Militants and Militaries

 

1913: The People's Army training, organisation founded by East End Suffragettes to defend demonstrations and Union pickets.

 "War is the continuation of politics by other means." - Carl Von Clausewitz

 Disclaimer: I am not in any way advocating readers carry out any of the things being mentioned or discussed. I trust in that people know their own situations and what is the most appropriate actions for themselves to take, and wouldn't dream of lecturing from afar on important subjects such as defence. This is merely a discussion of a more philosophical nature, about the role of martial matters and institutions in governance, and the state, and how this can shed some light on the nature and function of social phenomena and relationship such as discipline and hierarchy to give just some examples.

There's a discussion thread about militias and militaries, I started writing a response, then realised it had ballooned in length and also only bore tangential relevance to the discussion and the questions being asked. So instead of posting a wall of text in there I thought it'd be more polite and more useful to expand my thoughts into this.

 [quote]This militia vs. military question was inspired by a comment from a Marxist-Leninist that I got on one of my youtube videos:
Quote:

    but do you actually think that militia forces could stand against modern state militaries? Anarchists' rejection of state power and proffesional armies is a severe military handicap [/quote]

This bit is what got me to start typing away. I've seen this type of argument a lot, but it doesn't make much sense to me. Professional state armies, which for clarity’s sake is essentially the modern national army used by most nation states that exist on the planet at this present time, are designed to fight other professional state armies. The biggest victim of the modern military force is other modern military forces. They're very bad at fighting anything else, this is why asymmetric warfare became an inescapable buzzword after the invasion of Iraq and fighting in Afghanistan continued long after the formal Taliban military had been crippled. This also why Special Forces are called Special, they're supposed to be better than the regular military at fighting in ways that aren't typical. The American Green Berets were founded to fight irregular forces in terrain that made typical field battles impossible. Interestingly, the Special Air Service and Special Boat Service (SAS and SBS) were formed to fight modern state militaries by taking advantage of these weaknesses, though it took awhile for the SAS to learn how to do this as its first operations during World War II ended very badly.

The early history of the SAS Regiment could be described perhaps as heroically incompetent. The Regiment's official birthday is given as 16 November, 1941, when sixty men were dropped behind enemy lines in North Africa with the mission of locating and destroying a Libyan airfield. Of these sixty just over twenty made it back to base – without having found their target, let alone destroying it. The first real action was even more disastrous. Then, in February 1941, thirty-six men of the 11th SAS were dropped in Northern Italy and within a short time all of them had been captured or had surrendered – some to unarmed peasants. David Stirling was himself captured in 1943 by a German dentist and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. The SAS Regiment did, however, fight bravely behind enemy lines working with the various Resistance networks and Special Operations Executive in Occupied Europe knowing full well that Hitler had personally ordered that no SAS soldier was to be taken alive.

Stuart Christie's the Golden Road to Samarkind

 Though eventually they got better at it, though the targets had shifted from fighting the Axis and towards combating national liberation movements. 

The Special Air Service Regiment had proved its worth behind enemy lines in the Second World War and its structure was ideally suited for the type of warfare that was to be the hallmark of all liberation struggles. It was a go-anywhere unit that specialised in counterinsurgency campaigns and was specially trained in psychological warfare to secure the popularity of the colonialist powers. The ‘born again’ SAS emerged in Malaya under the command of an extreme rightwing staff officer, J.M. ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert
 

 Ibid

Point is, state militaries aren't very good at fighting things that aren't their exact mirror and need additional support, but even then with the creation of special forces and allowing some years of practical experience to recalibrate it's still quite a chequered list of results. The Green Berets didn't win Vietnam for the Americans, the Malayan and Kenyan uprisings had to be contained by concentration camp systems, and political compromises with local elites, the ambush and assassination missions of the British special forces while damaging did not win the day.

Vietnam is also a very important case study in military matters that is often overlooked or misunderstood by mythology. The North Vietnamese Army, NVA was a thoroughly modern and well led and well-equipped military, it lost every battle it fought against the United States military, and the US military despite its string of victories over the NVA failed to best the Ho Chi Minh National Liberation Front's (NLF though more commonly known as the Viet Cong) irregular warfare. While the NLF also did not manage to smash American forces on the battlefield, they kept the conflict going and tied down and then wore down the American military. This attrition was a major factor in the breakdown of discipline of American forces that increasingly crippled their ability to fight, by the 1970s a significant portion of the American military in Vietnam and a growing number in bases elsewhere were mutinying, and some open revolts had occurred. 

