillas rely on a friendly population to provide supplies and intelligence. Rural guerrillas prefer to operate in regions providing plenty of cover and concealment, especially heavily forested and mountainous areas. Urban guerrillas, rather than melting into the mountains and jungles, blend into the population and are also dependent on a support base among the people. When guerrilla fighters, particularly foreigners recruited and transported to the site of a conflict, have occupied a town and are coercing the population into cooperation or submission, they can be more properly characterized as terrorists, as they qualified as mercenaries.

Foreign support in the form of soldiers, weapons, sanctuary, or, at the very least, statements of sympathy for the guerrillas can greatly increase the chances of victory for an insurgency. However, it is not always necessary.

Maoist theory of people's war divides warfare into three phases. In the first phase, the guerrillas gain the support of the population through attacks on the machinery of government and the distribution of propaganda. In the second phase, escalating attacks are made on the government's military and vital institutions. In the third phase, conventional fighting is used to seize cities, overthrow the government and take control of the country.

Guerrilla Tactics were summarized into the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla in 1969 by Carlos Marighella. This text was banned in several countries including the United States. This is probably the most comprehensive and informative book on guerrilla strategy ever published, and is available free online. Texts by Che Guevara and Mao Zedong on guerrilla warfare are also available.

John Keats wrote about an American guerrilla leader in World War 2: Colonel Wendell Fertig, who in 1942 organized a large force of guerrillas who harassed the Japanese occupation forces on the Philippine Island of Mindanao all the way up to the liberation of the Philippines in 1945. His abilities were later utilized by the United States Army, when Fertig helped found the United States Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Others included COL Aaron Bank and COL Russell Volckmann. Volckmann, in particular, commanded a guerrilla force which operated out of the Cordillera of Northern Luzon, in the Philippines from the beginning of World War II to its conclusion. He remained in radio contact with US Forces, prior to the invasion of Lingayen Gulf. Banks and Volckmann, founders of Special Forces

Russell Volckmann, We Remained.

Guerrilla warfare sometimes involves surrounding nations, which are affected by a popular uprising against the neighbouring government. A case in point was the Mukti Bahini guerrillas who fought alongside the Indian Army in the 14-day Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 against Pakistan that resulted in the creation of the state of Bangladesh.

Examples

Examples of successful guerrilla warfare:

In many cases, guerrilla tactics allow a small force to hold off a much larger and better equipped enemy for a long time, as in the Second Chechen War and the Second Seminole War.

Guerrillas in Europe

Introduction

The well-known first aspects of guerrilla warfare occurred in what is now Israel with the guerrilla leader Judas Maccabaeus, described in the books of Maccabees in the Apocrypha in the Bible. For years he fought off the Seleucids. In centuries of history, many guerrilla movements appeared in Europe to fight foreign occupation forces. The tactics of Roman dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus against Hannibal could be considered a predecessor of guerrilla tactics. In expanding their own Empire, the Romans encountered numerous examples of guerrilla resistance to their legions. During The Deluge in Poland guerrilla tactics were applied. In the 19th century, peoples of the Balkans used guerrilla tactics to fight the Ottoman empire. In 17th century Ireland, Irish irregulars called tories and rapparees used guerrilla warfare in the Irish Confederate Wars and the Williamite war in Ireland. In India in the 17th Century an Indian self-proclaimed leader and king "Shivaji Bhonsle" revolted against the ruling Mughal using guerrilla tactics.

