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  BEATING GOLIATH

  ALSO BY JEFFREY RECORD

  The Specter of Munich:

  Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler

  Dark Victory:

  America’s Second War Against Iraq

  Making War, Thinking History:

  Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo

  The Wrong War:

  Why We Lost in Vietnam

  Hollow Victory:

  A Contrary View of the Gulf War

  Beyond Military Reform:

  American Defense Dilemmas

  Revising U.S. Military Strategy:

  Tailoring Means to Ends

  BEATING GOLIATH

  Why Insurgencies Win

  JEFFREY RECORD

  Copyright © 2007 Potomac Books

  Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  The views expressed in this book are the author’s alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Air War College, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other federal agency.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Record, Jeffrey.

  Beating Goliath : why insurgencies win / Jeffrey Record.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-59797-090-7 (alk. paper)

  1. Insurgency—History—20th century. 2. Insurgency—History—21st century. 3. Iraq War, 2003– 4. Vietnam War, 1961–1975. 5. United States—History, Military—20th century. 6. United States—History, Military—21st century. I. Title.

  D431.R43 2007

  355.02’18—dc22

  2007001847

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

  Potomac Books, Inc.

  22841 Quicksilver Drive

  Dulles, Virginia 20166

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Explaining Goliath Defeats: Will, Strategy, and Type of Government

  2. The Role of External Assistance

  3. The Iraqi Insurgency: Vietnam Perspectives

  4. The American Way: War Without Politics

  5. The American Way: Search and Destroy

  6. Conclusion

  Notes

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Introduction

  The continuing insurgency in Iraq underscores the capacity of the weak to impose considerable military and political pain on the strong. Whether that pain will compel the United States to abandon its agenda in Iraq remains to be seen.

  What is not in dispute is that all major failed U.S. uses of force since 1945—in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia (the jury is still out on Iraq)—have been against materially weaker enemies. In wars both hot and cold, the United States has fared consistently well against such powerful enemies as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union, but the record against lesser foes is decidedly mixed. Though it easily polished off Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the United States failed to defeat Vietnamese infantry in Indochina, terrorists in Lebanon, and warlords in Somalia. In each case the American Goliath was militarily checked or politically defeated by the local David. Most recently, the United States was surprised by the tenacious insurgency that exploded in post-Baathist Iraq, an insurgency now in its fifth year with no end in sight. An estimated 20,000 insurgents have battled 140,000 U.S. troops and an increasing number of Iraqi government soldiers and police to a military stalemate. What was expected to be a cakewalk became a quagmire.

  The phenomenon of the weak defeating the strong, though exceptional, is as old as war itself. Sparta finally beat Athens; Frederick the Great always punched well above his weight; American rebels overturned British rule in the Thirteen Colonies; the Spanish guerrilla bled Napoleon white; Jewish terrorists forced the British out of Palestine; Vietnamese Communists drove France and then the United States out of Indochina; and mujahideen handed the Soviet Union its own Vietnam in Afghanistan. Relative military power is a very imperfect predictor of war outcomes. Carl von Clausewitz believed that “superiority of numbers is the most common element of victory” and declared that the “best strategy is always to be very strong.” But the great Prussian philosopher of war also recognized that “superiority of numbers in a given engagement is only one of the factors that determines victory. Superior numbers, far from contributing everything, or even a substantial part, to victory, may actually be contributing very little, depending on the circumstances.”1

  Why do the strong lose? Indeed, what is meant by “strong”? As used here, the term means the side with greater material resources at its disposal—i.e., the side with numerical superiority in population, territory, industrial resources, financial power, and conventional military forces, especially firepower. Often, though not always, attending these material advantages is technological superiority. The stronger side (the heavyweight) usually beats the weaker side (the lightweight), all things else being equal. The problem is that all things else are often not equal. The United States enjoys unprecedented global conventional military primacy, yet its military difficulties in Iraq testify to the limits of that primacy against an irregular adversary whose fighting power stems primarily from nonmaterial factors.

  One of the most obvious cases of a decisive military victory arguably predetermined by crushing material superiority was Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War of 1941–45. In attacking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese entered a war with an enemy that dwarfed Japan in financial, industrial, and latent conventional military power; it was also an enemy with an enormous superiority in war-related sciences and engineering capacity that doomed Japan to technological defeat. (Both the atomic bomb and the B-29 that carried it lay beyond Japan’s technological reach.) Whatever nonmaterial advantages the Japanese may have initially enjoyed—combat experience, the element of surprise—could not begin to offset Japan’s relative material poverty. Under these circumstances the Japanese were driven to a desperate theory of victory based on the hope that their racial and spiritual superiority would provide a defense of their Pacific island empire tenacious and bloody enough to compel the Americans to accept a termination of hostilities that would leave Japan the dominant power in East Asia if not the Pacific. The Japanese pitted what they believed to be a superior willingness to die against a superior American capacity to kill.

