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Abstract
The concept of military victory has become opaque and quite different from the days of the industrial wars. Full military victory through total annihilation of the enemy has yielded to more complex ways of achieving political objectives. Eventually the understanding of the fact that the war is unwinnable on martial terms shifts insurgent strategy to one of survival, normally peace talks. It is this very shift of strategy, albeit the absence of insurgent annihilation, that constitutes the core of military victory for the government. Politicians and decision makers, if not military forces, blinded by the victory idea of the past, are unable to understand this reality. Hence, when peace talks are held, they are approached as the end of conflict rather than a shift to war by other means. This gives the upper hand to the insurgents.
Notes
1. “Interview with Timoleon Jimenez, Leader of the FARC.”
2. Echeverria, Clausewitz and Contemporary War, 64.
3. Ibid., 177.
4. Ibid., 180.
5. Sigman, 1848: The Romantic and Democratic Revolutions of Europe, 43.
6. The Cold War concept, aptly abbreviated MAD, whereby the use of nuclear weapons by one or several of the contenders would trigger massive retaliation and the destruction of both sides.
7. See Marks, Maoist People’s War in Post-Vietnam Asia.
8. See Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung.
9. See Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions.
10. Mao used Lenin’s ideas to organize and inform his revolutionary war. However, due to the rural nature of his country, he replaced the idea of mobilizing workers, unions, and associations to obtain a social explosion with the mobilization of the peasantry to develop ‘people’s war’ or ‘popular protracted war.’ This type of war has been taken as a model by numerous groups to include some of today’s jihadist groups in the Middle East.
11. The way Mao’s war has been structured with an initial guerrilla phase has given affected governments the false idea that what they are facing are only small and dispersed gangs of criminals. They are unaware that what actually is going on is an ascendant strategy which is designed to transition to the war of movement (i.e. maneuver or mobile warfare involving rival military units). Thus several armies have been surprised. In El Salvador and arguably in the Philippines, both armies were taken to the brink of defeat, forcing their governments to introduce radical changes in their strategies, policies, and budgets.
12. Each phase is characterized by the way the insurgent armed force is applied. During the first phase, this force is utilized in the form of small guerrilla groups accompanied by ‘struggle’ in local areas, which is terrorism, though not termed as such by the perpetrators. With time, these groups, having through political action mobilized manpower, ‘regularize’, become copies of government units. This allows them to exercise force-on-force in maneuver warfare (also rendered by the Chinese as the war of movement, by the Vietnamese as main force warfare). Eventually, as required, light units will become heavy units, and conventional warfare will allow the seizing of territory, the war of position. If the situation reaches this level, it is very likely the insurgency will defeat the government and will seize power.
13. Called ‘objective conditions’ in the Marxist theory. According to the same theory, they are complemented by the ‘subjective conditions’ produced by the radicalization of the masses through the political action of the insurgent group.
14. See Debray, Revolution in the Revolution.
15. In this country, the failure of the revolutionary process was total. The failure included the death of the revolutionary icon, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, the originator of the foco theory. Guevara performed poorly, not only at the tactical but also at the strategic level. He showed little understanding of such basic principles of irregular war as adaptability, flexibility, and modernization despite his previous failure in the Congo. There, he had been forced to flee after his men became demoralized and useless for combat. Later, in Bolivia, he became isolated from any kind of support; and in his final combat, he was captured and later executed by his Bolivians captors.
16. Ho Chi Minh was the real leader of the Vietnamese revolutionary process. However, the writing part was done by Truong Chinh, and in the field, operations were conducted by the famous Vo Nguyen Giap, the same general who defeated the French at Dienbienphu.
17. The American general William Westmoreland commanded the troops in Vietnam between 1964 and 1968. He implemented a strategy that sought to push the main forces away from the populated areas while the Vietnamese forces engaged in counterinsurgency. Often misunderstood as a strategy of ‘Search and destroy,’ the attrition phase was necessary in a situation that had already reached ‘war of position’ prior to U.S. main force intervention in March 1965.
18. A much repeated anecdote was reported at the time of the signing of the treaty between the US and Vietnam, in which the withdrawal of the American troops from that country was agreed. An American representative, Harry Summers, told the North Vietnamese representative that the Vietnamese had never defeated the American troops in battle. The Vietnamese officer answered to the effect ‘that might be true, but in war it is irrelevant.’
19. One of the most insightful of them is Professor Antulio Echavarria, who, in spite of his opposition to the concept of fourth generation war, defined with great clarity the strategic concept of center of gravity in a new dimension. For further information see his Clausewitz’s Center of Gravity.
