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Some Reflections on the Future of War
Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2000 by Martin van Creveld
The Germans soon discovered that it was precisely the most modern components of their armed forces that were of the least use. Hitherto their tanks, artillery, fighters, and bombers had experienced little difficulty in tearing to pieces the rest of the world's most advanced armies--including those of three world powers with combined forces considerably larger than their own; [32] now, however, confronted by small groups of guerrillas who did not constitute armies, did not wear uniforms, did not fight in the open, and tended to melt away into the countryside or surrounding populations, they found themselves almost entirely at a loss. Like other conquerors after them, the Germans learned that for counterinsurgency purposes, almost the only forces that mattered were those that were lightly armed--police, light infantry, mountaineers, special forces, signals units, and above all, intelligence personnel of every kind. All had to operate on foot or travel in light vehicles. Outside the towns they could be reinforc ed by reconnaissance aircraft, and on such comparatively rare occasions that the opposition allowed itself to be caught in strength, by small detachments of artillery and tanks. There was no room in these operations for the Wehrmacht's pride and joy, its armored and mechanized divisions--indeed, since the scale of these operations was usually very small, for any divisions at all.
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The discovery made by the Germans--and to a lesser but still significant extent, their Japanese counterparts--during World War II was later shared by virtually every other major armed force. Among the first to encounter guerrilla warfare during the immediate postwar years were the French and the British. In point of ruthlessness, their operations were very far from matching those of the Germans; still, particularly in the case of the French in Indochina and Algeria, they were ruthless enough. The French attempts, supported by every modern weapon they could bring to bear, to regain control of the colonies led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the destruction by fire and sword of entire villages, even districts. The British did not go as far; the largest number of native victims in any of their colonial campaigns seems to have stood at ten thousand (in Kenya); nonetheless, they too made routine use of capital punishment, torture, and the uprooting of entire villages. [33] Like the Germans, the British and the French armed forces learned that their most powerful weapons were worthless in such warfare. Against enemies so dispersed and so elusive that they could barely be found, the most powerful weapons of all, nuclear ones, were simply irrelevant.
Thereafter, the Dutch, Belgians, Spanish, and Portuguese were all forced to evacuate their colonies. The Americans, seeking to take the place of the supposedly demoralized French in Vietnam, sent first advisers, then special forces, and from 1965 on, huge conventional forces into that small, backward, and remote country. [34] Eventually the total number of Americans who served there exceeded 2.5 million, and the troops present in Southeast Asia numbered at one point in excess of 550,000. They were backed up by the most powerful military technology available, including heavy bombers, fighter-bombers, aircraft carriers, helicopters (the number of helicopters lost reached 1,500), tanks, artillery, and the most advanced communications system in history. The number of Viet Cong, North Vietnamese, and civilian dead probably stood at between one and two million. All to no avail--after eight years of fighting and fifty-five thousand dead, the Americans gave up.
