A history of guerrilla warfare. The author posits that Unconventional Warfare often thought of as a modern means of war has a long tradition that dates back to antiquity. This is a little under an hour. Everybody got quiet. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Heritage Foundation and to our elected by the was lerman auditorium. We welcome those who are joining a some of these occasions on our heritage website. For those and house as we prepare to begin, please make sure cell phones had been turned off. It is a courtesy that the speakers to appreciate. We will oppose the Program Within 24 hours on our heritage home page for your further reference as well. Hosting our event today is steven bougie. Director of r. Douglass and sarah alice and center for policy studies. He previously served as Senior Research fellow for defense. The homeland security. He is well versed in the special Area Operations and Cyber Security areas as well as defense support to civil authority. He served for three decades as an Army Special Forces officer in top pentagon official. In july 2001 he assumed the duties of military assistant to secretary rumsfeld and work daily with the secretary for the next five and a half years. Upon retirement from the army continued at the pentagon as Deputy Assistant secretary of defense Homeland Defense and American Security affairs. Please join me in welcoming steve. [applause] let me add my welcome to all of you. I think were going to have a real treat this morning. As john mentioned, i am a special forces officer by profession. So this area is near and dear to my heart. This is kind of what we do or did. Itll let me do it anymore. [laughter] i mentioned to max when he came in a little historical artifact in that when i was a cadet at west point i bought a book that had just been published. A two volume set. It was called war in the shadows , the guerrilla in history by robert aspirate. That book from 1975 until now really has been the sort of a benchmark for this kind of Historical Review of this subject area. That is a long time for a book tour keep that sort of position. Well, with apologies, i think his book is being replaced not. Max has done that. With this book which is on sale outside, invisible armies, he, i think, has set the new benchmark for the subject area. His book is very, very comprehensive. It is somewhat chronological, but not entirely. It is somewhat regional, but not entirely, and it is somewhat not functional is the right word, but topical, but not entirely. That sounds like it is not organized well. I dont want to give you that impression. It works very well. It flows well. Max is a really, really fine writer. And i say that from the standpoint of a reader. It is very easy to read in the way that sometimes historical works are not. So i would recommend it highly. We are going to do this morning is, when i get done introducing him, max is going to give some opening remarks. And were going to open up to questions and answers. When he is done with his prepared remarks i will come back up and play moderator. I will tell you now, when you ask a question i would like you to stand up and identify yourself briefly. If by the end of the second sentence i dont hear . And going to ask you to sit down very politely because the object of this exercise is for you to ask questions and trough from maxs knowledge and from the information he presents about the book, not to give a speech. If you want to give a speech come see me afterwards and we will see what we can arrange committed to your own program. But that is where were going this morning. For those of you that dont know, max is one of americas leading historians in military history and one of our best historical writers. He is presently that jeane j. Kilpatrick senior fellow for National Security studies at the council on foreign relations. He continues to write extensively in the weekly standard, the los angeles times. He is a regular contributor to the new york times, the wall street journal. He has been an editor and a journalist for the wall street journal for Christian Science monitor. He has written two other major books in the past that are of interest to me. The savage wars of peace, small wars and the rise of american power, and war made new, technology, warfare, and the course of history 1500 debt today. Next to mr. Wright really big bucks. And this morning he is going to talk to us about his latest invisible armies. A turnover you. [applause] thank you very much for that warm and generous introduction. Thank you also for your many decades of service. Indeed, i see a lot of folks here who are either on active duty or retired military, and i think all of you for your years of service to the nation. What i am here to talk about today is the contents of my new book, which, as steve mentioned, is a history of guerrilla warfare. Although it may seem daunting at first glance, i did try to tell a good story by encapsulating five dozen years of guerrilla warfare history into one book. That may seem like a formidable undertaking, but here today in front of your very eyes im going to do something that i think is even harder. Im going to try to encapsulate the entire book into about a 25 minute talk. So that is going to work out to about 200 years permanent. Fasten your seatbelts. Were going to go for a little historical journey here. What im going to do is first talk about the origins of guerrilla warfare, then im going to talk about how to counter guerrilla warfare. Finally, going to conclude about why it is incredibly important that we figure out how to counter guerrilla warfare. The question that i most often asked when i tell people to have been writing a book on the history of guerrilla warfare is what is the first guerrilla war . The answer is, guerrilla warfare is as old as mankind itself. It is