Miks sissid kaotavad (inglise keeles)

[kaur3]

Missugustel põhjustel sissid/geriljad/partisanid kaotavad sõjaliselt tugevamale vastasele? Sellele küsimusele proovib oma raamatu “How Democracies Lose Small Wars” ühes peatükis vastata Gil Merom. Järgnev lugu annab ehk aimu, miks Eesti vastupanuvtitluse sh. ka metsavendadega läks nii nagu ta läks.



Military Superiority and Victory in Small Wars
Historical Observations

Small war’s definition.
A small war has the following distinct characteristics: It involves sharp military asymmetry, an insurgent that fights guerrilla war, and an incumbent that uses ground forces for counterinsurgency warfare. The incumbent can be an indigenous government that fights on its own or with external participation, or a foreign power that imposes itself on the population/

The pattern of the outcomes of conflict between rivals of great military inequality remained unchanged from antiquity until well into the twentieth century. Control over superior means of destruction almost always promised victory, continuous domination, or successful pacification. Weak protagonists - and insurgent populations - did not always accept this state of affairs, nor did they always assess correctly the balance of power or the might and determination of their powerful conquerors or rivals. Nevertheless, when the military superiority of oppressors was unquestionable, so were the results.
In this chapter, three issues are discussed. First, 1 note why, under conditions of acute military inferiority, weak protagonists chose an insurgency strategy in order to fight domination. Second, I explore how military superiority was traditionally employed in pacification, and I define strategic prototypes of counter-insurgency. Third, I expose the key variable that guaranteed that military superiority would be translated into effective domination or pacification.
Fighting Small Wars: Insurgents and Oppressors
Much of what is known about military aspects of armed struggle against foreign domination comes from the study of guerrilla warfare,1 Communities and nations choose to fight a guerrilla war against oppressors because it proves to be "frugal" and because it makes their own forces less vulnerable. Guerrilla warfare turns out to be the only form of violent resistance that

has any chance of surviving repeated encounters with a militarily superior oppressor. Its advantages can perhaps be best understood by considering the burden associated with conventional warfare of pitched battles. In conventional warfare, armies seek to marshal their forces for decisive battles. They therefore rely on a great deal of logistic support, fixed bases, and a few wide supply lines. These require a great deal of centralization, investment of material and human resources in infrastructure, and in its defensive maintenance. Ultimately, these offer good targets, particularly for the militarily superior side. Guerrilla warfare, by relying on small independent formations, and on supply and shelter from an existing, widely decentralized infrastructure -the general population - can avoid much of the burden, as well as a single knockout blow.1 To use Mao's famous words, guerrilla warriors are fishes, while oppressed communities are the latter's sea. In these communities, guerrilla warriors find a vast and dispersed support and shelter system, and thus a base for great mobility and reduced vulnerability.3
The primary goal and best hope of insurgent movements has always been that they will manage to dissuade their powerful rivals from continuing to fight by imposing on the latter a high enough cost for a long enough period. Until roughly the second part of the twentieth century, however, and in spite of its obvious advantages, guerrilla warfare rarely proved to be a way to solve the political problems of oppressed communities. Indeed, both students and practitioners of insurgency warfare tend to agree that the success of guerrilla warfare depended primarily on the nature of the oppressor and the context of war, rather than on the particular advantages it provided to the oppressed.4
Oppressors hardly ever intended to let insurgency wars drag on or bleed them so much as to make their losses unacceptable. Rather, they devised a number of ways that individually, or in combination, could circumvent the insurgents1 guerrilla strategy and defeat armed insurrection. The crudest strategy was to target the popular base of insurgency and eliminate it indiscriminately., thereby destroying the ability of populations to produce and support insurgency. Alternatively, oppressors targeted the link between guerrilla forces and the popular base, trying to render insurgents ineffective by isolating them from their external and internal supply sources. Finally, oppressors targeted guerrilla leaders and fighting formations in an effort to surgically eradicate the military potential of oppressed communities. These traditional strategies were targeted at different aspects of the complex that

