Strategy Notes: Guerrilla Warfare 01

[Obligatory PC disclaimer: Live Free And Die is, of course, just a game and these supplementary notes are being added for the amusement and education of the players. Anyone who attempts to start an insurgent movement in the real world is probably being very silly and will likely die or spend the rest of their life behind bars, having accomplished nothing in the process. Neither I nor my family would officially condone such behavior. Carry on.]

The United States is one the most heavily-armed, militaristic societies the world has ever known, with over 700 military bases in 63 countries worldwide... so naturally we spend a great deal of time worrying about the possibility of an enemy force operating on our soil. This is nothing new; Invasion Literature was quite popular among the English at the height of their empire.

So let's say that, for whatever reason, you feel the need to take up arms against the local authorities: maybe it's an invading army, maybe your government has pushed you too far, or maybe you're fighting something altogether different...

...whatever you're fighting and whatever the reason; that's up to you. I'm here more for the how's than the why's. Most of us have seen Red Dawn (Patrick Swayze's first great acting role) and The Patriot (Mel Gibson's last) and so I'll assume we all have some idea of what to do when we the shooting starts: grab our guns, load up our classmates/drinking buddies, hit the local sporting goods store on our way to the mountains and gear up for open season on commie invaders or oppressive stormtroopers.

Well, that's a start, but do remember that most of the characters in those movies died.We don't want that to happen to us, so perhaps a little bit more study would be expedient.

What is guerrilla warfare?
The term was first coined to refer to the rebellions of Spanish and Russian citizens who fought against the invading armies of Napoleon, but the concept is much, much older. Ancient Israel saw at least two guerrilla rebellions in the time before and after the life of Christ, one described in the apocryphal Book of Maccabees.

Guerrilla warfare is a favoured strategy of peasant and tribal societies, and in this manner harkens to the very origins of organized warfare. It's also a useful strategy in a situation of power and wealth disparity, and in this manner harkens to the likely future of organized warfare.

A guerrilla fighter must often operate without the benefit of orthodox training, sufficient logistics, heavy weaponry, clear chains of command, modern safety or medical technology or the protections of international law. Willingness to die for their cause is often one of the biggest advantages they have, as much as the more-lauded advantages of mobility, defense, and knowledge of the terrain. It is an anonymous, unheroic form of war more befitting a thief or an assassin than a knight or a hero.

What isn't guerrilla warfare?
Good question, being as the term tends to be as anamorphic as the usual strategies...

It could be defined as war without battles, only raids and ambushes. Mao Zedung, arguably it's most successful strategist, felt that guerrilla warfare in and of itself could not topple an existing regime; guerrillas, in his opinion, must grow into a conventional army before they could win a conventional victory. This is what happened in China and later Vietnam. On the other hand, the Boers and Irish started as conventional armies and eventually transitioned into guerrilla forces.

"War of  the Flea" is one definition; "War of the Loser" might be a better one ("underdog" if you want to be charitable, and I don't). Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck and Thomas Edward Lawrence, two highly successful Europeans commanding native troops on opposite sides in the First World War, were both classically trained officers who adapted tactics of "tribal" or raider war upon the realization that they could never follow the Clausewitzian formula and have any hope of winning.

Some would say that there's a difference between guerrilla warfare and terrorism. I would argue that the difference between an Urban Guerrilla and a Terrorist is often sentiment at best.

Interestingly, guerrilla warfare played a relatively minor role in America's two most famous revolutions, the War of Independence and the War Between the States. These were mostly conventional wars involving conventional armies fighting each other in set-piece battles, with guerrilla actions being rare and peripheral.

The Texas Revolution, from what little I know about it, was also less guerrilla and more a war of Fabian maneuver, with the Mexican Army forced to march beyond their ability to supply or coordinate themselves, allowing for their defeat by the numerically-inferior Texans.

Any wars in your backyard and in your lifetime will likely be guerrilla in nature, simply because any military force that can conquer the whole continent is probably far too mighty to be engaged conventionally.

004: DIY

Jimmy's Diary
6th of September, 2000
We burgled our landlady's late husband's tool shed last night. The guy worked as a miner, mechanic, and electrician for most of his life and seems to have been quite the tinkerer. Shame he ain't still with us.

It was a little harder than we thought it would be, but our M1 Carbine is now an M2. The bullets are somewhat underpowered by rifle standards but in my opinion the firepower and the sturdy nature of the gun make up for it.

[Caleb: liberate our minds, by any means necessary!]
[Kate: preach it, brother!]

