Tropic of Chaos (5 page)

In others words, COIN, or small-wars theory, means social mutilation. If militarized adaptation means more low-intensity conflict, and if Pentagon soothsayers see irregular warfare, rather than conventional conflicts, as central to the world remade by climate change, then we must review the history of these methods in theory and practice.

Reviewing the history of America's small wars, three distinct phases emerge. From the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, asymmetrical wars formed part of the European imperial conquest of the Global South and the colonial policing that followed. In this phase, traditional societies fought for the continuation of their traditional lifeways. For them, asymmetrical warfare was essentially defensive action against invaders. The Zulu warriors in what is now South Africa, the Plains Indians of the American West, and the Pashtun tribal columns that attacked the British in the nineteenth century all waged their guerilla wars to defend old social orders, not to promote new ones.

Then, from the 1920s through the 1990s, small wars became increasingly (but not always) characterized by ideologically motivated insurgencies. Yes, poor peasants fought because they had grievances—too much exploitation—but the ideological and political aspects of the wars were crucial in articulating those grievances. The colonial and former colonial powers essentially fought defensive counterinsurgencies against these communist or nationalist liberation struggles that had modernizing aspirations and leaders driven by new ideas, people like Augusto Sandino, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh. All of these movements had welldeveloped, if sometimes flawed, theories about society.

With the end of the Cold War, asymmetrical conflict and counterinsurgency has become less ideological and certainly less intellectual. Now
insurgent movements are increasingly motivated by simple loot, survival, or irredentist and conservative, backward-looking ideas that almost always, upon examination, reflect simplistic moral philosophies rather than social theories.
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Or they have no ideas at all. The Taliban are an example, as are the various guerrilla armies of West and Central Africa, like the truly insane and now-defunct Revolutionary United Front that maimed, raped, and looted across Sierra Leone for eleven years starting in 1991; or the Lord's Resistance Army, a still-active, genocidal cult-militia of child soldiers that rampages through parts of Uganda; or the postideological gangster remnants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

One military intellectual, writing in the Army War College's journal
Parameters‚
recognized this third, post-ideological phase as part of a historical transformation away from growing stability toward increasing chaos: “Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, this process has been one of increasing law and order that led to prosperity for many Western nation-states, their public institutions, and their peoples. The cycle now may be shifting away from stability toward chaos, suggesting that the nation-state may be entering a period in which its usefulness as a concept for organizing societies will be severely challenged. . . . We may expect increasing chaos during the shift from what has been called the ‘modern' era to its successor.”
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The “successor” age—if climate-change mitigation and progressive adaptation are not embraced—will be that described by James Woolsey: civilization in decline, opened-ended counterinsurgency, a rising tide of violence.

Native Americans were early on subjected to a project of simple brutality at the hands of settlers, but later the US government fashioned a project of assimilation and pacification that was pseudoscientific and pseudohumanitarian in its discourse. The “civilization” program imposed upon the Cherokee served as an early example of this. “They must either change their mode of life, or they must die!” railed one anti-Cherokee US senator.
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The Cherokee chose the former.

Something like modern counterinsurgency characterized wars against the Plains Indians during the 1860s and 1870s. The American army beat the Sioux in part by imitating them: small, light, mobile cavalry units replaced large infantry formations, cutting the army's dependence on long, vulnerable supply trains. The mounted detachments worked closely with Indian scouts and mercenaries, typically from the Crow and Arikaras nations. At times, these small, mobile army units were bested or, in the case of General George A. Custer, annihilated.

The imitation of Indian methods was of course bolstered by the American military's superior firepower, transportation, and communications—that is, by America's industrial might. A crucial terrain of the warfare was economic. Native American hunting was restricted as the buffalo were exterminated, in part for their fur, in part to deny sustenance to the renegade bands that refused reservation life. Final victory over the Sioux came when Nelson Miles, out to avenge Custer, used the arrival of winter, which limited the Indians' mobility and access to food, to force the Sioux onto reservations. Once confined there, the Indians were subjected to all the methods of modern statecraft: identification, regimentation, surveillance, religious indoctrination, wage labor, money, ledgers, fines, military courts, and jails. The reservations were “total institutions” as defined by sociologist Erving Goffman. And as such, they destroyed, or remade, Indian culture and subjectivity.

In New Mexico, as General George Crook pioneered the use of small counterguerrilla patrols to harass Geronimo's Apache warriors, he also set up a system of mountaintop mirrors that communicated in a type of semaphore; this expanded his informational control over a wide area of intensely rugged terrain.
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Railroads, telegraphs, barbed wire, propaganda, ideological indoctrination, photography, legal legerdemain, fast-action repeating rifles, and Hotchkiss light field artillery all gave those brutal campaigns of subjugation a modern profile. Call it the prehistory of the Predator drone.

Thus, in the Indian wars, as in modern antiguerrilla campaigns, the military targeted civilians: attacking villages, burning crops, taking women
and children hostage, and concentrating the refugee populations at military forts so as to better watch over them. Divide-and-conquer tribalism was also fomented to facilitate in-fighting and the creation of local Indian auxiliaries. Recall, Sitting Bull was killed by his own former warriors turned reservation police.
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The plains wars produced no written doctrine or theory of pacification, but British officers, facing similar tasks at the end of the nineteenth century in the African, Indian, and Southeast Asian domains of the Crown, did write about their methods. As John A. Nagl lays out in his classic
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam
, the British officers, far away from their government, were often unable to receive instruction. Thus, they had to apply themselves to the study and development of new tactics.

