FOREWORD TO THE REVISED EDITION
Twelve years is a long time. When this book came out in the spring of 2002, 9/11 had just happened. A few months thereafter the Taliban had been toppled and a new government installed in Kabul, led by a charismatic, well-dressed, English-speaking political unknown named Hamid Karzai. Iraq was still ruled by Saddam Hussein, Egypt by Hosni Mubarak, Libya by Muammar Gadhafi. Nouri al-Maliki was just one of many agitators plotting against the Iraqi regime from exile—in his case in Syria, then a despotic but peaceful state. Osama bin Laden was still alive. So was Kim Jung Il. And Pope John Paul II. And Benazir Bhutto. And Michael Jackson. The iPhone and iPad had not yet been invented. “Smartphones” were a rarity. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube had not yet been launched. Lehman Brothers was still a financial powerhouse. Barack Obama was still an obscure state senator in Illinois. Only one Harry Potter film had been released and Lady Gaga was still known as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.
Much has changed in the succeeding 12 years, but one thing that has not changed is the salience and centrality of small wars in American foreign policy. Over the past decade the U.S. fought two of the biggest such conflicts in its history—in Afghanistan and Iraq—along with smaller conflicts in such places as Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen. In a sign of how much technology has changed, the latter two conflicts have been fought primarily with armed drones such as the Predator—a technology just starting to be used in 2002. Yet while the tools of warfare have changed, the challenges of small wars—fought against guerrillas and terrorists, not conventional military forces—have remained constant. American soldiers struggling against al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban could profitably study the past to learn how their ancestors dealt with Haitian cacos, Philippine insurrectos, Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and other irregular foes.
Indeed quite a few soldiers, sailors, aviators, and marines have done so using, I am humbled to say, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power as their historical guide. During the 2000s, when I made regular visits to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan as an informal adviser to American commanders, I would often meet some grizzled gunnery sergeant or midcareer major who would ask me “Are you that Max Boot?” before pulling out a dog-eared paperback copy of this book from a uniform pocket. Some have told me they read Savage Wars at the Basic School, command and staff college, or some other educational institution; others on some dusty and forlorn forward operating base while deployed. Admittedly many read it involuntarily—it has been placed on numerous military reading lists including those issued by the marine commandant and the chief of naval operations. But I have been gratified that so many of those uniformed readers found Savage Wars to be both entertaining and educational. For the armed forces, after all, the study of military history is no theoretical pursuit—it can be the difference between success and failure, life and death.
One of the most meaningful accolades this book has received comes from Marine Colonel Julian Dale Alford, a pioneer in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. I met Dale in 2012, when he arrived as a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He immediately told me what a big impact Savage Wars had had on him and his campaign plan for Al-Qaim, a dusty town in Anbar Province where his battalion was dispatched in 2005. I asked him to write down what he had told me. This is what he e-mailed to me:
In April 2004, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines deployed to Afghanistan; over the next seven months we distributed the battalion across eastern Afghanistan. . . . Throughout the course of the deployment, our concept of operations evolved into what I term “linking-up for operations” with one battalion each of the Afghan Army and Afghan Militia Force. What we did not do was to live among the people, or live with our Afghan partners. . . . We remained focused on fighting the enemy, rather than winning the support of the local population or building up Afghan Security Forces.
When I returned from Afghanistan in December 2004, my battalion was immediately designated to redeploy to Iraq in August 2005. I knew we were facing a COIN [counterinsurgency] situation, even if we were not yet calling it that. I began to read everything I could find on COIN, because I knew what we had done in Afghanistan was not enough to succeed in a COIN operation. The first book I read in the winter of 2005 was Max Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace. The book sparked memories of my earlier studies of COIN principles as a lieutenant and captain. I also re-read The Marine Corps Small Wars Manual, First to Fight by Victor Krulak, and The Village by Bing West, among others. The third part of The Savage Wars of Peace, “Superpower”—and in particular the chapters “Lessons Learned” and “Lessons Unlearned”—had a significant impact on how I thought about COIN and small wars, how I trained the battalion before we deployed to Iraq, and, most importantly, how we employed the battalion throughout the battle space in Al-Qaim. This book cemented in my mind that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces were the center of gravity, and that success hinged upon our living amongst and working with them.
