reach the main strength of the other to compel a military decision. On the one hand, the
irregular army cannot risk itself concentrated in open battle against its regular foe. On
the other, the regular army cannot locate insurgent forces in large numbers so that they
can be pinned down and destroyed. In other words, neither side has any realistic prospect
of achieving an approximation to victory while it fails to score heavily in the true
strategic currency of this kind of warfare. That currency, to repeat, is the will of the
civilian population, the true battle space in irregular warfare. Of course, there have been
circumstances wherein a long war is waged by both irregular and regular methods, as in
Vietnam from the early 1960s until 1975. In the latter year, South Vietnam was defeated
militarily by the regular North Vietnamese Army, so the will of South Vietnamese
civilians in the spring of 1975 was irrelevant.
A century ago, Colonel Charles E. Callwell of the British Army wrote in his classic
manual on irregular warfare, Small Wars, that the fundamental military problem for the
regular side was to find ways to bring the irregular enemy to battle (Callwell, 1990: ch.3).
An obvious answer is to threaten something that the irregulars would be compelled
to mass and stand to defend: their homes, families and animals are all possibilities. But
if the irregulars of the period do not have fixed abodes, with families, granaries and the
like, the regulars face a problem. So how can insurgents be compelled to fight in such a
manner that they can be defeated in open battle? In principle, it is necessary to argue
that today the contexts of irregular warfare are radically different from those dominated
by the apolitical assumptions that underlay Callwell’s magnificent treatise on colonial
warfare. As Ian Beckett has pointed out, the politicization of guerrilla warfare and
insurgency was largely a phenomenon of the post-1914–18 world (Beckett, 2001b: viii).
Irregular warfare could no longer be treated as a challenge to military and diplomatic
techniques. Callwell was interested in deterring, and if need be defeating, or at least
punishing, tribal-based violence. The need to win ‘hearts and minds’ was not a com-
mandment in his playbook. However, the colonel did emphasize the need to study the
irregular enemy carefully (Callwell, 1990: 33).
Because of the changes in the character of irregular warfare, especially its routine
acquisition of revolutionary political purpose, strategy for its suppression or containment
has had to alter. Contrary to the argument Callwell advanced, the difficulty of bringing
the irregular enemy to battle is no longer the primary challenge. Rather, the central
problem today is the protection of the civilian population. They are the battleground. If
a regular force achieves some success hunting guerrilla units in remote parts of a country
but neglects to protect the bulk of the civilian population, it will fail in the war. Irregular
warfare today is about the will of the people, not about dead guerrillas and captured
weapons. Those corpses and weapons are likely to be easy to replace.
For the irregular combatant, the strategic challenge is how to behave, or trap the enemy
into misbehaving, so as to shift the net balance of advantage in its favour. That challenge
can only be met politically. While all warfare is an expression of politics, none is more
pervasively so than irregular conflict. The irregular side, most probably employing a
mixture of guerrilla tactics and terrorism, will seek favourable political effect from
several courses of action. There are three especially productive tactics for irregulars to
adopt. First, they can inflict painful and humiliating isolated military defeats on the
regulars. This undermines the government’s prestige and diminishes public confidence
in the ability of the army and other security forces to protect them. Also, perhaps most
254 War, peace and international relations