Remember those arguments they used to have before the gun bans, with the rhetorical questions of why anyone would need an assault rifle? "Respectable" conservatives would always respond half-heartedly, often with appeals to that long-dead document, the Constitution (Laid in State since 1861, at least) but it was obviously a question they could never really answer because, well, they never would have need for military-pattern weapons of any kind. Where are all the respectable conservatives now? Most likely, the ones that ain't working for the occupation forces have all died of radon poisoning from hiding in their basements when the shooting started.

Let's, for a moment, set aside the question of what is and is not an assault rifle, even though the Branch Davidians got themselves and and their children massacred for doing just that, and consider that there is in fact a very good reason why someone might want to own one: they're quite useful for seizing a defended  enemy position or for preventing one's own position from being seized.

Beyond that? Guerrillas generally don't hold territory and seldom try to seize it. If all you're doing is the small-scale ambushes that tends to define guerrilla warfare, then an assault rifle might not be the best weapon for you. If, on the other hand, you want to rob a train—which will require you to seize control of at least one bunker, the section of rail that it overlooks and the train itself—then an individual rifle capable of automatic fire would be just what you want and you would be rather displeased to only have two of them.

A decent shotgun is an acceptable substitute. Range is even poorer than a carbine (though similar to a submachine gun), and they also tend to come short in capacity and rate of fire, but their killing power is unparallelled at close range and their simplicity of use lend them well to work in close quarters.

Grenades are also quite handy when it comes to defortifying one's enemy, and unlike assault rifles, I could quite easily produce a few with, as an old friend used to say, a few household chemicals in the proper proportions.

We're going to be working on that instead of silencers at the moment; as our operation will call for firepower over subtlety. We made off with a large can of calcium carbide last night (useful for explosives or chemical weapons), as well as about a thousand match heads and some Grant's Tree Stump Remover (potassium nitrate) and sugar. We'll see what we can do with it.

Steve and Maria saddled up and went to see if they could get in touch with Doug Henderson's people out in Pincherville. Kate's out hunting, and Caleb's going to join her when he's done helping me.

Strategy Notes: The Doctrine of Asymmetrical War - Gary Brecher

http://www.rednecksrevenge.org/?p=3037

[GM: A great deal of my writing borrows heavily from eXile columnist Gary Brecher AKA the War Nerd. He may be an alias for some campus commie poetry professor—the kind of person my players would be called upon to assassinate in this game—but he still seems to understand the real-life conflicts that most closely correlate to our fictional one.

...just try and overlook his odious, seething hatred of the good Jimmy Carter.]

For the eXile’s 250th issue celebration, I’ve decided to step back a bit and take a look at modern warfare, a sort of mid-term summary of everything I’ve been trying to teach you folks over the past hundred or so issues I’ve been writing for this paper.

I’ll give you the bad news first: no 21st century war is “purely military.” The days when countries duked it out on the battlefield are over for the foreseeable future. What we have now is something very strange. It goes by a lot of names, from “terrorism” to “asymmetrical warfare” to “fourth-generation warfare,” depending on whether you’re for it, against it, or just trying to sound cool. But whatever you call it, the key factor is that it never involves WW-II style conventional war between nation-states.

Oh, there’ll be a few good old-school conventional wars from time to time. My favorite is the Ethiopia vs. Eritrea war of the 1980s. And you could include the Iran-Iraq War from that same decade.

But those wars are rare, and going to get rarer. Because there’s a much cheaper, easier way to make war. This way doesn’t require any of the building blocks of conventional war: you don’t need industry, aircraft, armor or massive armies. In fact, this kind of war can be played by any group of wackos that can round up a dozen or so bushwhackers. All you need is small arms and a grudge — and those are the only two commodities most of the world has a surplus of.

It’s a heartbreaker for you hardware freaks, this idea that it just doesn’t matter whether our tanks are better than their tanks (or planes or artillery or whatever). But it’s time you grew up, guys: haven’t you kind of noticed that in most wars, the other side doesn’t even use tanks, or planes, or artillery (except mortars, which are so portable they can be considered small arms)? You guys are stuck in the dream about a classic NATO/Warsaw Pact Sumo match in Central Europe, and you just don’t want to think about all these brush wars. Well, time to wake up. The Warsaw Pact doesn’t exist any more, so that war is never going to happen. The fact is, it never was. If the Soviets had sent the tanks into the Fulda Gap, it would have been a nukefest, not a tank battle like Kursk. Not exactly a wargamer’s dream: before you can even get your corps deployed, the whole playing field would melt down.[1]

So I’m preaching real war here. If you want tank duels, go replay the Kursk Salient or project yourself fifty years into the future, where maybe, just maybe, the Asian powers will have a good all-out war. If you want to know about war now, then you have to jump into the weird world of “asymmetrical war.”

