Max Boot has written a sweeping history of guerrilla warfare, richly detailed and rigorously reported, from insurgency’s origins (ironically enough) in Mesopotamia in 2335-2005 BC, up until the present war in the same land between the rivers. The breadth of Invisible Armies is impressive. But the book’s main takeaway – that mass public opinion is a guerrilla’s best friend – feels a bit forced and is never proven in any systematic fashion. Nor does he consider in any depth alternative, and more plausible, explanations that most historians and political scientists attribute to the mid-20th century reversal of guerrillas’ poor fortunes. Too bad the book devolves into a familiar defense of popular-centric COIN, at a time when such a strategy is producing mixed results across the globe.
Guerrilla Hobnobbing
Before 1945, Boot argues, insurgents “won” about one-quarter of their campaigns. Since then, their success ratio has shot up to 40 percent. The puzzle is why. Boot attributes it to “the spread of communications technology and the increasing influence of public opinion.” He claims insurgents have become savvier at leveraging popular sentiment to their cause and against the state, using examples like Robert Naber’s War of the Flea or Leonard Bernstein hobnobbing with Black Panthers. Moreover, he claims, modern communications has “sapped the will of states to engage in protracted counterinsurgencies, especially outside their own territories, and have heightened the ability of insurgents to survive even after suffering military setbacks.”
The trouble is Boot either discounts or ignores other explanations. Wouldn’t weakened state capacity as a result of decolonization perhaps explain war outcomes? Typically stronger states emerge out of the embers of civil wars, especially in East Africa or in Southeast Asia. That would seem to predict that future insurgents, such as Ethiopia’s Somalis or the Philippines’ Moros, would be fighting steeper uphill battles than their predecessors. Boot also dances around the impact of poverty, which presumably would lower the opportunity cost for peasants taking up arms and joining a guerrilla group. The origins of the guerrilla leaders he profiles are not all broke peasants (Fidel Castro and Che Guevara both hail from wealthy backgrounds). He spends little time exploring the qualitative difference between urban-style guerrilla tactics versus those employed in diverse rural terrain like Afghanistan. “Throughout most of our species’ long and bloody slog,” he writes, “both before the development of urban civilization and since, warfare has been carried out primarily by bands of loosely organized, ill-disciplined, lightly armed volunteers who disdain open battle.” Fair enough, but this statement ignores Boot’s own evidence that many guerrillas throughout history were actually quite well organized, well disciplined, and well armed. Native Americans, for example, were renowned for their hunting skills, he writes. They knew the terrain better than the colonists. As George Washington wrote, “However absurd it may appear, five hundred Indians [could be a more potent fighting force] than ten times their number of Regulars.”
Another obvious explanation for why rebels begin winning more wars after 1945 is precisely because of the Cold War: Namely, aid poured into insurgent groups, mostly from Moscow, which was busy arming anyone it could with Marxist leanings (True, we supported rebels in Angola and Nicaragua but the Soviets far out-spent us). Another factor that should have received more attention from a military historian like Boot: The mechanization of modern militaries, which gave rise to force structures that made information collection among local populations – read: sifting insurgents from civilian – exceedingly difficult. Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III argue this actually fueled, rather than deterred, insurgencies.
(Boot also ignores the important and lucrative role natural resources played in the post-World War II era on dragging out insurgencies. Such resource endowments would obviously determine whether rebels were opportunists in it for the loot or were ideologically driven fighters with loftier ambitions, which would determine how – and against whom – they use force, how long they would stick it out, and so forth.)
To simply say that “controlling the narrative” tips insurgencies in the rebels’ favor is far too vague and deterministic to be of much value. Even the database Boot compiles refutes this thesis – several of the insurgent groups that won were not crafty propagandists, and vice versa (Among recent victors on the rebel side are the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo and the LURD/MODEL in Liberia, hardly the most technologically savvy of rebel movements. Darfur’s rebels, meanwhile, had Angelina Jolie and George Clooney in their corner, yet got clobbered.).
Boot argues that “the growing glare of media scrutiny would necessitate a kinder, gentler style of counterinsurgency.” He calls it the “great equalizer that allowed the militarily weak to best the strong.” But the mechanism by which this equalizer works is unclear and goes untested. Is it because governments are under the watchful eye of the media, and so cannot commit mass atrocities? If so, wouldn’t that negate one of his theses that “inflicting mass terror” is ineffective? So do states exercise restraint because of the glare of the media, because indiscriminate violence is ineffective, or because states are more altruistic as they have gotten more democratic? Or maybe it is because the weak can harness the power of the media, not unlike how the Colt revolver was embraced in the American West, to balance the scales, as it were, and broadcast their message to a bigger audience, thereby tipping public opinion against the state? Boot says that “small wars” are not only waged on the ground but in cyberspace and on satellite television. Well, ok, but how has this development actually tipped the balance of power in insurgents’ favor? He offers a few scant anecdotes from the American Revolution (which was where the British phrase “public opinion” originates), Algeria’s quest for independence, and the Vietnam War. But how does this demonstrate that newfangled information technologies always favor the underdog, much less account for the surge in rebel success after the Second World War?