impossible the say when the first guerrilla war took place because that is essentially a tribal war. Tribal warriors going back to the dawn of mankind have been fighting with hit and run tactics, staging ambushes, attacking in the villages and fleeing before the main force of the enemy can arrive. They dont stand toe to toe and slug it out at the enemy in the way that greek people would work the way we imagine conventional armies should. In essence tribal warriors have been taking part in guerrilla warfare for countless years. By contrast, counterinsurgency warfare and conventional warfare are both relatively recent inventions. Only made possible by the rise of the first citystates in mesopotamia about five dozen years ago. By definition you could not have a conventional army without. Until you have states had no conventional armies which had officers and enlisted ranks and bureaucracy and logistics and all these other things we associate with conventional armed forces. Guess what . As soon as you have the very first citystates in mesopotamia there were immediately being attacked by nomads from the persian highlands, essentially a religious. And so from the very start organized militaries have always spent a lot of their time fighting unconventional your regular warfare. You know what, those terms dont make a heck of a lot of sense. That is one of the big takeaways that i have from doing six years of reading and research for this book. The way we think about this entire subject is all messed up. We think that somehow conventional warfare is the norm, that the way you want to fight is how these conventional armies slug it out in the open. The reality is, those have always been the exception. Just think about the more modern world. What was the last conventual what we saw . This is a hard question to answer because, in fact, it was the russian invasion of georgia in 2008 which did not last long. Yet all over the world today there are people dying in war, whether afghanistan or molly or syria or a condo or meehan r or colombia or many other countries all these people are victims being ravaged by Unconventional Warfare. But the term, as i say, is off because this is, in fact, the norm. We have to adjust their thinking of a part thinking 360 degrees and understand that Unconventional Warfare is the dominant face of warfare, always has been, always will be. Every great power throughout history, every great general, including the generals of antiquity, had to do with the threat of Unconventional Warfare , including, of course, the greatest army of all, the roman legions. A pretty formidable force, even when they were not led by russell crowe. They bested every power in their neighborhood. Rome, as we also know, was ultimately brought down, sacked in the fifth century. And what was responsible for the downfall of room . Well, rome was much like the United States in that it did not have great power rivals. It was not surrounded by great states other than the party or person empire. Ultimately it was basically surrounded by those that are labeled as barbarians. How did the barbarians by . Well, they did that help organize the fourth jury. It did not have centurions. It did not have all the infrastructure of the roman legion. They fought in a very different style. Yet ultimately they were successful. The fall of rome was precipitated by a fierce group of warriors known as the ones. Truman historian left a very interesting imperceptive description of how they fought. He said, very quick in their operations of exceeding speed and fond of surprising their enemies. They suddenly dispersed and reunite after having inflicted vast loss upon the enemy scatter themselves over the plane in a regular formation, always avoiding an entrenchment. Now, think about that description. That sounds a lot like guerrilla warfare to me. That is essentially what they were practicing under their formal leader. They were masters of guerrilla warfare such that even pushed the germanic tribes further west into the roman empire and led to the collapse of the greatest empire in antiquity. So in many ways there is truly nothing new under the sun about the threat posed by guerrillas. They have been around longer than civilization self. And the fact that the u. S. Army, marine corps, and other modern militarys including the french have to deal with the threat today is absolutely unsurprising but i dont mean to suggest that absolutely nothing has changed over the course of the last 5,000 years. There have, in fact, been some significant changes. The biggest one has to do with the power of Public Opinion and propaganda. And this was something that was demonstrated in our very own war of independence. Now, when we think of the american war of independence we tend to think of battles lexington and concord where the yankees slithered on their bellies and shot at the red coats from behind trees and rocks in ways that the red cuts considered to be ungentlemanly and not quite cricket. Now, these were, no doubt, effective tactics, but in the end what is striking to me about studying the American Revolution is the extent to which it was decided not so much by what happened on the battlefield but what actually happened in the house of parliament, in the commons commanding lead. Now, when you read conventional accounts, if i may use that word, of the American Revolution , they usually conclude with the battle of yorktown in 1781 and which lord cornwallis surrendered about seven dozen trips to general washington, and there is no doubt this was a massive setback for the british war effort. But the fact remains that even surrender in seven dozen trips to washington, the british still had tens of thousands more troops in north america, and they could have some of tens of thousands more from other parts of the empire if they had decided to do so. But