T.E. Lawrence And the Mind of An Insurgent

Army, Jul 2005 by Schneider, James J

The Arab guerrilla, mounted on his camel, was an independent force unto himself. Lawrence wrote: "The Arab was simple and individual. Every enrolled man served in the line of battle and was self-contained. We had no lines of communications or labour troops. The efficiency of each man was his personal efficiency. We thought that in our condition of warfare the sum yielded by single men would be at least equal to the product of the compound system. ... In irregular warfare if two men are together one is being wasted."

From the foregoing analysis Lawrence distilled six fundamental principles of insurgency that even today have remarkable relevance. First, a successful guerrilla movement must have an unassailable base-a base secure not only from direct physical assault, but from attack in other forms as well, including psychological attack. Second, the guerrilla must have a technologically sophisticated enemy. The greater this sophistication, the greater this alien force would rely on forms of communications and logistics that must necessarily present vulnerabilities to the irregular. Third, the enemy must be sufficiently weak in numbers so as to be unable to occupy the disputed territory in depth with a system of interlocking fortified posts. Fourth, the guerrilla must have at least the passive support of the populace, if not its full involvement. By Lawrence's calculation, "Rebellions can be made by 2 percent active in striking force and 98 percent passively sympathetic." Fifth, the irregular force must have the fundamental qualities of speed, endurance, presence and logistical independence. Sixth, the irregular must be sufficiently advanced in weaponry to strike at the enemy's logistics and signals vulnerabilities.

In summarizing the practical relevance of his own theory, Lawrence provided the following bottom line: "Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

From the foregoing we can derive several characteristics of insurgent or guerrilla warfare that have relevance for today. First, for the insurgent, warfare is always offensive, never defensive; always protracted, never swift. Second, the news media, especially the electronic mode, is a weapon of the insurgent; it is his to manipulate, and if he manipulates it, he owns it. Third, guerrillas are always organized into the smallest possible-and most lethal-structure; this is how they survive in the first place. In current parlance, all are units of action; there are no units of employment. Fourth, and just as Lawrence understood, the ratio of troops-to-space determines the character of military operations. The simple physics of action makes the conventional force a mechanical solid under constant pressure from the fluid-like insurgent forces. Fifth, because insurgents command precision information regarding the conventional force, insurgent actions become precision strikes. Last, because insurgents have the physical characteristics of a fluid and the cybernetic structure of a hive, they are the most evolved of human networks.