1
Field Manual 3-24 and the heritage of counterinsurgency theory
Abstract
The Counterinsurgency Manual FM 3-24 has been accused of being over-dependent on the
counterinsurgency 'classics' Galula and Thompson. But comparison reveals that it is different in
spirit. Galula and Thompson seek practical control; the Manual seeks to build 'legitimacy'. Its
concept of legitimacy is superficially Weberian, but owes more to the writings of the American
Max Manwaring. The Manual presupposes that a rights-based legal order can (other things
being equal) be made to be cross-culturally attractive; 'effective governance' by itself can build
legitimacy. The fusion of its methods with an ideology creates unrealistic criteria for success. Its
weaknesses suggest a level of incapacity to think politically that will, in time, result in further
failures.
A military doctrine sets out to close the mind; the benefits of an accepted doctrine – the savings
in reaction time and mental energy, the improved co-ordination between colleagues, the likely
reinforcement of group identity – derive from the encouragement of shared presuppositions. To
put the point another way, a doctrine of this nature must be both teachable and learnable (which
sets an upper limit to its complexity); and should, if at all possible, enforce an impoverished
language in which the essentials of a situation can be summed up and then communicated. All
this is proper and desirable; as doctrines ought to simplify encounters with the world, they ought
2
to screen out some considerations. But by the same token, doctrines are revealing; they
reproduce and amplify the assumptions that were shared among the people that created them.
The best-known recent military doctrine, Field Manual 3-24 (the US Army
counterinsurgency manual that appeared over the signatures of Generals David Petraeus and
James Amos on December 15 2006), was amongst other things a document with properly
professional objectives; it aimed to give practical guidance to practical people in unforeseen and
frightening situations. But this particular doctrine had in its turn been shaped by the political
circumstances of its origins. Besides its narrowly professional function, the Petraeus Field
Manual had two broader purposes. One was to achieve a significant shift in military culture, redirecting American effort and resources towards the fighting of Long Wars1 that cannot be won
by simply winning battles. This involved communication of a number of hard sayings:
advantages in firepower may be useless, or actually counterproductive; there is a tradeoff
between force protection and operational effectiveness; soldiers may have to undertake ‘nonmilitary’ functions. The second was to shore up support for what appeared to be a doomed
adventure. The Manual was drafted in the twelve month period that started in December 2005,
and its formal publication, a year later, was in itself a notable political event; in the aftermath of
disastrous election results (November 7) and of the pessimistic Iraq Study Group report
1
The drafting team were guided by eight basic principles, of which the last was
that ‘counterinsurgents should prepare for a long-term commitment’ (Conrad Crane,
‘United States’ in Understanding counterinsurgency: doctrine, operations, and challenges,
ed.Thomas Rid and Thomas Keaney (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).. For contemporary
understandings of strategic ‘time’, see Austin Long’s chapter, ‘Time’ in the same volume..
3
(December 7), it greatly helped beleaguered defenders of the war to argue for increasing the
American commitment. It pointed to the existence of a group of officers, equipped with a body
of expertise and a degree of academic backing, who might, if they were adequately supported, be
more successful than their predecessors.2
The authors thus had reason to persuade themselves and others that there was a science of
counterinsurgency warfare whose principles were relatively timeless. Their situation was by no
means new; the idea of such a science has frequently been linked to a desire to reassure nonmilitary opinion. Both the French and British empires had given rise to semi-popular writings
whose sanitised codification of colonial practices was aimed, in part, at shoring up support for
imperial projects.3 But the drafting team’s approach was unexpected. They might have been
expected to emphasise their debt to the Marine Corps’ Small Wars Manual (1940), a wellconceived text that presented its practical advice within a framework of American values.4 The
2
David H.Ucko, The new counterinsurgency era: transforming the US military for
modern wars (Washington: Georgetown UP, 2009), p.114.
3
On the French tradition, see Douglas Porch, ‘Bugeaud, Galliéni, Lyautey: the
development of French imperial warfare’ in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of modern strategy from
Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp.376-407. The major British
works were C.E.Callwell, Small wars: their principles and practice, third edn (London: HMSO,
1906) and Sir Charles Gwynn, Imperial policing (London: Macmillan, 1934).
4
James S.Corum, Fighting the war on terror: a counterinsurgency strategy (St Paul MN:
Zenith, 2007), pp.18-19. The Small Wars Manual does appear in FM3-24’s bibliography, where
it is said to ‘cover lessons learned from the Corps’ experience in the interwar years’.
4
achievement of this obvious precursor is best appreciated through a contrast. The best-known
British treatment of the subject, C.E.Caldwell’s Small wars: their principles and practice (1896;
revised editions, 1899 and 1906), defined ‘small wars’ by reference to their methods as
‘operations of regular armies against irregular, or comparatively speaking irregular, forces’,
including expeditions aimed at conquest.5 But the self-understanding of the United States (as a
distinctly non-imperial power) and the institutional place of the Marine Corps (as an amphibious
instrument of naval strategy at the disposal of the State Department) encouraged a quite different
definition: small wars were ‘operations undertaken under executive authority, wherein military
force is combined with diplomatic pressure in the internal or external affairs of another state
whose government is unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of
such interests as are determined by the foreign policy of our Nation.’6 Here military force is
presented as part of a larger political order: it is one (of several) instruments of foreign policy
towards a ‘state’ whose ‘government’ is in some way aberrant or defective.
As we shall see, this fruitful focus upon governance (that is, government considered as an
activity) did actually find echoes in FM 3-24. But the main debts the authors acknowledged
were to books by foreigners: David Galula’s Counterinsurgency warfare: theory and practice
(1964) and (to a rather lesser extent) Robert Thompson’s Defeating Communist insurgency:
experiences from Malaya and Vietnam (1966). The leader of the drafting team has written that
the former was ‘probably the most influential “dead theorist” on the writers.’ The influence of
5
C.E.Callwell, Small wars: their principles and practice, third edn (London: HMSO,
1906), p.21-2.
6
U.S.Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual (New York: Skyhorse, 2009), p.1.
5
the latter was partly mediated through its impact on John Nagl, the associate of Petraeus who in
the end composed the Introduction.7 Nagl’s widely-read Eating soup with a knife:
counterinsurgency lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (2002; new edition 2005 with a Foreword
by General Peter Schoomaker the Army Chief of Staff) took over Thompson’s intellectual
framework as well as his notably flattering view of British policies.8 There were polemical
advantages in appealing to two writers who were not American (not least in shifting focus away
from Vietnam), but the Manual’s authors genuinely admired both these works, especially
Galula’s little treatise.9 When it was first translated into French (Galula had written his book at
Harvard, in English), Petraeus and Nagl co-authored a brief preface in which they described it
not just as ‘the greatest and the only great book ever written on unconventional warfare’ but as
‘the main source of the manual Counterinsurgency published in 2006.10
7
Crane, ‘United States’, p.63.