By living among the people of Al-Qaim and living, fighting and dying alongside of our Iraqi Army counterparts, we convinced the tribes of Al-Qaim to pick our side against Al-Qaida in Iraq in the winter of 2005–6, and that was the beginning of what we now know as “The Awakening.”
If you suspect Dale Alford of exaggerating or twisting the facts because of his subsequent friendship with me—well, then you don’t know Dale Alford. He is a no-nonsense, straight-shooting marine, instantly identifiable as such even in civilian clothes from his “high and tight” haircut, muscular build, and constant stream of profane and incisive observations. He does not suffer fools gladly and does not extend praise that is unearned—certainly not to a civilian egghead. The fact that he, and others on the front line, found value in this work means a good deal to me—more, in fact, than the accolades it garnered in publications such as the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books.
I would be fibbing, however, if I expressed complete indifference to the strong sales and enthusiastic reviews that Savage Wars received upon its release. That positive reception quite literally changed my life, for it led Leslie Gelb, then president of the Council on Foreign Relations, to hire me away from the Wall Street Journal, where I worked as the op-ed editor while I wrote this book on nights and weekends. Having put daily journalism behind me to become in the fall of 2002 a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council, I have had the opportunity to write and research full time thanks to the support of Les’s successor as Council president, Richard Haass, and of two directors of studies—James Lindsay and Gary Samore. During my time at the Council, I have produced two more books—War Made New: Technology, Warfare and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (2006) and Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (2013). Both have been well received by book buyers and book reviewers alike; Invisible Armies even made the New York Times best-seller list. But neither has achieved the lasting impact of Savage Wars (at least not yet), which has had the good fortune of being referred to as a “classic.”
Yet while Savage Wars has stood the test of time—it is still in print and continues to sell—it is by now in need of an update to take account of events since its publication, principally the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For this new edition I have added a chapter on those conflicts (“In the Shadow of 9/11: The Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq”) along with this foreword, an afterword, and an additional bibliography. The rest of the book is exactly as it appeared in hardcover in 2002.
If you did not read it then (or even if you did), I hope you will read it now, because understanding the history of small wars will remain of considerable importance long after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have receded into the mists of time. There are few certainties in history but one of them is that, notwithstanding the understandable war weariness of the American public, the U.S. will continue to be involved in these twilight struggles that are very different from conventional conflicts such as World War II or the Gulf War. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just turn the page and look at the historical record.
Max Boot
New York City
August 2013
PREFACE
The first airliner slammed into the World Trade Center at precisely 8:46 A.M., the second 15 minutes later. I was on my way to work, to an office opposite the Twin Towers, when it happened. I emerged from the bowels of the subway tunnel a few blocks from ground zero and was confronted by a scene of devastation that could have come straight from the London Blitz six decades before: refugees streaming away from the disaster, sirens blaring, police and emergency workers rushing around, and, enveloping all in a dark haze, clouds of ash and soot and smoke. The first of the World Trade Center towers had already collapsed. Before long I would watch the second one falling as easily as a Lego toy under a child’s fist. The bile rising in my throat, saddened, disgusted, dazed, I walked away from this scene of horror, looking back only occasionally, in wonderment, at a Manhattan skyline that in one terrifying moment had been transformed forever.
In the hours and days that followed many compared the events of September 11, 2001, to those of December 7, 1941—another day of infamy. Just as Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, so George W. Bush declared war following the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But what kind of war would it be? It soon became clear that the “war on terrorism” would bear little resemblance to World War II. After December 7, 1941, America mobilized as never before. Millions of men traded civilian clothes for military uniforms, millions of women left home to take jobs left vacant, whole factories were retooled from making cars and tractors to manufacturing tanks and artillery shells. After four years of supreme exertion, America’s sacrifices were rewarded with the unconditional surrender of its foes—Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy.
