Airpower and Restraint in Small Wars Marine Corps Aviation in the Second Nicaraguan Campaign, 1927-33

Aerospace Power Journal, Fall, 2001 by Dr. Wray R. Johnson

The 1935 edition was written by Maj Harold Utley, who had commanded marines in Eastern Nicaragua, as well as other marines experienced in small wars. The work was informed by the research of US Army officers and foreign experts in colonial warfare--including Colonel Callwell of the British army. [42] The 1940 edition was an encyclopedic work with over 400 pages of text comprising detailed treatments regarding organization, tactics, intelligence, propaganda, and a host of other topics, including the care and feeding of pack animals. But its treatment of revolutionary guerrilla warfare was groundbreaking and remarkably prescient regarding the nature of emerging revolutionary warfare: "After a study has been made of the people who will oppose the intervention, the strategical plan is evolved.... Strategy should attempt to gain psychological ascendancy over the outlaw or insurgent element prior to hostilities. [The] political mission ... dictates the military strategy of small wars." [43] This statement is quite remarkable in that this was the first time that US military doctrine placed the political mission ahead of military requirements. It also illustrates the extent to which the Marine Corps recognized the "new" guerrilla threat, including the realization that "the motive in small wars is not material destruction; [it] is usually a project dealing with the social, economic, and political development of the people." [44]

The authors of the Small Wars Manual gave special consideration to the underlying socioeconomic and political grievances that gave rise to insurgency and thus defined the theory of victory in such situations as relying upon an accurate assessment of the root causes of internal rebellion. For example, "the application of purely military measures may not, by itself restore peace and orderly government because the fundamental causes of the condition of unrest may be economic, political, or social." Consequently, "the solution of such problems being basically a political adjustment, the military measures to be applied must be of secondary importance and should be applied only to such an extent as to permit the continuation of peaceful corrective measures." [45] Given the primacy of the nonmilitary dimension, it is not surprising that the Marine Corps would acquiesce to the need for restraint--including the application of airpower. If the operational objective is to detach popular support from the guerrillas and reattach it to the central government, deliberately bombing civilians from the air is counterproductive.

In contrast to the service's recognition of the political dimension of small wars, the British, French, and other European powers of the same period continued to regard small wars as exclusively a military problem. Indigenous peoples were regarded as "inferior races" who understood only the sword and fire. [46] Resistance was to be smashed. European officers failed to discern and appreciate the manner in which ideologies borne out of Marxism, nationalism, Islam, and so forth, served to focus discontent and unify native peoples in a social, political, and military organization capable of resisting the regular armies of Europe. One must remember that the period encompassing the Marine Corps experience in Nicaragua (1910-33) and the British air-control experience between the world wars gave rise to such revolutionary figures as Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, and Emiliano Zapata, among others. The corps appears to have understood the emergent political nature of small wars in the twentieth century, including the need for restraint in the application of airpower, better than their European counterparts.