8
The Anglophilia of Nagl’s work was a product of the world before the
inadequate performance described in Frank Ledwidge, Losing small wars: British military
failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011)
9
Conrad Crane, ‘United States’ in Rid and Keaney, Understanding counterinsurgency,,
p.61.
10
‘Le plus grand et le seul grand livre jamais écrit sur la guerre non conventionnelle’; ‘la
principale source du manuel Contre-insurrection publié en 2006’. (David Galula, Contreinsurrection: théorie et pratique (Paris: Economica, 2008), pp.vi, xii). Nagl also provided a
Foreword to the recent Praeger edition (David Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare: theory and
practice (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), which is the edition which is cited here.
6
As a number of early commentators noted, there was something on the face of it
surprising about this open deference to Cold War theories.11 Galula and Thompson were
‘counter-Maoist’ writers, who took it for granted that Mao had set out the principles for rational
insurgents. In consequence, the heart of their approaches was an attempt to separate Mao’s
‘water’ from his ‘fish’. Both recognised this might require some forced resettlement. Both
could assume their enemies were members of a disciplined vanguard party. Both benefited from
the fact that their employers were empires that in a legal sense controlled the territory in
question. Neither had much to say about the special problems posed by primarily religious
motivations. The situation faced by the lopsided coalitions that occupied Afghanistan and Iraq
was manifestly very different. But none of this seems to have dented the conviction
(incautiously expressed in Petraeus’ Foreword) that ‘all insurgencies…use variations of standard
themes and adhere to elements of a recognizable revolutionary campaign plan.’12
One way to criticise the Manual’s work was thus to attack its assumption that lessons
formulated in the 1950s and the early 60s have relevance to the problems of today. Among the
initial responses, Frank G.Hoffman’s perceptive essay ‘Neo-Classical Counterinsurgency?’ drew
attention to a number of disanalogies between the past and present situations, including the
presence of multiple, sometimes transnational, insurgent actors; the much diminished importance
11
David Martin Jones and M.L.R.Smith, ‘Whose hearts and whose minds? The curious
case of global counter-insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 33:1 (2010), pp.99-100.
12
FM, Foreword.
7
of purely physical space; and the role of fundamentalist religion.13 Others have doubted if the
work has had much influence on actual American strategy and tactics. It is doubtful, for
example, if the extensive patronage showered on Sunni tribes can really be squared with the
Manual’s recommendations;14 it is certain that the practice of setting a date for withdrawal flies
in the face of attitudes encapsulated in the phrase ‘Long War’.15 This essay will, however, have
a rather narrower focus: it will compare the Manual with its most important sources.
This is, of course, an exercise in the history of ideas, but it also has a definite practical
payoff, if only in encouraging a better understanding of the whole nature of the Manual’s
projects. Comparison of the Manual with Galula (and to a lesser extent with Thompson’s work)
has the effect of laying bare two interesting facts. The first is that the Manual’s superficial
borrowings conceal a striking difference in spirit. As we shall see, the Manual’s innovations are
centred on its understanding of ‘legitimacy’ – a concept used to smuggle in an unacknowledged
commitment to an Americanized liberal order. The second is that the drafting team were writing
in good faith. There is no indication that they were themselves aware how far they were
13
Frank G.Hoffman, ‘Neo-classical counterinsurgency?’, Parameters 37:2 (Summer,
2007), pp.71-87.
14
See the remarks of Stephen Biddle and Stathis Kalyvas in ‘The new U.S.
Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political
Praxis’, Political Perspectives 6 (2008), pp.348, 352.
15
The British disaster in Aden was conventionally traced to this error: Frank
Kitson, Low intensity operations: subversion, insurgency, and peace-keeping (London: Faber,
1971), p.50.
8
departing from their sources; they simply read them through the lens supplied (as we shall see)
by some pre-formed professional assumptions. Their serious but innocent misreadings reflected
a deepseated imaginative constraint arising from their own presuppositions. These failings were
a symptom of an ideology that both encourages armed interventions and dooms them to
repeatedly unsatisfying outcomes.
I
The most appropriate starting point for an analysis is David Galula’s Counterinsurgency warfare
(1964), a work that a historian would study in conjunction with the report on his Algerian service
that he produced for the RAND Corporation.
The latter reveals that Galula was a French
officer of relatively robust opinions, whose view, for example, of “tortures” (the scare quotes are
his), was close to that expressed by the notorious Trinquier: some measure of enhanced
interrogation was an unpleasant feature of the modern art of war analogous (both said) to civilian
bombing.16 He had achieved results that he found satisfactory by means of imprisoning suspects
inside ovens in which he threatened to incinerate them.17 On at least one occasion, he let a
prisoner be executed without the benefit of legal process.18 Not surprisingly, he supported the
16
Daid Galula, Pacification in Algeria 1956-58 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, 2006), pp.143, 119. Roger Trinquier, Modern warfare: a French view of
counterinsurgency (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), p.20.
17
Galula, Pacification, p.118.
18
Galula, Pacification, p.173.
9
initial pro-Gaullist coup (which he regarded as the turning point that led to the defeat of
insurrection), and traced the French withdrawal to a needless collapse of the will in metropolitan
opinion.19 He was, however, definitely republican in feeling in ways that probably eased his
thought’s American reception: he preferred the term ‘counterinsurgency’ to ‘counter-revolution’
because the latter struck him as being reactionary;20 and felt contempt for the efforts of ‘the
psychologists’ at brainwashing the native population.21 Moreover, he had an uncritical faith in
the inherent attractiveness of secularisation; he favoured an aggressive assault on what he
revealingly called the ‘Islamic church’22 (this arguably influenced one of his major assumptions:
his unargued expectation of sustained passivity among a clear majority of ‘neutrals’). The
drafting team were not, of course, composing history; they might, however, have understood his
theory rather better if they had borne in mind this information.
Galula’s central teaching was that insurgencies are of their very nature local problems
that need to be addressed by local methods. Counterinsurgency takes place when there is an
insurgency to counter, and an insurgency can be defined (in a mild parody of Clausewitz) as ‘the
pursuit of the policy of a party, inside a country, by every means’.24 This careful formulation has
19
Galula, Pacification, 234-40; Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.54.
20
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.xiv.
21
Galula, Pacification, pp.53-4, 65-6. On the contemporary French school from
which he was implicitly distinguishing himself, see Etienne de Durand, ‘France’ in Rid
and Keaney, Understanding counterinsurgency, pp.16-22.
22
Galula, Pacification, pp.123, 160-61.
24
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.1.
10
at least four elements that need a little further exposition. First, insurgency is ‘the pursuit of the
policy of a party’, that is, of a programme adopted by a sectional interest. But secondly, the
party pre-exists the policy and may at least in principle out-live it; all parties need a programme,
but the programme can be changed if an ingenious party can find a substitute. Thirdly, any
insurgency is in its essence an internal conflict. Even if the territory where it happens is in a
formal sense a colony, and even if the conflict has significant external ramifications (which was
of course true – or believed to be true – of every Cold War conflict), the insurgents will be
challenging a local ruling power with the intention of displacing it. Lastly, their party’s policy is
one that is pursued by ‘every means’. Insurgencies are distinguished from revolutions and from
coups d’état by being relatively protracted struggles. They sooner or later involve a resort to
lethal violence, but their defining quality is not the violence, but readiness, when the moment
comes, to use it.