makes insurrection work. Each required a particular conduct, incurred various costs, and derived different benefits. However, they were not exclusive. Rather, these strategies were often used in a complementary manner, or in succession. Still, for analytical purposes, it is worthwhile to deal with each strategy separately.
Targeting the Popular Base: National Annihilation
The strategy of national annihilation is rarely used these days,5 In past times, however, it was part of the common political repertoire of conquerors. Empires, for example, expanded and retained their control over subjugated peoples by relying on the deterrent and actual effect of force. They often faced stiff opposition in conquest and insurrections thereafter. Occasionally, empires solved these problems by eliminating the population or national identity of their weak rivals. Such radical steps were taken by empires, not only in order to ensure that insurgents would not pose a similar problem again, but also in order to convince other subjugated peoples to calculate their behavior in a predictably docile manner. In short, the superior military power of empires presented weaker foes with a painfully limited choice between survival under subjugation or annihilation. The extreme outcomes of encounters between mighty military powers and their proud yet imprudent victims can be illustrated with great lucidity in historical cases, including those of the Melian refusal to accept Athenian hegemony (assuming that Thucydides' account is either real or representative), the Jewish Bar-Kokhba revolt against the Roman empire, and Cromwell's war against the native Irish.6 In these and many other instances, military superiority was used indiscriminately and without inhibition, and as a result, these confrontations were decided in a conclusive, and occasionally, irreversible manner.
The little community of the island of Melos was asked by Athens to switch sides and join its empire against Sparta. The Melian leadership was aware of its military inferiority, yet, for reasons that do not concern us here, decided not to commit itself to anything beyond neutrality. The cost of rejecting the Athenian quest for domination was the extermination of the entire adult male population - the actual and potential leaders and warriors - and the deportation of the remaining people as slaves.
The Jewish Bar-Kokhba revolt ended almost as tragically. The Romans had already fought a major Jewish revolt fifty-eight years earlier (in 66 A.D.) and they had faced continuous low-intensity insurrection thereafter.


However, the Bar-Kokhba uprising presented them with a more recalcitrant and costly challenge, and thus they took more extreme measures. They liquidated Bar-Kokhba's rebellious bands together with their popular base of support, and in this way made sure that the Jews would be unable to revolt again. Indeed, when the Romans had finished with the revolt, the Jewish nation was in ruins. A relatively conservative estimate suggests that the Jewish population was decimated by about 50 percent.
A millennium and a half later, the Irish revolt against England resulted in a similar outcome. Cromwell annihilated the garrisons of rebellious cities ruthlessly, in the process often killing the innocent civilians and the Catholic clergy. Many of the native Irish who survived were sent into exile in concentration camps, and Ireland's population was thoroughly blended with English colonists. Within ten years of the repression, the Irish population was decimated by an estimated one-third (the loss amounted to some half a million people).
Extreme brutality and little discrimination in dealing with empire-building and maintenance are not characteristics of the distant past only. Until well into the twentieth century, European states used to practice measures of extermination in various parts of the lands they ruled. The German wars in East and South-West Africa (1904-1907) left history some textbook examples of strategic annihilation.7 In August 1904, for example, General Lothar von Trotha pushed the rebellious Herero people into the Omaheke desert in South-West Africa (today's Namibia) and sealed off the west and southwest ends of this arid territory for about a year, in order to destroy the Hereros. The official 1906 history of the German General Staff noted that "the arid Omaheke was to complete what the German army had begun: the annihilation of the Herero people."8 Moreover, after von Trotha had isolated the Herero, he issued the following proclamation on October z, 1904:
[T]he Herero are no longer considered German subjects. They have murdered... and now refuse to fight on, out of cowardice... [they] will have to leave the country. Otherwise I shall force them to do so by means of guns. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot.9