  Twenty years after Japan’s unconditional surrender, a much stronger United States entered another war in Asia against an enemy much weaker than the Japanese were during World War II. Yet the United States proved unable to defeat that enemy and, after eight years of heavy fighting, withdrew from the conflict.

  Why did the United States beat the Japanese yet lose to the Vietnamese Communists? Why do Goliaths lose to Davids? The biblical David nailed the biblical Goliath with a single slingshot to the head, just as a safari hunter brings down a charging rhinoceros with a single rifle shot. Such instant and cheap victories based on technological superiority, however, are not available to the weak in wars against the strong.

  In attempting to answer the question of why the strong lose to the weak, I focus on states fighting non-state actors—specifically, states facing insurgencies within their own territory or overseas. The former include any organized movement aimed at overthrowing a constituted government via subversion and armed conflict, including terrorism
, guerrilla warfare, and traditional military operations; the latter include all armed rebellions against foreign government rule or military occupation. The key military characteristic of insurgent wars is the clash between regular government forces and irregular insurgent forces. Such wars are “small wars” as classically defined by C. E. Callwell in 1896: “Small war …may be said to include all campaigns other than those where both sides consist of regular troops”—i.e., “operations of regular armies against irregular, or comparatively speaking irregular forces.”2 This definition is echoed in the U.S. Marine Corps’ 1940 Small Wars Manual, which was reissued without alteration in 1990: “The ordinary expedition of the Marine Corps which does not involve a major effort in regular warfare against a first-rate power may be termed a small war.”3 Counterinsurgency is by definition small war because it involves operations by regular government forces against irregular insurgent forces. Small wars are thus qualitatively different from wars in which both sides employ regular forces against each other.

  In terms of regularity, conventional wars are thus symmetric, whereas small wars are asymmetric. Asymmetry is not a constant in all small wars, however. Maoist revolutionary war theory and practice embraces the evolution of insurgency from asymmetrical to symmetrical conflict; third-phase military operations based on insurgent transition from the weaker to the stronger side entail predominately conventional mobile and positional military operations supported by guerrilla warfare. The outcomes of both the Chinese civil war and the Vietnam War were decided by massive conventional military operations.

  I am not interested in the objectives or “cause” of particular insurgencies, nor their methods of violence, except in so far as either influences the course and outcome of hostilities. Insurgencies, because they are militarily weak, almost invariably employ some combination of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, methods of violence that are no guarantee of success. Indeed, guerrilla warfare may fail against a politically skilled and militarily careful adversary, and excessive reliance on terrorism, often testimony to lack of popular support, can be self-defeating. The Iraqi insurgency’s videotaped beheadings of hostages and large-scale employment of suicide bombings in crowded streets stand in considerable contrast to the Vietnamese Communists’ selective use of terror against government officials and “class” enemies. No less a terrorist mastermind than al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri was prompted in October 2005 to chastise Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for the Jordanian-born terrorist’s unnecessary alienation of Iraqi Shia and international Muslim opinion via al-Zarqawi’s exceptionally bloodthirsty and indiscriminate acts of terror.4

  Finally, in seeking to understand why states lose to insurgencies, I distinguish between general factors that seem common to many cases of state defeat by insurgencies and factors that, if not peculiar to the United States, are manifestly distinctive. Most states that lose to insurgencies appear to suffer from some combination of inferior political will, inferior war strategy, and an inability to isolate insurgent forces from external support. In the theater of operations they either lack popular support to begin with (e.g., the Israelis in the West Bank) or they lose it through military excess and political mistakes (e.g., the Americans in Vietnam). But other factors worked against the United States there. America has both a distinctive approach to strategy and a distinctive way of war rooted in its history, culture, political values, and geopolitical circumstances. All of these influences have combined to produce, among other things, not only an apolitical view of war, which encourages the pursuit of military victory for its own sake, but also a profound professional military aversion to counterinsurgency, which hands insurgent enemies a major strategic advantage.

  The following chapter reviews the recent literature about why the strong lose. That literature has postulated strong-actor inferiority of political will, bad strategy, and type of government as explanations for defeat. Each of these explanations sheds much light on the phenomenon of beaten Goliaths, but neither individually nor even in combination do they provide a completely satisfactory explanation. Great powers often display a lesser strength of political will in fights against weaker enemies, but they nonetheless go on to win more often than not—testimony to the advantage of being a great power. Overwhelming material superiority can also compensate for bad strategy—indeed, render strategy irrelevant. Native Americans, for example, had no effective strategic choices to block the Europeans’ westward advance across North America in the nineteenth century. And while modern democracies have displayed greater difficulty than dictatorships in sustaining protracted wars against irregular adversaries, there are enough instances of democratic success against insurgent foes (and insurgent victories over dictatorships) to deprive regime type as a reliable predictor of strong-side defeat in guerrilla wars.