The implication of this definition is that insurgencies are understood as violent extensions
of local politics; they are, in fact, a kind of civil war. Galula’s distinctive approach to the
military problem was to insist on seeing this conflict from within: to act within the system of
local politics through a party he had moulded for this purpose. This insistence on abstracting
from the wider political context (composed, for example, by formal or informal empires) was a
brilliant conceptual innovation; it also lent his thought a universal quality that eased its
intellectual transplantation. Though many of his suggestions appear to presuppose an almost
total absence of political constraint, he did not mean their usefulness to be confined to places that
formed a part of an imperial system. He took it as axiomatic that in any territory there would be
some kind of minority who were, or might become, the government’s allies. The counterinsurgent’s task is to locate this little group and help it dominate the population, ‘To find the
11
favourable minority, to organize it in order to mobilize the population against the insurgent
minority’.25
In consequence, he had a clear conception of his role: ‘Its essence’, he says, ‘can
be summed up in a single sentence: Build (or rebuild) a political machine from the population
upward.’26
It is often supposed that Galula’s central insight was that a counterinsurgency is
asymmetrical – to use his own Maoist expression, ‘a fight between a fly and a lion’27 - and he
does of course stress the importance of restraint and the essential pointlessness of simply killing
people. But at a deeper level, there is a symmetry between the strategies of the two sides. Both
sides will have to live among the people (the counterinsurgent in much larger numbers). Both
need to establish ‘control’ over the people. Lastly, both need to find themselves some kind of
political programme; a counterinsurgent victory will be only temporary unless it has this
ideological backing. In other words, the authorities need a ‘competing cause’.28 Unfortunately,
finding such a cause is difficult. The insurgents have after all had first choice of cause, and it is
likely that the counterinsurgent will ‘be left with a narrow choice of secondary issues that appeal
almost invariably to reason at a time when passion is the prime mover.’29 It is very important to
25
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.53.
26
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.95.
27
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.xii.
28
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.71.
29
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.72.
12
grasp that Galula expected that counterinsurgents would bear an ‘ideological handicap’;30
Galulan techniques are intended to help the less attractive cause.
It was, in part, this gloomy expectation that was the rationale of his insistence that
counterinsurgents should divide their efforts into phases. The ‘First Step’ took the fairly
traditional form of the expulsion from a given area of any sizeable insurgent forces. The Second
Step was the static deployment of troops so that ‘the population and the counterinsurgent
political teams are reasonably well protected’ and the troops ‘can participate in civic action at the
lowest level’.31 The space in question should be subdivided down to the level of the ‘basic unit’,
which is ‘the largest unit whose leader is in direct and continuous contact with the population’.
As contact with the populace was to be maximised; one such unit should be stationed in each
community. If a disaffected rural population was too dispersed for such arrangements to be
practicable, that population would have to be re-settled.32 Galula naturally stressed that this
should not be undertaken lightly; it is, however, worth noting that the criterion of resettlement
was not the safety of the population, but the achievement of an optimal deployment. As the
counterinsurgents made progress, they should be loyal to the principles of maximum contact and
maximum prudent dispersal; Galula disapproved of building barracks, if only because ‘soldiers
living in barracks would always appear…as outsiders, as people apart.’33
30
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.52.
31
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, pp.77-8.
32
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.78.
33
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.79.
13
The Third Step, which follows deployment, is ‘contact with and control of the
population’. This Step at most prepares the ground for later political action. Galula suggests that
the people should be made to do some task – repairing the streets, for example – to get them into
the habit of compliance.34 At this early stage, counterinsurgents should obviously set out to be
helpful – providing any relevant essential services – but should avoid ambitious social measures.
Galula emphasises that it is premature to implement whatever reforms the counter-cause has
promised or will promise.35
Such measures should never precede the Fourth Step, which is the weeding out of the
‘political agents’ of the insurgency. The best approach is to arrest large numbers of apparently
suspect people and use them to identify the leaders. This Step is bound to be unpopular: it is ‘a
police operation directed not against common criminals but against men whose motivations,
even if the counterinsurgent disapproves of them, may be perfectly honorable.’36 In
consequence, it should be given to ‘an organization that must in no way be confused with the
counterinsurgent personnel working to win the support of the population’, perhaps a police force
created for the purpose.37 If popular behaviour still fails to improve, the counterinsurgent has a
serious problem, but there is no need for premature despair:
34
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, pp.81-2.
35
Galula, Counterinsurgency, p.120.
36
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.87.
37
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.87.
14
he can still get (rather than win) the needed support. If his energy matches his
unpopularity, he may wait until peace becomes the key issue, and he can rely to a
greater extent on his own strength and on his small minority of supporters.38
Even in this unhappy situation, the counterinsurgent can move on to the Fifth Step of
holding local (as opposed to national) elections. If possible, these elections should be ‘absolutely
free’: ‘the danger that neutrals or even undetected insurgent supporters could be elected is small
because the population will realise that the counterinsurgent knows by now who was for
whom.’39 The real danger here is that the people will elect ‘not natural leaders but men chosen
for their presumed ability to placate the counterinsurgent’.40 But Galula is optimistic that leaders
can be found. In Step Six, the people elected can be ‘tested’ by giving them administrative tasks;
and those who pass the test can be provided with resources before (in Step Seven) they are
formed into a national party.
A party will be necessary, because ‘a party is the instrument of politics’. It must be
national because its enemy is also national. It must provide ‘the framework, the support and the
guidance’ for militants among the population. Lastly, it should ‘select its members carefully,
and rely more on quality than on quantity.’41 No ordinary party – ‘with the notable exception of
the Communists’ -42 would follow this eccentric policy, but this is not, of course, a normal party;
it is an instrument designed to mirror the insurgents’ organisation. Building a party is by no
38
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.89.
39
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.90.
40
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.91.
41
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, pp.92-3.
42
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.93.
15
means easy, but when it is successfully accomplished the one remaining step will be Step Eight
(the mopping up), which is a large-scale but conventional operation. A ‘victory’ in this kind of
war will take the form of ‘the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population, isolation
not enforced upon the population but maintained by and with the population’; Galula’s example
is ‘the Oran region in Algeria in 1959-60’.43
Galula’s text possesses some literary power, deriving, in part, from a tension between its
clinical style and glimpses of its real subject matter. Although he once presented his objective as
‘the support of the population - support not only in the form of sympathy and approval but also
in active participation in the fight against the insurgent’, the passage that follows explains that
this achievement depends on the assistance of a minority.44 He goes on to speak about his ‘law
of power’, the law that dictates the requirement to use a minority group to mobilise the general
population. Significantly, it is in this context that he expresses a degree of ethical discomfort:
The counterinsurgent who refuses to use this law for his own purposes, who is bound
by its peacetime limitations, tends to drag the war out without getting closer to
victory.
