© Columbia University Press
Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat
August, 2006
Cloth, 328 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-12982-4
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”When Soldiers Fight Warriors: Lessons Learned for Policymakers, Military Planners, and Intelligence Analysts”
Sun Tzu Again
Remember Sun Tzu! His advice was simple and yet timeless: "know your enemy." Even centuries after Sun Tzu first warned his political masters, this maxim is still a primary principle for all who go to war. And his advice still rings true even for dominant political powers like the United States, which possesses the most technologically advanced military capabilities. As the studies in this book remind us, soldiers and statesmen alike ignore Sun Tzu's counsel at their own peril.
But with the end of the Cold War, many believed a new world order was dawning. Disputes would now be settled through impartially negotiated agreements brokered by a rejuvenated United Nations. Sun Tzu was no longer germane. The role of force would diminish, and the waging of war would fade into an historical curio. Sadly, things did not turn out that way. Rather, the last decade of the twentieth century left a terrible legacy of violence, bloodshed, and destruction in its wake.
While the end of the twentieth century heralded an avalanche of progressive global change, it was also accompanied by a plethora of unanticipated conflicts. The Cold War gave way to a decade of bloody internal wars, with transnational dimensions, that pitted non-state armed groups against the military forces of modern nation-states. Insurgents, terrorists, militias, and criminal organizations, in large measure, were the product of weak and failing states. And, as the 1990s demonstrated, it was precisely in those lands that armed groups burgeoned and violently challenged state authority. Moreover, when it was caused by communal and religious differences, as often was the case, the fighting was particularly brutal, long-lasting, and difficult to terminate. According to the experts, these kinds of conflicts, generated by non-state armed groups, will remain a major cause of violence and instability in many regions of the world for the foreseeable future.
If the end of the twentieth century was marked by violent internal wars around the globe, the twenty-first century began even more tumultuously for the United States with al-Qaeda's lethal transnational attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Those strikes are now recognized as part of a global Salafi jihad movement, which combines a radical and puritanical interpretation of Islam with the use of deadly terrorist operations. The ultimate goal of the movement is to reestablish past Muslim glory in a great Islamist state. In addition to attacking corrupt Arab governments that defile Islam and infidel troops occupying Muslim lands, the vanguard of that movement—al-Qaeda—told its fighters in the late 1990s to strike the United States anywhere in the world where the opportunity presented itself, including the American homeland.
Since 9/11, the Salafi jihad movement has suffered major setbacks, among the most important the loss of its Afghan sanctuary. Nevertheless, it remains functioning and lethal in many parts of the world. As an international war-fighting organization, al-Qaeda has sought to adapt and relocate its networks. It has not given up the armed struggle. Leading specialists on radical Islam agree that al-Qaeda remains very dangerous and will not hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction to further its mission.
This is all a far cry from the hopeful refrain of "no more war." And accordingly, Sun Tzu's guidance remains as relevant for soldiers and statesmen in the twenty-first century as it did when he first offered it in the fourth century
The conflicts in Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as on 9/11: These wars, which pitted armed insurgent, terrorist, militia, and criminal groups against the armies of modern nation-states are prologue for the years ahead. We believe there is little to suggest otherwise. Therefore, U.S. policymakers as well as military and intelligence professionals can draw practical and prudent lessons from these pages. Indeed, as Iraq has demonstrated, it is absolutely vital that the Iraqis develop more effective methods for understanding and assessing such unconventional adversaries whose long-established conduct of warfare differs greatly from their own.
This study provides a framework for doing so. It sets out a series of operational-level questions for profiling and assessing the war-fighting modus operandi of armed groups, and demonstrates where to look for and how to find the answers in historical, anthropological, and cultural studies. We employed the framework to describe and appraise four postÐCold War conflicts—Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq—in which the armies of modern nation-states fought armed groups, often with great difficulty, in traditional societal settings.
Lessons Learned
If U.S. civilian leaders send soldiers to engage such unconventional warriors, then military commanders must have a clear-eyed understanding of their adversary's way of war. Moreover, when soldiers fight warriors, they must also know how to adapt to their adversary's way of war in order to prevail against it. To not understand and adapt accordingly, as the U.S. policymakers and military forces found out in Iraq, is to pay a considerable price in blood and treasure.
It is possible to gain an informed understanding of how, where, when, and why non-state armed groups will fight. By doing so, modern conventional militaries and their planners can avoid underestimating these traditional and unconventional warriors, and not repeat the mistakes of the past. Our case studies are illustrative of such underestimations and contain important operational lessons for U.S. policymakers and their adviserscivilian and military. It is to these lessons that we now turn.
