by Max Boot
By 2008 the war in Iraq was winding down, and I began to turn my attention to Afghanistan, traveling there regularly to assess the situation under a succession of American commanders. I was, for example, part of a small “directed telescope” team of advisors that General Petraeus convened in Kabul in the summer of 2010 when he first took command. I have also traveled to see other irregular conflicts for myself. I have been to Israel (I met with Yasser Arafat in 1998 and was present for both the war against Hezbollah in 2006 and the war against Hamas in 2009, and I returned again in 2011 to spend a week interviewing Israeli officers); to Lebanon (in 2009 I visited Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, where Hezbollah was born); to the Philippines (in 2009 and 2011 I traveled with U.S. Special Operations Forces assisting the Philippine armed forces in the fight against Islamist rebels); and to Colombia (in 2008 I went to see how the fight against FARC was progressing).
I am fully cognizant of how coddled I was as a visitor, and I always left in awe of the dedication and professionalism of the soldiers I met who had to endure hardship and danger unimaginable to most civilians. Nonetheless I believe there is real value in the forays I have made “down range.” By leaving my book-lined office in New York, I have been better able to understand what insurgency and counterinsurgency look like, smell like, feel like—not just in retrospect (the historian’s usual vantage point) but while fighting is still going on and the outcome remains uncertain.
I have benefited immensely from these trips. Yet the more I learned, the more I realized how much I still did not know. Bumper-sticker certitudes are easy to propound from thousands of miles away. The closer I got, the more questions I had. In 2006 I began an extended search for answers by starting to research the history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism. The result is Invisible Armies.
BOOK I
BARBARIANS AT THE GATE
The Origins of Guerrilla Warfare
1.
AMBUSH AT BETH-HORON
Romans vs. Jews, AD 66
THE RETREAT BEGAN in November. The year was AD 66.1 A Roman army more than thirty thousand strong had marched south from Syria into the province of Judaea to suppress an incipient uprising. The soldiers slaughtered Jews and burned towns as they advanced. Finally the legionnaires arrived at Jerusalem. From their camp on Mount Scopus, the imperial authorities sent emissaries to tell the rebels that they would be forgiven if they would throw away their arms and surrender. The Jews delivered their answer by killing one emissary and wounding the other. The legions then mounted five days of attacks on the capital. They captured the suburbs and were about to assault the inner city when, for reasons that remain mysterious, their commander, Cestius Gallus, the governor of Syria, decided to call off the offensive.
The Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who was himself a rebel before being captured and is the primary source for these events, was convinced that had Cestius “but continued the siege a little longer [he] certainly would have taken the city.” But perhaps in the heat of battle Cestius was not sure of success and was worried about being cut off from his supply lines with winter approaching. Or perhaps he thought that he had already made his point and that the Jewish rebels, having gotten a taste of Roman fury, would now come to their senses. If so, he was mistaken. Fatally mistaken. Far from being cowed, the Jews were emboldened by “this unexpected retreat” and fell with a vengeance upon the retreating ranks.
With its superior training, discipline, and cohesion, the Roman army was the most formidable military force in the ancient world—but only if it met its enemies in open battle. Roman infantrymen advanced into battle silently and slowly in a checkerboard formation, their polished armor and helmets gleaming in the sun. When they got to within less than thirty yards of the enemy, they would toss their pilum, a seven-foot javelin. Then the legionnaires would let out a terrifying scream and charge the enemy lines, already thrown off balance by the heavy javelins, to punch their foes in the face with their scutum, a rectangular shield weighing approximately sixteen pounds, and to stab them in the belly with their gladius, a short double-edged sword that gave its name to gladiators. This initial wave of legionnaires would be supported in the rear by two reserve lines of infantry and on the flanks by cavalry and foreign auxiliaries armed with missile weapons such as bows and slings. Also available would be specialists in such fields as mechanical artillery, fortifications, road building, surveying, bridging, and logistics. Roman soldiers were sworn to follow their eagle standards to the gates of Hades if necessary, and if they failed they knew they could be subject to “decimation” by their own officers: every tenth man in a unit that disgraced itself could be flogged to death. There was no more formidable a military force in the ancient world.2
But all of this military might could be negated if the legions were caught in treacherous terrain and harassed by skillful, determined guerrillas. That is precisely what happened to Cestius Gallus’s army as it marched along narrow, winding mountain paths from Jerusalem heading for the Roman-held cities of the Mediterranean coast. The legionnaires and their local allies were beset by lightly armed Jewish fighters who would fire their slingshots or javelins from above and dash down to pick off stragglers with swords and knives. With their heavy armor and equipment, weighing up to a hundred pounds per man, the legionnaires were too slow to catch these nimble harassers. Among those killed early on was the commander of the Sixth Legion, a unit roughly five thousand strong, equivalent to a modern U.S. Army brigade. Much of the baggage train had to be abandoned and the pack animals killed.
