PART I

THE RISE OF MODERN WARFARE

The historical transition from World War II to the anticolonial struggles and the Cold War brought about a fundamental shift in the way that the United States and its Western allies waged war. Two new models of warfare emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s, and began to reshape US military strategy: nuclear warfare and unconventional warfare. Though polar opposites in terms of their respective scopes, both were developed in large part at the nerve center of US military strategy, the RAND Corporation. Formed in 1948 as an outgrowth of the research wing for the US Air Force, RAND worked closely with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to craft these new warfare paradigms.¹

At one end of the spectrum, the United States developed nuclear-weapon capability and strategy, as did some of its Western allies. There emerged a whole field of military planning that brought together game theory and systems analysis, and produced a warfare logic very much at odds with conventional war strategy. Nuclear-weapon strategists invented theories of “massive retaliation” and “mutually assured destruction”—military paradigms that were dramatically different from earlier forms of engagement and far greater in scale than conventional warfare. American nuclear strategy focused on the superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union and presumed a global conflict of extraordinary proportions.

At the other end of the spectrum, there emerged a very different model localized especially in the colonies—a far more surgical, special-operations approach targeting small revolutionary insurgencies and what were mostly Communist uprisings. Variously called “unconventional,” “antiguerrilla” or “counterguerrilla,” “irregular,” “sublimited,” “counterrevolutionary,” or simply “modern” warfare, this burgeoning domain of military strategy flourished during France’s wars in Indochina and Algeria, Britain’s wars in Malaya and Palestine, and America’s war in Vietnam. It too was nourished by the RAND Corporation, which was one of the first to see the potential of what the French commander Roger Trinquier called “modern warfare” or the “French view of counterinsurgency.” It offered, in the words of one of its leading students, the historian Peter Paret, a vital counterweight “at the opposite end of the spectrum from rockets and the hydrogen bomb.”²

Like nuclear-weapon strategy, the counterinsurgency model grew out of a combination of strategic game theory and systems theorizing; but unlike nuclear strategy, which was primarily a response to the Soviet Union, it developed more in response to another formidable game theorist, Mao Zedong. The formative moment for counterinsurgency theory was not the nuclear confrontation that characterized the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the earlier Chinese Civil War that led to Mao’s victory in 1949—essentially, when Mao turned guerrilla tactics into a revolutionary war that overthrew a political regime. The central methods and practices of counterinsurgency warfare were honed in response to Mao’s strategies and the ensuing anticolonial struggles in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa that imitated Mao’s approach.³ Those struggles for independence were the breeding soil for the development and perfection of unconventional warfare.

By the turn of the twentieth century, when President George W. Bush would declare a “War on Terror” following 9/11, counterinsurgency warfare was well-developed and mature.⁴ And with the spectacular rise of US general David Petraeus, counterinsurgency theory gained dominance in US military strategy. Today, given the geopolitics of the twenty-first century, modern warfare has replaced the military paradigm of large-scale battlefield warfare of the earlier century.

Counterinsurgency warfare has been one of the most consequential innovations of the post–World War II period, in terms of our contemporary politics. In hindsight, it is Mao, rather than the USSR, who was the more momentous and long-lasting foe. Mao is the one who turned warfare into politics—or, more precisely, who showed us how modern warfare could become a form of governing. Perhaps only in retrospect, post-9/11, can we truly understand the full implications of early counterinsurgency theory.