Why are guerrilla tactics so incorrect?

January 20, 2011 9:37 PM

At least as far as media reports seem to show, Naxalite and Palestinian militant (examples I'm the most familiar with, but certainly not limited to) tactics seem to revolve around suicide attacks and civilian attacks. Why is that, when it seems like such a tactically ill maneuver?

I can understand that religion and asymmetric warfare have their influences (Islamic martyrdom and an ideology that strives for a one-stage solution (within the Israel-Palestinian conflict), but I just don't understand why they would resort to such tactically ill maneuvers.

For example, I'll watch videos of IDF soldiers with guns engaging Palestinian teenagers with slingshots. I just have to ask: Why are these Palestinian militants out and about tarnishing public opinion of their cause when they could be back "home", righteously defending? Why don't they attach themselves to the property currently under their physical possession and defend it? Realistically speaking, shouldn't it be recognized that you cannot "win" militarily (by which I mean militarily winning against the State of Israel by demolishing it), and so your best option would be to prolong your "success" by as much as possible by defending what you have and gaining public support?

Sure, the international community wants a two-state solution with both sides ceasing conflict. But which side is going to be more seriously criticized in this hypothetical scenario where even though the Palestinians are still drawing arms, its purely in a demonstrable defensive action? Obviously the side of the aggressor.

Am I a military genius for recognizing this, or am I an idiot missing some crucial piece of information because this idea is just ignorant?

posted by SollosQ to Education (18 answers total)

Well, for one thing, there's that new study that says that after all, they may just be suicidal. It was also on the Blue a while back.

I don't know the psychology of the people who send them out, but for the bombers themselves, if they are suicidal to begin with, the idea of having their death make a difference is a huge motivator. They see their death as striking a blow. Perhaps being shot by an IDF soldier would be a better martyrdom, but that's not guaranteed, unless you go the "suicide by cop" route, which lessens the righteousness of your death.
posted by Hactar at 9:56 PM on January 20, 2011

A couple of possibilities (aka wild ass guesses) for why people throw rocks at people who are armed with firearms:

1. Rocks, slingshots, etc., are the only weapons they have
2. For whatever reason, those are the best tactics they know
3. They're angling to be perceived as David in a David vs Goliath conflict, knowing that many people almost reflexively root for the underdog (think the tank guy from Tiananmen Square)

Disclaimer: YMMV, IANASocialScientist, etc.
posted by AMSBoethius at 10:19 PM on January 20, 2011

For example, I'll watch videos of IDF soldiers with guns engaging Palestinian teenagers with slingshots. I just have to ask: Why are these Palestinian militants out and about tarnishing public opinion

1) How does throwing a rock at someone with a gun tarnish your image? Isn't the person with the gun also going to be tarnished?

2) What makes you think chaining themselves to their house, or whatever, will do any good?

In fact, Palestineans do engage in non-violent resistance as well, but it doesn't make the news.
posted by delmoi at 10:41 PM on January 20, 2011 [3 favorites]

tarnishing public opinion of their cause

You know, right-wing Zionist bloggers are not the sum total of "public opinion", for starters. Even in Western countries, polls show strong support for the Palestinian cause (broadly defined), and the continued occupation is very likely a strong factor in this. Israel routinely receives condemnation from United Nations resolutions in the General Assembly, and is only prevented from punishment by the Security Council by the American veto.

Second, asymmetric warfare is, well, asymmetric. They obviously do not have the military tools for direct head-to-head confrontation. But they do have the tools for what in chess is a "pin", and what in warfare is a means of tying up or draining the enemy's resources or morale. Palestine can afford -- can't afford not -- to play the long game, just as Afghans and the Taliban can just outwait the latest foreign empire to temporarily divert its attention their way. They all leave in the end. Palestinians and Arabs generally may believe that the Jewish State is a temporary aberration in the grand sweep of history; contrary to Western media portrayals, they know that the conflict only dates back to the nascence of Zionism in the late 19th century, and that open violence between Jews and Arabs is really only something that began in 1949, and that the occupation of the West Bank in the 1973 war is when the Israelis took on the role of imperial aggressor and shed the image of plucky underdog. It's living memory.

