Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (46 page)

None of the exact circumstances are yet certain, but it seems that Russian troops and pro-Moscow Chechens had laid an ambush for Maskhadov. He went down in a hail of bullets or a grenade blast, or both. His fellow Chechens said he had died heroically, taking on the ambushers alone, to cover the withdrawal of his bodyguards he had ordered to escape. From Moscow the report was that his incompetent security detail had gunned him down with their own panicky, ill-aimed fire. Whatever the details, or distortions, Maskhadov was dead.

The Chechen insurgency virtually collapsed in the wake of this profound loss. Mark Kramer has observed that the impact of his death “cut deeply into the Chechens’ morale and weakened the spirit of resistance.”
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A year later, in July 2006, Basayev was blown up when explosives he had gathered for use on a raid accidentally detonated. More and more Chechens began to reach accommodation with the Russians. Events were finally unfolding as they had in the nineteenth century, when violence gradually waned in Chechnya. Sporadic fighting in the southern mountains continued, and still goes on today, conducted by a few hundred holdouts. In the spring of 2010 Chechen terrorists launched yet another attack on the Russian transit system, though this one paled in comparison to their earlier “spectaculars.”

Of all the masters of irregular warfare considered in this book, Aslan Maskhadov seems to have suffered the most ignominious fate, his cause the greatest setback. Perhaps so. Yet what he accomplished in the field is among the most amazing results achieved in all military history. For he was no simple raider or guerrilla. Rather, he built a radically new kind of military force, one comprised of countless small, lightly armed bands doing direct battle with a large, industrial-age army—and winning. His campaigns in the 1994–1996 war will be studied for ages by all military professionals and no doubt by new generations of insurgent leaders as well.

Even Maskhadov’s skillfully conducted defensive operations in the second war with the Russians bear close scrutiny. The Russians’ renewed effort, launched late in 1999, featured both far greater resources and manpower and vastly improved tactics. That Maskhadov was able to hold Grozny for months in the winter of 1999–2000 and retain his freedom of movement throughout so much of Chechnya for years after the fall of the capital is a remarkable testament to his generalship.

That he was just as great a statesman may be seen in his success in negotiating peace with Alexander Lebed, his skillful balancing between the moderate and radical factions in his own government, and even in his final, unilateral effort to halt the fighting while restarting negotiations for a truce with the Russians. There was a clear nobility about the man whose first name means “lion” in several languages of the region. Like C. S. Lewis’s noble lion Aslan, who sacrificed himself to bring an end to a terrible tyranny in one of the Narnia tales, Aslan Maskhadov also gave his life with a similar hopeful vision in mind. Whether his sacrifice will help free the Chechens is uncertain; but the skillful way he fought and his nobility of character and purpose—in short, the ways he lived and died—are sure to inform and inspire countless others for generations to come.

MASTER LESSONS . . .
AND A LOOK AHEAD

If there is a common theme that runs through the stories of the masters of irregular warfare, it is their resilience in the face of defeat and other adversity. Where the great captains of the more conventional battlefield often marched through their careers with long strings of impressive victories, guerrillas, insurgents, and raiders frequently struggled through repeated rough patches, regularly losing battles and large tracts of territory. Caesar suffered hardly a single reversal in battle throughout his long career in the field; Napoleon spent well over a decade in high command without so much as a drawn fight. Had either suffered serious losses as often as the greatest irregular warriors, their careers would have been sharply foreshortened. Of the traditional war leaders who rose to eminence, only Frederick the Great of Prussia lost battles very nearly as often as he won them, yet remained in the field long enough to achieve his aims. Among irregulars, however, a war record like Frederick’s is more the norm. A leader of guerrillas, insurgents, or raiders with an unbroken string of victories is quite rare.