The first classic in this genre was
The Defensive Duffers Drift
by Major General Sir Ernest Swinton. A strange little volume,
Duffers Drift
describes Swinton's experience as a young captain leading a British company in the Boer War. The book is arranged as a five-part dreamscape of interconnected and repeating nightmares. In each, the Boers trick and attack Swinton in new and more devious ways. Each nightmare is followed by a list of lessons, which grow more ruthless with each repetition of the cycle.
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Realizing that he is fighting not only guerrillas but a whole people, Swinton concludes, “There are no
flanks,
no
rear,
or, to put it otherwise, it is
front all round.
”
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From this he concludes, never trust the locals; detain them, burn their farms, and starve them out, the women and children included. Attack their social fabric, for that is what the guerillas depend on.

Later works include Charles Caldwell's
Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice
and Charles Gwyn's
Imperial Policing.
Both helped establish core features of counterinsurgency doctrine—minimal use of force, civilian and military coordination, development of proxy forces—but they lack the trippy, laudanum-laced quality of
Duffers Drift
.

For American forces, small-war tactics matured considerably with the rise of the so-called banana wars. Between the late 1890s and the late 1930s, US military forces intervened in Chile, Haiti, Hawaii, Nicaragua, China, Panama, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and many other places. All of these conflicts were more or less irregular and asymmetrical and entailed controlling the civilian population rather than annihilating a conventional force.

The order of the day was measured violence, small-unit tactics, mobility, cultural and psychological warfare, and the modern methods of administration, regulation, and surveillance. Detainees, often civilians, were concentrated in camps; checkpoints and official identification documents controlled civilian movement. At times these campaigns involved destroying the enemy's means of sustenance; burning whole villages was routine practice. Hungry civilians then became dependent on the food handouts, or “modern” economic-development programs, of the occupiers, and the areas of the guerrilla operations were effectively depopulated.
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Central to victory was the creation and training of local auxiliary forces. When the Marines pulled out, they wanted to count on the local constabulary,
guardia civil
, or gendarmerie to repress any reformist politicians, trade unionists, nationalists, or socialists who might seek to upset the existing order by taxing foreign business and redistributing wealth.
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This use of ethnic minorities to divide and conquer has been dubbed “ethnoliberation opportunism” by anthropologist Philippe Bourgeois. It occurs again and again in small wars—examples include the CIA's use of mountain tribes in Laos during the Vietnam War; the arming of mujahideen mercenaries against the Soviets during the Afghan jihad of the 1980s; and now the development of Shia death squads and the Sunni based
Safwa
militia in Iraq.
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Cultivating these proxies almost always means cultivating criminals and fanatics. Their names from the Cold War include Brooklyn Rivera in Nicaragua, Joseph Savimbi in Angola, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan. These useful sociopaths are
never easy to control and when they have served their purpose as proxies, they are let go to wander violently across the landscapes of their own societies.

From the US Marine Corps' banana wars in the Caribbean and Latin America came a book, the
Small Wars Manual
, published in 1940. By that point, the Marines had some experience to draw on. As the manual's first edition noted, “The Marine Corps has landed troops 180 times in 37 countries from 1800 to 1934. Every year during the past 36 years since the Spanish-American War, the Marine Corps has been engaged in active operations in the field.”
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Small wars were constant and ongoing.

The Marines' small-war methods tended to combine carrot and stick, terror and reconciliation. Violence was applied to dislodge the authority of the rebels or the offending government. The Marines burned crops and homes, took prisoners, and terrorized the common people. Smedley Butler said that his troops burned down most of northern Haiti. Official reports used subtler language to describe the same: “Troops in the field have declared and carried on what is commonly known as ‘open season,' where care is not taken to determine whether or not the natives encountered are bandits or ‘good citizens' and warehouses have been ruthlessly burned merely because they were unoccupied and native property otherwise destroyed.”
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Once populations had submitted, however, they were permitted to return to their normal lives and economic activities.
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The Nation
described it more bluntly: “U.S. Marines landed in Haiti, seized the gold in the National Bank, took over the customs-houses, closed the legislative assembly, and refused payment of salaries to Haitian officials who refused to do the white man's will.”
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Butler, a veteran of many small wars, put it even more directly: “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short I was a racketeer for capitalism.” Butler said he had “helped in the raping of a half dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”
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In 1952 the US military created the Special Forces. With this development, counterinsurgency became further institutionalized and more clearly associated with a political doctrine of defending capitalism. A few years later, Ernesto Che Guevara published
Guerrilla Warfare‚
which is similar to the
Small Wars Manual
in that it is full of practical, even commonsense advice: “Movement by night is another important characteristic of the guerrilla band, enabling it to advance its position for an attack and, where the danger of betrayal exists, to mobilize in new territory.”
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But
Guerrilla Warfare
also emphasizes the role of ideas and politics. For Guevara ideology is both means and end. According to him, only a self-consciously political insurgency can win: “The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly shown by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in the region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army, hegemony, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground and often very good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is the support of the people; and inevitably these gangs are captured and exterminated by public forces.”
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For Guevara, the military superiority of the guerrilla band is born of its relationship to political ideals: “We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protests of the people against their oppression and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.”
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