Perhaps the most important challenge confronting the military commander in fighting guerrillas is the need to modify orthodox battlefield thinking. This was as true in ancient, medieval, and colonial times as it is today. Alexander the Great’s successful campaigns resulted not only from mobile and flexible tactics but also from a shrewd political expedient of winning the loyalty of various tribes (Alexander recruited one guerrilla leader into his army and then married his daughter). The few Roman commanders in Spain—Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, Marcus Porcius Cato, Scipio Africanus the Elder and the Younger, and Pompey the Great—who introduced more mobile and flexible tactics often succeeded in defeating large guerrilla forces, and their victories were then exploited by decent treatment of the vanquished in order to gain a relatively peaceful occupation.

In their conquest of Ireland, the Normans borrowed the enemy guerrilla tactics of feigned retreat, flanking attack by cavalry, and surprise. (These tactics were countered by the Irish retreat to impenetrable bog country.) Early settlers in Virginia and New England tried to adopt the best features of Indian guerrilla tactics: small-unit operations, loose formations, informal dress, swift movement, fire discipline, terror, ambush, and surprise attack. As frontiers expanded, colonists reverted to European methods of formal warfare with disastrous results until a Swiss mercenary, Henry Bouquet, trained his new light-infantry regiment to fight Indian-style in the French and Indian War (1754–63). (See also Robert Rogers.) Bouquet’s treatise on tactics, clothing, arms, training, logistics, and decentralized tactical formations is reminiscent of Caesar’s work on Gaul. British generals fighting in the New World never quite understood Bouquet’s teachings and suffered accordingly. A similar blindness cost Napoleon I and his generals disastrous defeats in Spain and Russia.

The French conquest of Algeria (1830–44) might well have failed had it not been for tribal discord and the tactical innovations of Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, who understood the value of the ruse, the raid, and the ambush. Bugeaud dispensed with heavy columns in favour of small, fast-moving task forces, or “flying columns,” which pursued the Berbers and brought them to battles that were usually won by disciplined French troops using superior arms. Although Bugeaud believed in constructive occupation—“the sword only prepared the way for the plough”—he nonetheless depended more on fear than on persuasion, relying on the razzia (raid) to implement a scorched-earth policy to starve the natives into submission. Bugeaud’s offensive tactics of clearing, holding, and expanding became the model for subsequent pacification campaigns around the globe, including the United States’ winning of the West and U.S. forays into colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines.

Such were the string of colonial successes that occasional serious reverses due to inept leadership and ill-trained troops were shrugged off. Orthodox commanders were generally quite content to put unquestioning faith in sheer military weight with little consideration given either to the poor organization and leadership of native forces or to the lack of modern arms and allies. Blockhouses and garrisons kept the peace in pacified areas. If natives rebelled, they were put down with force.

This simplistic approach was challenged by a French general, Louis-Hubert-Gonsalve Lyautey. He had been taught by Joseph-Simon Gallieni in Indochina in 1895 that military success, in Gallieni’s words, meant “nothing unless combined with a simultaneous work of organization—roads, telegraphs, markets, crops—so that with the pacification there flowed forward, like a pool of oil, a great belt of civilization.” Lyautey later employed this tache d’huile, or oil-spot, strategy in Algeria, where he used the army not as an instrument of repression but, in conjunction with civil services, as a positive social force—“the organization on the march.”

Lyautey’s success went generally unheeded—the South African War, for instance, introduced the use of the concentration camp for civilian noncombatants—as did the potency of the guerrilla weapon in World War I and subsequent decades. Native rebellions continued to be put down with force, and no one paid much attention to Mao’s guerrilla war; nor were orthodox commanders greatly impressed with the guerrilla weapon in World War II. The greater was the postwar shock, then, when these commanders and their subordinates were called upon to quell organized insurgencies by ideologically motivated, combat-trained guerrillas equipped with modern weapons and often politically allied with and supplied by the Soviet Union and its satellite countries.

