Although it is without rules, irregular warfare is not without techniques. Western strategists have drawn inspiration throughout the XXe century of Asian experiments to deal with insurrectional movements – at the risk of corrupting regular armies.
Irregular warfare – this form of warfare conducted outside the legal frameworks and principles supposed to regulate it – has long been considered an exception in the history of wars and major conflicts that have marked the XXe century. Because of its lack of nobility, but also probably because it willingly presents itself, wrongly, as a strategy of the weak against the powerful, it has remained a phenomenon little studied by historians. Of course, many case studies taking into account the irregular dimension of contemporary conflicts exist, highlighting in particular the vagueness characterizing the distinction between combatants and civilians, the evolution of the tactics used or even the new theaters of confrontation which present themselves as multiple figures of irregular warfare. Few of them, however, adopt a global perspective, generally dealing with a specific armed group without studying it as the singular variation of a more general phenomenon. The work of Élie Tenenbaum proposes, for its part, a global approach to irregular warfare, as it has been conceptualized and conducted by Western armies, mainly British, French and American.
By adopting the Western point of view, considered here through the three great military powers of France, Great Britain and the United States, the author reveals the logics that motivated the emergence of new tactics, the doctrines and the different profiles of strategic actors that characterized irregular warfare in the XXe century. The choice to focus on these three countries is justified by the Western domination exercised over the rest of the world since the XIXe century, and their central role in the production and importation of irregular warfare tactics and doctrines. While this perspective may seem restrictive and reproduce an understanding of the world and global history that is now widely contested by critical theory, it is nonetheless of interest in showing how irregular warfare has been able to present itself as a form of strategic innovation in the face of new types of conflict, while remaining considered a type of war located on the margins of Western modernity.
From the constitution of an irregular strategic community, born from cooperation between Western armies engaged in the wars of decolonization, to the globalization of irregular strategic knowledge and the progressive decline in the use of this form of warfare from the 1970s, the path proposed by the author is chronological and thematic and covers all the major conflicts that marked the second half of the 19th century. XXe century. The history of irregular warfare as presented by Tenenbaum is first of all that of a gradual rise, marked in particular by the struggles for independence and the dismantling of colonial empires in a context of the Cold War. While the new revolutionary techniques used by the Maoists in China were quickly taken up by the insurrection movements emerging in neighboring colonized countries, Asia appeared as a veritable “strategic laboratory of irregular warfare” (p. 21). From Indochina to Malaysia via the Philippines, the Asian theater presented itself as a space for the formulation and experimentation of various techniques of irregular warfare, such as population control and the formation of light mobile units. Many personalities, military or political, crossed paths and collaborated there, who would later be considered experts in counter-subversion at the time of its globalization. The British Robert Thompson and the Frenchman David Galula, two officers who served in many theatres, thus appear as recurring figures in this great story of irregular warfare. They played a decisive role in the international circulation of strategic knowledge between the different Western powers engaged in the field of irregular warfare, but also and above all in the theorization effort to which it was subject.
The book shows in fact with great precision the rise in power of a doctrine of irregular warfare, from the French experience in Algeria, which despite its indisputable failure enjoyed international influence, to the development of a real doctrine of counter-insurgency during the Kennedy presidency. This effort to theorize irregular warfare is motivated in part by the growing influence of think tanks dedicated to strategic thinking such as RAND corporationmainly in the United States, but also in Europe, through which “strategic smugglers” such as the famous Galula pass.
Irregular warfare as conceived by the West struggles to become institutionalized in the long term as a strategic doctrine, and the fight against subversion has been in decline since the end of the 1960s. The fight against subversion is discredited by its use on national territory to confront the “internal enemy”, before finally being considered a political peril. The author shows in particular how irregular tactics have been used in order to reestablish authority in the face of protest movements of different kinds, such as the civil rights movement in the United States, theIrish Republican Army in Great Britain or the Trotskyist or Maoist far-left movements in France. The implementation of irregular procedures on the national territory leads to abuses that contradict the rule of law and will end up discrediting the use of irregular procedures to ensure domestic peace.
