Waging “Small Wars” in the New Millennium

• Author: Alan Chong,Ong Weichong
• Published date: 01 January 2014
• Date: 01 January 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X13490929
• Subject Matter: Forum: Revisiting Small Wars

Forum: Revisiting Small Wars
Armed Forces & Society
2014, Vol 40(1) 3-16
Waging ‘‘Small Wars’’
ª The Author(s) 2013
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in the New Millennium:
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X13490929
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Chameleonic Missions
and Virtual
Aggression—An
Introduction
Ong Weichong1 and Alan Chong1
Abstract
‘‘Small wars’’ have returned to the international political agenda in the early twentieth
century with almost a vengeance. Leaving aside the factors of social media and satellite
television today, the nature of small wars has adhered to its politicized, xenophobic,
and asymmetrical characteristics. The latter were predicted by British and American
military manuals produced in the early to middle twentieth century. This special issue
aims to revisit the nature of small wars in the era of great power interventions in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Libya in the 2000s. It will be apparent that two further characteristics
need to be appended to small wars: chameleonic missions and virtual aggression.
Keywords
small wars, insurgency, virtual war, civil affairs, interventions, stabilization opera-
tions, civilization and war
Small wars have historically defied definition by blurring the front lines of combat and
military protocol. This special section aims to account for two additional characteristics:
1 S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Corresponding Author:
Alan Chong, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Blk S4,
Level B4, Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798.
Email: iscschong@ntu.edu.sg

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Armed Forces & Society 40(1)
chameleonic missions and virtual aggression. The original ‘‘classics’’ of conceptua-
lizing small wars remain Charles E. Callwell’s volume simply titled Small Wars,1
reprinted several times between 1899 and 1937, and the Small Wars Manual2 pub-
lished by the US Marine Corps in two prominent editions in 1935 and 1940. But it
was Callwell who first called attention to small wars as a residual category of combat
that does not fit anywhere else. In Callwell’s words, ‘‘it comprises the expeditions
against savages and semi-civilised races by disciplined soldiers, it comprises cam-
paigns 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, and it thus obviously covers operations very varying in their
scope and in their conditions.’’3
Between the two manuals, small wars have been broadly attributed the following
features. First, a small war can only be said to exist when a Great Power, or a ‘‘civi-
lized state,’’ attempts to quell insurgencies and punish rebels at home or overseas.
Second, the opposing forces must constitute an ‘‘irregular’’ otherness: they are not
uniformed, disciplined soldiers trained to fight similarly professional counterparts
employing recognizable doctrines. Third, fighting against irregulars is a matter of
confronting inferior cultures. In Callwell’s racist tone, one significant ‘‘difficulty
which the regular army has sometimes to contend with in small wars is treachery
on the part of ostensibly neutral bodies or tribes, while in civilized warfare such a
thing is almost unknown . . . The standard of honour varies greatly among different
uncivilized or semi-civilized races; but it is not by any means the case that those low-
est in the human scale are the least to be trusted. When operating in certain parts of
the world or in contact with certain people a commander has always to be on his
guard . . . ’’4 The US Marine Corps was more subtle in arguing that engaging in small
wars is tantamount to combining doses of diplomacy with military force, the mix of
the two being dependent upon the nature of the political objectives at war’s incep-
tion, the character of the opposing forces, and their preferred modes of operations.5
Fourth, a highly localized, contextual understanding of the vulnerability of the
enemy is needed if the intervener is to successfully bring the irregular forces to heel.
Once again, there is no better description than Callwell’s in all its vintage, derived
from the era of British imperialism: ‘‘when there is no king to conquer, no capital to
seize, no organized army to overthrow, and when there are no celebrated strong-
holds to capture, and no great centres of population to occupy, the objective is
not so easy to select. It is then that the regular troops are forced to resort to cattle
lifting and village burning and that the war assumes an aspect which may shock the
humanitarian.’’6
In the twenty-first century, small wars remain unequally brutal contests where the
technologically and numerically weaker combatants revel in their asymmetry or
inventively amplify their operations in spite of limited technological means. Their
political ends however, following Carl von Clausewitz, need not be consigned to the
size of their weaponry’s caliber. Captured between 2005 and 2012, the following
three excerpts illustrate in no uncertain terms the return to the paradigm of waging

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Weichong and Chong
5
small wars while raising a number of research questions7 along the way. These are
aspects of the research agenda that the authors in this special section have responded
to in their diverse ways.
Let us begin with two excerpts from the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan. First, a
snapshot quoted from David Kilcullen’s book The Accidental Guerrilla:
Ninety percent of the people you call ‘‘Taliban’’ are actually tribals. They’re fighting
for loyalty or Pashtun honour, and to profit their tribe. They’re not extremists. But
they’re terrorized by the other ten percent: religious fanatics, terrorists, people allied
to [the Taliban leadership shura in] Quetta. They’re afraid that if they try to reconcile,
the crazies will kill them. To win them over, first you have to protect their people, prove
that the extremists can’t hurt them if they come to your side – Afghan provincial
governor, March 15, 2008.8
The second comment represents a sharply dissenting view from the father of a
Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl of the US Army. Robert Bergdahl blamed his son’s capture
by the Taliban on the Army’s ‘‘fallacious’’ belief that counterinsurgency doctrine
meant winning over the Afghan population by building schools, roads, and conduct-
ing community relations tasks:
It doesn’t achieve what they say it’s going to achieve. It’s a bio-metric data-gathering
device—send the rabbits out there to get IED-ed so you can figure out who to kill at
night. How ethical.9
Robert Bergdahl believed, on the basis of his son’s rapid descent in tone from
optimism to pessimism in his e-mails sent home, upon being deployed to Paktika
province in Afghanistan in mid-2009, that the design of such a doctrine was psycho-
logically degrading to those in uniform tasked to implement it. Robert Bergdahl
believed that his son was captured by the Taliban as a result of being deployed for
goodwill patrols. This does beckon the question of whether there is a civil–military
disconnect both in the United States and in Afghanistan. How might civilians relate
to the military as a legitimate authority in community relations?
Finally, the third excerpt examines a fundamental assumption that Western
powers ought to always retain an armed response to tackling small wars. After all,
it does seem logical that if their opponents are relatively impoverished in the tech-
nological sophistication of their weaponry, the West should employ their advantage
in armor, electronic intelligence, naval and air superiority to the hilt. A second
research question can thus be teased out: Does a ‘‘magic bullet’’ lie in the state of
knowledge and technological development of the West’s military lethality? The con-
sequences of an armed response based on this fundamental assumption is evident in
the aftermath of the Libya humanitarian intervention of 2011. While Prime Minister
David Cameron of the United Kingdom, President Nicholas Sarkozy of France, and
President Barack Obama of the United States hailed the ‘‘clean’’ intervention of

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Armed Forces & Society 40(1)
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air power and limited numbers of
special forces advisory teams among the Libyan rebels, the ouster of Libyan autocrat
Muammar Gaddafi left a power vacuum on the ground that has remained incomple-
tely filled by a Transitional National Council.
The local military councils, based in major cities such as Misurata, Zintan, and Tri-
poli that had organized the networks of disconnected resistance efforts into a holistic
resistance against Gaddafi, had a different attitude toward demobilizing their arms:
We are the ones who are holding the power there—the people with the force on the
ground—and we are not going to give that up until we have a legitimate government
that will emerge from free and fair elections,’’ said Anwar Fekini, a French-Libyan
lawyer who is a leader of the armed groups in the western mountains and is also close
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