Most governments and commanders simply floundered while calling for more soldiers and more weapons. The Greek army originally tried to suppress what they termed “bandits” by using static defense tactics that soon failed. Once the army had received massive reinforcements of U.S. arms and equipment, it launched large-scale offensives, or “search-and-clear” operations, which met with only limited success. Chinese Nationalist commanders moved vast armies hither and yon in futile efforts to capture Mao’s guerrillas before finally holing up in towns and cities, where they eventually fell prey to Mao’s own army divisions. During the Hukbalahap Rebellion (1946–54), U.S. Army advisers in the Philippines trained and equipped Filipino combat teams supported by armour, aircraft, artillery, and even war dogs. Large-scale search-and-destroy operations—the “ring of steel” tactic similar to that unsuccessfully employed by German commanders against Tito’s guerrillas—produced minimal results, as did free-fire areas (zones in which troops may fire at anything and everything), massive and sometimes brutal interrogations of villagers, and the employment of terrorist tactics, all of which further alienated the rural people whose support was necessary to defeat the guerrillas. Wiser commanders replaced conventional tactics with small-unit patrols and a variety of ruses that largely neutralized overt guerrilla action, then turned the army to the vital task of winning civil cooperation. With this the Huk insurgency died, but by the 1970s the failure to carry out promised reforms, mainly land distribution, brought on a guerrilla insurgency by the New People’s Army that lasted into the 21st century.

British commanders in Malaya also performed ineffectually in the early phases of the communist insurgency that began in 1948. Eventually, however, they realized that the support of the rural natives was vital to their goal of eliminating the entire guerrilla apparatus. Once they had achieved a reasonable civil-military chain of command, their first priority became the reestablishment of law and order, which meant revitalizing the rural police function. The military effort concentrated on breaking up and dispersing large guerrilla formations, then depriving them of the initiative by small-unit tactics—mainly frequent patrols and ambushes based on valid intelligence often gained from natives. The subsequent civil effort was designed to win “the hearts and minds” of the people, first by providing security in the form of village police and local militias working with government forces, second by providing social reforms (land reform, schools, hospitals) that identified the government with the people’s best interests. Harsh measures were necessary: the compulsory census, an identity-card system, suspension of habeas corpus (with carefully publicized safeguards), searches of private property without a warrant, the death sentence for persons caught with unauthorized weapons, harsh sentences for collaborators, curfews, resettlement of entire villages, and other extraordinary measures. These were somewhat palliated by the British government’s promise of eventual independence and by the general unpopularity of the guerrillas among the majority Malay population as well as among the urban Chinese business community.

American military forces began to recognize the rising importance of unconventional warfare during the Cold War, though this recognition came only grudgingly to the top command. In the early 1950s U.S. Army Special Forces units—later known as the “Green Berets”—were formed as deep-penetration teams designed to contact and support indigenous guerrilla groups in rising against communist governments. Though superbly trained, they suffered from severe linguistic limitations and in the event were never committed. In a notable role reversal during the Vietnam War, numerous Green Beret teams were assigned to assist Montagnard tribes in countering the generally effective operations of Viet Cong guerrillas—though not with outstanding success in spite of heavy financial and material support.

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Orthodox senior commanders in Vietnam and later conflicts seemed oblivious to lessons learned in Malaya and the Philippines, the foremost of which was to offer the opponents, and particularly their supporters, a government that would fairly adjudicate their grievances. Believing solely in a military victory, they relied on tactics that only further alienated the very people whose hearts and minds had to be won over if the guerrillas were to be denied their support. Wholesale aerial bombings, mass artillery interdiction of suspected sanctuary areas, division- and corps-strength “sweeps” in which few guerrillas were captured or killed while entire villages were destroyed, free-fire areas that resulted in the deaths of women and children, isolated chains of military outposts and static defensive barriers that were easily outflanked, mass arrests, brutal interrogations, and cruel incarcerations—all of these amounted to a frightful expenditure of lives and money as one country after another threw in the towel, the United States in Vietnam, France in Algeria, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

These campaigns failed on two levels. On the civil level, the authorities refused to admit the validity of often well-founded grievances and failed to undertake vital and generally long-overdue reforms under military and police protection for as long as was necessary. On the military level, the specific failures cited above can be summarized in four words: too much too soon. In order to be successful, counterguerrilla warfare must be a happy marriage between civil and military authority, between the civilian administrator and the soldier-policeman. For the administrator to function properly, the rebels must be contained and then neutralized—a long and arduous task. Throughout history commanders have proudly pronounced the demise of the guerrilla only to witness his reappearance in a year or two, as happened in Peru with the Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) group.

The key to waging successful counterinsurgency warfare lies in the nature of the insurgency. If an insurgency is an ill-founded uprising, either political or criminal, a legitimate government can treat it as such and can call on the support of other governments if necessary. But if an insurgency is founded on legitimate grievances that an ineffectual, biased, or corrupt government refuses to recognize, much less amend, then the conflict will not be ended until that government agrees to reach a solution by negotiation, not force. Too many governments, influenced by strong military establishments or by sweeping declarations of war, have refused to recognize the legitimacy of guerrilla challenges, seeking instead an ephemeral victory by means of military force, which is eventually answered in kind by guerrilla warfare.