they were not able to do so because of the power of a new force and in search of warfare, a term that was all the point fatefully in 1776, the power of Public Opinion. Now, if the Founding Fathers had been battling not the british empire, but the roman empire, i can assure you that the romans, no matter how many battlefield defeats they suffered, would have come back. George washington, the founders, would have been crucified quite literally. The fact that this did not happen is because of what happened in an institution that the romans did not have to worry about, at least not after the rise of the empire. That was the house of commons, parliament. In 17821 year after the year after the battle of yorktown there was a very close vote in the house of commons to discontinue offensive operations in north america. The vote was 234215. It was a nail biter, but because lord north, the hardline Prime Minister who wanted to prosecute the war against the american rebels, he lost that vote and therefore he had to resign office. And lord rockingham and his legs and had committed to a policy of conciliation with there american brothers took office. And that, i would submit to you, was truly where the American Revolution was one. That was something the Founding Fathers were very well aware of. They tried very hard to influence Public Opinion, not only in the american colonies, but also a great burden. When you think about documents such as Thomas Paines common sense or our very own declaration of independence, as much as anything, these were propaganda weapons used against the british kaj and they had their impact of the course of several years long years of war, they wore down the british will to fight and ultimately resulted in this note to discontinue the war in north america. Now, that is something new in warfare, something that was completely different. That was something that, you know, the huns and the romans did not have to worry about, the power of Public Opinion. All of a sudden, the rise of democracy or the spread of media , that becomes a major force. In fact, many others in the future would seek to emulate what the american rebels did, including some such as the viet cong or the iraqi or afghan insurgents who have tried to use the power of propaganda and Public Opinion against us. All these factors are especially important in the theories of one of the great and most influential purists of guerrilla warfare that there ever was, and he had a very different view of guerrilla warfare than that as practiced by the nomadic warriors doubled. He wrote an incredibly influential book in 1938 called on protracted warfare, which he wrote sitting in a cave in northern china after the long march working so intently that he did not notice that a fire from a candle was burning a hole in the sock. And what he emphasized, as he famously said among the people like water. The army is like fish. He said that it was essential to keep the close relationship. A Guerrilla Force had to be cognizant of winning the support of the public upon him and was operating. He gave instructions to his soldiers to be courteous and polite, to pay for all articles and establish the safe distance from peoples houses. Now, believe me, this was not something they worried about thousands of years before. Their idea of Public Relations was simply killing as many people as they possibly could in as gruesome fashion is that possibly could. But now he understood that in this newage you had to Pay Attention to Public Opinion, and that is something that has been incredibly influential ever since. It has especially influential, even more so with terrorist organizations because terrorism, as the anarchist said in the 19th century, is propaganda by the deed. Even morning guerrilla warfare, terrorism is really about selling a Public Relations point. In fact, in latin, obviously the most famous terrorist of our age, went so far as to say that the media war is 90 percent of wheat. Now, the very fact media has become so important, the very fact that Public Opinion has become so incredibly important puts a great power like the United States, especially a great Democratic Power like the United States at a disadvantage. You know, something very interesting comes out when you look at what has changed in guerrilla warfare. It is part of this book. We did a database of insurgency since 1775, which has included as an appendix to read what we found was that the when rate for insurgences gone up since 1945. Prior to 1945 insurgence one about 20 percent of their worst. Since 1945 there winning about 40 percent of their worst. So the rate for insurgents has roughly doubled. What accounts for that . I would argue it is the power of Public Opinion and propaganda, the ability of even a relatively weak groups to bring down stronger adversaries by marshaling Public Opinion against them. That is something that all insurgence try to do these days, and sometimes very successfully. But their is a danger here, and we should not swing too far from one extreme to the other. We should not we should not underestimate the power of guerrillas, but nor should we overestimate the power of guerrillas and terrorist because theyre not invincible, and i think there has been a fallacy in the tendency in the postworld war two era to focus on a handful of successes, the mouth and the coach human. While. These guerrillas are 10foot tall super human spirit they cannot possibly be defeated. That is, in fact, not the case. If you go back to the figure i cited to you, even with their winning roughly 40 percent, that means theyre losing 60 . The reality is, just as most business startups dont become an apple or microsoft, so most insurgent groups dont become the vietcong or the chinese red army. And to make that point, i would refer you to one of the most famous insurgents of all time,