How far to extend the limitations is a matter of ethics, and a very serious one, but
no more so than bombing the civilian population in a conventional war. All wars are
cruel, the revolutionary war perhaps most of all because every citizen, whatever his
wish, is or will be directly and actively involved in it by the insurgent who needs him
and cannot afford to let him remain neutral. The cruelty of the revolutionary war is
not a mass, anonymous cruelty, but a highly personalized, individual one. No greater
crime can be committed by the counterinsurgent than accepting, or resigning himself
to, the protraction of the war.45
43
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.54.
44
A point also stressed in Pacification, pp.xxiv, 69.
45
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.53.
16
Galula does not, then, advocate Long Wars. His hints about the ‘law of power’ suggest that he
hopes to avoid them by letting his indigenous friends be ruthless. It also seems that he applies a
utilitarian standard: it is tactically helpful to be seen to be benign, and very important not to
cause disorder, but the supreme importance of finishing the war will justify virtually any kind of
short-cut.
17
II
When we turn back from Galula to FM 3-24, we find extensive evidence of the former’s
influence. But the fragments that were borrowed took on a different sense within their altered
intellectual context. Galula set out to create a political movement, but had no special
commitment to liberalism or democracy. It is true he believed in the virtue of local elections, but
this was a way of finding local leaders who could be grouped into a national movement; he did
not suggest that specific political structures must form a part of any lasting end-state. Indeed, he
had no faith in lasting end-states. He thought that any victory might be temporary and fragile (at
least from a Western outsider’s point of view); if the insurgents’ grievances had a degree of
merit, the counterinsurgent’s party might in time adopt their cause.46 He did not promise
permanent solutions.
The Manual’s assumptions are completely different. Where Galulan counterinsurgents
were ‘to build or rebuild a political machine from the population upwards’, it tells its readers that
their task – ‘the primary objective of any COIN operation’ - is ‘to foster development of
effective governance by a legitimate government’.47 The concept of ‘legitimacy’ is central:
military action can address the symptoms of a loss of legitimacy. In some cases, it
can eliminate substantial numbers of insurgents. However, success in the form of a
durable peace requires restoring legitimacy, which, in turn, requires the use of all
46
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.96.
47
FM, 1-21.
18
instruments of national power. A COIN effort cannot achieve lasting success
without the HN [host nation] government achieving legitimacy.48
It may be supposed that this focus makes little difference or that the idea is implicit in the
classics. Frank Hoffman, for instance, regards ‘the emphasis on “legitimacy”’ as an example of
a principle ‘not reflected in the writings and teachings of the masters, but...absorbed over time.’49
But in fact the appeal to this famously difficult concept is at the heart of what is wrong with the
Manual’s recommendations.
Fortunately, its underlying theory can be recovered with some confidence. Stathis
Kalyvas has remarked that the Manual’s social theory ‘is squarely located within the “grievance”
line of thinking’ suggestive of ‘the older literature on revolutions’,50 but it is possible to be more
specific. As might have been expected, the Manual’s thinking drew upon existing American
writings. The leader of the drafting team has written that they began by using ‘a definition
developed by Max Manwaring at the Army War College that was based very much on Western
liberal values of political participation. Later revisions recognised that other factors, such as
security concerns or religious beliefs, could shape local definitions of legitimacy.’51 The
Manual’s text corroborates this statement; with the exception of ‘security’, the Manual’s six
‘indicators’ of legitimacy were drawn from an essay - ‘ The central political challenge:
48
FM, 1-120.
49
Hoffman, ‘Neo-classical counter-insurgency’, p.72.
50
Kalyvas, ‘New Field Manual’, p.351
51
Crane, ‘United States’ in Rid and Keaney, Understanding counterinsurgency, 62.
19
government and legitimacy’ – that Manwaring had published three years earlier.52
Manwaring’s thought in turn appealed to an empirical project - ‘A Model for the Analysis of
Small Wars’ – that he had undertaken for US Southern Command in 1984-87.53
The Model derived lessons from 43 Small Wars by asking his informants (mostly exparticipants) to use a scale from one to four in answer to 72 questions. These answers were then
aggregated in six categories, of which the most important, for present purposes, was the
‘legitimacy’ of government (good scores on this measure correlated strongly with the eventual
outcome of the conflict). ‘Host Government Legitimacy’ was defined as follows:
The Host Government is considered legitimate when it has a significant degree of
domestic support as measured by electoral results, opinion polls, and/or media
commentary; when its people do not perceive its actions to be corrupt; when it
delivers necessary governmental services with reasonable efficacy and impartiality;
and when political change can be effected without resort to violence. (This latter
usually involves a relatively free and open electoral system, i.e., democracy). 54
52
Compare FM, 1-116 with Edwin G.Corr and Max G.Manwaring, ‘The central
political challenge: government and legitimacy’ in Max G.Manwaring, Edwin G.Corr,
and Robert H.Dorff (eds), The search for security: a U.S. Grand Strategy for the twenty-first
century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), p.50.
53
The writers concerned are conscious of forming a school. For a ‘Chronological
List of select works relating to the Manwaring Paradigm’, see John T.Fishel and Max
G.Manwaring, Uncomfortable Wars revisited (University of Oklahoma Press, 2006),
pp.315-24.
54
Max G.Manwaring and John T.Fishel, ‘Insurgency and counterinsurgency:
towards a new analytical approach’, Small wars and insurgencies 3 (1992), p.309.
20
At bottom, Manwaring’s theory was simple; it can quite plausibly be seen as an updating and
elaboration of the idea within the Small Wars Manual that the point of intervention is to sort out
‘government’. As he put it in an early publication, ‘the root causes of “people’s wars” are
longstanding political, economic, and social injustice’;55 when grievances are taken away,
legitimacy will follow. In consequence, he emphasised that struggles for legitimacy were
basically struggles to be seen to meet popular ‘needs’: in the Philippines, for instance, ‘the
objective was the people…the attack was against the argument that the government could not
and would not be responsive to ordinary people’s needs’.56 The problem he went to some
lengths to obscure was the relationship between legitimacy-for-the-West and what might be
called legitimacy-for-locals. He quoted Gurr’s Why Men Rebel (1970), for instance, which cited
a study suggesting that ‘the legitimization of leaders through election gives them a greater
influence over group members than the assumption of leadership without election’; he refrained,
however, from quoting the following sentence: ‘The implication is not necessarily that election is
a requirement for legitimate authority; it is likely to be in democratic societies, not necessarily so
55
Max G.Manwaring, Towards an understanding of insurgency wars: the
paradigm’ in Manwaring (ed.), Uncomfortable wars: towards a new paradigm of Low
Intensity Conflict (Boulder, CO, 1991), pp.25.
56
Manwaring, ‘The paradigm’, pp.20-1.