Indeed, the results of this and other German campaigns were devastating. Large portions of the original populations of rebellious African tribes -between 50 and 80 percent - perished. Most, it seems almost unnecessary to emphasize, were innocent civilians who had never taken up arms. Many of those who survived the systematic hunting-down operations and the premeditated food and water deprivation were sent to labor camps or into exile under harsh conditions.
As Iraq's treatment of the Kurds and its southern Shiite population indicates, annihilation is for some states still an acceptable method of oppression, if not a final-solution strategy. The foundations of the Kurds' communal identity, cohesion, and national survival (and their capacity to oppose Baghdad) are and were in the ethnically homogeneous pastoral base and the proximity to external sources of supply. After the collapse of the Kurdish revolt of 1974-1975, Iraq launched a calculated campaign in order to destroy these foundations. Large Kurdish groups were forced to move into specially constructed and easily accessible villages near cities or major roads. Other Kurds were resettled, often in groups of up to five families, in Arab villages in southern Iraq. Hundreds of Kurdish villages were either destroyed or repop-ulated with Arabs.10 In 1991, following the Shiite insurgency in southern Iraq, one of Saddam Hussein's leading henchmen, Ali Hassan Magid, appeared in an Iraqi army film explaining to his lieutenants that the way to handle the rebellious Shiite villages was to annihilate them altogether."
Finally, the Chinese approach to Tibet and the Indonesians' dealings with the native residents of East Timor seem also to fall within the general pattern of national destruction. Communist China brutally subdued Tibet in 1950, and since then has spared no effort to eliminate all symbols and feelings of Tibetan nationalism and identity.12- Similarly, Indonesia invaded East Timor (following the departure of Portugal}, annexed the territory (July 1976), and declared it to be the country's twenty-seventh province. Since then, and until it granted East Timor independence in 2.002., Indonesia has engaged in a continuous struggle against the native people, avoiding no brutal method of oppression.13


Targeting the Social Bonds: Mild and Extreme Strategies
Indiscriminate annihilation, scattering, or exile can be replaced by a less radical strategy of isolation. Oppressors can effectively respond to insurrection by targeting the political base of the guerrillas, which constitutes the vital link between the warriors and the population. The commander of the French forces in Algeria during the late 19505 (and the leader of the Army coup of April 1961), General Chalie, explained:
The theory, the famous theory of water and fish of Mao Tse-tung, which has achieved
much, is still very simple and very true: If you withdraw the water, that is to say, the
support of the population, fish can no longer live. It's simple, I know, but in war only
the simple things can be achieved I4
In principle, isolation can be achieved both by benevolent conversion and by intimidation. Furthermore, benevolent and coercive methods are not necessarily incompatible. They can be complementary, as Gallieni recommended in 1900 and as Magsaysay proved in his struggle against the Hukbalahaps in the Philippines (in the early 19505).*5 Or they can be applied differentially to various segments of the same population. A mixed application of methods becomes particularly useful in dealing with ethnically, politically, or otherwise heterogeneous populations. Indeed, imperial powers often quite shrewdly calculated the dosage and application of coercion according to the internal divisions in enslaved provinces. The British imperial policy of "divide and rule," and particularly the emphasis on winning "hearts and minds," demonstrate that benevolence can indeed be integrated into isolation strategy without giving up coercion.16
Still, benevolent conversion is rarely the dominant method of isolation. Moreover, benevolent isolation can easily regress into intimidation and terror, and the escalation of brutality does not necessarily end there. In other words, coercive isolation can very well lead to annihilation. Indeed, the line between coercive isolation and annihilation, analytically clear as it may be,

