Winning the war of the flea: lessons from guerrilla warfare

Military Review, Sept-Oct, 2004 by Robert M. Cassidy

Staving Off Defeat

Today, the Army is prosecuting three counterinsurgencies and learning to adapt to insurgency and counterinsurgency in contact. This is a genuinely compelling reason to expand the Army's depth and breadth of knowledge about counterinsurgency operations. The U.S. military, particularly the Army, must develop a culture that emphasizes stability operations and counterinsurgency among its core missions.

The global war against the flea will be protracted, but it will be won. The rule of law, democracy, and civilization will prevail over chaos, theocracy, and barbarism. As Mao Tse Tung said, "Although guerrilla operations are the cosmic trap of military strategy, the muck, the quicksand in which a technologically superior military machine bogs down in time-consuming futility, they cannot in and of themselves win wars. Like mud, they can stave off defeat, but, like mud, they cannot bring victory." (21)

NOTES

(1.) Robert Taber, The War of the Flea: Guerrilla Warfare in Theory and Practice (New York: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1965), 27-28.

(2.) See Robert M. Cassidy, "Prophets or Praetorians: The Uptonian Paradox and the Powell Corollary," Parameters (Autumn 2003): 132-33.

(3.) For a short discussion on military culture and big-war preferences, see Cassidy, Russia in Afghanistan and Chechnya: Military Strategic Culture and the Paradoxes of Asymmetric Conflict (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute, 2003), 8, 54-60.

(4.) Sam C. Sarkesian, America's Forgotten Wars: The Counterrevolutionary Past and Lessons for the Future (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 245.

(5.) Andrew J, Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine 1860-1941 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988), 55-92; CPT Randolph B. Marcy, The Prairie Traveler: A Handbook in Overland Expeditions (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, January 1968).

(6.) Birtle, 64-65.

(7.) Anthony James Joes, America and Guerrilla Warfare (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 120-23.

(8.) Max Boot, Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 126.

(9.) Sarkesian, 178-180.

(10,) Ibid.

(11.) Ibid.

(12.) U.S. Marine Corps (USMC), Small Wars Manual (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940), 1-1-1-31; USMC Combat Development Command, Small Wars (Quantico, VA: U.S. Marines Corps, 2004 Draft), iii-iv; Scot, "A Century of Small Wars Shows They Can Be Won," New York Times Week in Review, 6 July 2003.

(13.) Ibid.

(14.) U.S. Department of the Army, A Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam (Washington, DC: US. Department of Defense, 1966), 1-9; Lewes Sorley, A Better War (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1999), 10-125.

(15.) Jeffrey J. Clarke, Advice and Supped: The Final Years (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988), 196-207.

(16.) Frank Pelli, "Insurgency, Counterinsurgency, and the Marines in Vietnam," unpublished paper, USMC Command and Staff College, Quantico, VA, 1990, 13-16; Brooks R. Brewington, "Combined Action Platoons: A Strategy for Peace Enforcement," unpublished paper, USMC Command and Staff College, Quantico, VA. 1996, 13-19.