SWJ and personal friend Gian Gentile reviews Max Boot's latest book (Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present) at the New York Journal of Books.
In an interview shortly after the publication of his book Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present, Max Boot claimed that he did not make a “particular point” in the book, but aimed “simply to tell a story that has never been well told before.”
After reading Invisible Armies, however, it is hard to take Mr. Boot’s remarks in this interview seriously...
Comments
"Never mind whether or not American strategy and security interests in the world demand fighting such wars. Instead for Mr. Boot simply because they have been fought in the past, America should keep fighting them in the future."
With all due respect to Colonel Gentile (and to Mr. Boot, for that matter), it seems reasonable to surmise that because guerrilla warfare is both ancient and omnipresent, American troops should at the very least be prepared to fight across the full spectrum of warfare, should our strategic interests require us to pursue policies by prosecuting small wars. As sympathetic as I am to Colonel Gentile's sentiment that focusing on counterinsurgency risks a departure from other, more conventional forms of warfare that American forces have traditionally excelled at, this idea that we can pick and choose what types of warfare we engage in, or that fighting guerrillas will be contrary to American security interests in all cases, is simply absurd. It's the same argument that was made after Vietnam: "That was really hard, and we aren't really satisfied with our results, so our solution is to plan not to do it anymore." That's remarkably wishful thinking. As Colin Gray points out in his 1999 book Modern Strategy:
"The domain of strategic effect, purposeful or otherwise, is not confined to 'civilized', as contrasted with 'savage', warfare. There are two principal errors to avoid. The first is to regard the realm of real war and 'real soldiering' as coterminous with symmetrical conflict, at least as roughly identical to the experience of regular forces fighting regular forces. This error can promote the idea that 'small wars', in Callwell's meaning, are irrelevant, perhaps dangerously irrelevant, diversions from the mainstream requirement to prepare for real war (i.e. grande guerre). Armed forces that decline to take small wars seriously as a military art form with their own tactical, operational, and political - though not strategic - rules invite defeat. The second error is to regard small wars and other forms of savage violence as the wars of the future that will largely supplant the allegedly old-fashioned state-centric 'regular' wars of a Westphalian world. There are some grounds for identifying a contemporary 'transformation of war' that favours irregular forces and violence, just as there are some grounds for claiming that the state, at least in the forms promoted by Westphalia, is in sharp decline, even if it is not quite ready to fall."
In many ways, Max Boot is this decade's B.H. Liddell Hart - except that he has no military experience (much less combat experience) and no theory. So...as far as I can tell, he pretty much follows along with the trends in military thought currently in-vogue among the elite circles with which he runs. I mean, in some ways, it is nice to see a pundit defending Army end strength, even if his assumptions are all wrong and his logic distorted. Likewise, it would be of some value to introduce Max Boot I (RMA Max) to Max Boot II (COIN Max). Yeah, that might be an unacceptable breach in the space-time continuum, but the resulting synthesis might be a step in the right direction. Which leads to a theoretical question.
How many boots does one, in fact, need to have on the ground to achieve success in counterinsurgency ? Since Mr. Boot is apparently making the rounds hawking his book, there may actually be the chance to pose this question directly to him. Let me suggest a simple algorithm to kick off the discussion:
(1) Take the dimensions of the territory to be stabilized, in square kilometers
(2) Divide the population of the territory into the (1)
(3) Divide by the number of ground troops committed to the counterinsurgency operation, minus defections and desertions.
(4) What is the resulting ratio ? Does it change over time ? How does technological capabiity (mobility, firepower, sensing, communications) affect the threshhold necessary for success.
If one can solve the algorithm using the contents of Boot's book, he wins. If not, he loses.
I suspect Boot's new book may have some flaws and more than likely is biased like most texts on insurgencies or on history period. I am disappointed though that Gian used this review to push his own bias by once again attacking GEN Petraeus's strategy in Iraq and then championing GEN Westmoreland.
I'm normally not a fan of Boot's books, and after listening to him on a couple of CSPAN shows discussing his book he lost a lot of credibility with me when he dismissed the possibility of future state on state war (of course, that could undermine how many copies he sales), but putting that to the side he still made some interesting observations on the evolution of unconventional warfare that convinced me to eventually read his book. Hopefully we can all learn from those we often disagree with. In fact it is hard to expand our mind if you don't read and seriously consider the opinions of those who challenge your beliefs.