is in the real world not all that distinguishable.17 The French struggle against the Algerian rebel Abd al-Qadir in the mid-nineteenth century illustrates the degenerative nature of isolation.18 With the prolongation of war and the accumulation of frustration, the French increasingly resorted to policies of terror and devastation. One of their preferred and most savage techniques was the razzia - an indiscriminating raid involving the killing of people, destroying and plundering property, and burning the crops of tribes that joined the insurrection. Soon enough, however, the razzia did not seem satisfactory, and some of the officers developed an even more brutal mode of thinking. By 1843, one of them recommended: "Kill all the men over the age of fifteen, and put all the women and children aboard ships bound for the Marquesas Islands or elsewhere. In a word, annihilate everyone who does not crawl at our feet like dogs."iy
The British employed a milder form of isolation policy during the Boer War. They relied on a static network of blockhouses and on a scorched-earth policy, which resulted in the destruction of property, the killing of cattle, and the burning of crops. They also executed rebels and incarcerated Boer families in concentration camps.10 Although by the counterinsurgency standards of the time their policies were quite restrained, they still imposed an appalling cost on the Afrikaners. Thus, while the Boer warriors lost an estimated 2,500 people out of some 60,000-65,000 who were involved in the guerrilla stages of war, an additional 20,000 people, mostly children, perished in the concentration camps.11
Of course, the idea of isolating indigenous populations from the insurgents by concentrating the former in controlled areas, was not new, nor applied only by the British Empire. The Spanish used concentration camps in Cuba, and the Americans, who denounced them for doing so, had earlier concentrated the Indians in reservations. The Americans also treated the Philippines in much the same manner later on. Then the Mexicans did so

domestically, and the Japanese followed suit in Manchuria." In fact, the same ideas were also behind the U.S.-South Vietnamese "strategic hamlet program" that was inaugurated in February 1962 and assumed larger proportions during 1966-1970. In this case, the goal was to drive villagers, often by means of bombing, into the hamlets' perimeters, so as to deny support to the Vietcong insurgents and create free-fire zones where greater firepower could be applied indiscriminately.13
Iraqi policy toward the Kurds also comes to mind as containing a component of isolation through terror. For example, during clashes between the government and the Kurds in 1963, the military governor of Northern Iraq declared:
We warn all inhabitants of villages in the provinces of Kirkuk, Sulaimaniya and Arbil against sheltering any criminal or insurgent and against helping them in any way whatsoever. We shall bomb and destroy any village if firing comes from anywhere near it against the army, the police, the National Guards or the loyal tribes.14
It is important to conclude the discussion of isolation by emphasizing that the shift from less to more coercive methods of isolation is not only the product of the frustration created by the dynamics of insurgency war, or the need to deter the indigenous population from cooperation with the insurgents/5 Rather, brutalization is also the result of the fact that the war is fought over a commodity that no antagonist fully controls: perceptions of the future (which explains the French and American emphasis of psychological warfare).16 In that sense, both parties tight over not only the current, but also over future, relations with the population. They try to convince the people that they alone will be in power once the struggle is over. That is precisely one of the major reasons why such struggles tend to involve high levels of brutality against civilians. After all, the legitimacy of rulers is intimately related to the perceived degree of institutional monopoly over coercive power. Thus insurgents try to prove that they can break the rulers' monopoly of coercive power, and rulers try to prove just the opposite. Both are ready to remorselessly punish any cooperation with their antagonist in

order to prevent perpetual erosion in their public position. This tendency to resort to the extremes of brutality was immortalized in the absurd words of an American officer in Vietnam. The latter explained, after the bombing of Binh Tri (during the Tet offensive), that "it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it."17
Targeting the Military and Political Cadres; Decapitation and Eradication Modern military forces often prefer to deal with military opponents rather than with the civil population. The military objective of hostilities (irrespective of the type of war) is usually to engage and destroy the enemy's fighting formations or render them ineffective by eliminating their military and political command. Counterinsurgency forces regularly consider isolation not as an end in itself, but rather as a means of forcing on insurgents a military showdown. In such cases, insurgency-warriors and insurgency-leaders are the prime targets for eradication. Such eradication is carried out in several ways. Benign methods include, for example, apprehension, incarceration, and deportation. Less benign methods include the use of bounty hunting, murder, and executions - sometimes following judicial procedures, but more often without any consideration for laws.
During the Italian campaign in Abyssinia in 1935-1936, Mussolini's orders were straightforward: Shoot all rebels.lS In 1947, the French in Indochina launched the failed operation "Lea" that was designed to eradicate the Vietminh's fighting force and leadership.29 Even in the British Empire, perhaps the most benevolent of all modern colonial and oppressive systems, the execution of insurgent leaders and warriors was considered a legitimate means to fight and deter insurrections.30 The American search and destroy missions (such as in operations Attleboro, Cedar Falls, and Junction City), body-counting policy, and project Phoenix during the Vietnam war are but a few of the latest examples of policies that were designed to eliminate the backbone of insurrection.51 The Israeli operation of special hunting squads against the Palestinian insurgents during the early 19705 (Rimon) the first Intifada (Shimshon and Duvdevan) and the incursions into Palestinian cities and villages in April 2002 and after are other modern examples of efforts designed to eliminate the fighting backbone of insurrection.