No such triumph would be likely over the forces of terrorism—any more than total victory could be declared in the war on crime, or the war on drugs, or the war on poverty. Just as this was not a conflict that would result in total victory, so it would not call for the total mobilization of the home front. No draft was instituted after the attack, nor was industry put on alert. This war would be fought by a relatively small number of professional soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines. They would be pitted against the men of the shadows, holy warriors who wore no uniform, who shirked open battle, who took refuge among civilians and emerged to strike when least expected at the infidel’s most vulnerable outposts. Traditional weapons systems, designed to pulverize enemy armies, would have a role to play in this conflict, but often only a marginal one. The greatest challenge in fighting terrorism was not to kill the enemy; it was to identify the enemy. Spies, police officers, covert operators, even diplomats would be on the front lines; and civilians would suffer more heavily than the uniformed military.
This “long twilight struggle,” to borrow John F. Kennedy’s phrase, must seem utterly alien to those schooled in the history of America’s big wars—which is to say virtually anyone interested in American military history. The big wars, especially the Civil War and World War II, are celebrated in countless books, movies, and documentaries. As it happens, these were America’s only experiences with total war in which the nation staked all of its blood and treasure to achieve the relatively quick and unconditional surrender of the enemy. Yet somehow many of us have come to think of Gettysburg and D-Day—conventional, set-piece engagements—as the norm, not the aberration. Some historians even speak of an “American way of war”: war that annihilates the enemy; war that relies on advanced technology and massive firepower to minimize casualties among U.S. forces; war that calls on legions of citizen soldiers; war that results in total victory.
But this is only one way of American war. There is another, less celebrated tradition in U.S. military history—a tradition of fighting small wars. Between 1800 and 1934, U.S. Marines staged 180 landings abroad. The army and navy added a few small-scale engagements of their own. Some of these excursions resulted in heavy casualties; others involved almost no fighting. Some were concluded in a day or two; others dragged on for decades. Some were successful, others not. But most of these campaigns were fought by a relatively small number of professional soldiers pursuing limited objectives with limited means. These are the nonwars that Kipling called “the savage wars of peace” and that a modern author, Bob Shacochis, has evocatively described as “a foggy, swamp-bottomed no-man’s land . . . an empty space in an army’s traditional reality, where there are no friends and no enemies, no front or rear, no victories and, likewise, no defeat, and no true endings.”
When I started researching this book, most of these actions were terra incognita to me. And yet there was something strangely familiar about these long-ago events. American troops hunting a warlord? Could be the pursuit of Pancho Villa in 1916—or Muhammed Farah Aidid in 1993 or Osama bin Laden in 2001. The U.S. Navy protecting merchant shipping in the Middle East? Could be the war against the Barbary pirates in 1801–1805—or the “tanker war” against Iran in the Persian Gulf in 1987–1988. U.S. Marines invading a Caribbean island? Could be Haiti in 1915—or 1994; the Dominican Republic in 1916—or 1965; or perhaps Grenada in 1983.
Intrigued by these parallels, I was drawn deeper into this subject when I stumbled across fascinating stories—tales of blunders and bravery, low cunning and high strategy, nobility and savagery—involving forgotten heroes of American history. Men such as David Porter, a leading captain of the early navy who tried to adopt into the “great American family” a cannibal kingdom in the South Pacific and was later court-martialed for infringing Spanish sovereignty while pursuing pirates. “Fighting Fred” Funston, an army officer who helped end the Philippine War by leading a daring commando raid to capture the leader of the insurrectos. And Smedley Butler, American’s foremost colonial soldier in the early years of the twentieth century, who, on retiring from the Marine Corps, turned into a leading anti-imperialist and pacifist.