Europe 1800-1900

Napoleonic Wars

In the Napoleonic Wars many of the armies lived off the land. This often led to some resistance by the local population if the army did not pay fair prices for produce they consumed. Usually this resistance was sporadic, and not very successful, so is not classified as guerrilla action. There are three notable exceptions though:

  • The rebellion in the Tyrol of 1809 led by Andréas Hofer.
  • In Napoleon's invasion of Russia of 1812 two actions were ordered by Tsar Alexander which could be seen as initiating guerrilla tactics. The Burning of Moscow after it had been occupied by the Napoleon's Grand Army, so depriving the French of shelter in the city, is a classic guerrilla action. The second was his imperial command that the Russian serfs should attack the French. This did not so much spark a guerrilla war as encourage a revengeful slaughter.
  • In the Peninsular War the British gave aid to the Spanish guerrillas who tied down tens of thousands of French troops. The British gave this aid because it cost them much less than it would have done to equip British soldiers to face the French troops in conventional warfare. This was one of the most successful partisan wars in history and is the origin of the word guerrilla in the English language.
Others

In 1848, both The Nation and The United Irishman advocated guerilla warfare to overthrow English rule in Ireland.

The Poles used guerrilla warfare during the January Uprising.

Europe 1900 – 2000

Anglo–Irish War

The wars between Ireland and the United Kingdom have been long and over the centuries have covered the full spectrum of the types of warfare. The Irish fought the first successful 20th century war of independence against the British Empire and the United Kingdom. After the military failure of the Easter Rising in 1916, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) resorted to guerrilla tactics involving both urban warfare and flying columns in the countryside during the Anglo-Irish War (War of Independence) of 1919 to 1921. The British security forces were fought to a standstill and the government of the UK agreed to meet representatives of the Irish uprising to negotiate a settlement. The settlement which resulted — the Anglo-Irish Treaty — satisfied few. It created the Irish Free State of 26 counties as a dominion in the British Empire; the other 6 counties remained part of the UK. The IRA fought an unsuccessful Civil War (1921-23) against the Irish free staters using tactics similar to those used against the British but lost. The partition of Ireland laid the seeds for the later troubles.

World War II

In World War II, several guerrilla organisations (often known as resistance movements) operated in the countries occupied by Nazi Germany. These included the Polish Home Army, Soviet partisans, Yugoslav Partisans, Bulgarian NOVA ,French resistance or Maquis, Italian partisans, ELAS and royalist forces in Greece. Many of these organisations received help from the Special Operations Executive (SOE) which along with the commandos was initiated by Winston Churchill to ""set Europe ablaze". The SOE was originally designated as 'Section D' of MI6 but its aid to resistance movements to start fires clashed with MI6's primary role as an intelligence gathering agency. When Britain was under threat of invasion, SOE created Auxiliary Units to conduct guerrilla warfare in the event of invasion. Not only did SOE help the resistance to tie down many German units as garrison troops, so directly aiding the conventional war effort, but also guerrilla incidents in occupied countries were useful in the propaganda war, helping to repudiate German claims that the occupied countries were pacified and broadly on the side of the Germans. When the USA entered the war the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) co-operated and enhanced the work of SOE as well as working on its own initiatives in the Far East.

Japans invasion of China also prompted guerilla activity in rural areas of occupied China.

Post World War II

After World War II, during 1940s and 1950s, thousands of fighters in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania participated in unsuccessful guerrilla warfare against Soviet occupation.

In the late 1960s the Troubles started in Northern Ireland. They had their seeds in the Anglo-Irish War, and came to an end with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in the mid-1990s (1998). The peace is fragile and it is too early to tell if a permanent end to the conflict has occurred and which group, if any, won. Although both loyalist and republican paramilitaries carried out terrorist atrocities against civilians which were often tit-for-tat, a case can be made for saying that attacks such as the Provisional IRA carried out on British soldiers at Warrenpoint in 1979 was a well planned guerrilla ambush [1]. The Provisional IRA, Loyalist paramilitaries and various anti-Good Friday Agreement splinter-groups could be called guerrillas but are usually called terrorists by both the British and Irish governments. The news media such as the BBC and CNN will often use the term "gunmen" as in "IRA gunmen" [2] or "Loyalist gunmen" [3] committed a "terrorist" act. Since 1995 CNN also uses guerrilla as in "IRA guerrilla" and "Protestant guerrilla" [4]. Reuters, in accordance with its principle of not using the word terrorist except in direct quotes, refers to "guerrilla groups"[5].

