Guerrilla Warfare Has Made Monkeys Of Invading Forces

Chicago Tribune
Apr 4, 2003

At the height of Napoleon's power, Europe lay at his feet. The French emperor could make and break kings as he pleased. But when he put his brother on the throne of Spain in 1808, the nation's unhappy peasants responded with a tactic that utterly baffled Napoleon, perhaps the greatest general in history.
Small bands of lightly armed Spaniards fell upon French soldiers when and where least expected, and then faded back into the countryside before a counterattack could be mounted. As a result, Napoleon was compelled to keep large forces tied down in Spain that he desperately needed elsewhere when his empire began to crumble.

``The lion in the fable tormented to death by a gnat gives a true picture of the French army,'' observed a contemporary, the Abbe de Pradt.

The Spanish word for war is guerra, and in that language, guerrilla is a band that wages war. The word has been adopted by English to describe the unconventional, hit-and-run warfare and those who wage it. And it is guerrilla warfare that is bedeviling U.S.-led forces in Iraq.


Less Can Be More

It is a confounding form of warfare in which traditional military textbooks go out the window. It can transform the lesser armed into the more formidable force. Stunning battlefield success can leave the victor the more vulnerable.

At the beginning of World War II, success was a German monopoly; the defeats belonged to the Russians.

Josef Stalin's forces were ill- prepared, the Soviet dictator having purged most of the officer corps in paranoid fear of a military coup. He steadfastly refused to believe intelligence that a German attack was imminent. Accordingly, Adolf Hitler's army quickly drove hundreds of miles into Russian territory, much as U.S. soldiers and Marines have in Iraq.

But that left the Germans with hugely extended lines of supplies that Russian partisans began to harass, just as Iraq's Fedayeen Saddam are attacking American supply convoys.

Frederick the Great of Prussia confronted similar difficulties trying to keep his cavalry supplied in the face of attacks by 18th century Bohemian guerrillas.

``Every bundle of hay cost blood,'' Frederick noted afterward.

Military history shows that when a nation finds itself invaded by a more powerful one, two responses are possible. The invaders can be met in set battles, in which case the defenders most often go down to defeat, or the defenders - as Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung did in battling Japanese invaders during World War II - can fight a guerrilla war.

Mao set down his military philosophy in a few maxims: ``The enemy advances; we retreat. The enemy camps, we harass. The enemy tires, we attack. The enemy retreats, we pursue.''


Home Field Advantage

Commanders facing guerrilla resistance often are unprepared by experience to know that winning battles doesn't necessarily end a war. The English found that when fighting the Welsh in the 12th century, reports a contemporary chronicler, Gerald of Wales.

``Though defeated and put to flight one day,'' he noted of the Welsh, ``they are ready to resume combat on the next, neither dejected by their loss nor by their dishonor.''

The Pentagon's thinking was that Saddam Hussein's repressive regime would rob Iraqis of the will to fight.

Yet repression can be trumped by patriotism when a people find themselves invaded. The Russians had suffered terribly under the Soviet regime. Yet they set those feelings aside when Stalin dropped the revolutionary propaganda and called upon them, using religious symbolism, to defend Mother Russia.

Guerrillas don't win wars by defeating their opponents as conventional military forces do. They realize their job is to make the other side weary of a stalemated conflict.

When the Viet Cong mounted their Tet offensive in 1968, they suffered tremendous casualties. By traditional military calculus, they lost. But they won the propaganda battle.

As the American patriot Thomas Paine clearly recognized, when armies face guerrillas, all bets are off. He was convinced that George Washington's lightly armed soldiers could defeat the British army, even though the Americans often couldn't stand up to their opponents in open battle. That was set aside, in Paine's thinking, by another consideration: The enemy troops were foreigners; the Americans were fighting for their homeland. That would decide the matter, no matter how many initial victories the British might have.

``There is something in a war carried on by invasion that makes it differ in circumstances from any other mode of war,'' Paine noted, ``because he who conducts it cannot tell whether the ground he gains, be for him, or against him, when he first makes it.''

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