Traditional Concepts of War Remain Relevant
The first lesson to be learned from this study is that traditional concepts of warfare do indeed exist, you can learn the details about them if you know where to look, and they remain very relevant in today's world.
Ethnic, tribal, clan, religious, and communal groups execute operations based on these traditional ways of war, often adapting them to the time and setting in which they are fighting. But they are not spelled out in the kinds of doctrinal field manuals that guide modern armies. Consequently, when conventional militaries engage armed groups from traditional societies in unconventional conflict, they frequently have little or no understanding of their adversary's way of war, and discount their capacity for combat.
Our case assessments reveal that it is possible to gain an awareness of the concepts of warfare that armed groups follow in order to organize themselves for combat. Tribal, clan, communal, and religious ways of war are not published in easily accessible handbooks or posted on the Internet, but the information is available. Our assessments of the Somali, Chechen, Afghan, and Iraqi war-fighting traditions and narratives are illustrative of how to gain such insight.
Traditional societies do not have standing professional armies in the Western sense. Rather, all men of age in a tribe, clan, or communal group learn through societal norms and legacies to fight in specific ways, and to fight well, if required. These traditions emphasize when to fight, the importance of combat skills, personal courage, honor, and valor in battle. In addition, they can and do have highly specialized and effective leadership structures for the conduct of battle. But they do not correspond to Western categorization. In planning for a military intervention in such settings, soldiers and statesmen must grasp the following: (1) armed groups found in traditional societies have long-standing methods of combat and ways of organizing to fight outsiders; (2) their members are well versed in these modes of fighting and are prepared for wartime roles; and (3) these traditional concepts invariably take protracted, irregular, and unconventional forms of combat.
This study documents the military misfortunes that come to pass when policymakers and those professionals who serve them fail to include these considerations in their planning. The insurgency in Iraq is only the most recent example. In Somalia, for example, within the clans, military power has traditionally determined political status. Clans with the most war-fighting skills were able to wield the most political power among their peers. Thus, while the United States wrote off Aidid as a thug in charge of a gang of armed thugs, to his Somalia clansmen, Aidid was the equivalent of their minister of war, commanding powerful paramilitary warrior forces well-versed in deeply rooted warfare methods. The resulting carnage from this oversight left nineteen U.S. elite soldiers dead and resulted in the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia.
The Russian military likewise caused feuding tribes and clans to unite against them with disastrous consequences in both Afghanistan and Chechnya, where their invasions provoked extraordinary and violent resistance. In both cases, as we highlighted, Red Army planners had little or no understanding of the concepts of war that produced this remarkable defiance.
Recall the bloodbath in Grozny on New Year's Eve 1994: tank after tank, the pride of the Russian military, in smoking ruins while Chechen fighters picked off soldier after soldier from their rooftop sniper nests. The Chechen concept of war has been shaped by traditional clan military organization and training, a history of resisting Russian invasions, and Sufi Islamic influence that cast resistance to Russian invaders as a religious duty. These factors guaranteed the armed resistance of the Chechen peoples from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It is no surprise, then, that far from presenting the Red Army with a cakewalk, Chechnya became a terrible quagmire.
Organization and Command and Control Are Decentralized and Unconventional
Once military planners and intelligence analysts have come to appreciate an armed group's concept of war, the next step is to consider how the armed group organizes units for fighting and how those units are led. The second lesson from this study is that such units are almost always relatively small in size—no battalions or divisions here—and are assembled for unconventional operations, most notably ambushes and hit-and-run strikes.
It is important to recognize that although non-state armed groups may not wear uniforms or drill in formation, they do maintain the ability to mobilize rapidly for war and adapt their traditional tactics to fight modern foes. One of the patterns we have seen repeated in the case studies is small tribal or clan fighting units that are organized along geographical lines and commanded by fellow tribal or clan members. Sometimes, as in Somalia, the war leader has a separate position in a clan, but more often at the local level he is also the chief political leader. Sometimes the command-and-control structure can be traced straight back to ancient times, and sometimes tribal commanders have adapted time-honored traditions to modern weapons and enemies. But, be it Bedouin raids or Afghan ambushes, policymakers must be aware of the formidable fighting units and communal command-and-control structures that persist in traditional societies.
