On the key differences between European conventional warfare and colonial warfare in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
/The fundamental difference between European conventional warfare and colonial warfare was the asymmetric nature of the belligerents. These distant wars were waged with little guidance from the European governments, relying instead on a handful of soldier-politicians or businessmen, and their small armies, to subdue the native population for economic gain. Racist ideologies, coupled with brutal military operations against insurgent and civilian alike, were hallmarks of asymmetric wars.[1]
European conventional warfare is rooted in maneuver warfare as epitomized by 17th and 18th century campaigns conducted by professional soldiers and mercenaries. It was replaced by a new war, the levée en masse, or conscription, during the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793. It mobilized all the state’s resources under the guidance of a political authority to seek decisions on the battlefield against peer or near-peer enemies. This became the hallmark of European conventional warfare.
Colonial warfare was never waged under European conditions of equality. Overseas warfare pitted asymmetric forces against the encroaching European powers. The weaker actors avoided direct battles, striking intermittently, thereby protracting the uneven struggle into a war of attrition.
Beja - Sudanese Warrior
Although colonies were important for the economic growth of European powers, commitment from Europe remained absent. The distance to colonies, and national interests focused elsewhere, meant that overseas investment was low and dependent on regional commanders - men on the peripheral edges of European life, the colonial officers.[2] The French colonial experience was driven by officers who sought to make the conquered part of the empire, have a profitable economic relationship, and to reinvigorate a national purpose against their perceived malaise of Republican France.[3] Colonies were intended to make France great again. Because the European governments did not fully support overseas expansions, settlers and business interests such as the British East India Company or the German East Africa Company, aggressively used their freedom from political oversight to expand their holdings. Colonial warfare’s aim was the subjugation of the natives for power and financial gain.
European forces sought decisive battles against larger hostile, often ill-armed and ill-disciplined, armies ranging from European-trained armies to fanatical devotees to guerrillas.[4] Open battles resulted in the wholesale slaughter of the indigenous force.[5] Thus small war fighting became dominant and was conducted by guerilla forces much to the frustration of the regular armies. One such example was the raiding tactic employed by T.E. Lawrence’s Arabs during the Great War who formalized these experiences into a theory on guerrilla war.[6] Theirs required mobility, security, time and doctrine but, importantly, popular support and propaganda.[7]
Colonial warfare practitioners were not respected by their European counterparts and failed to rally the military institutions to their cause.[8] Their means were limited and there was no glory in overseas service. Joseph Gallieni and Hubert Lyautey, for example, the creators of the oil-spot doctrime in Indochina, one of expanding the military footprint in a hostile region, did not bring their colonial warfighting experiences to the French army upon their return but instead sought to learn the latest European military theories. [9] The carrot and stick as well as the oil-spot counterinsurgency doctrines remained exclusively a colonial military application.
Colonial wars had two components; insurgencies, resisting a foreign invader or fighting a civil war often involving third parties; and counterinsurgencies, requiring adaptability to each unique insurgency. Much like any war, no insurgencies are ever the same but British colonial officer Charles Callwell saw colonial warfare in three distinct classes: ‘campaigns of conquest or annexation, campaigns for the suppression of insurrections or lawlessness or for the settlement of conquered or annexed territory, and campaigns undertaken to wipe out an insult, to avenge a wrong, or to overthrow a dangerous enemy’.[10] The first campaign is directed against tangible centers of gravity, the second campaign of pacification is waged against an indeterminate force that entails ‘the crushing of a populace in arms and the stamping out of widespread disaffection by military methods.’[11] Callwell’s campaigns, exemplified by the latter, were primarily punitive expeditions against savage enemies.
British colonial-era Gatling machine-guns
Colonial warfare on the whole was attritional because of its asymmetry. Few indigenous societies withstood an outright military debacle.[12] Insurgencies promised survival. Colonial soldiering required ‘imagination, judgement, and special skills, not stiff obedience or Prussian formations’.[13] Mobile forces, lightly armed in smaller columns, instead of divisions with all their accompanying logistical trains, required freedom from European doctrine. Indigenous forces who sought to modernize suffered because of changes brought about in the political and social realms. Native governments may have had a weak central authority or were politically fragmented.[14] An increase in modernization often led to financial ruin forcing the rulers to join the Europeans thus creating additional upheaval.[15] Therefore, low technology insurgencies dominated colonial warfare.
