I've written here before about the problems caused by a lack of understanding of our own American revolutionary history. Jeffrey Record, one of today's leading military analysts, gives us an example of how understanding that history can be valuable in helping to frame the problems of the present. It's in the Autumn 2006 edition of the US Army War College journal Parameters: External Assistance: Enabler of Insurgent Success. Record writes:
As in Vietnam, the rebels in America fought a total war while the metropolitan power fought a limited war. The rebels gambled their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on victory, whereas, for British commanders, defeat meant reassignment elsewhere or a return to the pleasures of London society. For the British, North America was a distant theater of operations; for the Americans, it was home. Indeed, after France intervened on the rebel side, North America became, for the British, not a secondary, but rather a tertiary theater of operations (after Europe, where Britain faced the possibility of invasion, and the Caribbean, where Britain sought to defend its fabulously lucrative Jamaica and other sugar and spice islands).
The Americans also had a superior strategy: (1) protracted irregular warfare conducted by local militias, guerrilla bands, and an elusive Continental Army aimed at wearing down Britain’s political will, coupled with (2) a search for foreign intervention that could neutralize British material superiority. Though George Washington initially sought a conventional military decision in and around what is now the greater New York City area, he soon came to recognize the perils of positional warfare against a materially superior professional army (especially one supported by the guns of the Royal Navy). He reverted to a strategy of hit-and-run attacks against exposed British and Hessian detachments based on the implicit assumption that the Continental Army could win, or at least not lose, simply by surviving. As Donald Snow and Dennis Drew observe:
"Washington knew he had no reasonable hope of victory against the British ... in open battle. At best he could wage defensive battles, judiciously withdraw after inflicting casualties, and wait to fight another day. With some good fortune (and poor British tactics) Washington might be able to fall upon isolated portions of the British force and inflict small defeats. Washington’s objective had to be to buy time, raise the cost of the war to the British, and hope that they would tire of the whole affair. The other American hope was for foreign help from France, Britain’s traditional enemy and colonial rival."
The British, for their part, seemed to have no strategy other than seizing cities like New York and Philadelphia in the hope that Washington would come out and fight. British forces in the Thirteen Colonies, whose peak strength was 35,000,8 were woefully insufficient to seize control of colonial America; they could do little more than hold selected ports and make occasional forays into the hostile American interior, where they faced constant attrition by American irregulars. An entire army under Sir John Burgoyne was entrapped in upstate New York by the all too often formidable combination of the regular Continental Army screened and supported by militias. Indeed, the British were unprepared to cope with the mix of regular and irregular warfare, and in the end, according to one assessment, it was “unconventional victories [in the countryside] that enabled Washington’s conventional army to survive and ultimately to triumph. The British lost the war in the countryside.”
Record's argument focuses on the fact that French assistance to the rebels was decisive for the American revolutionary victory. Yes, Virginia, the patriotic Americans were assisted by foreigners. The FRENCH, no less!
What will we tell the children?
And the French helped a lot:
But France’s greatest contribution was strategic: by declaring war on Britain, France transformed what, for Britain, had been a colonial insurgency into a world war. By the end of 1780, ally-less Britain was fighting France, Spain, and the Netherlands, whose combined ships-of-the-line totaled 180 to Britain’s 120, in North America, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. Together with several hundred American privateers, the French, Spanish, and Dutch navies threatened not only Britain’s trans-Atlantic lines of communication and its sugar-rich empire in the Caribbean but also the security of Britain itself. For the first time in over a century, control over the maritime approaches to the British Isles was seriously threatened by a naval coalition whose chief member - France - also fielded the best army in Europe. For Britain, the war in North America had suddenly become a strategic liability. Anthony James Joes does not overstate the case that “there is probably no more clear-cut example of the importance of outside help to the success of an insurgency than the American War of Independence.” Especially critical was the French navy, “which carried French troops to America as well as gold, clothing, and cannons to Washington’s army [and] kept that specter of an invasion luridly before British eyes [and] interrupted the already quite tenuous system whereby the British supplied their forces in America.”
I guess this means all those propaganda claims about how the Americans were fighting for freedom and independence and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was all just a bunch of French propaganda designed to bamboozle naive British citizens who dared to doubt the wisdom of King George. It was all a big French Catholic conspiracy against God-fearing British Christians. The truth is finally out.
Record goes on to explain how the North Vietnamese suffered conventional military setbacks in the 1968 Tet Offensive and the 1972 Easter Offensive because they made the mistake of duplicating a key strategic mistake of Gen. Robert E. Lee, the Christ of the Confederate Lost Cause religion.
He also makes the important point that slavery was key not only to the start of the American Civil War but also to its conduct and outcome:
... (T)he South had only two hopes for victory: to reduce the unfavorable material odds via foreign intervention or, failing that, to adopt an indirect strategy of guerrilla warfare, a strategy for which there was ample precedent in the Spanish guerrilla of 1808-1814 against the French occupation of Spain. Unfortunately, prospects for foreign help in the form of British and French diplomatic recognition (and subsequent access to British and French war materiel) were problematic from the beginning. By late summer of 1862, French Emperor Napoleon III favored recognition, but only if Britain would follow suit. In Britain, however, public opinion was divided: upper-class conservatives favored recognition, whereas the middle and working classes opposed it. The government itself also was divided: Lord Russell, the foreign secretary, wanted to recognize the Confederacy, whereas Lord Palmerston, the prime minister, was most reluctant because he believed recognition would lead to war with the United States. In the end, it all boiled down to whether the South could convincingly demonstrate that it could defend its declared independence. In this regard, Lee’s defeat at Antietam in September 1862 and Lincoln’s subsequent issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, which committed the Union to the abolition of slavery (a very popular cause in Britain), fatally weakened Confederate prospects for foreign intervention. As for the option of guerrilla warfare, it was beyond the imagination of the leading Confederate generals, who saw themselves as soldiers in the European tradition of regular combat, and who were in any event hardly disposed to embracing a strategy whose very example could inspire slave insurrections — the nightmare of the White South. (my emphasis)
Record's argument could be superficially used to argue that the key to defeating insuregencies is to cut off their external support. Thus, one could argue that without external assitance of some sort (Iran? Syria?), the Iraqi insurgents could be easily suppressed.
But Record also notes that the importance of external assistance is not a hard-and-fast rule:
Only against the most enfeebled government (e.g., the French regime of Louis XVI in 1789, the Czarist government in 1917, the Batista regime in Cuba in 1959) is an unassisted rebellion likely to triumph. In such cases the government, not the insurgents, is the weaker side.
A realistic understanding of particular situations is always required. In the case of Iraq - which he does not address directly - the official government also acts to a large extent as a partisan force of the Shi'a against the Sunnis especially, and also against the Kurds.