Media Scrutiny
Throughout the book, it’s unclear how “media scrutiny” forces counterinsurgents to behave less badly or insurgents to win more splendidly. He discusses the shrewd military tactics of Mao and the early Zionist movement, but offers scant evidence to suggest it was public opinion and the rise of communications technology that saw both succeed. First, public opinion is too broad as an explanatory variable to have much meaning, which is why civil war scholars have largely ignored it in their analysis. Sri Lanka and Russia, both democracies with varying degrees of media freedoms, were able to commit untold number of war crimes during their respective counterinsurgency operations (incidentally which both states won, something Boot only mentions in passing). Moreover, Boot fails to consider that mass public opinion can be mobilized to favor the state. In Turkey or Iraq, when suicide attacks by the PKK or AQI began killing civilians in Diyarbakir and Anbar provinces, these attacks were broadcast on television and the internet and public opinion turned against the insurgents. The result in both cases was that locals (even co-ethnics) turned against the insurgency.
It’s unclear how “media scrutiny” forces counterinsurgents to behave less badly or insurgents to win more splendidly.
His attempt at empirically proving his thesis also falls flat. One would think that Boot, whose entire thesis is premised that public opinion helps insurgents win wars, would try to code this explanatory variable (even in a simple binary way) in his database. But he does not include this in his empirical analysis (Fair enough, he is a historian - but then why include a database in the first place, if not for using the empirics to test your hypothesis?). Moreover, several of the insurgencies he codes as rebel victories (e.g. Chechen defeat of Russian forces in 1996) only flare up again several years later, calling into question what constitutes a “victory.” Another problem, common among datasets on war, is he does not compare apples to apples. All guerrilla campaigns are lumped together, regardless of their root (ideological, religious, or ethnic), relative importance (Ninja rebels in Congo versus Hezbollah), means (terrorism versus hit-and-run tactics), and ends (separatism versus millenarianism). It would have made more sense to examine only guerrilla rebel movements, as the book jacket suggests, rather than to provide a Big Idea theory that seeks to explain global terrorists, peasant bandits, and all of history’s mischievous non-state rabble-rousers in between. It’s not clear Mikhail Bakunin and Mao have that much in common.
Boot further claims the “spread of democracy, schools, and colleges … have sapped the will of states to engage in protracted counterinsurgencies.” But how exactly? Presumably, he assumes that democracies fight insurgencies differently than authoritarian states because their publics have greater access to information and lower tolerances for human rights abuses. Even if this were true, does this mean publics inevitably turn against asymmetric wars, which on average last a decade or more? Or that they inevitably pressure their governments not to use disproportionate force or commit atrocities? Recent polls, however, suggest Americans are supportive of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, so long as our efforts are framed as winning the war. Ditto Israel’s public with regards to Hamas and Hezbollah. Is Boot implying that states with high literacy rates and good university systems not fight small wars? Turkey just erected over 90 universities over the past decade – I guess that means it should get out of the counterinsurgency business.
For all his research, Boot has little to say on what causes insurgencies or civil wars. Nor does he provide much advice on how to win civil wars, except to double down on the Pentagon mantra that population-centric COIN is preferable to “killing bad guys.” For Boot, the Holy Grail is leveraging public opinion, both local and global. He writes that the 19th century anarchists took advantage of newspapers and magazines, the Vietcong and PLO used broadcast television, and al-Qaeda and its affiliates use the internet. Never mind that anarchism became a footnote of Russian history; Arafat’s mug on magazine covers popularized the Palestinian cause but has yet to produce an independent state; and the beheadings posted on YouTube have backfired for al-Qaeda, as its popularity continues to sink among Muslims.
Indeed, the guerrilla movement with perhaps the widest reach – with TV stations and samizdat-like newspapers abroad – not to mention the most sophisticated firepower (boasting a navy, air force and army), was the Tamil Tigers. They lost their war (Boot only mentions this inconvenient fact twice). The terrorist organization with the savviest media apparatus is probably Hezbollah, even sending birthday cards to New York Times reporters in the region (As a former Beirut-based journalist, I was once stopped by Hezbollah before my captor asked me to “friend” him on Facebook). Yet they too have been unable to “win” their various wars with Israel.