Europe post-2000

Currently, the Basque ETA and Corsican FLNC and other groups such as the Greek Marxist Revolutionary Organization 17 November claim to be guerrillas, but are commonly recognized as terrorists since they almost exclusively murder civilians instead of attacking legitimate military targets, and this is how the governments and media of their respective countries prefer to refer to them.

The ongoing war between pro-independence groups in Chechnya and the Russian government is currently the most active guerrilla war in Europe. Most of the incidents reported by the Western news media are very gory terrorist acts against Russian civilians committed by Chechen separatists outside Chechnya. However, within Chechnya the war has many of the characteristics of a classic guerrilla war. See the article History of Chechnya for more details.

Guerrillas in the American Revolutionary War

While the American Revolutionary War is often thought of as a guerrilla war, guerrilla tactics were uncommon, and almost all of the battles involved conventional set-piece battles. Some of the confusion may be due to the fact that generals George Washington and Nathaniel Greene successfully used a strategy of harassment and progressively grinding down British forces instead of seeking a decisive battle, in a classic example of asymmetric warfare. Nevertheless the theater tactics used by most of the American forces were those of conventional warfare. One of the exceptions was in the south, where the brunt of the war was upon militia forces who fought the enemy British troops and their Loyalist supporters, but used concealment, surprise, and other guerrilla tactics to much advantage. General Francis Marion of South Carolina, who often attacked the British at unexpected places and then would fade into the swamps by the time the British were able to get organized enough to return fire, was named by them The Swamp Fox. However, even in the south, most of the major engagements were set-piece battles of conventional warfare. See also Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, for another Revolutionary example.

Guerrillas in the American Civil War

Irregular warfare in the American Civil War followed the strictures of irregular warfare in 19th century Europe. Structually, irregular warfare can be divided into three different types conducted during the Civil War: 'People's War', 'partisan warfare', and 'raiding warfare'. The concept of 'People's war,' first described by Clausewitz in On War, was the closest example of a mass guerrilla movement in the era. In general, this type of irregular warfare was conducted in the hinterland of the Border States (Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and northwestern Virginia), and was marked by a vicious neighbor against neighbor quality. One such example was the opposing irregular forces operating in Missouri and northern Arkansas from 1862 to 1865, most of which were pro-Confederate or pro-Union in name only and preyed on civilians and isolated military forces of both sides with little regard of politics. From these semi-organized guerrillas, several groups formed and were given some measure of legitimacy by their governments. Quantrill's Raiders, who terrorized pro-Union civilians and fought Federal troops in large areas of Missouri and Kansas, was one such unit. Another notorious unit, with debatable ties to the Confederate military, was led by Champ Ferguson along the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Ferguson became one of the only figures of Confederate cause to be executed after the war. Dozens of other small, localized bands terrorized the countryside throughout the border region during the war, bringing total war to the area that lasted until the end of the Civil War and, in some areas, beyond.

Partisan warfare, in contrast, more closely resembles Commando operations of the Twentieth Century. Partisans were small units of conventional forces, controlled and organized by a military force for operations behind enemy lines. The 1862 Partisan Ranger Act passed by the Confederate Congress authorized the formation of these units and gave them legitimacy, which placed them in a different category than the common 'bushwhacker' or 'guerrilla'. John Singleton Mosby formed a partisan unit during the American Civil War, which was very effective in tying down Federal forces behind Union lines in northern Virginia in the last two years of the war.

Lastly, deep raids by conventional cavalry forces were often considered 'irregular' in nature. The "Partisan Brigades" of Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Hunt Morgan operated as part of the cavalry forces of the Confederate Army of Tennessee in 1862 and 1863. They were given specific missions to destroy logistical hubs, railroad bridges, and other strategic targets to support the greater mission of the Army of Tennessee. By mid-1863, with the destruction of Morgan's raiders during the Great Raid of 1863, the Confederacy conducted few deep cavalry raids in the latter years of the war, mostly due to the losses in experienced horsemen and the offensive operations of the Union army. Federal cavalry conducted several successful raids during the war but in general used their cavalry forces in a more conventional role. A good exception was the 1863 Grierson's Raid, which did much to set the stage for General Ulysses S. Grant's victory during the Vicksburg Campaign.