What lessons might these small wars of the past teach us about small wars in the future? In the late 1990s—the decade of Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo—I was intrigued by these recurring conflicts and hoped to read a book to answer that question. Not finding one, I decided to write it myself. So here it is: a concise history of America’s small wars abroad that tries to relate the past to the problems confronting the United States today.
This book focuses on what was known around the turn of the twentieth century as “small wars.” These days social scientists and soldiers usually call them either “low intensity conflicts” or—a related category—“military operations other than war.” Whatever you call them, most still fit the classic definition offered by a British officer at the end of the nineteenth century: “campaigns undertaken to suppress rebellions and guerrilla warfare in all parts of the world where organized armies are struggling against opponents who will not meet them in the open field.” There are at least four distinct types of small wars that will be covered here: punitive (to punish attacks on American citizens or property), protective (to safeguard American citizens or property), pacification (to occupy foreign territory), and profiteering (to grab trade or territorial concessions). Some operations serve more than one purpose. The term “small war”—a literal translation of the Spanish word guerrilla—refers to the tactics employed, not the scale of combat. Even Vietnam was in many respects a small war, which explains why it is treated at length in this book.
These conflicts might as well be called “imperial wars”—a term that, American sensitivities notwithstanding, seems apt to describe many U.S. adventures abroad. Indeed, having set out to write a purely military history, I found myself of necessity also chronicling the political course of American empire. Along the way, I offer a number of interpretations that diverge from the conventional wisdom, especially about the “Banana Wars” in Central America and the Caribbean, which too often have been caricatured as interventions undertaken to install dictators friendly to the interests of big business.
Small war is necessarily an elastic, inexact term. Perhaps the best way to define these conflicts is to say what they are not: They are not America’s major conventional conflicts, the War of Independence, War of 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, or the Gulf War. Nor, at the other end of the spectrum, is this book concerned with pure shows of force, such as Theodore Roosevelt’s dispatch of the fleet to Morocco in 1904 after a wealthy American expatriate was kidnapped by a bandit chief called Raisuli. (“This government wants either Perdicaris alive, or Raisuli dead!”) Generally, for an action to qualify as a small war, some shooting is required.
For purposes of brevity and focus, I have made no attempt to mention, let alone describe, every American small war. There is nothing here on small wars in colonial America; this book starts after the birth of the federal government in 1789. Nothing on the quasi-war with France (1798–1800), a series of purely naval battles against a Great Power; this book focuses on confrontations between American forces and those of less-developed countries. Nothing on the many wars against Native Americans, the primary occupation of the U.S. Army until 1890; this book focuses strictly on American small wars abroad.
The bulk of this book consists of a narrative that tries to tell the history of America’s small wars in all their rich, fascinating, sometimes gory detail. The final two chapters are more analytical, trying to tease out the lessons of small wars past for small wars present and future.
The conflicts discussed in this book can be divided into three distinct periods of U.S. history:
(1) Commercial power (late 1700s to the 1890s). The United States grew rapidly economically during this period but not militarily, because the country lacked a central government strong enough to mobilize much military power except in extraordinary circumstances such as the Civil War. Yet even during periods of “peace,” American sailors and marines were often killing and being killed far from home. No matter how small the navy, its hot-blooded captains always stood ready to avenge even the slightest insult, real or perceived, against American people and property. And thanks to the enterprise of Yankee merchants, who sent their speedy clipper ships and whaling ships all over the globe, there was never a shortage of “incidents” to send cannonballs flying. The longest and most important small war to result was waged against the Barbary States of North Africa, the subject of Chapter 1. Chapters 2–3 chronicle many minor landings abroad throughout the nineteenth century in locales ranging from Sumatra to Samoa, each typically lasting only a few days. These forays—which I describe, borrowing a bit of slang from British India, as “butcher and bolt”—served much the same function as World Trade Organization negotiations do today: to open up more of the world to Western commerce. For most of the nineteenth century, American merchants benefited from the protection of the Royal Navy. But if Britain was the world’s policeman, the United States was a junior constable, often working hand in glove with the British to defend freedom of the seas and open markets in China, Japan, and elsewhere. The U.S. Navy even joined from time to time in the Royal Navy’s most idealistic mission, to stamp out the slave trade.