21
in others.’57 Samuel P.Huntington’s Political order in changing societies (1968) is similarly
cavalierly treated. Huntington’s work is quoted for its statement that ‘successful great
revolutions do not occur in democratic political systems.’58 No mention is made of Huntington’s
larger conclusion that democratic suffrage may be an obstacle to socio-economic modernisation
and that ‘it is authority that is in scarce supply’.59 The social science that Manwaring appealed to
was thus a shaky basis for his optimistic view that the reform of the political system went hand in
hand with other forms of progress.
The drafting team’s initial definition thus drew upon a somewhat problematic body of
work that was, to put it mildly, shaped by preconceived commitments. It is relevant that the
context in which this work arose was Southern Command in the mid-Reagan period; Max
Manwaring and his immediate colleagues were primarily Latin American experts whose
understandable preoccupation was with the conflict in El Salvador. Their reading of this conflict
was that oligarchic rule was ultimately unsustainable: ‘it was clear to even the most obtuse that
the country was either going to follow the way of Nicaragua or Chile’. Under these
circumstances, the American instinct was to seek a return to ‘normalcy’ (presumably meaning
57
Manwaring, ‘Insurgency and counter-insurgency’, p.275; cf. Ted Robert Gurr,
Why Men Rebel (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010), p.190. Compare also the quotation at
p.275n.14 with its context in Gurr, Why men rebel, p.192.
58
Manwaring, ‘Insurgency and counter-insurgency’, p.274.
59
Samuel P.Huntington, Political order in changing societies (New Haven, CT: Yale
UP, 1968), pp.7-8. On the Manual and modernization theory, see also the good discussion in
Fitzsimmons, ‘Hard hearts and open minds’.
22
something not unlike Pinochet), but the Salvadorans wisely chose ‘a modification of the Chilean
model.’ Salvadoran counterinsurgents ‘centered their efforts around basic reforms and the
establishment of the foundations of participatory democracy.’60 In other words, El Salvador was
prey to social forces that led to an inexorably modernising process; the role of the Americans
was to assist that process towards a liberal democratic outcome. It is not, for present purposes,
important to decide if this interpretation of the Salvadoran war was generous to his allies’
motivations.61 What is relevant and important is that the strategy that he imputed – a strategy of
removing all kinds of grievances in the context of a modernising programme – was taken to be
relevant to other kinds of problem in rather different socio-cultural settings.
Implicit in Manwaring’s approach was a call to activism in which the idea of ‘legitimacy’
combined a practical judgement about stability with a view of what Americans expected.62 An
essay on peace operations from 1998 declared that
The days of delineating a successful international political end-state as simple shortterm self-protection, limited adherence to human rights and the election of civilian
political leaders, or material compassion for a humanitarian problem are over. The
60
Manwaring and Courtney E.Prisk, ‘The need for strategic perspective: insights
from El Salvador’ in Uncomfortable Wars, pp.107-8.
61
For an alternative interpretation, see e.g. Elizabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent collective
action and civil war in El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), pp.28—9.
62
This is clearest from his associate Courtney Prisk’s essay, ‘The umbrella of
legitimacy’ in Manwaring, Uncomfortable Wars, esp. the remarks at pp.71-2.
23
American public expects US efforts…to make the world – and the United States – a
better place in the long term.63
His 2003 essay ‘The central political challenge: government and legitimacy was part of a
volume that argued for a ‘Grand Strategy’ to which ‘legitimate governance’ was central,
principally on the grounds that ‘legitimate governance is inherently stable because it has
the political competence and societal support to adequately manage internal problems.’64
Although he thought that ‘forcible imposition’ would not work, he also believed that
When U.S. interests are threatened by events in a weak and menaced State, the main
element of U.S. policy and strategy must go beyond promising simple democracy
(i.e. the election of civilian leaders) to facilitating and guiding responsible leaders in
a long-term, patient, but firm and vigilant pursuit of moral legitimacy.65
III
63
Max G.Manwaring and Edwin G.Corr, ‘The “Almost Obvious” lessons of peace
operations’ in Towards responsibility in the New World Disorder: challenges and lessons of
peace operations, ed.Max W.Manwaring and John T.Fishel (London: Frank Cass, 1998),
p.193.
64
Max G.Manwaring and Edwin G.Corr, ‘Central political challenge’ The search for
security: a U.S. Grand Strategy for the twenty-first century, ed.Max G.Manwaring, Edwin
G.Corr, and Robert H.Dorff (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), p.49.
65
Corr and Manwaring, ‘A Grand strategy for the United States’ in Search for
security, p.125.
24
As we shall see, the Manual’s underlying theory has close affinities with Manwaring’s, but it is
overlaid with rather different material that hides this fact from any casual reader. In part this is a
consequence of the authors’ policy of trying to draw authority from mainstream social science. 66
The theory of ‘legitimacy’ adopted is plainly meant to be recognised as Weber’s. It is true the
authors never quite define legitimacy; they do, however, illustrate its meaning by noting that
Governments described as “legitimate” rule primarily with the consent of the
governed; those described as “illegitimate” tend to rely mainly or entirely on
coercion. Citizens of the latter obey the state for fear of the consequences of doing
otherwise rather than because they voluntarily accept its rule.67
In its clearest single treatment of the subject, the Manual defines ‘power’, following Weber, as
‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his or
her own will despite resistance.’68 Authority is ‘legitimate power associated with social
66
The presence of a number of unacknowledged quotations and/or close
paraphrases has led to accusations of simple plagiarism (Daniel Price, ‘Anthropology as
lamppost: a comment on the counterinsurgency Field Manual’, Anthropology today 23: 6
(2007), pp.220-21). This is plainly unfair; unlike an ordinary plagiarist, the authors had
an interest in acknowledging their sources, which were, for the most part, found in
obvious places. But the uncertainty about citation practice reflects a failure to think
through the nature of the authority that they were claiming.
67
FM, 1-113.
68
FM, 3-55. The source is Max Weber, Economy and society: an outline of interpretative
sociology, 2 vols, ed.G.Roth and C.Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), vol.
I, p.53.
25
positions’ and ‘is justified by the beliefs of the obedient’. There are three primary types of
authority. It can be ‘rational-legal, which is grounded in law and contract, codified in impersonal
rules, and most commonly found in developed, Western societies’. It can be charismatic, ‘which
is exercised by leaders who develop allegiance among their followers because of their unique,
individual charismatic appeal, whether ideological, religious, political, or social.’ And lastly, it
can be traditional, ‘which is usually invested in a hereditary line or particular office by a higher
power’.69 These plainly Weberian statements might be taken to suggest that the Manual is also
Weberian in treating value-judgements as in essence arbitrary; one reason its production was
greeted with relief was its apparent openness to cultural difference, especially in its insistence
upon the urgent need to gather knowledge of what counts as being ‘legitimate’.70
But appearances are deceptive. The Manual has a simple view of human motivations that
feeds into a simple view of culture. There are ‘interests’ or ‘core motivations that drive
behaviour’, including ‘physical security, basic necessities, economic well-being, political
participation, and social identity’, that will, if neglected, give rise to ‘grievances’.71 Conversely,
settling grievances will, other things being equal, gain popular support. The Manual is prone to
69
FM, 3-63. If this draws on the discussion at Weber, Economy and Society, I, 226-41, the
explicit reference to a ‘higher power’ (as opposed to a vaguer sense of tradition as sacred) seems
to intrude a new and non-Weberian idea.