Federal counter-guerrilla operations were very successful in preventing the success of Confederate guerrilla warfare. In Arkansas, Federal forces used a wide variety of strategies to defeat irregulars. These included the use of Arkansas Unionist forces as anti-guerrilla troops, the use of riverine forces such as gunboats to control the waterways, and the provost marshal military law enforcement system to spy on suspected guerrillas and to imprison those captured. Against Confederate raiders, the Federal army developed an effective cavalry themselves and reinforced that system by a large number of blockhouses and fortification to defend strategic targets. Federal attempts to defeat Mosby's Partisan Rangers fell short of success due to Mosby's use of very small units (10–15 men) operating in areas considered friendly to the Rebel cause.

In the late 20th century several historians have focused on the non-use of guerrilla warfare to prolong the war. Near the end of the war, there were those in the Confederate government, namely Jefferson Davis who advocated continuing the southern fight as a guerrilla conflict. He was opposed by generals such as Robert E. Lee who ultimately believed that surrender and reconciliation were better than guerrilla warfare.

Guerrillas in Latin America

In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Latin America had a number of urban guerrilla movements whose strategy was to destabilize regimes and provoke a counter-reaction by the military. The theory was that a harsh military regime would oppress the middle classes who would then support the guerrillas and create a popular uprising.

While these movements did destabilize governments, such as Argentina, Uruguay, Guatemala, and Peru to the point of military intervention, the military generally proceeded to completely wipe out the guerrilla movements, usually committing several atrocities among both civilians and armed insurgents in the process.

Several other left-wing guerrilla movements, often backed by Cuba and/or the Soviet Union, attempted to overthrow US-backed right-wing military dictatorships, whilst US-backed Contra guerrillas attempted to overthrow the left-wing elected Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

Guerrillas and the Vietnam War

Within the United States, the Vietnam War is commonly thought of as a guerrilla war. However this is a simplification of a much more complex situation which followed the pattern outlined by Maoist theory.

The National Liberation Front (NLF), drawing its ranks from the South Vietnamese peasantry and working class, used guerrilla tactics in the early phases of the war. However, by 1965 when U.S. involvement escalated, the National Liberation Front was in the process of being supplanted by regular units of the North Vietnamese Army.

The NVA regiments organized along traditional military lines, were supplied via the Ho Chi Minh trail rather than living off the land, and had access to weapons such as tanks and artillery which are not normally used by guerrilla forces.

Over time, more of the fighting was conducted by the North Vietnamese Army and the character of the war become increasingly conventional. The final offensive into South Vietnam in 1975 was a completely conventional military operation with no elements of guerrilla warfare.

By the end of the Vietnam War, U.S.-led forces had killed or incapacitated a large share of the NLF's guerrilla fighters.

Guerrilla warfare in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Kurdish Northern Iraq

Guerrilla warfare formed an integral part of the US/NATO military campaigns in Kosovo in the late 1990s and Afghanistan in 2001, which created a unique style of warfare which combined low technology guerrilla warfare with high technology air power. In these campaigns, guerrilla fighters with coordination from special forces would engage the enemy forcing them to move out into the open where they could be destroyed using air power supplied by the United States. In both cases, the guerrillas were able to take advantage of their local knowledge and willingness to take casualties to great effect when supplemented by outside air power. In Kosovo the Kosovo Liberation Army, a separatist paramilitary, was aided by the NATO air forces. In Afghanistan numerous anti-Taliban militias (consisting of regular soldiers and guerrillas), including the Afghan Northern Alliance, were aided by US air power. This formula was used again, in War on Iraq, against the Iraqi Army by Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas with the aid of U.S. special forces and the U.S. Air Force.

References

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See also

External links

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