This distrust of the counter-subversive struggle is also accompanied by a more general doctrinal disinvestment, which follows the failures of the Algerian and Vietnam wars. This erasure of irregular warfare is evident at the institutional level, particularly military, but also on the intellectual level. In France, the doctrine of “revolutionary war”, a term designating the French irregular doctrine, is seen by the civil authorities as a manifestation of the growing politicization of the army, which was definitively abandoned after the attempted putsch of 1961. In the United States, the tensions caused between military institutions and civil society lead to a questioning of the US strategic culture and a reorientation towards more conventional horizons. We then observe a form of “reconventionalization” of war then more readily focused on technological modernization, as well as the disengagement of the great Western powers from Third World conflicts, with a few exceptions (as shown by the American involvement in Central America).
But it was especially in the context of the reconfiguration of the balance of power between nations at the end of the Cold War that the real withdrawal from irregular warfare as it had been conceptualized by the West took place. While it acquired international recognition by being admitted as a member state of the United Nations in 1971, where it ended up occupying a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, China toned down its discourse of revolutionary war and reduced its support for insurrectional movements. While it was not enough to end the armed struggles waged throughout the world, this Chinese withdrawal significantly minimized their strategic scope and the involvement of the West. The civil wars that broke out at the end of the Cold War were of little strategic interest to the Western powers, who only engaged in them through peacekeeping operations under the aegis of the international community.
The 1970s also marked the emergence of terrorism as a strategy in its own right in the hands of armed groups, particularly in Europe and the Middle East, from the Italian Red Brigades to the Palestinian Fatah and the Basque movement. ETA. Faced with this new threat, Western nations adopted a set of exceptional legislative measures and invested in international cooperation at the legal level but also in terms of intelligence. At the operational level, they designed new types of intervention such as targeted elimination or the release of hostages. These reconfigurations did not, however, prevent the West from falling into stupor in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Such an attack was nevertheless predictable. The author speaks of amnesia of the Western strategic community which was unable to understand or adapt to the transformations of the theaters of intervention at the beginning of the XXIe century. The bogged down nature of the American army in Iraq shows that the West has not learned the lessons of the decolonization wars of the XXe century. It was not until 2006 that counter-insurgency was rehabilitated as a strategic process, driven by tactical adaptation on the ground as well as by a certain renewal of strategic thinking conducted within various academic institutions and think tanks. This renewal, however, lacks a political project, while irregular warfare continues to be considered a passing phenomenon. The author nevertheless concludes on the importance of considering irregularity as a “full-fledged part of the spectrum of conflict” (p. 413).
This book is primarily concerned with the West’s inability to adapt to the new configurations born of the wars of decolonization. It is thus interesting to note that if the beginnings of irregular warfare date back to the First World War, it is in fact primarily from the Asian experience that the great principles of irregular warfare are extracted as they are applied to other theaters in the following years. While it is understandable and legitimate that the author adopts the Western point of view, it is regrettable to have little information on the impacts of irregular warfare in the target countries. Furthermore, the book, which draws on an impressive number of sources, highlights the importance of transnational circulations of the different concepts of irregular warfare and a certain unity of the Western experience of this type of war. The author thus speaks of a “connected history” (p. 405), and breaks down the barriers between the history of irregular warfare by convincingly showing the bridges that exist between its different theaters. More mysterious are these famous “knowledge transmitters” who, from theater to theater and from ministries to think tankscontribute to the theoretical formulation of Western counterinsurgency strategy. The trajectory of some of them is described in the book, but we would like to know more about these actors straddling the military and political worlds. Finally, the history of irregular warfare as analyzed by Tenenbaum allows us to better understand the construction of representations of the “non-Western” other. It demonstrates the West’s inability to think of the world outside of its cultural and political hegemony; and this is where its greatest weakness lies.