Few theoreticians thought of guerrilla warfare as part of a revolutionary effort until the Irish Republican Party used guerrilla tactics for political ends from 1919 to 1921.[16] Their impact on other revolutionary movements was later seen in Burma, India and Palestine.[17] Politically grounded insurgencies emerged after the Second World War with the rise of nationalism and communism. Whereas in pre-modern war and colonial warfare the goal was to return to the status quo, the era after witnessed revolutionary warfare intending to create a new political order.[18]
Counterinsurgency tactics involved outright killing, deportations, and scorched earth policies. French operations in the 19th century in North Africa, including the use of punitive raids and the wholesale murder of families, were brutal and despite the adjustment to mobile columns less than successful. Part of colonial warfare included the attempt to win over the local population in an effort to suffocate their support for the insurgents – the carrot and stick doctrine or the hearts and minds campaigns. Building infrastructure, endeavoring to create a better educational and health care system were accompanied by harsh methods including mass arrests and wholesale population relocation. One such an example can be found in the unsuccessful oil-spot strategy in French Indochina.[19] The carrot and stick approach sometimes yielded results but winning the hearts and minds of the natives was grounded in common butcher and bolt raids using indiscriminate violence.[20] Success came by the sword.
Unlike in European wars, counterinsurgencies were racist and used excessive force despite contrary claims that minimal force was used while conducting hearts and minds campaigns.[21] Force was driven by racist ideologies prevalent during its time. Although dehumanization is common in war, it took on racial overtones with the sentiment of Europeans civilizing the overseas savages and that the civilized would prevail.[22] Colonial warfare was cruel and brutal outside of what would have been acceptable in European conventional warfare. Indiscriminate slaughter and the use of experimental weapons, such as the exploding Dum-Dum bullet, were used against the so-called savages but were outlawed in Europe.[23] German tactics included the wholesale murder of the Herrero and Nama and by driving survivors into the desert to die of thirst.[24] The troublesome Boer insurgents and civilians were also labeled as criminal or less than white, allowing for their incarceration and wholesale destruction in concentration camps.[25]
Another difference to European warfare was that indigenous forces held the strategic advantage because of their lack of centers of gravity which were present in European conventional war.[26] The tactical advantage lay with the colonial armies because of their discipline, organization, technological superiority and firepower.[27] Population removal, absence of legal systems, lack of oversight from their own governments, fortification systems to stem raids, concentration camps, mobile columns, raids, and the carrot-stick approach of building houses and infrastructure became the counterinsurgents’ tools. But unrestrained force by the counterinsurgents was the true driving force in colonial warfare.
Colonialism died a slow death after World War Two but the cultural imprint of the colonialists remains imbedded in the former colonies. German, French and English languages and institutions exist in their former colonies. Winning the hearts and minds of the natives through the carrot and stick approach, or through excellent governance as Thomas Mockatitis sees the hearts and minds campaigns, are irrelevant because fundamentally a superior foreign country is in power, using brutal means of oppression to achieve its goals.[28]Excesses committed in colonies against savages would not have been tolerated in a European conventional war during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing lessons from colonial insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, asymmetric warfare, for modern use are illusionary.[29] Although there are historical differences between European conventional warfare and colonial asymmetric warfare, it remains that war is war, each unique, each an act of violence to impose one’s will over the opponent. [30]
Bibliography
BOOKS
Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age 1986., edited by Gordon A. Craig, Peter Paret, Felix Gilbert and Gordon A. A. Craig. Princeton: Princeton University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=5614083.
Understanding Counterinsurgency : Doctrine, Operations, and Challenges 2010., edited by Thomas Rid, Thomas Keaney. London: Routledge. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=515345.