(2) Great power (1898–1941). The United States heralded its arrival as a force to reckon with by humiliating an old, decrepit power, Spain, and snatching some of its colonies in 1898. Thereafter interventions would become longer and more ambitious, none more so than the costly and controversial campaign (described in Chapter 5) to put down resistance from Filipinos who did not want to trade one colonial master for another. Wars of territorial conquest—mostly fought against the Indians—were common in U.S. history, but the Philippine War was an aberration, a war of annexation waged overseas. A better harbinger of the future was the campaign that resulted from the Boxer uprising in China in 1900. America joined in a multinational expedition to rescue the besieged legations in Peking (Chapter 4). While the European and Japanese participants were determined to carve out their own spheres of influence in China, the United States pointedly committed itself to maintaining free trade for all—the Open Door.
America was only one of many powers active in the Far East, but closer to home it established itself as a hegemon. Under Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. announced that, in order to forestall European intervention, it would police the Caribbean itself. Chapter 6 suggests that this policy was motivated by a variety of considerations: strategic (the security of the Panama Canal), economic (American-owned plantations, railroads, banks, and other businesses), and idealistic (“the white man’s burden”). Whatever his motives, Uncle Sam brought virtually every Central American and Caribbean nation under his sway. Most were not annexed outright (the exceptions being Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, and the Virgin Islands) but, like Cuba, turned into Yanqui protectorates. The United States preferred to exercise power through diplomatic and economic means—Dollar Diplomacy. But having made a commitment to dominate the Caribbean, it sometimes found itself drawn into small wars against its will. To take one example from Chapter 6, Teddy Roosevelt had no desire to intervene militarily in Cuba when a revolt flared in 1906, but the government forced his hand by resigning. Rather than risk a loss of prestige, he reluctantly undertook a three-year occupation.
This policy, inaugurated by Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, was expanded by Woodrow Wilson, who emphasized the moral (critics would say moralistic) dimension of U.S. foreign policy. His goal was “to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” In 1914 the United States briefly occupied Veracruz, Mexico’s principal port, in order to force from power a brutal dictator (Chapter 6). In 1915 and 1916, Wilson ordered the occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic in an attempt to create stability on the island of Hispaniola. America wound up running Haiti for 19 years, the Dominican Republic for eight years (Chapter 7). Along with the occupation of the Philippines, this provided the armed forces with their most extensive experience in running a foreign country, what today would be called nation building.
Wilson was drawn once again into Mexico because of its continuing turmoil. When the rebel chief Francisco “Pancho” Villa raided a New Mexico town in 1916, the president dispatched General John J. Pershing with more than 10,000 men south of the border to crush the Villistas (Chapter 8). A couple of years later the United States found itself drawn into another major revolution, the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. Woodrow Wilson committed 15,000 soldiers to Siberia and northern Russia in 1918 in response to entreaties from France and Britain (Chapter 9).
The Republican administrations of the 1920s tried to curtail American commitments overseas, but a brief pullout of marines from Nicaragua backfired. Another civil war broke out at once, and back came the marines. They would spend six years, 1927–1933, chasing the rebel leader Augusto Sandino around the jungles of Nicaragua (Chapter 10). In the early 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, the United States finally eschewed military intervention in the Caribbean and Central America as part of FDR’s Good Neighbor policy. Still, America in the ’30s was not completely isolationist. U.S. troops remained on peacekeeping duty in China, trying with some success to protect American missionaries and businesses from revolutionary unrest and, with considerably less success, to protect China from the creeping menace of imperial Japan (Chapter 11).
