Brian Hughes and Fergus Robson - Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day

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Dr Brian Hughes

is NUI Research Fellow in the Humanities at An Foras Feasa, Maynooth University, Ireland and a historian of modern Ireland, specialising in civilian and grassroots experiences of conflict in revolutionary Ireland. His most recent book is Defying the IRA? Intimidation, Coercion, and Communities during the Irish Revolution (2016).

Dr Fergus Robson

is Associate Director of the Centre for War Studies and currently lectures on Napoleonic Europe in Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. He is a specialist on resistance and rebellion during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. His recent work on French soldiers cultural encounters with Italians and Egyptians complements his interest in the contested creation of national identities and states.

The entrance of US forces into Afghanistan in 2001, the joint USBritish invasion of Iraq from 2003, and the subsequent military and political difficulties that developed, have coincided with indeed encouraged a vigorous renewed interest in counterinsurgency operations after what might be viewed as several decades of relative neglect. In 2006, the US army published Field Manual 324 ( FM 324 ) as a doctrine for modern counterinsurgency (or COIN).

At the heart of this debate is a disagreement about the use of history in understanding unconventional war and strategizing in the present, and accusations that the past has been misunderstood or, worse, misrepresented by those drawing parallels and lessons for application in present conflicts. The extent to which lessons from the past can be applied to modern conflicts remains contested as scholars continue to examine the transferability of knowledge between campaigns.

The comparative element in much of this literature, and other work on insurgency and counterinsurgency, has remained, for the most part, temporally narrow and rooted heavily in the modern era. For those interested in modern British counterinsurgency, and also those encouraged to look backwards by its failures in the twenty-first century, there is a significant focusing of attention on the wars of decolonization after 1945, what has been described as the classic age of British counterinsurgency. But the history of this form of war goes back much further.

Military doctrine in eighteenth-century Europe did also, in fact, clearly identify small war, kleiner krieg , or la petite guerre in opposition to war as practised by field armies on campaign and fighting in set-piece battles and sieges. This understanding, however, referred not so much to insurgency but to the deployment of regulars in raiding, ambush, and reconnaissance: irregular operations. It was only during and after the wars of the French Revolution, in particular the Peninsular War, that the more modern notion of the guerrilla began to take shape. This was a direct consequence of the spectre, and myth, of the Spanish guerrilla as a national uprising, as well as a variety of contemporary conflicts and concomitant changes in the ways armies were understood, raised, deployed, and imagined. Carl von Clausewitz identified the phenomenon and he and others attempted to theorize it in light of the French leve en masse , the Spanish guerrilla, and the Russian and German national uprisings against the French. These resonances across centuries would seem to require the type of inquiry being undertaken in this volume, and an even longer temporal gaze.

As the contributions in this collection make clear, there is much to be gained by identifying continuities and change over the longue dure . Alexander Hodgkins points to the coherent mobilization and deployment strategies used by insurgents in East Anglia and Devon (Chapter A Great Company of Country Clowns: Guerrilla Warfare in the East Anglian and Western Rebellions (1549)) which are similarly evident in Raphalle Branches description of FLN policies in Algeria (Chapter The Best Fellagha Hunter is the French of North African Descent: Harkis in French Algeria) and Daniel Sutherlands evocation of the traditions and structures of guerrilla recruitment and action in Civil War United States (Chapter American Civil War Guerrillas). On the counterinsurgent side, the strong parallels between the ways in which (some) French commanders practised pacification in Fergus Robsons chapter (Chapter Insurgent Identities, Destructive Discourses, and Militarized Massacre: French Armies on the Warpath Against Insurgents in the Vende, Italy, and Egypt) and the soft COIN analysed by Julia Welland in Afghanistan (Chapter Gender and Population-centric Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan) emerge as striking evidence for a cyclical process of learning (and forgetting) effective repressive strategies. While the messiness and complexity of insurgencies and unconventional warfare are evident throughout this volume, Matthew Lloyd (Chapter Unorthodox Warfare? Variety and Change in Archaic Greek Warfare ( ca . 700 ca . 480 BCE)), Brian McGing (Chapter Guerrilla Warfare and Revolt in 2nd Century BC Egypt), Alastair Macdonald (Chapter Good King Roberts Testament?: Guerrilla Warfare in Later Medieval Scotland), and Sen Gannon (Chapter Black-and-Tan tendencies: policing insurgency in the Palestine Mandate, 192248), in particular, demonstrate the analytic flaws of binary models of Western-non-Western, conventional-unconventional, Scottish-English, and colonial counterinsurgency ways of war.