It is also important for policymakers to know that tribes, clans, and family groups take orders from their own leaders, often based on local hierarchies, and do not belong to a centralized military command-and-control system. In Afghanistan, for example, the Mujahideen comprised hundreds of individual and mostly independent units, with local tribesmen under the command of local leadership. As a result, the loss or capture of one commander impacted the effectiveness of an individual unit, but other units in the area were able to continue their operations.
Another important element in warfare conducted by many armed groups is the flexibility of small armed units. Such organizations have rarely confronted conventional militaries head on, but have utilized hit-and-run ambush techniques that take advantage of their superior knowledge of local terrain and improvised explosives. Indeed, conventional militaries are particularly vulnerable to such ambushes especially along their supply lines.
When policymakers and their advisers fail to take into consideration traditional command-and-control structures, the consequences can be dire. Recall, for example, that Saddam Hussein had strengthened and armed Sunni tribes during his war with Iran, and then in the 1990s had to rely on them to help maintain local security. They were also tasked by Saddam Hussein to coordinate with special elements of the Ministry of the Interior to resist U.S. forces in the event of an invasion. These tribal militias were to deploy in small-unit formations and employ guerrilla warfare tactics.
As the conventional Iraqi army was defeated or melted away in the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom, these irregular forces, with their traditional methods of fighting, were already organized and preparing to resist U.S. occupation. They became the Sunni Rejectionist element of the Iraqi insurgency.
The Areas of Operations Are Expanding
Next we must ask, where are armed groups likely to carry out operations? Will they be confined to the rural redoubts of their traditional societies or has urbanization changed the area of operations (AO)? Will operations be confined to the state in which the conflict is taking place, or will the battlefield be extended transnationally by the armed group across borders and geographical regions? And what happens if planners and analysts fail to take into consideration the strength of lineage support tribal, clan, and religious warriors receive in their homelands?
Thus, the third lesson to be drawn from the case studies concerns AO issues. When the traditional warriors we studied were able to operate from their rural homelands they capitalized on the support, or at minimum acquiescence, of local populations and their superior knowledge of the terrain and enemy activities in it, with deadly consequences. That superior knowledge can be a crucial advantage, as each of the armed groups examined here demonstrated. It provides a level of local intelligence that is extremely advantageous.
In Afghanistan, for example, the Mujahideen operated from their local tribal areas—in mountainous regions where Soviet tanks had limited effectiveness, and tribal hit-and-run ambush techniques proved exceptionally deadly. Moscow, moreover, ensured the war would spread countrywide when it placed its military deep in the heart of rural Afghanistan. The destruction caused by Soviet operations and the refugee flows turned all of Afghanistan into a war zone, so that the Mujahideen were able to operate throughout Afghanistan's rugged rural terrain with impunity. They quickly turned this to their advantage and made all but the major highways no-go areas for the Soviet Army.
Likewise, recall the situation in the Sunni triangle of Iraq. While U.S. soldiers have been able to easily defeat the insurgents when they cornered them, the problem has been how to corner them. That has required actionable intelligence, and collecting it through the first twenty months of the occupation was the Achilles' heel of the American effort. The insurgents, operating in their home territory, suffered no such lack of information, as demonstrated by their capacity to elude U.S. forces to carry out suicide attacks, assassinations, and IED detonations.
The armed groups examined in these pages, however, are not limited to the rural or traditional battlefields. They have also demonstrated considerable flexibility in adapting their traditional concepts of warfare to the urban battlefield. In the 1990s, for example, Chechen warriors were extremely adroit at innovating and extending the fight into the cities—a new operational environment for them. They adapted their small-team approach—ambushes, hit-and-run tactics, surprise attacks, and quick withdrawals—to the capital city of Grozny with lethal efficacy. They dug into the basements of apartment and other multistory buildings to destroy Russian tanks at ground level from protected locations that were difficult to counter. And on rooftops they positioned sniper teams that included individuals skilled in the use of rocket launchers. The Chechens adapted superbly to their new environment and trapped Russian forces in the urban canyons of Grozny, just as they once had in the mountains in battles long passed.
Then there was the feckless effort of UNOSOM II at trying to capture and arrest General Aidid in the urban terrain of Mogadishu. Task Force Ranger, made up of elite U.S. forces, intensified its search to find and snatch him in September 1993. But Aidid controlled his area of operations. Mogadishu belonged to Aidid, who knew how to operate effectively in its narrow back alleys and crowded streets. And on October 3 that year he demonstrated this with bloody conviction when Task Force Ranger's snatch and grab mission quickly went very sour.