And I’ll tell you: once you make that jump, you find this kind of war is just as interesting, just as satisfying as setpiece battles. I made the jump ten years ago, when I realized my hardware research wasn’t helping me understand the wars that were actually happening in Africa and Asia. And I’m glad I did, because I understand the world way better than most people. I knew Iraq would go bad because I’ve studied this kind of war. I wish more people had. Maybe we wouldn’t have jumped into this mess.

To get your head around this kind of war, you have to delete most of your ideas about warfare. That’s right: get your Black & Decker out of the garage, charge that puppy up, and do some brain surgery on the part of your cortex that stores your favorite ideas about war. Here’s a list of War Myths, so you’ll know where to drill:

1. War involves battles.
Wrong! Most of the “armies” in the world right now avoid battle and focus on killing civilians.[2] This is the hardest thing for Americans to understand: armies that don’t aim at victory and actually avoid battle. So many war buffs who ought to know better just won’t see this. If you read military blogs, you know the type: guys who say “we won every battle in Nam!” as if that proves we should have won. Boneheads! The NVA/Viet Cong strategy was classic irregular warfare stuff, based on outlasting the enemy, not defeating him in battle. When they did go for military victory, like in the Tet Offensive, it was a near-disaster,[3] saved by the other key fact about this sort of war:

2. You win by killing the enemy.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. In this kind of war the enemy wants you to kill a lot of people. A lot of irregular warfare groups start their campaigns with a suicide raid, where they expect to be slaughtered.[4]

3. Hi-tech beats lo-tech.
Not lately it doesn’t. Here again it’s a matter of you hardware freaks facing hard facts. If we take Iraq 2003 as a familiar and painful example, you saw a classic outcome: our hi-tech beat their wanna-be hi-tech in the conventional battles. Then we started getting picked off by low-tech ambushes where the insurgents used homemade IEDs in combination with old, rugged Soviet weapons like the RPG-7 and Kalashnikov. After two years, those simple weapons are still effective — and they’re actually getting lower- and lower-tech! Take IEDs: when the Iraqi insurgents started using them, they’d hook the detonator up to a garage-door opener or cell phone so they could be set off by remote control signals. Our convoys started using jammers to stop those signals from getting through to the detonators. So now the insurgents are using wires or even string to set off the IED. You can’t get much lower-tech than a string. And that’s why it works, because you can’t jam a string either.

4. “Overwhelming force! Hit the insurgents hard enough, and they’ll quit.”
Wrong. Americans are pretty well anti-death, but lots of other tribes are in love with the idea of the martyrdom thing. Like the Shi’ites, whom I’ve written about already, some might say with admiration. People who woof about “hittin’ ‘em hard” haven’t thought cold and hard enough about what they mean. We have a problem with the Iraqi Sunnis. There are about seven million of them. All you need for an effective insurgency is a few hundred urban guerrillas (with a much bigger base of civilian supporters). So they’re never going to run out of young men. And no overwhelming force short of neutron bombs will solve the problem. Which brings us to another very interesting question, the future of genocide and nuclear weapons.[5] But as long as we’re wimping around with this “no nukes” rule, there just ain’t no kind of overwhelming force that can convince every testosterone-poisoned Sunni kid to join the Pepsi Generation. Consult your own experience, remember what young males are like! Remember high school PE! How hard would it have been to get those guys, Beavis and Butthead times 80, to plant a bomb or shoot a sentry if they thought they could get away with it, or better yet, be seen as heroes by their fellow countrymen? Teenage boys are the cannon fodder of any guerrilla war, and teenage boys are nothing but weasels who stand on their hind feet sometimes. Keep that in mind when media types try to hand you our next piece of total crap:

5. People want democracy and peace and all that kind of stuff.
No. In fact, HELL no! Let me repeat your first lesson: consult your own experience instead of believing the talking heads. Do you care about those things — I mean, compared to money and sex and taking revenge on the MR2 that cut you off a couple of blocks back? The only ideology I see around me is God. Most people in Fresno have a bad case of God. It takes up all their brain power trying to read the Bible and mind everybody else’s business. They wouldn’t care if Charles Manson took power as long as he said God and Jesus every few seconds. Out of all the people I’ve met, I can only think of one who cared about democracy: my Social Studies teacher. But he was one of these decent old Minnesota Swedes, goodhearted, too soft for Bakersfield, committed to ignoring reality. His wife, another big Secular Humanist, left him for a dyke, his students called him “Gums” and he admitted once to our class that he’d lost his Faith. That made him Public Enemy #1 with the Christians and he had to transfer to another school district. That’s what believing in that stuff’ll get you.[6]

If this is a democracy, it’s weird how the only people who go in for it are conmen and closet cases like Rove. No normal American would go near it. They know better. We all know local politics belongs to real estate developers at civic level and to the corporations at Federal level. Which is fine with me, and with most Americans, but why call it democracy?

