Abstract
Max Boot, a neoconservative journalist and self-styled military historian, sets out in Invisible Armies to provide a history of insurgency and counter-insurgency from the Peloponnesian Wars to David Petraeus’s ballyhooed ‘surges’ in Iraq (2007) and Afghanistan (2010). Boot’s message proclaims that irregular warfare has always been with us, so we better figure out how to win such conflicts. His answer echoes John Arquilla’s Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits: How Masters of Irregular Warfare Have Shaped Our World (2011). Both authors are epigones of such nineteenth-century proponents of small wars as Hubert Lyautey and C.E. Callwell, who argued that counter-insurgency signified a distinct category of warfare in which success required the old saw of a brilliant, energetic ‘maverick’ commander willing to jettison the rigid and unimaginative mindset of Big War armies.
For historians who find this ‘great man’ agency a woefully incomplete explanation for outcomes in insurgent warfare, Boot has a retort – failure in counter-insurgency can be explained by such unsurprising phenomena as leadership fatigue, the persistence of a conventional war mindset inappropriate to insurgent wars, or bureaucratic intrigue. Political context, the failure of Western values to transfer to non-Western societies, and strategic miscalculations become unacceptable explanations to ‘Wilsonians under arms’ such as Boot. To wit, Lyautey’s tribal engagement strategy collapsed in the Riff War in 1925 because he was ‘old and sick’, not because his indigenous charges chaffed under French policies contrary to their interests and bolted at the first opportune moment. France’s 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu was the result of the search for a ‘conventional battle’, according to Boot, when in fact the base aéroterrestre concept that underpinned it was cribbed from ‘wayward genius’ Orde Wingate’s 1944 Operation Thursday in Burma. Because it was meant to provide a base to support a French-sponsored maquis in the Tonkin highlands, Dien Bien Phu became a trap laid by political circumstance and counter-insurgent, not conventional war concepts.
Edward Lansdale, a ‘living legend’, and the wildly popular, according to Boot, Ngo Dinh Diem became martyrs to institutional intrigue. Lansdale, one of the architects of the ARVN, the army that couldn’t shoot straight, whose creation came at the expense of the militias successfully employed by the French to keep communist contagion to a minimum in Cochin-China, fell victim to ‘bureaucratic enemies’. Diem, a totally corrupt Tonkinese Catholic imposed by Senator Mike Mansfield and Cardinal Joseph Spellman on a Buddhist country, sealed peasant support for the VC when he reinstalled the Vietminh-expelled landlords, who in turn proceeded to charge the peasants exorbitant back rents. He scattered the ARVN in penny-packet numbers around the country under the command of trusted provincial governors, many of them Catholic northerners, so that they could be picked off piecemeal by the insurgency. Nevertheless, Boot believes that, but for the CIA machinations, Diem might have become South Vietnam’s Ramon Magsaysay. Boot regurgitates Lewis Sorley’s tired argument that William Westmoreland, the quintessential conventional soldier in starched fatigues, ‘lost Vietnam’, as if Vietnam was Westmoreland’s – or any American’s – to lose. Eric Bergerud, a far more judicious and careful historian than Boot, refuted this view two decades ago by showing that counter-insurgency was always part of the US Army’s repertoire in Vietnam. The problem was that Westmoreland had to ‘clear’ the entrenched VC/NVA presence in the provinces before he could ‘hold and build’. And in any case, the whole US nation-building enterprise in South Vietnam was a lost cause from the beginning.
Invisible Armies is not exclusively a compendium of COINdinista cant. On occasion, clear-headed assessment pokes through an incomplete, when not misleading, narrative. T.E. Lawrence’s achievements, such as they were, were possible because he operated on the flanks of Allenby’s 69 000-man army, which prevented the Turks from concentrating against his Hijabis. The ‘super soldiers’ of the Second World War SOE and OSS ‘seldom had much of an impact’, apart from Yugoslavia, where Tito ‘relentlessly attacked Axis forces’. Characteristically, Boot fails to tell us that in 1943 Tito proposed making common cause with the Germans against the rival Chetniks and any future Anglo-American invasion of the Balkans. Boot also acknowledges that the strategy of ‘setting Europe ablaze’ by encouraging resistance movements was morally questionable because it opened civilians to barbaric Axis reprisals. Moreover, the Allied-armed resistance movements became difficult to control – welcome to counter-insurgency – and set the stage for post-1945 civil and anti-colonial conflicts. Boot also correctly captures the Mussoliniesque character of Castro’s 1959 march on Havana, and the romantic assumptions underlying Che Guevara’s overreach in Bolivia.
But sporadic flashes of lucidity both muddle Boot’s argument and call attention to the questionable quality of Invisible Armies as a work of real academic history as opposed to the propagation of a now disputed doctrine. For instance, if Lawrence was really a marginal figure condemned even by officer contemporaries as ‘an unfortunate charlatan’, why was he so lionized during and after the Great War? With his myopia for the great man in irregular combat blind to context, Boot tells us little about publicist Lowell Thomas’s quest to create and market a military hero in the age of machine warfare, and nothing at all about Lloyd George’s agenda to mobilize TEL’s faux Arab revolt as a vehicle to renege on the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement to share the Ottoman possessions with the French; Liddell Hart’s post-World War I campaign to harness TEL’s trumped-up exploits to market his ‘indirect approach’ and ‘victory without battles’ alternative to continental intervention goes unmentioned. Instead, Boot suggests that Lawrence’s post-war fame can be traced in part to his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ‘rightly acclaimed as a great work of literature’. Lawrence biographer David Fromkin concluded that, like his famous book, ‘the campaigns of Lawrence of Arabia were a cheat because T.E. fabricated them’ (D. Fromkin, ‘The Importance of T.E. Lawrence’, New Criterion, September 1991, http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-importance-of-T-E-Lawrence-4416).
Having laid out the woeful strategic and moral shortcomings of Second World War special operations, Boot fails to explain the political and institutional reasons for SOF’s ever-increasing sway in the US military from the 1960s. Likewise, explanations for the general failure of Latin American insurgencies might start with the influx following their ‘military victory’ in Algeria of French COINdinistas into Latin America – further evidence that Clausewitz’s dictums about the political character of war elude Boot – where, abetted by the CIA’s Operation Condor, they helped to raise the concept of dirty war in the Southern Cone to unprecedented levels in the 1970s and 1980s. US security assistance can also produce unintended consequences, as in El Salvador in the 1980s, where the US-sponsored Salvadorian army grew so large and autonomous that even conservatives were persuaded to strike a bargain with the FMLN adversaries.
To conclude, such statements as ‘[Petraeus] avoided the kind of indiscretions that later would prematurely end General Stanley McChrystal’s tour in Afghanistan’ offer further proof that this contentious, politicized, and poorly researched book has passed its sell-by date.