Eradication has occasionally failed. But, as demonstrated by the killing of Mahmadou Lamine by the French in Western Africa (1887), the capture of Aguinaldo in the Philippines by MacArthur's forces (March 1901), and the war in the Vendee (1793-1794 phase), decapitation can work well, at least in some cases and for some time.31 In fact, the idea of fighting insurgency by eradication was apparently so attractive, that totalitarian states carried it to monstrous extremes, as a preventive rather than reactive doctrine, which was designed to assure quick submission following a conquest. The Soviets proved this in their massacre in the spring of 1940 of Polish POWs and other subjects in Katyn, and the Nazis proved this in their plans and conduct in Poland and other conquered Eastern territories.
Lavrenti Beria, the ruthless NKVD chief, wrote to Stalin regarding the 2.5,700 Polish prisoners who were held by his organization after the liquidation of Poland, that they were "all ... bitter enemies of the Soviet power, filled with enmity to the Soviet system ... Each ... plainly awaits liberation, thereby gaining the opportunity to actively join the battle against the Soviet authorities."33 Accordingly, and since the NKVD considered "all of them lasl hardened enemies of the Soviet power with little expectation of their reform,"34 Beria found it "essential" to "apply towards them the punishment of the highest order - shooting."35 Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General of Poland, summed up Hitler's objectives for the "Extraordinary Pacification Action" in Poland in much the same terms. "The men capable of leadership in Poland," Frank told his officers, "must be liquidated. Those following them ... must be eliminated in their turn."36
Violence and Counterinsurgency: Brutality as a Means of Cost Management
Violence is not only the primary means of getting the desired results of war. Rather, it is also a way of managing its costs. In other words, states resort to greater and less selective methods of brutality in pacification wars not only because these prove to be effective, but also because they prove to be

efficient. Higher levels of violence can cut down on the investment and loss of manpower and material, both through the destruction involved and the fear generated. This instrumental logic was succinctly encapsulated in the order of General Keitel to the Nazi occupation forces in Eastern Europe:
In view of the vast size of the occupied areas in the East, the forces available for establishing security in these areas will be sufficient only if all resistance is punished not by legal prosecution of the guilty, but by the spreading of such terror by the Armed Forces as is alone appropriate to eradicate every inclination to resist among the population ... Commanders must find the means of keeping order by applying suitable draconian measures.37
Of course, the Nazi concept of violence and the consequent atrocities German soldiers perpetrated in occupied territories were not entirely innovative.38 Conquest and pacification, including those involving European powers up to the mid-twentieth century, were often based on high doses of indiscriminate violence. Brutality was perceived as a pragmatic, and often as the only, way of solving the problem of the shortage of resources. Indeed, as Michael Howard reminds us, early European conquests outside the Continent were often obtained in spite of great numerical inferiority, precisely because of a superior ability to employ violence.39 The Spanish conquests in America, Howard writes, were owed to the "single-minded ruthlessness ... desperation, and ... fanaticism" of the Spanish soldiers.40 Technological inventions such as artillery, later the machine gun, and eventually air power, only improved the ability to manage cost through violence.41 Modern European powers simply continued an old imperial tradition. They conquered, and then prevented the deterioration of their rule through the