The United States faced the same problem in the regional cities of Iraq's Sunni triangle. Army and Marine forces fighting against insurgents in Fallujah in 2004, for example, were confronted with small groups of fi ghters willing to use every advantage of their crowded urban landscape to launch ambushes, wire buildings for explosives, set up IEDs, and conceal snipers. Since the late 1990s, however, the Marines have studied and trained for the urban battle. That preparation paid off in early November 2004, as they took back the insurgent sanctuary of Fallujah. It was a bloody, close-quarters, and fierce fight. While the number of insurgents slain and the number that got away was not clear, they were driven from their sanctuary. It was a decisive setback for the insurgents, because they lost a safe haven from which they had been able, unencumbered, to establish secure bases for training, planning, and launching operations.
This new urban area of operations has repercussions for policymakers in considering how and where to deploy forces and how to plan for urban battles. What happens when planners fail to take into consideration the ability of tribal warriors to adapt to new areas of operations can be seen in the bloodbath in Mogadishu. Aidid's fighters used back alleys and rooft ops to ambush Task Force Ranger. Fighting street to street and using children and women as human shields, Aidid's forces reminded the West what can happen when tribal forces take on even elite Western soldiers on their terrain. And the policy effects were unambiguous. After the October 3 debacle, the Clinton administration, according to David Halberstam, decided to "cut and run."
Finally, as the case studies reveal, modern-day armed groups are able to extend the battlefield regionally and transnationally. The Chechens broadened their area of operations through various terrorist strikes, including ones inside Moscow. And al-Qaeda has developed a capacity to carry out strikes on a global battlefield. As we saw earlier, Iraq quickly became a magnet for radical Islamists who are part of al-Qaeda's global Salafi Jihad. Iraq, like Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Bosnia and Chechnya in the 1990s, has turned into a central front for jihad warriors.
Types of Operations, Targeting, and Constraints on the Use of Force Are Evolving
The fourth lesson for policymakers and planners is that armed-group warriors no longer confine their irregular and unconventional operations against intervening nation-states and their security forces to classic guerrilla warfare tactics. Operations have been diversified. This has, in turn, broadened the targets selected for attack.
To be sure, as our cases show, classic guerrilla-warfare operations are still utilized. In Iraq, for example, in addition to the use of snipers, insurgents have also employed guerrilla tactics, including ambushes, to attack U.S. military forces—especially supply convoys. And Afghan tribal units attacked Soviet supply convoys using such tactics as ambush and sniper attacks that conformed to long-standing Afghan tribal warrior operations.
That said, armed groups have effectively broadened their traditional unconventional repertoire to include a variety of IED operations such as car bombs, suicide attacks against many different targets, improvised roadside explosives to render supply and communication lines vulnerable, kidnapping and beheading of noncombatants, and the desire to acquire WMDs. Suicide and IED operations have been used extensively in Iraq and Chechnya. Radical jihad warriors led by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi have carried out several grisly beheadings in Iraq. And as the report by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded, based on captured documents, detainee interviews, and search of its former facilities in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda has every intention of using WMD if it acquired the capability.
Changes in the type of operations executed have likewise altered the traditional types of targets selected to attack. In the past, tribal, clan, and communal units have targeted fellow warriors. However, this has morphed into something much broader and more deadly when conflicts like those in Chechnya destroy the traditional structures of society and foreign Islamic fighters bring their own brand of indiscriminate warfare to the fight. Likewise, in Iraq the types of new operations noted above have altered insurgent targets to include not only American troops and the new Iraqi forces they are training, but U.S. civilian officials, members of the elected Iraqi government, UN representatives, NGO workers, foreign contractors and journalists, and ordinary Iraqi citizens as well.
These changes in operations and targeting point to a fifth lesson for policymakers, planners, and analysts. When the military of an outside power invades the territory of a traditional society, the strict customary codes that govern the use of force, status of noncombatants, and the proportionality of attacks are often modified and even suspended. This was evident in the case studies. And when the constraints on traditional warfare are eschewed, as seen in Iraq, everyone from contractors to aid workers and journalists, and everywhere from hospitals to schools and places of worship, become fair game.
In the traditional cultures analyzed in this study, we observed longstanding constraints against targeting noncombatants. Warfare was not to be conducted where women and children lived or in the vicinity of churches and mosques. However, as documented in Somalia, the collapse of central authority and intervention by outside forces contributed to a new form of unconventional warfare in which there were few restrictions. The same has been true in Iraq, where insurgents use mosques as operational bases, minaret towers as sniper nests, and schools as a place to cache arms or bomb and kill children.
