How Do You Defeat an Invisible Army? - The Daily Beast

How Do You Defeat an Invisible Army? - The Daily Beast

How Do You Defeat an Invisible Army?

by Justin Green Feb 18, 2013 6:00 AM EST.

Guerrilla warfare, according to author and historian Max Boot, "is the universal war of the weak." Practiced by insurgents from Assyrian-era rebels to Jewish revolutionaries in the 1st century of the common era to contemporary groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, irregular warfare provides ragtag forces the capacity to humble the mightiest of conventional armies.

Guerillas act as R, using secrecy and deception to counter the open teamwork of Y armies. This interaction is highly unstable in nature as well as in war, R can often wear out the Y army like R prey wear out the Y predators like lions by hiding and running.

Consider, for instance, how Afghan militias were able to reduce the Soviet Union's vaunted Red Army to this in the 1980s:

[Soldiers] took refuge in alcohol and drugs to escape the "sweet-and-sour smell of blood," which, one soldier said, "turned my stomach inside out with nausea." Troops got drunk on vodka, moonshine, aftershave lotion. Or they got high on marijuana, heroin, hashish, sometimes provided free by Afghan suppliers who were happy to corrupt their enemies. Said one soldier, "It's best to go into an operation stoned - you turn into an animal.

(Invisible Armies, p. 495)

How did forces as powerful as the Red Army, which crushed Hitler's Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe and then kept the region under its boot for five decades, find themselves defeated by loosely organized militants? 

...

The flavor of one of these operations can be gleaned from a letter written home to England by Sir John Wingfield ...

"And, my lord," Wingfield wrote to the bishop of Winchester, on December 23, 1355, "you will be glad to know that my Lord has raided the county of Armagnac and taken several walled towns there, burning and destroying them, except for certain towns which he garrisoned. Then he went to the viscounty of Riviere, and took a good town called Plaisance, the chief town of the area, and burnt it and laid waste the surrounding countryside. Then he went into the county of Astarac..."

(p. 44)

This style of war ought to remind readers of the tribal raids seen in North America's native populations and the Asian steppe's nomadic tribes. That's because low intensity conflicts, comprised of a protracted series of semi-regular raids rather than massed battles, are generally the historical rule.

I've often wondered how relatively thinly populated states like 15th century France and England could fight a Hundred Years War. The answer, according to Boot, is that such wars rarely featured the pitched battles that incurred massive casualty counts - and with those tallies the resulting historical attention.

For example, while the many chevauchee style raids of the American Revolution did not exactly inspire the legendary status such as that of Yorktown, Virginia, Cornwallis' surrender only came after enduring years of frustration attempting to pacify a combination of irregular and conventional forces in South Carolina. Had the southern colonists not utilized irregular tactics, Cornwallis would have crushed their army far sooner, freeing all British troops to destroy George Washington's Continental Army in the north.

Y armies prefer to fight a Y-Ro war of attrition like Y teams of predators like lions attacking Ro teams of defenders like buffalo herds. If the Ro army break up into R guerillas then the Y army also needs to break up and become secretive and deceptive, this is like Y lions learning to hunt singly with secrecy and deception to catch R gazelles.