And as for peace, I was always against it. Peace is for people who have satisfying lives. The rest of us want that flood, that real rain. Like the man said, “Bring it on.”

Look around the world and you’ll see that people are divided into ethnic gangs, like the planet’s one big San Quentin. All they want is for their gang to win. If they have any ideology beyond that, it’s more of the God stuff, and you need Thorazine to cure that. Godfearing gangbangers, that’s exactly what we ran into in Somalia, 1993. Half the population of Mogadishu turned on our guys who were trying to provide aid for the starving. They didn’t want peace, democracy or any of that shit. They wanted their clan to win and the other clans to lose. And if stopping the aid convoys from getting food to those enemy clans was the only way to win, they were ready to make it happen, ready to die fighting our best troops backed by attack helicopters and APCs. We killed maybe a thousand of these “civilians” and lost 18 Rangers and Delta operators. And the Somalis made the anniversary of that fight a national holiday. It’s worth giving a moment to let that sink in: these people fought to the death against overwhelmingly superior US forces, because they wanted their clan to win by starving rival clans to death.[7]

Yes, Grasshopper, you must meditate on the fact that People are superstitious tribalists. Democracy comes about 37th, if that. Nobody wants to face that fact: we’re tribal critters. We’ll die for the tribe. More to the point, we’ll kill for it. We don’t care about democracy. And I’m not just talking here about people in tropical hellholes like Somalia, I mean your town, your street. Most Americans are just like me: old-school nationalists. We want America to be Roman, to kick ass. The rest is for Quakers.

Just remember, everything they told you is wrong. Here’s a quick list of the main points. Go and meditate upon them. Memorize them while I whack you with this stick like a good Zen teacher should.

1. Most wars are asymmetrical / irregular.

2. In these wars, the guerrillas / irregulars / insurgents do NOT aim for military victory.

3. You can NOT defeat these groups by killing lots of their members.

In fact, they want you to do that.

4. Hi-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.

5. “Hearts and Minds,” meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.

6. Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL: “my gang yay, your gang boo!” It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.

Footnotes:
1. People overestimate the lethality of nuclear weapons. Twilight: 2000 gave us a pretty good picture of how armies would function in a nuclear battlefield. It can be done, even if the tankheads only get a few months before the fuel runs out and their hardware becomes a set of rusty monuments.

That was always a very interesting, underrated RPG, or at least I thought so. It was widely criticized back in the day because All-Killing Nuclear Winter was an article of holy writ to Cold War-era liberals and the idea of a nuclear war being survivable, in any capacity, enrages them...

...and also because one of the background events (Germany re-uniting) was considered unrealistic.

2. This is simply following Sun Tzu's wisdom that the way to avoid what is strong is to strike what is weak. It may not be the nicest way to operate, but it makes tactical sense. A guerrilla warrior operating in North America might have to change his strategies somewhat, as civilians here are more likely to be armed.

3. The conservatives actually get this one right: the Viet Cong was shattered by Tet and lost everywhere except in the minds of the American voters. For the rest of the war, it would be the North Vietnamese Army who did most of the heavy lifting. A lot of guerrilla forces are destroyed because they try to go conventional too early: before the Viet Cong  it was the Greek DAG, and afterwards it was the Tamil LTTE.

4. Obviously most people are not overly eager to die, but it can often be advantageous to their still-living fellows when they do. See: Alamo, Easter Uprising. As Soren Kierkegaard said,  the tyrant dies and his rule ends, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

5. Genocide is an excellent CI weapon for those who are powerful (Russia vs Chechnya , China vs Tibet) or isolated (Sudan vs Dinka, Indonesia vs Papua) enough to get away with it, but even that ain't foolproof. Nazi Germany certainly had no qualms against brutalizing civilians, and yet were unable to destroy Tito's partisans.

6. Religious fervor can do wonders to compose mortals with immortal fire, to paraphrase WH Auden. What then, of non-religious communists from whom we hear so much of when it comes to revolution (including the occasional atheist suicide bomber)? Perhaps Albet Camus was right when he said the future is the only transcendental value for men without God.

7. That, like pretty much everything Americans know about Somalia, is something of a simplification. Funny thing is, Somalia as an anarchist/fundamentalist "failed state" has seen quite a few improvements in living standards over what existed under the reign of pro-business despot Siad Barre.