The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having _refused_ combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.

Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.

Report on the state of the US military by Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr.

Most victories against non-traditional militaries (from rival replacement state irregular armies, to militia bands, to terrorist cells etc) happen either when the opposition is transitioning into a professional military (more on this below), or through logistical superiority, the state can afford to just use manpower or material in a lengthy war of attrition, and to be blunt if a movement can't sustain a terrorist cell, guerrilla army or militia column during a struggle there is zero chance they could've done that with traditional military which is far more wasteful of resources. Or just luck, this does happen in war, sometimes you get lucky and stumble upon a weak point.

You also can't really look at military organisation in isolation to the rest of the economic and social structure. If you want or need a professional military you need a state and economy to match, and once you have that you aren't really revolutionary any more. Discussion of the Spanish Civil War often revolves around the militarisation of the militias, but what's often overlooked is that this is a symptom of a much deeper conflict. From the beginning, the opposition to Franco was split irreconcilably between the Republic and the Collectives. The two can't coexist, so once the Communist Party of Spain and the Soviet Union chose to support the Republic over the Council of Aragon and the collectives, that showdown was inevitable.

It's not an accident that Democratic revolts were fought in the beginning with democratic (well more so than usual) forces and that once a centralising authority established itself these democratic tendencies were clipped and replaced. 

The New Model Army had its democratic agitators pushed out or locked up once Cromwell and the parliamentarians (mostly landowners and merchants, with a few Gentlemen and Lords) had secured control of the situation. The New Model Army then stopped looking very new and was used as a force for conquest and oppression. This is not an accident, had the New Model Army maintained its original composition and organisation the campaigns in Ireland could not have been fought, too many regiments were opposed to it and wanted to push even harder for further domestic reform.

A book I highly recommend on this subject of military organisation reflecting or rather driving social and economic relations to match it is Michael Howard's War in European History. It's a history of warfare in Europe, but instead of focussing on battles and generals its focus is on structural reforms and how European society had to adapt and change to support these new military institutions and forces. 

But to abstract war from the environment in which it is fought and study its techniques as one would those of a game is to ignore a dimension essential to the understanding, not simply of the wars themselves but of the societies which fought them.

Maoist military doctrine is essentially just a blueprint for state building, which is probably why of all the socialistic schools, it's been one of the more popular amongst the national liberation movement struggles. Its stages of people's war trace how you're supposed to take an irregular force made up of passionate volunteers and build it into a functioning professional military in anticipation of taking control of the state.

Stage One: The revolutionary forces must establish a defensible base area which allows the organisation to be streamlined and centralised.

Stage two: The organisation must spread to other areas with the aim of establishing a stalemate or equilibrium which will allow time to gather the resources needed to strengthen the people's army, and meanwhile start implementing policies that subvert and weaken the government in vulnerable areas.

Stage Three: capture and consolidation of the nation's key infrastructure and defeat of the official government's remaining forces, replacing the government with the new "revolutionary" one.

It's usually between stages two and three that Maoist movements fail to achieve their goals and either lose or recede back into stage one. The Shining Path of Peru claimed at their height in the early 1990s to be at the second stage and were close to moving onto stage three, when their leader Guzman was discovered and arrested and the entire movement collapsed into a handful of isolated bands hiding in the remote parts of the country before they too were captured or surrendered. 

Different Maoist groups and non Maoists like a handful of IRA leaders in the 1980s have given their own spins on the basic plan i.e. "adapting them to local conditions", but essentially the more you control, the more you act like a professional government and the more your armed forces resemble a professional military. The People's Liberation Army was officially founded in 1948 though officially it traces its history back into the 1920s claiming to be the successor to the Communist party's first armed wing. So far the strategy has had a very good record at building largish militant forces, but a very poor one in terms of conquest of power, the two victories being mainland China during the aftermath of World War II, which shouldn't invalidate their success and achievements, but it does raise the question of the validity of this strategy when groups adopt it when they aren't operating in a similar context. And Nepal, but the latter is controversial even amongst Maoists whether it counts as a successful example of People's War. 

The point I'm slowly stumbling towards here is there is no actual magic blueprint to success once social conflict becomes militarised. All we can say for certain is that the state is no magic solution, even in the cases where state organisation and its conventional military do succeed in the struggle for power, than we're left with just a change in managers, and not much more to show for all the death and misery caused.