Nathanael Greene is perhaps the best exemplar of this pattern. During the American Revolutionary War he failed to win even a single battle yet completely wore down the forces of his opponent, Lord Cornwallis, and prepared the way for ultimate victory at Yorktown. And he is hardly alone. Francisco Espoz y Mina saw his Spanish guerrilla forces virtually wiped out on three occasions, yet he rose again and again, finally prevailing over the French occupiers of his country. Giuseppe Garibaldi did win defensive victories in his insurgent campaigns in South America, but he suffered crushing defeats in Europe, especially in his heroic, doomed defense of the Roman republic. Yet he persisted, and in the end his Thousand freed Italy. In more recent times Vo Nguyen Giap’s countrywide irregular offensives in Vietnam were repeatedly beaten, first by the French and later by U.S. forces. But he too held on, defeating the French at Dienbienphu in 1954 and more than twenty years later overseeing the final collapse of the American-supported regime that stood between him and the unification of his country.

Even those irregulars with more imposing battle records suffered in other ways. Abd el-Kader, peerless in an ambush, a raid, or even a pitched battle, had to fight on the run for fifteen years. The situation was virtually the same for Christiaan de Wet and his Boer insurgents, and for the Indian
DACOIT
Phoolan Devi, though the active careers of de Wet and Phoolan were much shorter than Abd el-Kader’s. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck won almost all his battles, whether he was the attacker or standing on the defensive, yet he had to relinquish all the territory of German East Africa to Allied forces during World War I. The strategic situation of Aslan Maskhadov in the Russo-Chechen wars was, in this respect, quite similar to von Lettow’s.

Sometimes adversity came in the form of social, organizational, or technical constraints. Robert Rogers had to fight hard to get his British masters to take the notion of “ranging” seriously; in the end he was able to convince them to transform all their regular forces in North America into capable bush fighters. Mina was at first snubbed by the Spanish nobles who were trying to lead resistance from a distance, yet eventually they made him a general in charge of the most important area of guerrilla operations. Denis Davydov had to lobby hard to be given permission to form even a small unit of deep-striking raiders to harass Napoleon’s forces in Russia—but he succeeded, and contributed mightily to their defeat. Charles Lockwood had to cope with a mix of difficulties as he was putting together his “submarine insurgency” against the Imperial Japanese Navy: his skippers were too stodgy and his torpedoes didn’t work. Yet he mastered both challenges and conducted the most effective irregular naval campaign in history.

Aside from their sheer indomitability in the face of defeat and other seemingly intractable problems, the masters of irregular warfare often showed a ruthlessness rarely seen elsewhere, save perhaps in the rise of some tyrants and many crime lords. Mina provided archetypal insight into this aspect of insurgent leadership with his systematic killing of rival guerrilla commanders so as to consolidate his own control. The noble Abd el-Kader took to executing tribal leaders who seemed to have gone over to the French occupiers of his beloved Algeria. George Crook, the great Indian fighter renowned for treating Native Americans with compassion and respect, had early on showed his darker side. During the Civil War he tacitly allowed junior officers under his command to execute captured rebel guerrillas so as to avoid the problem of their being paroled and returning to the fight. Even T. E. Lawrence showed ruthlessness from time to time, personally executing a tribesman during one crisis—to prevent a blood feud from erupting—and on more than one grim occasion allowing his Bedouins to cut down helpless fleeing or surrendering Turkish troops.

Beyond these traits of doggedness in defeat and cold-bloodedness, so commonly found among many of the masters, other insights may be drawn from their careers that still resonate profoundly and carry important lessons for military practitioners in this new era of irregular warfare. Indeed, it is difficult to see the continuing relevance of Frederick the Great’s “oblique” order of battle or Napoleon’s onrushing columns. Frederick’s flanking attacks may have informed notions of modern maneuver warfare, and Bonaparte’s frenetic operational tempo may have prefigured
BLITZKRIEG
, but the landscape of battle today is bereft of traditional foes waiting to be outflanked and overrun. Instead of being massed, they are dispersed and must be found before they can be fought—like the tribal warriors that Rogers contended with and that Crook met a century later, or the insurgents that Frank Kitson made an art of exposing before he engaged them. The wars against al Qaeda and other terrorist networks, and even those conflicts to come against other nations, are more likely to take on an irregular hue.

