Gregory Fremont-Barnes - A History of Counterinsurgency [2 volumes]

A History of
Counterinsurgency

Volume 1

From South Africa to Algeria,
1900 to 1954

GREGORY FREMONT-BARNES,
EDITOR

Praeger Security International

Copyright 2015 by Gregory Fremont-Barnes

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A history of counterinsurgency / Gregory Fremont-Barnes, editor.

pages cm. (Praeger security international)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9781440804243 (hardcopy : alk. paper) ISBN 9781440804250 (ebook) 1. CounterinsurgencyHistory. I. Fremont-Barnes, Gregory, editor.

U241.H572015

355.021809dc232014037384

ISBN: 9781440804243

EISBN: 9781440804250

191817161512345

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Gregory Fremont-Barnes

Gregory Fremont-Barnes

Simon Robbins

Matthew Hughes

Simon Robbins

Karl Hack

Yannick Veilleux-Lepage and Jan Fedorowicz

Peter McCutcheon

Readers, particularly those accustomed to British English, should note that this publication follows the Chicago Manual of Style for capitalization and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary for hyphenation.

The Chicago Manual of Style capitalizes only the formal names of armies, navies, etc. Words such as army and navy are lowercased when standing alone or when not part of an official name. Titles and offices are capitalized when they immediately precede a personal name but are lowercased when following a name or used in the place of a name. Political divisions (empire, republic, etc.) are capitalized when they follow a name and are used as an accepted part of the name but lowercased when used alone. When preceding a name, these terms are capitalized in the names of countries but lowercased in entities below the national level.

Gregory Fremont-Barnes

Conventional armies have long maintained an aversion to counterinsurgency. Most of their doctrine, training, ethos, and experience reflect their preference for engaging in operations against enemies trained and armed more or less like themselves and for employing similar tactics. Even after 1945, Western strategists, though confronted by the numerous wars of decolonization and others involving elements of asymmetric warfare, felt they understood the challenges of conventional war fighting, whether in Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands, or the Gulf, and consequently looked in dread at the alternative offered by counterinsurgency. In short, armies are conservative institutions, which by definition do not embrace change happily; insurgency offers challenges with which even the most sophisticated forces cannot easily cope. The uncomfortable reality remains that most wars are unconventional, low-intensity conflicts, which by their nature are usually protracted, are financially burdensome, seldom terminate with a clear-cut victor, and more often than not erode the reputations of senior officers and the forces under their command. Historically, insurgencies have been viewed as ungentlemanly, the preserve of uncivilized foes, which in many cases have forced upon conventional armies frustrating operating environments with inconclusive results marking the outcome of intermittent fighting.

Insurgency and counterinsurgency do not constitute new forms of warfare, for in their modern manifestations their roots may be traced back to the nineteenth century, with guerrilla operations themselves enjoying a long historical legacy dating back to ancient times. The British and French are best acquainted with modern counterinsurgency, whose features as we know them today began to emerge out of the formers experience in South Africa, when guerrilla operations replaced the conventional phase of the Anglo-Boer War during the second year of that conflict. Nevertheless, the roots of modern counterinsurgency may be said to stretch back a century, to the late eighteenth century, for with the growth of revolution and nationalism war became increasingly the mechanism by which disenfranchised or oppressed groups sought to achieve a new political order without the application of conventional force, in combination with elements of terrorism, propaganda, and subversionin short, all the features of insurgency with which we are familiar today. War wedded to an ideology and pursued by peoples rather than sovereigns, obliged governments, and their armed forces to adapt to new circumstances and to develop principles of counterinsurgency, which would heavily influence the methods later employed in the twentieth century and beyond.

Three notable instances, all involving the French, predate the period on which the present study focuses, yet each reveals a number of characteristics consistent with those featured in COIN operations of more recent times. A brief look at these case studies is therefore instructive: the suppression of the revolt in the Vende from 1793 to 1795, the antiguerrilla operations in Spain and Portugal between 1808 and 1813, and the conquest of Algeria between 1830 and 1847.

The French Revolution, the first modern ideological movement, may be seen as the mainspring of modern insurgency and counterinsurgency, for it unleashed ideas of popular resistance and the concept of the citizen soldier that heavily influenced the conduct of the armies of revolutionary and Napoleonic Franceand yet paradoxically sparked a spirit of resistance among its enemies. Thus, hardly had the armies of the revolution begun to confront the royalist armies of Austria, Prussia, and the Holy Roman Empire than in 1793 troops of the French Republic converged on the western region known as the Vende to suppress a rising of conservative peasants and their clergy, many of whom desired the return of monarchism, strongly supported the primacy of the Catholic faith, and opposed the abolition of conscription and other initiatives emanating from Paris but anathema to many rural Frenchmen.

By the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of November 1790, priests were obliged to swear an oath of allegiance to the government, in violation of the principle of the primacy of the Catholic Church to appoint its own clergy. For the scattered, isolated rural communities of western France, the church represented an institution of unity and conservative continuity, as well as a symbol of regional identity. Officials sent from Paris at best met a frosty reception at best and violence at worst. The governments efforts at de-Christianizing the region only exacerbated an already fraught situation, which pitted an anticlerical and radical urban movement against a deeply conservative, religious rural community wishing to carry on the traditions of previous generations. In the poverty-stricken Vende, moreover, seigneurial dues had historically not been burdensome, and thus more equitable taxation formed a prominent feature of their objection to revolutionary reforms that rendered the peasantry worse off than under the