(3) Superpower (1941–present). The attack on Pearl Harbor signaled the end of the U.S. peacekeeping mission in China, and with it the end of an era of small wars. Most professional soldiers disdain such conflicts against irregular foes as unsporting and unpleasant, preferring to prepare for combat against other large, well-organized armies. The Marines alone embraced these missions as part of their raison d’être, and in the decade leading up to World War II they compiled the lessons of their hard-won experience in the Small Wars Manual (Chapter 12). This incisive handbook was all but forgotten, however, by the time America became embroiled in Vietnam. General William Westmoreland and the army high command chose to fight a conventional big-unit war—with tragic consequences. Chapter 13 reinterprets the Vietnam War through the prism of small wars, suggesting the United States might have had better luck had it tried to implement a pacification strategy of the sort that had worked well in the past.
Chapter 14 looks at how the U.S. armed services have struggled with the bitter legacy of Vietnam. Their dominant reaction was summed up in the Powell Doctrine, which holds that America should unsheath its sword only when its vital interests are threatened, and then only if it is prepared to use overwhelming force with total public support to achieve a fast victory and then go home. This mindset proved a poor fit with the actual missions the Pentagon was forced to undertake in the post–Cold War era. It was almost as if a great mathematician were called upon to fill out tax forms—and found himself flummoxed by this quotidian challenge. Chapter 15 looks at the lessons of past small wars and suggests how they might prove a better guide to the future than the big-war mindset embodied in the Powell Doctrine.
If there is one theme that emerges from this book it is that, though the reasons have changed over the years, the United States has always found itself being drawn into the “the savage wars of peace.” America’s strategic situation today presents more opportunities than ever before for such entanglements. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, America has stood head and shoulders (and also probably torso) above all other nations, possessor of the world’s richest economy and its most potent military. In many ways the chaotic post–Cold War environment resembles that of the post-Napoleonic world, with the United States thrust willy-nilly into Britain’s old role as globocop. Unlike nineteenth-century Britain, twenty-first century America does not preside over a formal empire. Its “empire” consists not of far-flung territorial possessions but of a family of democratic, capitalist nations that eagerly seek shelter under Uncle Sam’s umbrella. The inner core of the American empire—North America, Western Europe, Northeast Asia—remains for the most part stable and prosperous, but violence and unrest lap at the periphery—in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans, and other regions teeming with failed states, criminal states, or simply a state of nature. This is where America has found itself getting involved in its recent small wars, and no doubt will again in the future.
Why wars? The United States has many other tools—diplomatic, economic, cultural—to shape the international environment to its liking, but when all else fails the use of force cannot be ruled out. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15.” Why small wars? To begin with, because big ones are unlikely. Knock on wood, there are few major powers willing or able to challenge the big kid on the block. North Korea, Iraq, and perhaps Iran are B-level threats; with the demise of the Soviet bloc, there are no remaining A-level threats, though one may emerge in the future (perhaps from a rising China or a resurgent Russia).
But that does not mean there are no threats. As America discovered on September 11, 2001, terrorists using primitive means can inflict terrifying casualties in what strategists call “asymmetric warfare.” In the 1990s America had the luxury of undertaking small wars to help shape the international environment in ways conducive to its ideals—Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and all the rest. Following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it would wage these conflicts for the more direct protection of its citizenry.
Whatever the specific causes of each war, we should not lose sight of a larger truth. Economists call it a yield curve: When cost is low, demand is high. America has long been more powerful than all but a handful of countries, so the cost of intervention in small states has always been low. Or so it appeared before virtually every conflict; it did not always work out that way. The perceived cost grew dramatically during the Cold War, when every use of American force risked provoking a clash of superpowers. But in the post–Cold War world, the price of exercising power appears low once again. If you want to see what lies in store for the armed forces in the future, you could do worse than to cast your gaze back to the past.