70
FM, 1-118.
71
FM, 3-66.
26
implying that ‘effective governance’ can be the basis of legitimacy; 72 some cultures will be quite
content with mere security,73 but a rational-legal order of a broadly Western type is a ‘major
factor’ in securing acceptance.74 Legitimacy may, of course, take other, competing forms, but
the default assumption is that, other things being equal, good government will in itself build up
legitimacy.75
Within the context of this theory, the influence of Weber does have one interesting
consequence. Weber’s own treatment of legitimacy as matter of ‘legitimacy-beliefs’76 is the
most likely source of a focus on beliefs that has some quite important implications The Manual
defines ‘culture’ as ‘a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours and artifacts that
members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another’,77 but closer reading
shows that it is just ‘beliefs’ that matter. An artefact gains its importance from its function
within the ‘customs’ and ‘behaviours’. But if they are more than casual, those customs and
72
Others have noticed this. For an interesting discussion, see Michael
Fitzsimmons, ‘Hard hearts and open minds? Governance, identity, and the intellectual
foundations of counterinsurgency strategy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 31:3 (2008),
pp.337-65.
73
FM, 1-114, 117.
74
FM 1-119.
75
FM, 5-5, 6.
76
Weber, Economy and Society, vol.I, p.213,
77
FM, 3-37.
27
behaviours rest on ‘values’, which are in turn defined as ‘enduring beliefs’.78 This means that a
culture consists in beliefs, that is, to use the Manual’s definition, in ‘concepts and ideas accepted
as true’.79 There may, of course, be some beliefs that people are not consciously aware of; but
the clear implication is that culture can be grasped as a determinate list of propositions.
Moreover, beliefs can in principle be altered. There are, we are told, three different kinds
of belief - core, intermediate, and peripheral – which are, it seems, hierarchically ordered. On
core beliefs, the Manual is quite cautious (though not perhaps cautious enough):
Core beliefs are those views that are part of a person’s deep identity…attempts to
change the central beliefs of a culture may result in unintended second- and thirdorder consequences. Decisions to do so are made at the national-strategic level.80
Intermediate beliefs, we are told, ‘are predicated on reference to authority figures or authoritative
texts. Thus, intermediate beliefs can sometimes be influenced by co-opting opinion leaders’.81
Lastly, from intermediate beliefs flow peripheral beliefs. These beliefs are open to debate,
consciously considered, and easiest to change.’82
There are signs, then, that the Manual’s insistence that soldiers must be sensitive to
culture does not exclude a confidence that there exist techniques for bringing about large-scale
cultural changes. The existence of pre-modern ways of exercising power may be part of the
78
FM, 3-44.
79
FM, 3-40.
80
FM, 3-41.
81
FM, 3-42.
82
FM, 3-43.
28
‘human terrain’83 on which the soldier operates, but there are elements of that terrain that can,
with difficulty, be adjusted. Such optimism will be necessary, as the default objective of US
policy is a demandingly specific project. The counterinsurgent will secure ‘effective
governance’ by working simultaneously along several ‘logical lines of operations’. Unlike
Galula’s carefully-phased programme, the Manual’s encourages soldiers to do everything at
once. It is open to commanders to vary or omit particular ‘logical lines of operation’, but there is
a tacit assumption that they will all be mutually supporting. The Manual’s only image (as
opposed to diagram) is of a piece of rope composed of a number of parallel strands.84 The
counterinsurgents will set up a police force with impartial practices, generally meritocratic
promotion procedures, and rigorous civilian oversight.85 They will restore what is described as
‘freedom to conduct lawful commerce’86 involving rough equality of opportunity within a
basically free-market order. They will avoid encouraging militias and do their best to minimise
sectarian divides, promoting instead a ‘national perspective’,87 from which, it is hoped, the
people will opt to cast their vote in the eventual national elections.88 In all this, the Manual is
83
The US Army’s favoured metaphor. On the ‘Human Terrain System’, see Montgomery
McFate, ‘Culture’ in Rid and Keaney, Understanding counterinsurgency, pp.194-6.
84
FM, fig.5-3.
85
FM, 6-47, 6-97.
86
FM, fig.5-2.
87
FM, Table 5-5.
88
FM, fig.5-2, 5-44.
29
loyal to Max Manwaring’s assumption that there can be no conflict between types of
modernisation.
But one of its well-meant objectives in practice receives much more stress than all of the
remainder put together. The government must install a rule of law: a heading in bold type
announces that Security Under the Rule of Law is Essential.89 ‘The rule of law’, we are
informed, ‘is a key goal and end-state in COIN’.90 In other words, the ideal is a part of the endstate from which the military logic flows. However extreme the local situation, the
counterinsurgents themselves exist in a law-governed world: ‘every action by counterinsurgents
leaves a “forensic trace” that may be required sometime later in a court of law.’91 Their first
priority is to bring this blessing to the general population; this in itself may be enough to give
legitimacy. To take a fairly representative statement, ‘a government’s respect for pre-existing
and impersonal legal rules can provide the key to gaining it widespread, enduring societal
support’.92 Great faith is reposed in the use of legal procedures, in part because ‘when insurgents
are seen as criminals, they lose public support’.93 The Manual fails to entertain the possibility
that this inverts the arrow of causation: that acts are seen as criminal only in situations in which
their perpetrators aren’t supported.
89
FM, heading at 1-131.
90
FM, D-38.
91
FM, 1-133.
92
FM, 1-119.
93
FM 1-24.
30
The rule of law is something that comes first in every sense. The counterinsurgent’s
earliest objective is the local population’s ‘physical security’. But before the population is
physically secure, there must be a ‘functioning police and judiciary system’ and the police and
courts must be ‘fair and non-discriminatory’.94 If there is no such system, the counterinsurgent
forces may need to set one up; if it exists, but it is weak, then they should do their utmost to
support it, if necessary by lending civilian personnel.95 One reason that this is important is that
the insurgents themselves, if they are captured, will have to be processed through the legal
system: ‘they are not, when captured, prisoners of wars’, but ‘criminal suspects within the legal
system of the host nation.’96
In its largest sense, the rule of law is short-hand for detailed and specific political ideals.
In the Manual’s fullest treatment of the subject, we are told that
Some key aspects of the rule of law include
a government that derives its powers from the governed and competently
manages, coordinates, and sustains collective security, as well as political, social, and
economic development...
Sustainable security institutions. These include a civilian-controlled military as
well as police, court, and penal institutions. The latter should be perceived by the
local populace as fair, just, and transparent.