Three days after setting out, the Romans had to march through a narrow pass next to the village of Beth-horon, adjacent to the modern Israeli town of Beit Horon in the West Bank. Already Beth-horon had been the site of a notable victory by Jewish guerrillas against an occupying force—it had been where the Maccabees had defeated the Greco-Syrian Seleucid army in 166 BC, exactly two hundred years before. Now history was about to repeat itself. The Jewish rebels had gathered here, noted Josephus, “and covered the Roman army with their darts.” There was no escape for the beleaguered, exhausted soldiery. Above them on the hillsides their enemies were as thick as olive groves. Below were steep precipices down which the cavalrymen on their frightened horses “frequently fell.” “[T[here was neither place for their flight,” Josephus wrote, “nor any contrivance . . . for their defense.” All they could do was cower under their shields and pray to their deities. Josephus believed that the Jews would have “taken Cestius’s entire army prisoners, had not the night come on.”
Under cover of darkness, Cestius managed to escape with the remainder of his command. He left behind four hundred of his “most courageous” men with orders to fly their colors and pretend that the whole of the army was still at Beth-horon. When morning came, the Jews discovered the ruse and immediately killed the four hundred soldiers before setting off in pursuit of Cestius. Even though they did not catch up with the retreating legions, Cestius had suffered a humiliating defeat. More than 5,700 of his soldiers had perished, and he had been forced to leave behind not only his baggage and his siege engines but also—even more galling to a legionnaire—an eagle standard.3
2.
CLASSICAL CONFLICTS
The Peloponnesian War, Alexander the Great in
Central Asia, the Maccabees, and the
Bar Kokhba Revolt, 426 BC–AD 132
THE ROMAN LEGIONS returned four years later, in AD 70, under the emperor’s son and future emperor, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, to conquer Jerusalem. By the time they were done, the Jewish Temple lay in ruins and, wrote Josephus, no doubt with some poetic license, the streets were piled so high with corpses that “the ground did nowhere appear visible” and “the whole city [did] run with blood.” Captured rebels were crucified or sold into slavery.4
Although unsuccessful, the Jewish Revolt showed the vulnerability of even ancient empires to irregular tactics. The Jews were among the most successful practitioners of guerrilla warfare in the classical world, but they
were far from alone. The surviving literature of this period amply attests to the power of guerrillas, even if the word itself would not be coined for millennia to come. A few famous examples make the point, starting with the most influential account of war and politics ever written.