Likewise, in Chechnya, while traditional restraints on targets and tactics are applied to Chechens, no such restraints are accorded to Russian forces or increasingly to Russian civilians. Indeed, terror as a tactic has replaced selective targeting. By 2004 the use of suicide tactics by the so-called Black Widows of Chechnya targeted ordinary Russian citizens indiscriminately both in Moscow and in the Russian provinces neighboring Chechnya.
When policymakers and planners fail to take into consideration this devolution in traditional constraints on targeting and do not prepare accordingly, the personnel they send as part of the intervening forces, military and civilian alike, can suffer very costly consequences. Remember the burnt corpses of four U.S. contractors being ripped apart by a jeering and frenzied mob in Fallujah. And the indiscriminate targeting of noncombatant civilian contractors, translators, NGO workers, and journalists, including their beheading, has become part of the radical Islamic jihadist's operational repertoire.
The Role of Outside Actors Is Diversifying
The sixth and final lesson for policymakers, planners, and analysts is that the role of outside actors, most importantly the global Salafi Jihad movement and its al-Qaeda vanguard, must be considered at the outset. These external forces often bring immense quantities of financial support and jihadi warriors inspired by a radical and extremist fervor to the local fight. Moreover, their presence can transform the conflict from a local or regional security problem to part of what the Salafi movement defines as their global jihad.
In Somalia for example, al-Qaeda provided important operational insight into U.S. tactics for Aidid and his tribal warriors. The presence and role of al-Qaeda was largely unknown by the U.S. led UNOSOM II. Thus, even as they were dismissing Aidid as a tinhorn warlord, Osama bin Laden's men were providing him with the tactical advice he was able to utilize to fight Task Force Ranger with considerable success.
Russian forces have also learned the hard way that foreign fighters bring important skills and support to local conflicts. During the Soviet-Afghan war, outside actors supplied both logistical assistance and fighters. Th is assistance came from states such as Saudi Arabia and the United States, as well as from non-state radical Islamist groups and individuals. Financial assistance and the influx of foreign fighters helped the Mujahideen to launch increasingly deadly attacks against Soviet forces.
Finally, outside forces have played an important role in the insurgency in Iraq. In addition to the former regime elements and Sunni Rejectionist warriors, global jihadi fighters have flocked into Iraq to fan the flames of their holy war against the United States. And, as noted above, these outside actors are not restrained by any codes of warfare or limitations on whom they target. These insurgents are the most difficult and deadly for the United States and its allies to deal with because they are not fighting for a stake in Iraq's political future. Rather, their war is a nihilistic and destructive battle against the presence of the U.S. in Iraq and the very notion that Iraq should transform itself into a democratic regime. Remember what Zarqawi declared at the time of the January 2005 election. He labeled candidates running for election "demi-idols" and those planning to vote "infidels." Democracy was nothing short of "heresy" and "against the rule of God."
The Bottom Line
In conclusion, we have outlined six fundamental principles&mdashindispensable prerequisites—that should guide policymakers, planners, and analysts in their understanding of how, where, when, and why non-state armed groups will fight. When policymakers send soldiers to fight warriors, they must be aware that, for warriors, traditional concepts of war remain highly relevant. What is more, these traditional concepts will invariably take protracted, irregular, and unconventional forms of combat "on the ground."
Moreover, the fighting units of these armed groups will almost always be small, decentralized, and unconventional. And they will be commanded by local chieftains who know how to lead men in brutal combat. All of this makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to launch a single decisive attack against them. The aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom is illustrative. It must also be recognized that armed groups are quite capable of expanding their area of operations from rural to urban terrain, as Chechens proved in Grozny. Armed groups are also extending their battlefields regionally and globally.
Likewise, operations, targeting, and constraints on the use of force are also devolving to include noncombatants, hospitals, churches, and mosques. Indeed, as the insurgents in Iraq demonstrate daily, no target is off limits. Finally, when policymakers send American soldiers to fight in these areas, they should keep in mind that the role of outside actors continues to diversify and expand, and that external support can play an important role in the effectiveness of non-state armed groups. Witness the international Salafi jihadists who have fought on many battlefields since helping drive the Red Army out of Afghanistan.
If we fail to take these key principles of warfare into consideration and grasp their importance when fighting armed groups in traditional societies—the warriors of contemporary combat—we will encounter bloody surprises and make deadly miscalculations. Remember Mogadishu, Grozny, the Hindu Kush mountains and the deadly plains of Afghanistan, and the Sunni triangle of Iraq.
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