damaging of all, such defeats cause civilians to doubt that the government will prevail.
As a matter of prudence for personal survival, civilians are inclined to support the side
that they believe ultimately will win. As a result, the public will withdraw its support
from official COIN efforts.
Second, the irregular side will hurt civilians deliberately even though their allegiance
is strategically crucial. By doing this, the irregular offers undeniable proof of the inability
of the government to meet its primary obligation, the protection of its people. Also, to
kill and maim civilians teaches the plain lesson that the irregular is able to reach and hurt
those who oppose it.
Third and finally, the irregular will attempt to goad the regular enemy into tactics
that should prove self-defeating. Since the contest is about rival claims to legitimacy,
each side must strive to provoke the enemy into behaviour that contributes to its delegit-
imization in domestic public, and perhaps foreign, perception. Insurgents are often only
part-time warriors, indistinguishable from civilians for most of the time. It follows that
it is all too easy for regular troops to err by treating everybody in a neighbourhood, for
example, as being by and large guilty. If the regulars overreact and behave with scant
discrimination, inadvertently they aid recruitment for the irregulars’ cause. An attitude
of ‘shoot on suspicion’ is fatal for a COIN and CT campaign.
Irregular warfare has been a permanent feature of the strategic history of the two
centuries covered in this book. American colonists of both political persuasions
showed the way in the 1770s and 1780s, while Spanish and Portuguese guerrillas brought
irregular conflict to a high and brutal pitch of effectiveness. Before the French Empire
triggered irregular resistance in the Tyrol in 1808, in the Iberian peninsula in 1808–14
and in Russia in 1812, its Republican predecessor had struggled bloodily against domestic
guerrilla fighters. The irregular warfare in 1793–6 in the Vendée region of western
France, conducted to suppress a Catholic insurgency, matched in atrocity and counter-
atrocity anything to be found in the French conduct of irregular combat abroad. At least
400,000 people died in that COIN campaign. Civil wars tend to extremes of violence.
The issues are more immediate and therefore personal. The passion of the people is
aroused, with dire consequences for the prospects of moderation in behaviour.
The nineteenth, twentieth and now twenty-first centuries have recorded dozens,
probably hundreds, of insurgencies, great and small. Until the fourth quarter of the twen-
tieth century those insurgencies were primarily anti-colonial in context and motivation.
They were largely rural in origin and popular strength, though not in leadership, and
many were armed with an ideology that mingled nationalism with a local or borrowed
variant of Marxism. Needless to say, twentieth-century Marxists had to turn the master’s
theory of historical change on its head. They needed to explain how proletarian
revolution could occur in countries that scarcely had a proletariat. Mao Tse-tung showed
the way to succeed with his theory and practice of people’s revolutionary war in a rural
context. (This was formulated after a disastrous attempted urban insurgency in the
1920s.) But an irregular party does not have to resort to violence. Mahatma Gandhi’s
challenge to the legitimacy of British rule in India was deadly in its non-violence.
Gandhi, demonstrating Machiavellian cunning based upon deep cultural understanding
of both the British and his own people, tempted the former to offend against their own
values and principles. He achieved a moral ascendancy for his highly irregular campaign
of non-violent resistance. That ascendancy was politically priceless. Indeed, the ability
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