Most of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War recounts a conventional conflict between Athens and Sparta, but there were also many clashes of irregulars. During a war lasting almost three decades, there were only fifty-five major battles, whereas just in the first few years the Athenians alone staged hundreds of low-level attacks on various locations. “This was raiding and killing,” writes the historian Victor Davis Hanson, “not formal war as previously defined by the Greeks.”5 The less-than-heroic side of this iconic conflict was best captured in Thucydides’s description of a civil war on the island of Corfu in 427 BC pitting pro-Spartan “oligarchs” against pro-Athenian “democrats”: “There was death in every shape and form. And, as usually happens in such situations, people went to every extreme and beyond it. There were fathers who killed their sons; men were dragged from the temples or butchered on the very altars; some were actually walled up in the temples of Dionysus and died there.”6
This was far from the lone instance of unconventional warfare in the Peloponnesian War. Consider, for example, Thucydides’s account of how in 426 BC the “fast moving and light armed” natives of the Aetolian hills in northwestern Greece decimated a ponderous force of armored hoplites from Athens. The Athenian commander, Demosthenes, had been convinced that “the Aetolians were an easy conquest.” Like other generals from city-states located on a plain, he preferred whenever possible to seek victory by sending densely packed phalanxes of infantry, as many as fifty men deep, each of them equipped with a bronze helmet and heavy armor, crashing into an enemy similarly equipped and arrayed. But the Aetolians’ “asymmetric” tactics made that impossible. They would fall back “whenever the Athenian army advanced” and advance again “as soon as it retired.” Only allied archers saved the Athenians from disaster initially, but as soon as their arrows ran out, the rout was on. The Athenians tried to flee, but, in a scene reminiscent of the later slaughter at Beth-horon, “a great many were overtaken” by the Aetolians “and fell beneath their javelins.” Others plunged “into pathless gullies and places that they were unacquainted with” and “thus perished.” The remainder fled into a forest, which the Aetolians set on fire. One can only imagine the agony of these hoplites being roasted alive in their cumbersome armor or else being asphyxiated as they tried desperately with fumbling hands to strip off their breastplates and helmets. “The Athenian army,” Thucydides concluded, “fell victims to death in every form, and suffered all the vicissitudes of flight.”7
The Athenians might have taken some comfort at their misfortune if they could have known that the greatest Greek conqueror of them all—Alexander the Great—would experience similar frustrations at the hands of supposedly inferior foes. Arrian’s The Campaigns of Alexander, Plutarch’s The Life of Alexander the Great, and Quintus Curtius Rufus’s The History of Alexander, among other sources, recount the difficulties that the Macedonian king experienced in Bactria, Sogdiana, and Scythia—modern-day Afghanistan and Central Asia. Alexander had already defeated the mighty Persian Empire, but it took him another two years (329–327 BC) to subdue the fierce tribes of this frontier region. Entire Macedonian detachments were lost in ambushes, and Alexander himself was wounded twice. In one battle his leg was shattered by an arrow; in another he was struck in the neck and head by a stone, causing diminished eyesight and nearly blindness. The harsh terrain, ranging from the towering peaks of the Hindu Kush to the arid deserts of Central Asia, added to the Macedonians’ difficulties. Plutarch later compared fighting this decentralized uprising led by numerous petty warlords to “cutting off the heads of the Hydra, which always grow back twice as thick.” To supplement his military countermeasures, which included sending his soldiers to scale snowy, rock-bound peaks where the rebels were ensconced, Alexander had to undertake diplomatic outreach, his most successful initiative being his agreement to marry Roxane, the beautiful daughter of a rebellious baron named Oxyartes. By the time Alexander finally moved on to India, he had been thoroughly drained by his exertions and did not have long to live.8
After Alexander’s death, his empire was carved up among various successor states. The greatest was the Seleucid kingdom, which came to control much of the Middle East. One of its kings, Antiochus IV, overreached himself, however, when he erected a statue of Zeus in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, ordered Jews to sacrifice pigs, and generally tried to ban at spear point the practice of the Jews’ own religion. Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities and the Bible’s two Books of Maccabees tell the story of the resulting revolt launched in 167 BC by the priestly Hasmonean clan to reclaim independence for Judaea. Under the leadership first of Judas Maccabeus (“Judas the Hammer”) and then, after he was killed, of his brothers, the Jewish rebels used ambush and surprise to wear down and defeat the more powerful occupation army with its intimidating armored elephants. By 142 BC, after more than two decades of warfare, they had driven the Seleucids out and established their own dynasty in one of antiquity’s most successful insurgencies.9
The Maccabees had less than a century of independence before their state fell under the sway of an empire far mightier than the Seleucids’—and one that, as we have already seen, had far greater success in crushing another Jewish revolt. Yet even the devastating Roman response to the uprising of AD 66–70 was not sufficient to extinguish the Jewish desire for independence. As recounted by Cassius Dio in his Roman History, the Jews rebelled twice more against Roman authority. A revolt among Diaspora Jews living in the Middle East occurred in AD 115 and a revolt among Jews in the Holy Land in AD 132. The latter uprising was led by a self-proclaimed messiah known as Simon bar Kokhba (“Son of the Star”), whose followers scurried out of caves in the Judean desert to harass the Roman garrison. Both uprisings were ultimately crushed, but their suppression required several years in each case and the dispatch of many thousands of Roman troops. After the Bar Kokhba revolt, Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina—hence the origin of “Palestine.”10
3.