Winning ‘Hearts and Minds’
Boot keeps returning to the familiar refrain that insurgencies are battles over “hearts and minds,” even as he seeks to dispel myths over this misused cliché. He points to the British strategy in Malaya as a textbook example of how to employ the population-centric strategies so popular among the COINistas crowd. But even in his analysis Boot admits that the use of force (collective punishment tactics) and coercion (e.g. resettling squatters) by British General Gerald Templer was necessary to win “hearts and minds” in that campaign. The media seemed to play little role. More important was that Malaya conveniently sat at the end of a peninsula, and so its insurgents were isolated from outside support and sitting ducks (whereas French Indochina bordered an unfriendly People’s Republic of China), something that incidentally helped Sri Lanka defeat its Tamil opposition to end its decades-long civil war.
The “hearts and minds” phrase is also problematic because it assumes that the fence-sitting populace is just this lumpen mass that can be molded either to favor the government or the insurgent (He writes that the problem with insurgents in the pre-modern era is “they did little or nothing to woo undecided people or to undermine the will of the growing populace, save by brute force). But doesn’t this contradict his notion that the spread of schools – hence, an informed populace – was the downfall of counterinsurgents? Moreover, if global “public opinion” were the main predictor of insurgency success, wouldn’t outsiders be intervening on the side of insurgents more often in places like Syria, moved as they were by the atrocities there, and thus tip the balance of power against the state?
Boot writes that “political organizing and propaganda have been rising in importance as factors in low-intensity warfare,” as insurgents seek increasingly to win the “battle of narrative,” while their ancient forerunners were largely apolitical and tribal.” Here the suggestion is acute that modern governments must manage their public image better if they are to retain their legitimacy. But this theory effectively reduces COIN to a public relations exercise. Why “clear, hold and build,” when, like the IDF and other armies have done on occasion, you can just go on Twitter and win fans over to your side?
The book’s main strength is its breezy prose. Once readers can sift through the sappy prologue, which resembles at times a grad school application essay (“By leaving my book-lined office in New York, I have been better able to understand what insurgency and counterinsurgency look like, smell like, feel like”), the book takes off. Boot is a fantastic writer, even if his neoconservative brand of politics, which creeps into the latter pages as he heaps praise on our COIN efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, can be called into question. He avoids academic mumbo-jumbo and writes lucidly in the style of a gifted opinion writer and historian, which is what he is, escorting readers through centuries of conflict, armed with impressive details about virtually every guerrilla battle since the Peloponnesian War.
Who knew that a young war correspondent named Winston Churchill would visit the Swat Valley and document troop frustrations with “guerrilla tactics,” which informed the future prime minister’s push for waging total war in WWII? Who knew that the New York Times in 1881, following the assassinations of both the Russian tsar and American president, called for a “War on Terrorism”? Boot compares battle scenes to Puccini operas. On Ireland’s Michael Collins: “He traveled without bodyguards or a disguise, cycling through the streets on an ‘ancient bicycle whose chain,’ one of his men wrote, ‘rattled like a medieval ghost’s’.” He can sometimes gush too much, both about insurgent and counterinsurgent alike. On Collins, for example, he comes off like a fawning sport announcer: “If there has ever been a heroic or likeable terrorist, the Big Fellow was it.” On Petraeus, “Even into his fifties, he was known for engaging in push-up contests with soldiers half his age – and winning.” Such fitness agility may or may not be useful for fighting Afghan or Iraqi insurgents (and Petraeus’s marital infidelities, which violate the Army’s code of ethics, curiously go unmentioned). Some of the book’s strongest chapters document the importance of T.E. Lawrence on the course of counterinsurgency doctrine, as well as Edward Geary Lansdale, fictionalized in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, on not relying on search and destroy missions (advice General Westmoreland would ignore in South Vietnam).
He wants his book to be a “one-stop destination” to understand guerrilla armies. But the problem with the book is its author is neither critical nor probing enough of the controversial population-centric strategy formerly in vogue among Washington insiders (and of which Boot was a cheerleader of, despite its dubious success in Iraq and Afghanistan). This is not to say that a scorched-earth strategy would work better. But modern democracies, even by Boot’s own admission, may be too fickle and impatient to allow for such population-centric strategies to play themselves out, and that effective counterinsurgency, as the Brits learned in Malaya, does require some coercion. Moreover, by overemphasizing information and public relations at the expense of other important explanations – ethnic cleavages, poverty, humiliation – the takeaway is that these kinds of wars can be won by just spinning the message better, that we should be deploying PR flacks, not just Marines in flak jackets, to war zones.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Just ask the salesmen behind our recent debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present
by Max Boot
Liveright, 576 pages, $22.72