instigation of short and particularly violent actions. In the 1898 Omdurman battle in the Sudan, for example, the British forces led by Kitchener subjugated the upper Nile river region, losing 48 soldiers while killing some 11,000 Dervish.
The use of brute force in order to control the costs of imperial/colonial wars continued throughout the first half of the twentieth century even as some European powers became more liberal and democratic.42- According to observers, the French strategy during the Druse revolt in Syria in the 19103 seems to have been to crush the rebellion "by the maximum use of every mechanical contrivance [but] with the minimum use of French soldiers."43 On May 7, 192.6, the French turned a whole quarter in Damascus into rubble in a twelve-hour period. The death toll was estimated at between 600 and 1,000. During the 1916 Easter rebellion in Ireland, a British four-day military repression in Dublin resulted in 1,351 Irish dead. In Africa, the British felt free to pacify Somaliland through air bombardment. The Italian army added the use of poison gas to these practices in its war in Abyssinia (1935-1936). In both the British and Italian campaigns, violence, as Michael Howard observes, "achieved its purpose in terrorizing resistance into rapid submission and so diminishing the requirements for a prolonged land campaign."44 In May 1945, in Setif, Algeria, the French are estimated to have killed at least 6,000 people. During the 1947-1948 revolt in Madagascar, 60,000 people are estimated to have been killed.
The relationship between the level of violence and the material and human cost of conquest can be clearly illustrated by a brief comparison of the strategy, cost, and outcome of the 1904-1907 German pacification of rebellious African tribes and the British pacification of the insurgent Boers in i899-i9oz. Admittedly, the variance between the cost and outcome of the two cases cannot be attributed solely to the difference in the strategic choice (which includes the methods of pacification and the consequent levels of violence and degrees of discrimination). Still, the variance is so remarkable that it would be unjustified to deny the role played by the strategy and methods of violence. While the Germans chose to indiscriminately annihilate, the British chose to isolate and eradicate selectively. The Germans used altogether some 18,000 troops in East and West Africa. The British deployed some 449,000 troops (though only about 50,000 were used for offensive operations). The cost for the Germans was 2.2. million pounds sterling. The British spent



zzo million pounds. The Germans were responsible for the death of perhaps as many as 400,000 people, the British for some 25,000. In the battles of the Boer War, the British lost some 7,900 soldiers. Yet the total of British dead amounted to 22,000. Moreover, the ratio of battle fatalities was almost one to two in favor of the Boers. Overall, then, the British lost more soldiers in the Boer War than the Germans used in their campaigns in Africa.45
With these and additional examples in mind, one can form some generalizations about the use of violence. From the perspective of unscrupulous oppressors, the removal of the popular base of insurrection or the destruction of the national identity of subjugated peoples are simple and cost-effective measures. Indiscriminate annihilation requires relatively little investment and military skills, and produces long-lasting results.
Much as with annihilation, no particular genius is necessary for the exercise of isolation, particularly when it is based on coercion. Isolation does require greater investment and patience than annihilation. But its requirements can be minimized through the escalation of the level of brutality.
Admittedly, the use of less-discriminate methods of violence in the pursuit of isolation is not risk-free. The attitude of the target population can presumably be hardened, the pool of material and human resources available to insurgent forces may grow, and the readiness of oppressed people to fight and endure sacrifice can also increase with additional suffering.46 The implications of such potential developments, however, should not be exaggerated. Beyond a certain threshold of coercion, the emboldening effect of brutality may very well be offset by the fear it creates. Oppressed communities may become too fearful to let their feelings of humiliation, insult, and vengeance guide their behavior. Moreover, oppressors may be indifferent to the counterproductive effects of coercive strategy, assessing that it is still easier and cheaper to base their rule on crude terror rather than compromise, seduction, or careful application of brutality. Japanese conduct during the 19305 and early 19405 in China and East Asia47 - the largest population base on earth - illustrates that great violence and brutality do not necessarily create a problem of unmanageable proportions, nor do they necessarily turn out to be self-defeating.48

