GUERRILA WARFARE

© MMXVIII V.1.0.1
by Morley Evans

Spanish guerrilla resistance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_warfare

We are accustomed to thinking of Che and Fidel when we think of guerrilla warfare. That's who everyone has seen on the TeeVee. Recently, we have learned of Chinese warfare tactics and strategies. Chinese are the baddies du jour. The word "guerilla" was coined during the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. The picture above illustrates a Napoleonic column being ambushed by Spanish citizens. Lord Wellington employed guerrilla warfare in the Peninsular war where he had a small British force. 

The Russians used guerrilla warfare against Napoleon too. Scorched earth left nothing for Napoleon's Grande Armée to eat. Armies were used to living on plunder. They did not need supply lines. Logistics was given not much attention. Russian armies would appear and retreat. Chasing ghosts in the Russian expanses exhausted the French army and used up its energy. Napoleon captured Moscow which the Russians had torched. Napoleon was forced to leave Russia or die in Moscow during the winter. Leaving, the French invaders died anyway. During the long miserable, horrifying retreat, the French army was destroyed by starvation, frostbite, disease, exhaustion, and Cossack ambushes and raids. Napoleon's Marshalls unanimously urged him to flee to save himself. Almost none of the huge Grande Armée survived. Napoleon's invasion of Russia was a complete and unmitigated disaster.

After mopping up resistance with European allies including Prussia and Britain, the Russian army entered Paris. Napoleon was arrested and imprisoned on the island of Elbe. Alexander I of Russia had defeated Napoleon who had been undefeated as France's leader. 

The British remember Wellington at Waterloo. Wellington defeated Napoleon after "the monster" had escaped from the Elbe prison and returned to France to resurrect the French Empire. France enthusiastically supported Napoleon as it does to this day. After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, he was imprisoned on St. Helena where he died at age 51.

Guerrilla warfare is not new.

The essay below tells us about British use of guerrilla warfare in World War II and Britian teaching Americans how to use it. 

From ANTIWAR.com

World War Two’s Covert Ops Are Failing in the Post-War World
by Charles Glass Posted on October 12, 2018

Before President Barack Obama authorized clandestine operations to defeat Syrian President Bashar al Assad in 2013, he asked the CIA to write the history of its secret wars. The classified document, say those who have read it, is a record of failure from Albania to Cuba to Angola to Nicaragua. Yet Obama went ahead with the covert program for Syria, which the CIA ran from Turkey and Jordan. Like its predecessors, Operation Timber Sycamore failed. It neither toppled Assad nor prevented Salafi jihadi fanatics from dominating the Syrian opposition. President Trump cancelled the program in July last year, but he is not immune to the siren call of another secret war – in his case, against Iran with as much chance of a positive outcome as Syria.

Why the fascination with arming foreign insurgents and proxy armies to fight wars that the US won’t fight itself? “We’re busily training, you know, local troops to fight local militants, why do we think we have this aptitude for creating armies?” Andrew Bacevich, a retired army colonel and author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, once told me. “I don’t know. It sure as hell didn’t work in Vietnam.” Two reasons stand out. One is that, as Bacevich explained, insurgencies are wars “on the cheap,” not only in dollars but in assuring the public that American soldiers’ lives are not in danger. It is also a midway point between invasion and doing nothing. And most American presidents, faced with an opportunity to undermine rival states, want to do something.

READ MORE
https://original.antiwar.com/charles_glass/2018/10/12/world-war-twos-covert-ops-are-failing-in-the-post-war-world/