  A critical factor in insurgent success is foreign help, which is the subject of chapter 2. External assistance is certainly no guarantee of victory in insurgent wars, but there are few examples of unassisted insurgent success against governments or occupations not already on the verge of collapse. Chapter 2 examines six examples of assisted insurgencies: the American War of Independence (1775–83), the Spanish guerrilla against the French (1808–14), the Chinese Communist defeat of the Nationalist Government (1945–49), the French-Indochina War (1946–54), the Vietnam War (1965–75), and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–89). To illustrate the military impact of absent or denied external help, the chapter also looks at the American Civil War (1861–65), the Boer War (1899–1902), the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), and the Algerian War (1954–62).

  Chapter 3 applies explanations of strong-actor defeat to the ongoing war in Iraq. Though the outcome of that conflict remains undetermined, there has been sufficient war experience there to make tentative judgments on the strength of U.S. interests in Iraq and the quality of U.S. strategy relative to those of the insurgent enemy, on the capacity of early twenty-first-century American democracy to sustain the war, and on the actual and potential role of foreign assistance in determining the war’s outcome. To sharpen the analysis of prospects for strong-actor success/failure in Iraq, I employ previously published research comparing the Vietnam and Iraq wars.5 Comparison to Vietnam does not—and is not intended to—suggest the inevitability or even likelihood of U.S. defeat in Iraq; the differences between the two wars, including the size and fighting power of the enemy, greatly outnumber the similarities. Comparison nonetheless provides important insights on the Iraq War, especially on the challenges of overseas state-building and sustaining domestic political support for a protracted war against a seemingly undefeatable enemy.

  Chapters 4 and 5 examine America’s strategic culture and methods of war as impediments to success in counterinsurgent conflicts. An abiding American embrace of war as a substitute for politics has bred a general aversion to limited wars and a particular dislike of intervention in foreign internal wars. Once the shooting starts, Americans tend to view military victory as an end independent of the reasons for war in the first place. This approach can and has produced politically sterile military successes. Reinforcing national aversion to limited war is the professional military’s acute distaste for counterinsurgency, which is in large part a function of preference for the conventional warfare it wages so well. This dread of counterinsurgency is troubling because irregular warfare is increasingly supplanting conventional combat as a means of resolving violent disputes within and among states.

  The final chapter presents the study’s major findings. There is no convincing single-factor explanation for strong-actor defeats. Goliaths usually win, but their exceptional defeats are almost always the result of a combination of inferior political will, ineffective strategic interaction with the enemy, and failure to isolate the weaker side from foreign help. Indeed, external assistance appears to be the most common enabler of insurgent success. And it does not help if the Goliath in question is a modern democracy. Democratic Goliaths do indeed suffer inherent disadvantages in conducting long wars against irregular e
nemies, though, at least in the United States, the impact of casualties on domestic political opinion is a function primarily of military action’s perceived costs, benefits, and chances of success. That said, America’s peculiar political system and scientific approach to war greatly impede its ability to conduct counterinsurgent warfare—to the point where a strong case can be made for adopting a policy of refusing U.S. involvement in foreign internal wars altogether.

  1

  Explaining Goliath Defeats:

  Will, Strategy, and Type of Government

  During the cold war, serious intellectual examination of the phenomenon of the strong succumbing to the weak was provoked by a series of events: the success of the Chinese Communists in 1949, the rapid and largely unexpected disintegration of European colonial empires in Asia and Africa, France’s violent defeat in Indochina and Algeria, and above all the defeat and humiliation of the United States in Vietnam. Western conventional military superiority over non-Western adversaries, which had been a source of European imperial success since the days of the Conquistadores, was exposed after World War II as vulnerable to irregular and politically revolutionary warfare. Maybe the West was not as strong as it appeared. Perhaps it was irreparably weakened by the European civil wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45. The United States had emerged from World War II stronger than any Western power before it, yet had gone on to be defeated by the same enemy that had vanquished the French. What accounted for the remarkable success of the Vietnamese Communists against two far more powerful Western states?

  In seeking the common cause that explains the stronger side’s loss to the weaker, Andrew Mack, in his pioneering 1975 assessment, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict,” argued that the answer lay in differentials in political will to fight and prevail that were rooted in different perceptions of the stakes at hand. By focusing on will to fight, Mack embraced Carl von Clausewitz’s conception of war as, at bottom, a contest of wills. Calling war “nothing but a duel on a larger scale,” the great Prussian philosopher of war defined it as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” Force was but “the means of war; to impose our will upon the enemy is its object.”1