It's probably also something that is more the fever dream of Zionists than Arabs, but the latter are outbreeding the former at a great clip. It's already becoming a significant political problem for Israel to maintain its democracy and allow Israeli Arabs full democratic rights.

The Scots want to dissolve a union that dates back 350 years. Kosovo suffered under the Serbs for slights dating back to the 11th century. Not everyone's memory dates back only to the first season of Knight Rider.
posted by dhartung at 11:08 PM on January 20, 2011 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Asymmetric warfare has been proven to be tactically sound. As someone who deals with the subject from very close, I can assure you that it is not limited to the Israel/Palestinian arena. Industrial wars are by and by large a thing of the past; if you take a look at Operation Enduring Freedom or Iraqi Freedom, you will see that the toppling of a government can take less than a month but the ensuing turmoil breeds instability.

US Military doctrine also addresses the complexity of COIN (counter-insurgency) warfare and provides a viewpoint into just how complex it is (check this link out for more) . I would split current Palestinian resistance into three major trends: semi-conventional threat (Hamas buildup in Gaza with advanced anti-tank missiles and rockets which can reach Tel Aviv or Jerusalem), guerilla warfare (guns, knives and explosives) and local resistance. The local resistance, in the form of rock throwing etc, is extremely cheap for the Palestinians but wins their war; a soldier at a checkpoint has very little recourse when someone throws a cinder-block at him.

Until recently, physical defense against the Israeli threat was not tactically sound; Palestinian leaders rarely missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, screwing over the civilians for their own purposes. Most Arab governments rally around Israel as a talking point but do very little on a practical level to assist. So civilians were left frustrated and needed an outlet.

I say recently because the West Bank has seen marked improvement, following high levels of cooperation between Israel and the PA. Gaza Strip, with the radical Hamas in charge, seems like it will stay a problem for a long long time though.

/End rant.
posted by eytanb at 11:38 PM on January 20, 2011

Best answer: How does throwing a rock at someone with a gun tarnish your image?

I thought the OP meant 'why go blow up yourself and some civilians when you could be doing the David and Goliath thing like these teenagers and maybe winning public support?'
posted by obiwanwasabi at 2:31 AM on January 21, 2011

I would guess you are looking at things the wrong way. When simple things like throwing rocks or even just the act of being Palestinian can get you killed or arrested then why not use that martyrdom to take down some of the enemy. Why does a soldier in war attack in a hail of bullets to destroy the machine gun nest? Why attack Normandy when you know thousands will die?
posted by JJ86 at 6:05 AM on January 21, 2011

What makes you think chaining themselves to their house, or whatever, will do any good?

I know of at least one prime example of what non-violent protest can achieve.

This also makes good reading.
posted by dougrayrankin at 6:05 AM on January 21, 2011

Also understand that Israel = Palestine = their home that they are defending.
posted by JJ86 at 6:07 AM on January 21, 2011

Best answer: Press coverage is itself a resource for an insurgency, and there's only so much of it to go around. Things like suicide bombings help to initially capture attention in a way that chaining yourself to a building or throwing rocks really doesn't.

Also, insurgent tactics are intended to provoke fear in order to destabilize a government, and more violent and dramatic attacks with a larger group of casualties are better for this purpose than some sort of nonviolent resistance. Further, the individuals who are carrying out those attacks aren't the leaders of the organized resistance and are wholly expendable.

I think that it's a mistake to think of insurgency as necessarily having some larger agenda for running a government or defeating an enemy army. That's sort of the classical counterinsurgency/Maoist take on things, but in modern times it's often sufficient to just sow disorder and prevent a government from gaining any sort of legitimacy in the area. Creating this void of effective governance makes it easier for others to emulate and makes governance or even the maintenance of some low level of social order expensive.