And lastly, ‘fundamental human rights’ as described in UN Declaration on Human Rights and
the International Convention for Civil and Political Rights. Although there may of course be
94
FM, 3-67.
95
FM, D-39.
96
FM, D-14.
31
derogations from these rights in a condition of emergency, the Manual insists that ‘respect for the
full panoply of human rights should be the goal of the host nation.’97
IV
Thus the Manual’s well-meant, indeed laudable, objectives involve an ideological commitment.
One can, indeed, be rather more precise: other things being equal, the end-state will deliver a
highly American mix of equality of opportunity, free access to free markets, and self-defence
through private litigation; there is a remarkable fusion between his ‘logical lines of operation’
and a specific kind of social order. The very first part of the operation, the establishment of socalled ‘physical security’, involves the implementation of ethical ideals – the complex norms
involved in the creation of relatively impartial legal systems – that may well be new to the host
nation’s culture and that are bound, if taken seriously, to come at a degree of political cost. One
difference that results is especially striking. As we have seen, Galula’s Fourth (and arguably
most important) Step was the eradication of the ‘political agents’ of the insurgency. This should
follow the establishment of ‘control’, but precede attempts to create a political party. As we
have also noticed, Galula emphasised that this particular Step would be distasteful; it was
important to prevent the unpopularity from tainting the main body of the counterinsurgent forces.
By contrast, the Manual notes blandly that
after insurgent forces have been eliminated, removing the insurgent infrastructure
begins. This should be done so as to minimise the impact on the local populace.
Rooting out such infrastructure is essentially a police action that relies heavily on
97
FM, D-38.
32
military and intelligence forces until HN police, courts, and legal processes can
assume responsibility for law enforcement within the cleared area.98
The Manual does not see the purge as anomalous and distasteful; it is a ‘police action’ in the
straightforward sense that it is part of normal law enforcement. Like everything done by the
counterinsurgent forces, it is an element in the seamless process of setting up a Western rule of
law.
This is a significant pointer to the nature of the shift between Galula and the Field
Manual. Galula’s purge established the conditions in which his ‘favourable minority’ could act
upon and mobilise the undecided neutrals; the central purpose of his strategy was to create an
instrument (his party) and to enable it to dominate. The Manual ignores the party and puts in
place no similar coercive mechanism. Where Galula postulated a kind of iron law of oligarchy ‘this holds true for every political regime, from the harshest dictatorship to the mildest
democracy’99 - that minorities mobilise majorities, the Manual envisaged an ‘end state’ in which
the ‘neutral or passive’ were greatly outnumbered by government supporters.100 It is relevant
that the Manual’s ‘Guide for Action’ (Appendix A)101 presumes that local allies can win in a fair
98
FM, 5-57.
99
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.53.
100
Contrast the Galulan fig. 1-2 with the non-Galulan fig.5-1.
101
This Appendix was substantially the work of David Kilcullen (Crane, ‘United States’,
p.67), whose views are well set out in his ‘Deiokes and the Taliban: Local Governance, Bottomup State Formation, and the Rule of Law in Counterinsurgency’ in Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency
(London: Hurst, 2010), pp.147-61. This excellent lecture argues (appealing to Kalyvas, The
logic of violence in civil wars (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006)) that ‘support follows strength,
33
fight. We are informed that ‘successful trusted networks’ will ‘grow like roots into the populace.
They displace enemy networks, which forces enemies into the open...’102 This of course inverts
Galula’s recommendations; Galula took it for granted that the eradication of those he had
described as ‘political agents’ should precede efforts to create networks of loyalists. The
explanation for the loss of phasing is that the Manual takes the central problem to be the
intensification of proper government; that is why COIN operations can properly be called ‘armed
social work’.103 The idea that gets lost is the notion that, when all is said done, all government is
by and for a faction, that is, that the essential problem is political. A telling verbal detail
illustrates the difference. In Galula’s work, the concept of ‘mobilisation’ refers to the activities
promoted by his party. In the Appendix, it refers to motivations that are supplied by the
American forces (in essence by convincing the local populace that its true interests are best
served by defeating the insurgents).104
As should by now be obvious, there is a pattern here. The Manual neglects politics –
understood as the activity of giving one group power over others – in favour of improved
not vice versa’ and that strength rests in capacity to reduce fear and uncertainty by establishing a
permanent presence, through a predictable system of rules and sanctions’ (pp.151-2). There is
nothing to quarrel with here. But it by no means follows that it is feasible to ground the ‘rules
and sanctions’ on a rights-based individualist model.
102
FM, A-26
103
FM, A-45. See also Kilcullen’s stress on government in ‘Deiokes and the Taliban’,
pp.149-51.
104
FM, A-6, 7, and 41.
34
administration. The upshot is a kind of schizophrenia. The culturally sensitive general will want
to deal with human beings wholesale: he will learn from one part of the Manual how to discover
groups, suborn their leaders, and so detach them from the opposition. He will accept Galula’s
hint that ‘it may be useful to remember that a peacetime political machine is built essentially on
patronage.’105 Meanwhile, his specialist helpers, pursuing their ‘logical lines of operations’ in
deference to the Manual’s other features, will want to deal with human beings retail: they will set
up institutions that are designed to face towards rights-bearing individuals. These institutions, it
is hoped, will build ‘legitimacy’ through the politically risky tactic of favouring the weak against
the strong. Where Galula advised systematic use of patronage, they will instead prefer to ‘send
the message that favouritism and partisanship [in contracting] are not part of the process in a
legitimate government.’106 Kalyvas perceptively notes that ‘the manual allows its unrealised
longer-term objectives of intervention (i.e.political development) to influence its methods (i.e. its
understanding of society as entailing direct and unmediated links between national actors and the
population at large).’107 But this is not an oversight that could be remedied by looking at
provincial power structures with the aid of improved empirical social science; the Manual’s
whole conception of the relationship between ‘legitimacy’ and governance simply equates the
‘methods’ and ‘objectives’.
V
105
Galula, Counterinsurgency warfare, p.47.
106
FM, 8-45.
107
Kalyvas, ‘Field Manual as political science’, p.353.
35
The Manual thus departed from Galula in ways that show its authors were culturally remote from
the whole spirit of the enterprise. It may be thought their real debt was to the British School and
in particular to Robert Thompson. Thompson’s account of victory in Malaya placed one of the
least morally problematic of British counterinsurgency campaigns in an exceptionally attractive
light.. Moreover, he can certainly be quoted as stressing the importance of effective government.
But even this most promising of texts gives little support, when closely read, to the Manual’s
core assumption that Western-style governance in itself has the capacity (other things being
equal) to make a government ‘legitimate’. ‘Government’ in Malaya was already up and running;
it was an apparatus that would be inherited by the colonial power’s Malay successors. So long as
the insurgency was confined to the Chinese, all that the British had to do was promise
independence on terms that effectively guaranteed Malay predominance.108 The British were
thus assisted by the local ethnic faultlines. In this strategic context, Thompson was less
committed to particular Western values than to the rather vague idea of ‘development and
progress’, which might, if steadily pursued ‘with an air of established order’, trump the two rival
forces of nationalism and ‘religion and customs’.109 He was sceptical about democracy110 and
108
For an illusionless account of the complex dynamics of the situation both within the
Chinese community and between the Chinese and Malays, see T.N.Harper, The end of empire
and the making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999).