Successful eradication of insurgent forces, be it one against the leaders, the warriors, or both, requires a greater investment and more talent than other strategies of counterinsurgency. It depends on such factors as timely and accurate intelligence, highly competent mobile-forces, and a widespread deployment (that can provide logistics for the gathering of intelligence, the strike operations, and the defense of local communities). Investment is not limited to the creation of infrastructure, but rather includes continuous maintenance as well. The more "surgical" the eradication effort, the greater the patience, skill, and investment required.
Yet even "surgical" eradication does not eliminate the need to rely on brutality. The hasty acquisition of intelligence, often from sources unwilling to supply it, necessarily involves a great deal of personal violence. The eradication of guerrilla forces, whose culpability can hardly ever be proven in a proper and cost-effective legal manner, is also inherently brutal. In short, while selective and careful counterinsurgency is more costly than other pacification strategies, it does not eliminate the need to rely on extreme violence. The application of violence could very well be more selective, but almost unavoidably the methods - torture and summary executions, for example -are not so selective or legitimate (and nothing has been said about the brutality involved in "preventive" eradication, as was revealed, for example, in Hitler's and Stalin's treatment of the Polish elite during World War II).
Conclusion
In the face of military superiority, conflict between conquerors and oppressed communities tends to regress into guerrilla and counterinsurgency struggle. Guerrilla strategy offers the underdog a cheap, efficient, and often the only way to remain militarily active in spite of logistical, numerical, and material inferiority. It provides the insurgent with a chance for a prolonged struggle by relying on the support of indigenous population. Conquerors and oppressors who refuse to compromise with the political demands of their weak rivals can nevertheless deal with insurgencies in one of several ways. They can annihilate the popular base of insurgency, isolate the population from the insurgents, or selectively eradicate the insurgents and their leaders. Each of these strategies requires a readiness to resort to violence against a civilian population, and violence indeed proves to be effective and efficient. It reduces the amount of human and material resources invested and lost in conquest and pacification. All in all, then, our discussion in this chapter reveals a vicious principle: If the oppressors are uninterested in reconciling their interests with those of the oppressed, then the incentive to escalate the level of violence is compelling. The chances are that a less selective use of violence will cut the costs and reduce the time of planning and executing each of the strategies of pacification. From an expedient point of view, then, the movement on the strategic scale from selective eradication to indiscriminate

annihilation is tempting. In that sense, counterinsurgency is inherently degenerative. Benevolent isolation can easily give way to coercive isolation, and the latter contains the seeds of annihilation. Indeed, the most disturbing conclusion from our current moral vantage point is that brutality pays. The logistical parsimony of guerrilla warfare can be met with the parsimony of uninhibited violence, at least as long as altruistic moral restraints are absent.

[Slinky]

kuradi pikk tekst

[hillart]

Pikk jutt, sitt jutt, kuid põhjus on kõigil sellistel juhtudel üks ja ainuke.
Ükskõik kui arvukad ja missuguse relvastusega on väed, neil peab olema TAGALA. Ilma tagalata toimub mingisugune tegevus vaid väga üürikest aega, kui üldse toimub. Ja seejärel, kui kogemata kombel veel totaalset lüüasaamist toimunud ei ole, vaid enese hädapaärane elushoidmine.
Ka EV KV-kke on see arusaam viimase paari aasta jooksul väikese virvendusena aju hallides käärudes ilmnema hakanud. Pisitasa, aga siiski.
Kuigi, nagu seda juba üle aastakümne tehtud on, ikka veel sõditakse õppustel ilma kaotusteta (rääkimata haavatutest) ja perpetum mobile-tüüpi relvadega.

[oleeg]

Vaenlasel on alati suuri raskusi sisside olemuse mõistmisega. Sellest on tulenenud ka raskused sisside eksisteerimise alustugede kõigutamisega. Sisside tegevuse pärssimisel on vaenlase meetodid olnud seinast – seina ehk propagandast kuni suguvõsa represseerimiseni.
Sageli on sisside vastu võitlemisel kasutatud ära nende kõige nõrgemat kohta: rahva toetusest ilmajäämist. Olulisel kohal on ka väljastpoolt saadava abi äralõikamine.