Building public opinion and waiting for others to intervene only works when you have access to some sort of political clout.
posted by _cave at 6:22 AM on January 21, 2011

Factor in that any given Palestinian resistance fighter is unlikely to be at all educated, comsidering the state of their country. While it may make more tactical longterm sense to adop a more passive resistance, this is not going through the head of a man who wants to blow himself up.
posted by drethelin at 6:26 AM on January 21, 2011

Best answer: It's a bit difficult to parse your question; indeed, it would have been helpful if you had actually asked a coherent question. Purely from the start of your post I think the question is "Why do militant groups use suicide attacks and conduct attacks on civilians?", with your explicit assumption that such tactics are ineffective.

As part of the answer, I'd suggest reading Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape. In it, he analyses a set of suicide attacks from 1980 to 2004 and concludes that suicide terrorism has less to do with Islam as most people assume; indeed, Palestinian terrorist groups drew their inspiration for suicide vests from the Tamil Tigers. Indeed, Robert Pape concludes:

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland...suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism.

Robert Pape has a point; I mean, civilian attacks certainly worked for the Israelis in the leadup to their declaration of independence. Keep in mind that killing civilians cuts both ways, and indeed a fascinating example is yet again the Tamil Tigers. Once one of the most feared terrorist groups in the world they sported their own navy and air force, regularly conducted suicide attacks and even air strikes on Columbo, the capital of Sri Lanka. How does a democratic government defeat such a vicious, persistent, and effective terrorist group? After decades of conflict, by finally killing over 20,000 civilians in six months.
posted by asymptotic at 7:04 AM on January 21, 2011

I don't have any firm answers to your question, but I would recommend watching the 2005 film, Paradise Now, which explores this issue quite thoroughly.
posted by schmod at 7:56 AM on January 21, 2011

What makes you think chaining themselves to their house, or whatever, will do any good?

Well, it's the Israelis in the bulldozers, not Vogons.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:47 AM on January 21, 2011

Response by poster: Just for clarification: I don't mean non-violent methods of protest, but rather the military defense of the property that is clearly under your control at the moment (your houses that have not yet been encroached upon).

I suppose I just don't understand the whole modern insurgency and counter-insurgency tactics. For instance: consider U.S. counter-insurgency tactics, specifically in Vietnam. My understanding is one of the reasons why that conflict went as bad as we did, was because we were so focused on conventionality which was ill-suited against the unconventional guerrillas who had public support. The idea that I seem to keep leaning on was a report I read about a specific tactic that was used only in a few situations but never widely adapted despite its seemingly great success. This tactic was to attach a U.S. military unit to a village that would help out with their agricultural duties, as well as defend them. This exhibited an increase in U.S. and Vietnamese local support, because the Vietnamese people by and large just wanted to work and not get caught in the conflict and die.

Though this example is from a counter-insurgency perspective, I keep wanting to apply it to insurgency perspectives as well. Why don't the Naxalites stop hiding in the woods, coming out to do suicide attacks or civilian attacks, when they could attach themselves to villages and act in their best interest? Why don't the Palestinian militants stop doing the same thing, and come back to protect their current homes that are being resettled by the Israeli's. I'm not talking about chaining themselves to the house. They've obviously commited themselves to military action, so why don't they open fire (first as a warning obviously) on Israeli settlers, and then open fire on the military that then comes to enforce Israeli expansion? (Has this ever been done? It almost seems like at first this would be a success, and would deter further Israeli expansion because they'd be less wanting to expand. On the other hand, even if they do further their attempts at expansion, they'd face serious possibility of failure unless they move in in such a way (large scale military forces on a few defensive rebels) that one might realistically expect their to be international military support for Palestinian defense)

The first priority should be defense of current property, but it could then be expanded and argued for its legitimate application towards the recapture of property that was recently expropriated from them.
posted by SollosQ at 8:55 AM on January 21, 2011

Best answer: why don't they open fire (first as a warning obviously) on Israeli settlers, and then open fire on the military that then comes to enforce Israeli expansion?

A couple of reasons, first, take a look at the bulldozers Israel uses to knock down houses during a settlement project. As you can see, they are fully armored against small arms fire. They are part of the military. There's no stage in the process going on here with ripe unarmed civilian targets waltzing into potential danger zones for your freedom fighters to ambush. The settlers and the military work together. First the military comes in and wipes out any possible hiding places, rounds up all potential fighters and removes them from the area, dead or alive. THEN the settles come in, behind the boundaries of the blockades, the blockades that keep new potential fighters out of the conflict zone.


