Summary: We, like people throughout history, assume that our military advantages are God-given and permanent. History suggests otherwise. Today we take a brief look at the past, and speculate about ways technology both gives — and takes away — military superiority.
Throughout our wars the neocons and their allies repeatedly claimed that foreign powers gave substantial aid to the insurgents. While probably true to some extent for small arms, the great anomaly during these wars was that the insurgents found no national sponsors to give them anti-air weapons, radically changing the tactical situation (as stingers did to the Russians, and French aid did for our Founders). This was discussed repeatedly on the FM website since 2003, most recently in The threat of insurgents using MANPADS is exaggerated (July 2010):
Especially significant, Stratfor does not discuss why these powerful and easy to get weapons remain unobtainable (except small numbers, mostly obsolete versions) by our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our helicopters make tempting targets should our enemies get them in decent numbers. Insurgents failure to obtain them during a decade of conflict constitutes prima facie evidence that {insurgents have little external support}.
Dominance of the air gives modern armies a massive advantage over insurgents (although they still usually defeat foreign armies; see the links at the end). The advance of technology gave us this advantage. Might technology take it away? This rise and fall of the military advantage of civilization over barbarians is a historical pattern, described in a letter by R.W. Johnson of Cape Town in response to David French’s review in the 5 April 2012 London Review of Books of The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan 1838-42 by Diana Preston.
David French compares the battles of Isandhlwana (1879) and Maiwand (1880), where the British were worsted by the Zulus and Afghan tribesmen respectively (LRB, 5 April). As he says, these triumphs over modern armies caused a sensation, though neither of them quite as much as the similar defeat of Western arms at the Battle of Little Bighorn a few years earlier (1876).
The key to these defeats lay in the parity of military technology. Custer’s men had single shot Springfield 73 rifles; Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull’s men had Winchester repeater rifles. At Isandhlwana (and probably Maiwand) the British had Martini-Henry single-shot rifles. The Zulus had some of these too, but the short stabbing spear, used by highly disciplined units, was a match for rifles that continually needed reloading. All such outcomes were put beyond reach of Third World armies, first by the Gatling gun, introduced in the 1880s, and then by the Maxim, the first fully automatic weapon (1884). These were used over and over against Zulus, Mahdists and Matabele and never failed.
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A similar technological catch-up occurred in the 1950s when the Viet Minh managed to carry broken-down AA guns on bicycles down the Ho Chi Minh trail and then reassemble them at Dien Bien Phu, where they were more than a match for French air power – flimsy helicopters and old Second World War piston-engined planes. Within a few years, US jets, heavily armoured Chinooks and napalm had put that sort of success in pitched battle beyond the Vietnamese.
But there is a recurrent tendency for ground soldiers to catch up. The latest instance is the high-tech weaponry belonging to Gaddafi that is now being bought up by Somali pirates, some of whom could probably sink a modern warship.
Might technology military parity to insurgents, perhaps with cell phones, manpads and cyber-weapons? Insurgents usually defeat foreign armies even with grossly inferior military technology. What happens if they gain rough parity, or anything close to that?
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Some notes about modern insurgencies:
- ”Why do we lose 4th generation wars?“, 4 January 2007 — About the two kinds of insurgencies
- Was 9/11 the most effective single military operation in the history of the world?, 11 June 2008
The scorecard of counter-insurgency warfare:
- More paths to failure in Iraq, 16 December 2006 — Myths about COIN in Iraq
- How often do insurgents win? How much time does successful COIN require?, 29 May 2008
- Max Boot: history suggests we will win in Afghanistan, with better than 50-50 odds. Here’s the real story., 21 June 2010 — Boot discusses 7 alleged victories by foreign armies fighting insurgencies.
- A major discovery! It could change the course of US geopolitical strategy, if we’d only see it, 28 June 2010 — Andrew Exum (aka Abu Muqawama) points us to the doctoral dissertation of Erin Marie Simpson in Political Science from Harvard. She examines the present and past analysis of counter-insurgency. This could change the course of American foreign policy, if we pay attention.
- A look at the history of victories over insurgents, 30 June 2010