UNCIVILIZED WARFARE
Tribal Wars of Mass Destruction
IF WE ARE to understand the type of war waged by modern guerrillas and terrorists, it is highly illuminating to immerse ourselves in the past. In particular it is essential to grasp the basics of guerrilla warfare in the ancient and medieval worlds, a time when such tactics were adopted by groups ranging from the Jews of the Holy Land to the nomads of Inner Asia and the clansmen of the Scottish Highlands. All of the great empires of antiquity, whether in the West or the East, had to devote considerable resources to combating this scourge. And many ultimately failed. Ancient guerrillas may have been primitive by modern lights—they lacked weapons such as the AK-47 capable of inflicting mass slaughter, they did not answer to a Politburo, they did not solicit funds from sympathizers abroad, and seldom did they issue bombastic communiqués to justify their existence—but nevertheless they could be exceedingly effective. As we shall see, they brought down the empires of Mesopotamia and Rome, and they overran significant parts of the Chinese Empire. No polity in the world was safe from the predations of terrifying and ruthless raiders, bound together not by political or religious ideology, like many modern-day insurgents, but simply by ties of tribe and kinship. Revolts against imperial authority were also common in conquered lands. Ancient sovereigns, even in undemocratic polities, had to learn to temper the harshness of their response by delivering benefits to those they governed to forestall future revolts. Thus was born what is today known as counterinsurgency.
Classical history was well known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet these invaluable lessons in the power and ubiquity of low-intensity conflict had been all but forgotten—or, if remembered, discarded as relics of a primitive age with little application to the modern world. Writ
ers as distinguished as Clausewitz and Jomini imagined that guerrilla warfare was more novel than it actually was; they were shocked and dismayed when they encountered it. Even today there is a tendency to think that there is something new about guerrilla tactics—that they are a departure from the norm, which is assumed to be state-on-state conflict.
Nothing could be further from the truth. While there are many novel aspects of low-intensity warfare as it has developed since antiquity, the essential concept itself was already well established by the time that David, one of the first guerrillas whose name we know, became king of Israel around 1000 BC. (David’s credentials as a guerrilla were established not in his legendary combat with the Philistine champion Goliath but rather in subsequent years after he had been forced to flee the jealous wrath of his own king, Saul, and took to leading an outlaw band in raids on Amalekite and Philistine settlements in the Judaean wilderness.)11
Guerrilla warfare is as old as mankind. Conventional warfare is, by contrast, a relatively recent invention. It was made possible by the development of the first agricultural societies after untold millennia in which the hunter-gatherer reigned supreme. Farming communities for the first time produced enough surplus wealth and population to allow for the creation of specially designed fortifications and weapons as well as the hiring of specialists to operate them. That process began after 10,000 BC in the Middle East and a few thousand years later in the Americas, Europe, and East Asia. The first genuine armies—commanded by a strict hierarchy, composed of trained soldiers, disciplined with threats of punishment, divided into different specialties (spearmen, bowmen, charioteers, engineers), deployed in formations, supported by a logistics service—arose after 3100 BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia.12 The first full-scale battle between two such armies of which we have a detailed account occurred in 1468 BC near Megiddo, a town eighteen miles southeast of the modern Israeli city of Haifa. It pitted perhaps five thousand soldiers from Egypt against two thousand soldiers from a coalition of local city-states.13
