Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asiaby the Industrial Revolution in the West.^5 The second element allowed
Western militaries to quickly adapt to local conditions of warfare that
made victory possible against non-Western states and peoples. The fall
of most non-Western states to Western arms by the early twentieth cen-
tury also encouraged adaptation to the Western military model among
those non-Western states that remained, including Siam, Japan, China
and a few others. This last handful of extra-Western states reshaped their
militaries along Western lines in the context of the increasing cost of
war. The effect of European expansion and Asian attempts at military
replication effectively bifurcated warfare into two generalized categories
each with the development of peculiar tactics, strategies, technology,
and vocabularies. The first included the kind of modern warfare that
would be waged in possible contests with Western and Westernized
military machines. The second consisted of what was characterized
as the backward (often referred to as “traditional”) warfare waged by
various popular insurgencies that broke out in the colonial world to
challenge Western rule.
The wave of national revolutions across the colonial world beginning
in the early post-war period sustained the existing bifurcation between
Western and non-Western warfare, although the Cold War era insurgent
would be increasingly better armed than their colonial-era counterparts.
As both the West and the Communist Bloc provided arms, advisors,
training, and ideologies to African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin
American combatants, warfare everywhere no longer appeared to be
solely dependent on the stage of social or technological development
at which a society was. Instead, the scale of war and the weaponry used
was determined by economy and environmental context, such as the
struggle between poor peasants versus well-funded state armies (often
superpower proxies) and, often, the politicization of either, for example
ideologically informed strategies such as the protracted warfare of Mao
- Ness & Stahl, “Western Imperialist Armies in Asia”. See the example of the effort
by the Vietnamese state to replicate a Western steam engine in the nineteenth
century by carving a solid boiler out of wood in Alexander Woodside, Vietnam
and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Nguyen and Ch’ing Civil Government
in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Harvard: Harvard East Asian Studies,
1988). Nevertheless, the Vietnamese effort here did such on the second attempt in
1840. See Nguyen The Anh, “Traditional Vietnam’s Incorporation of External and
Cultural and Technical Contributions: Ambivalence and Amibiguity”, Southeast
Asian Studies 40.4 (2003): 454, n. 12.