Beckett, Ian and Ian F. Beckett. 2001. Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and their Opponents since 1750. London: Routledge. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=178848.
Callwell, Colonel C. E. 1996. Small Wars. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
Newsinger, John. 2015. British Counterinsurgency. 2nd edition. ed. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Porch, Douglas. 2013. Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of WarCambridge: Cambridge University Press.
von Clausewitz, Karl. 1943. On War. Translated by O. J. Matthijs Jolles. New York: The Modern Library.
Walter, Dierk. 2017. Colonial Violence. Translated by Peter Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
JOURNALS
Desai, Raj and Harry Eckstein. 1990. "Insurgency: The Transformation of Peasant Rebellion." World Politics 42 (4): 441-465. doi:10.2307/2010510. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2010510.
Mockaitis, Thomas R. 2012. "The Minimum Force Debate: Contemporary Sensibilities Meet Imperial Practice." Small Wars & Insurgencies 23 (4-5): 762-780. doi:10.1080/09592318.2012.709766. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2012.709766.
Scheipers, Sibylle. 2015. "The use of Camps in Colonial Warfare." The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43 (4): 678-698. doi:10.1080/03086534.2015.1083230. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2015.1083230.
Selth, Andrew. 1991. "Ireland and Insurgency: The Lessons of History." Small Wars & Insurgencies 2 (2): 299-322. Doi:10.1080/09592319108422983. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592319108422983.
Steinmetz, George. 2005. The First Genocide of the 20th Century and its Postcolonial Afterlives: Germany and the Namibian Ovaherero. Vol. 12. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0012.201/--first-genocide-of-the-20th-century-and-its-postcolonial?rgn=main;view=fulltext.
Wagner, Kim A. 2018. "Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency." History Workshop Journal 85 (1): 217-237. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/691159/summary.
Whittingham, Daniel. 2012. "‘Savage Warfare’: C.E. Callwell, the Roots of Counter-Insurgency, and the Nineteenth Century Context." Small Wars & Insurgencies 23 (4-5): 591-607. doi:10.1080/09592318.2012.709769. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2012.709769.
MULTIMEDIA
"Grievances and Demands – the Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants (February 27-March 1, 1525)" German History in Documents and Images., accessed May 9, 2019, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=4323.
"Wars & Conflict: 1916 Easter Rising - Aftermath: The Anglo-Irish War.” BBC.,
accessed May 3, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/aftermath/af04.shtml.
Browne, O'B. "Creating Chaos: Lawrence of Arabia and the 1916 Arab Revolt.”, http://www.historynet.com/creating-chaos-lawrence-of-arabia-and-the-1916-arab-revolt.htm.
[1] Mockaitis (2012) p.776 for contemporary racism
[2] Porch (1996) p.v
[3] Porch (1986) p.406
[4] Beckett (2001) p.12
[5] Wagner (2018) pp.227-9
[6] Browne (2010)
[7] Beckett (2001) p.20
[8] Rid (2010) p.11
[9] Porch (2013) p.32, p.404, Rid (2010) p.13p
[10] Callwell (1996) p.25
[11] Callwell (1996) p.26
[12] Porch (1996) p.xv
[13] Porch (1986) p.404
[14] Walter (2017) pp.264-5
[15] Porch (1996) p.xvi
[16] Seith (1991) p. 301, BBC (2014)
[17] Seith (1991) pp. 302-5
[18] Desai (1990) pp.446-7, Lotzer (1525)
[19] Porch (2013) p.168
[20] Whittingham (2012) p.592
[21] Porch (2013), Newsinger (2015), Wagner (2018) p.221
[22] Whittingham (2012) p.592
[23] Wagner (2018) pp.223-30
[24] Steinmetz (2005) p.3
[25] Beckett (2001) pp.38-40, Scheipers (2015) p.679
[26] Clausewitz (1943) 4.9
[27] Beckett (2001) p.33
[28] Mockaitis (2012) p.777
[29] Mockaitis (2012) p.777
[30] Clausewitz (1943) 1.1