Why don't the Naxalites stop hiding in the woods, coming out to do suicide attacks or civilian attacks, when they could attach themselves to villages and act in their best interest?

Isn't that what everyone who lives in the village is already doing? It's not like these occupations are popular with the suppressed populations. They just have no power to resist effectively, hence the large quantities of small and 'useless' actions you decry. They don't have to win the hearts and minds of their fellow country men, and the hearts and minds of the world just don't care, as best they can tell.
posted by nomisxid at 9:57 AM on January 21, 2011

Best answer: The advantage of insurgency is that it doesn't gather a large group of armed people together that can be targeted by conventional military forces. In cases in Iraq where insurgents did try to get together to form large armed groups and were detected, they were often detected and killed.

An insurgency doesn't defeat anyone by itself--it delays and confuses its target about who and where the enemy is. It also motivates the use of coercion against the population in general, further estranging them from whatever government or force that's engaged in a counterinsurgency.

The disadvantage of dealing with the population directly as an insurgent is that you usually have to promise them things like security in order to get them to cooperate with you, and insurgencies often don't have the resources to come through on those promises. It's much more efficient to thwart governance than to organize a large-scale resistance, and if you do it well enough than the retaliation from the government does recruiting for you when they crack down.

There are a lot of atrocities that take place in the world that don't provoke international sanction. If I were a Palestinian insurgent, I wouldn't be holding my breath for the UN or some other agency to come to my rescue during some valiant last stand.

Galula and some other writers on counterinsurgency do a good job of explaining the logic behind this style of conflict
posted by _cave at 10:42 AM on January 21, 2011

Best answer: The first priority should be defense of current property, but it could then be expanded and argued for its legitimate application towards the recapture of property that was recently expropriated from them.

You're really hung up on this point, as if each individual parcel of land can have conventional military seize-and-hold doctrine applied to it. It's impossible. A conflict goes asymmetrical when one side is unable to militarily resist the other. If you could get some guys together to defend a single farm, a la Zulu, you'd simply draw a major military response from an enemy that has much greater resources and could either destroy you or in the process destroy the property.

That could easily define certain conflicts in the beginning (e.g. some elements of the Balkan war), but by the time what you're questioning is happening, that point is long since past. They'll just get encircled and defeated in detail, losing their primary resource, which is people willing to fight for the cause. Guerrillas develop because they engage quickly and melt away into the countryside or populace. Rock-throwing bands of teenagers don't win anything, but they harass the occupying force, require it to maintain a defensive posture, and prevent it from standing down and acting like a heavily armed police force. Rock-throwing, especially, is essentially a swarm attack -- too many enemy elements to engage effectively with the available weaponry. They rarely actually arrest the kids, they usually just fend them off with rubber bullets. And make them fearful of any civilian contact.

Your understanding of Vietnam is also somewhat oversimplified. (I recommend Karnow's history, and the documentary that inspired it.) The US actually operated a school of counterinsurgency doctrine it had learned in various Latin American interferences, and it was applied in different ways at different stages of the Vietnam action. In a strict sense, it worked, locally, but wasn't enough to win the overall war -- which was actually two types of war, an insurgency broadly supported by the Viet Cong and at the back of a supply chain, Russia and China, and a conventional war with tanks and infantry against the Army of the Republic of North Vietnam, which was also largely effective as long as we were willing to put US troops on the front line and accept high ground-war (and civilian) casualties. The war was lost, however, in the political arena of the illegitimacy of the South Vietnamese government and its overreaction against the insurgency, such that it became a government worse than the alternative of a communist takeover.

You need to understand the difference between tactics and strategy, and comprehend what works at what level and how it's possible to win the battle but lose the war. Another case in point: The Battle of Algiers (viewable on Netflix). The French won the counterinsurgency but lost the war by becoming illegitimate in the eyes of the populace, losing a territory they had thought of as part of "Metropolitan" France (the French political entity) for a century and a half.
posted by dhartung at 1:41 PM on January 21, 2011