109
Robert Thompson, Defeating communist insurgency: experiences from Malaya and
Vietnam (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1966), pp.64-6.
110
Thompson, Defeating communist insurgency, pp.67, 78.
36
seems to have had no particular views about markets. His principal reason for being optimistic
about the appeal of ‘material well-being’ was that Asians typically live ‘in peasant communities
where the family tradition is venerated and the instinctive loyalties are to the advancement of
closest relatives.’111 This may be patronising, but it does not presume that Western moral ideas
are universal.
In any case, Thompson shared Galula’s feeling that the importance of the ‘cause’
diminished over time
the government must demonstrate both its determination and its capacity to win.
These are the foundations of popular support...if the issue is evenly balanced, neither
the government nor the insurgent cause is a matter of great importance.112
By his own account, the British displayed the will to win in ways the Manual does not
contemplate; it is striking, for example, that the Manual has nothing to say on the mechanics of
resettlement. Even in this relatively clean war, they also made use of some tactics that
subsequent commanders could hardly contemplate. Thompson set a high value upon the rule of
law, but he was the first to point out that the law could be savage. Apart from the forcible
shifting of more than half a million Chinese peasants,113 the British were ready for ruthlessly
punitive action, including collective punishment of whole communities, the imposition of
111
Thompson, Defeating communist insurgency, p.65.
112
Thompson, Defeating communist insurgency, p.69.
113
As Harper points out, this figure omits the ‘re-grouping’ of some 650,000 others,
greatly to the advantage of employers (Harper, Making of Malaya, pp. 176, 204-6)
37
‘repatriation’ (i.e. deportation to China) for relatively trivial offences, a mandatory death penalty
for carrying a gun, and life imprisonment for supplying food.114
Even so, it could be argued that their strategy had failed because it was inadequately
Maoist. Thompson himself contributed a Preface to the American John McCuen’s The art of
counter-revolutionary warfare (1966). He cannot, however, have been much pleased with some
of McCuen’s conclusions. As a more rigid counter-Maoist writer, McCuen saw the methods that
the British had employed as instruments of popular ‘mobilisation’. He recommended that ‘the
final step in mobilising the masses is counter-revolutionary organisation of the people…every
possible person must be included, influenced, and committed’.115 In consequence, he was
critical of British policy for neglecting ‘political and psychological counter-organization’;
‘kindness and propaganda achieved little more than benevolent neutrality’.116 As he had
114
Thompson, Defeating communist insurgency, p.53. Nagl, Learning to eat soup with a
knife, is noticeably muted on such questions. For revisionist discussions of how the British
actually behaved, see Huw Bennett, ‘”A very salutary effect”: counterinsurgency strategy in the
early Malayan emergency’, Karl Hack, ‘The Malayan emergency as counterinsurgency
paradigm’, and Paul Dixon, ‘”Hearts and minds”? British Counter-Insurgency from Malaya to
Iraq’ (contributions to Journal of Strategic Studies 32:3, pp.353-444).
115
John J.McCuen, The art of counter-revolutionary warfare (London: Faber, 1966),
p.57.
116
McCuen, Art, p.164. McCuen’s negative judgement has some scholarly support.
For an ultra-sceptical view of the effectiveness of ‘hearts and minds’ which is, however,
38
grasped, the logic of the classical tradition pointed towards the methods of the French
‘psychologists’.
There is no need to think that such measures were morally acceptable, politically wise, or
likely, in the long term, to be crowned with much success. They did, however, at least address
the problem of how ‘support’ was to be generated without assuming that a Western order would
automatically be found attractive. The Manual forswears such methods and puts nothing in their
place: in a world in which counterinsurgents are increasingly confined by moral and political
limitations, and some insurgent groupings have an ideology that has a wider appeal than
communism, its strategy consists in offering better government. If the population should reject
this blessing, the Manual is imaginatively barren. In their French-language preface to Galula,
Petraeus and Nagl appear to suggest that they have got no answer to religion: ‘one does not in
general overcome religious fanatics except in imprisoning them or killing them’ (which possibly
implies the rather dubious assumption that only religions cause problems of this nature).117
As this bleak observation suggests, it is wrong to assume that wars over ‘legitimacy’ will
be less ferocious than wars that have apparently more cynical objectives. It is relevant that such
conflicts are hard to terminate; when the declared objective is liberal governance, it is hard for
the counterinsurgent to compromise and run without experiencing loss of face. If the Long War
for the rule of law is in the end foreshortened by means of a tolerable treaty with local notables,
based on Chinese sources, see Karl Hack, Defence and decolonisation in Southeast Asia:
Britain, Malaya, and Singapore 1941-68 (Richard Curzon, 2001), pp.126-9.
117
‘On ne maîtrise généralement les fanatiques religieux qu’en les emprisonnant ou en les
tuant’.(Galula, Contre-insurrection, p.xi).
39
the mission is experienced as a failure. Success as Galula or even as Thompson conceived it will
be experienced as marred by gross ‘sectarianism’ and ‘corruption’. It is not obvious that the
feeling will be much assuaged if (as is not unlikely) the oppression that results reflects the
outcome of a free election. And actors that repeatedly regard themselves as failures are unlikely,
in the long term, to retain the will to fight.
There are, of course, less instrumental reasons for disapproving of the Manual’s project;
there is a moral case against the use of violence in order to re-make an alien culture. But the
point of comparing the Manual with its most important sources has been to show the reasons
why it fails in its own terms. The sources its authors acknowledged (Galula and Thompson)
were read in a way that they derived from the sources they did not (the kind of American
thinking that is found in Manwaring). The result was not just that the classics were
sentimentalised - that the text ignored unpalatable tactics – but that their recommendations
involved utopian goals. No doubt this was over-determined; a very long-established disposition
to think of intervention as correcting ‘governance’ (conceived of as protection of life and
property) was reinforced by recent, human-rights-based, rhetoric. But the upshot was a startling
level of failure to understand the words upon the page. The worrying implication is that this
level of failure was not the fruit of cynicism or incompetence, but of an incapacity to think in
other ways. Given that governance was the key objective, the equation between governance and
human-rights-based order meant the strategic problem was the defence of rights. In other words,
insurgencies were thought of as obstacles to a political order that was the likely outcome of
convergent modernisation. The ideology concealed within ‘legitimacy’ replaces a political view
of counterinsurgency – as the struggle of some groups to govern others – with a less troubling
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picture of a modernising process that only a ‘fanatic’ could object to. If so, the kind of thinking
that the Manual inculcates will lead to many future disappointments.