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From the lives and campaigns of the masters of irregular warfare, several insights may be drawn. In particular, five related pairs of concepts have borne deeply upon the phenomenon of irregular warfare—and, in my view, will continue to shape the future of conflict in important ways.

TRANSFORMATION AND INTEGRATION
. These two concepts have to do with the alternate possibilities of reconfiguring an entire force or creating a subordinate irregular component and allowing it to operate in tandem with more traditional formations. Robert Rogers provided the first glimpse of the advantages that could present themselves when a whole army became attuned to irregular operations. His elite rangers may have contained in their ranks the best bush fighters operating in the North American wilderness of the mid-1700s; but their most important contribution was in diffusing their techniques to the remainder of the British forces. The improvement of the British between Braddock’s opening defeat at the hands of a small Franco-Indian force and Amherst’s capture of Montreal five years later was nothing short of miraculous.

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was another bush fighter who turned a total force toward irregular warfare. Throughout the hard-fought World War I campaign in East Africa, von Lettow was always vastly outnumbered and cut off from supplies and reinforcements from home. Yet his remarkable little army more often than not held the initiative, mounting a major offensive into Mozambique even after several years of relentless pursuit by considerably larger British and other Allied forces.

Perhaps the best modern example of a force that became almost completely imbued with irregular fighting skills may be found in the Chechen insurgents who fought under Aslan Maskhadov’s command. Not only were they able to conduct hit-and-run raids against a far more numerous Russian force; they also fought them head-on and, in their first war, won outright. Even in the second war, aspects of which still rage on today, Chechen irregulars fought hard and well, at least until Maskhadov himself was killed.

For all the attractiveness of creating an entire force capable of operating in this manner, it is not always possible. Indeed, it seems a somewhat rare phenomenon. More often it is necessary to employ a skillful blending of conventional and irregular troops and operations. In the eighteenth century, Nathanael Greene drew the blueprints for this manner of fighting, then executed such a campaign in the field. His tough Continentals forced the British to concentrate against them; when the Redcoats did so, his irregulars ran wild. When the British dispersed to chase the guerrillas, Greene’s regulars advanced in threatening ways. Lord Cornwallis was always caught between at least two fires, which is why Greene won and in the process changed the course of history.

Although T. E. Lawrence was less tightly tied to regular forces during World War I in the Arabian desert, he did rely on British sea power to support his irregulars’ advance, and he coordinated his many raids with the advance of Allenby’s large regular army. The result was a remarkable victory against very sturdy Turkish opponents who had previously beaten the Allies badly in pitched battles at Gallipoli, and who had held their own in the fighting in Palestine and Mesopotamia.

Without doubt the finest modern example of integrated guerrilla and conventional operations was provided by Vietnam’s Vo Nguyen Giap, whose mix of these methods proved powerful enough to defeat the French and then the Americans. While his record includes the great conventional victory in 1954 at Dienbienphu, his forces were beaten badly during 1968’s Tet offensive and once again in the 1972 Easter offensive. Absent his ability to pursue a guerrilla war alongside and in between major offensives, Giap could never have won.

Today, a decade on in the terror war begun by the 2001 attacks on the United States, al Qaeda and its affiliates still seem to be emulating Aslan Maskhadov’s model of one force that can conduct either fleeting raids or more protracted swarming engagements against regular forces in the field. Thus isolated terrorist attacks around the world have been coupled with more protracted insurgent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The American and Allied response to this challenge has been to integrate conventional and irregular forces—witness the opening invasion of Iraq, or the surge there and later in Afghanistan, along with the special operations task forces who were engaging in their own raids. In the long run the Rogers model of complete transformation may offer the promise of better results for the counterterrorist coalition than the Greene framework of integration.