Are Insurgencies Beatable?

This is perhaps one of relevant political-historic questions of today. As the United States military – the stronger one in the world - continues to fight Iraqi insurgencies, more and more people point out to the Bush administration and the General Staff that historically modern armies have never beaten this type of armies. The French lost to FLN in Algeria, the Soviets lost to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, and the Americans lost to Viet Cong in Vietnam. While certainly insurgencies have been more common in 20^th and 21^st century history, in Western history, they date as far back as the Spanish guerrilla resistance against Napoleon’s army in early 19^th century. Even Carl von Clausewitz in his classic On War has devoted a chapter to “people’s wars” in the scheme of his more widely read conventional war analysis. More recently, the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld wrote The Transformation of War, the only non-American book on the U.S. army officer-reading list. In this book, he advises Western nations to assemble smaller armies that mimic insurgencies if they want to win these types of wars, because Western soldiers are morally discouraged from fighting weaker enemies.

Certainly there is merit in citing Western nations’ bad track record and promoting smaller armies, but overall, the pessimistic critiques of modern armies much too often fail to examine all warfare against insurgencies. When one starts to recollect that Syria beat the Muslim Brotherhood and Lebanon forced out the PLO, among the many non-Western victories over insurgencies, the track record of conventional militaries suddenly dramatically improves. The truth is that insurgencies are weak. They can be beat and they have been beaten before. It’s not an easy task. In case of the Syrians, it takes a massacre of an entire city of Hama to do the job, but nevertheless, it can be done. Unlike the successful non-Western powers, Western nations have lost to insurgencies because of a lack of dedication and will. The French, the Soviets, and the Americans never made it a priority to win in their perspective wars. Even Iraq has been just one of the issues in American politics. What Western nations need to understand is that to win wars against insurgencies they must be devoted: they must be ready to face very heavy causalities among their soldiers and they must be ready to inflict even heavier casualties on the civilians of the opposing side. Just because they are fighting a scattered army doesn’t mean that they can win easily or that the other side is unbeatable; they must treat it as a conventional war, which certainly costly, but winnable. If they start to show weakness by trying to minimize causalities of their army personal and the local civilians, as the Israelis have done in the 1982 and 2006 Wars with Lebanon, they will never achieve their tasks. That being said: is the cost of war against insurgencies worth it? That’s up to politicians and the public to decide. Are insurgencies beatable? Absolutely.