20. The rampant insecurity that affected the countryside in Colombia was reflected in the permanent fear amongst much of the peasantry. According to the Colombian Defense Ministry, during 2002, 2885 citizens were abducted in the countryside, an average of 8 per day.
21. Local newspapers, in particular el Tiempo from Bogota, were more concerned with making headlines and breaking news than in understanding the government’s strategy, and for this reason, they misguided their audiences, focusing upon the tactical, ignoring the strategic effects obtained through that strategy.
22. In 1961, during the IX Congress of the Communist Party of Colombia – and following the directives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that encouraged peaceful coexistence – this approach was adopted as part of further conspiratorial action. It was given priority over guerrilla war, which was considered supporting rather than primary.
23. Eduardo Pizarro Leon Gomez (a well-known Colombian analyst) defines FARC as a guerrilla party ‘working for a political project of a political party, which in turn has command and control over the guerrilla group.’
24. Ospina, A la Cima sobre los hombros del diablo, 228–30.
25. One of the conclusions of the FARC VII Conference was to implement massed actions against isolated detachments of the armed forces in order to obtain better results and demoralize the troops.
26. These are part of the conclusions of the FARC VII Conference. This was the most important of FARC’s conferences. It called for a protracted war to seize power.
27. This offensive was launched mainly in the city of San Salvador. After some days of hard fighting, the FMLN suffered high casualties and withdrew. However, it was an important step leading to the signing of the peace in El Salvador, the demobilization of the FMLN, and the end of the conflict.
28. This is linked to the quality of popular mobilization. If a strong peasant rate of mobilization can be sustained for a prolonged time, the war of movement can be prolonged. If it fails, the process will fail.
29. Through this technique FARC surprised and defeated military units in places such as las Delicias (Caquetá), el Billar (Caquetá),la Carpa (Guaviare), Paramo de Alizales (Nariño), San Juanito (Meta), Pavarando (Antioquia), and Mitu (Vaupes). During these actions, the military units were not only defeated but FARC was able of seize hundreds of troopers as hostages. Some of them spent prolonged periods of captivity that lasted a dozen years before they were rescued by the Colombian Army.
30. Orlando Restrepo, “Municipalities Without Police Stations Fight Back.” El Tiempo [Bogota], 9 July of 2000.
31. FARC’s leader, aka Tiro Fijo (Sure Shot), during several of FARC’s guerrilla conferences, complained about the lack of mobilization capacity showed by leaders and members of this insurgent organization.
32. This concept was developed by the French professor Michel Weiviorka in The Making of Terrorism. Therein, he explains ‘inversion’ as a process of evolution of an insurgent organization into a terrorist one.
33. Without enjoying popular support, the insurgents begin to see everybody as hostile and as potential enemies.
34. In this way, the deceased FARC guerrilla leader aka Mono Jojoy used to encourage his men to kill without further investigation those persons they considered as enemies of FARC.
35. Following this logic, a bomb was placed in the social club El Nogal in Bogota on 7 February 2003, killing 36 innocent civilians.
36. Several countries, such as the U.S. and the European Union, classified FARC as a terrorist organization because of these actions against innocent civilians.
37. In spite of this, during the peace process in Havana (Cuba) between the government and FARC, the terms were overwhelmingly favorable to FARC, to the point that the agreement was rejected in a plebiscite called by the president.
38. Thomas A. Marks has observed that the defeat and extermination of the Tamil Tigers was caused at least in part by the extreme radicalization of some of its militants, in particular of LTTE leader Prabhakaran. His determination to confront the Sri Lankan military frontally ultimately ceded to it the advantages of mobility, surprise, and flexibility. The result was LTTE’s decimation and, like Che, his own death.
39. Antonio Navarro, a former guerrilla leader of the also defeated M-19 insurgent movement, admitted that he and some of his guerrilla mates understood that fighting against the government was useless. He demobilized himself, was admitted as part of a political process, and sometime later was elected as mayor of a Colombian city, and further on as congressman.
40. He has been accused by his own guerrillas of authorizing the killings of approximately 300 of his men that were accused (but never proven) of being infiltrators.
41. To try to counter this problem, FARC leadership ordered the killing of those who displayed these symptoms. In this way, discipline was restored in some of the FARC Fronts and Bloques. There are no statistics on these killings, but some sources claim they were in the thousands.
42. Baron Colmar Von der Goltz, a well-known German Army strategist before the First World War, explained in The Conduct of War that as soon as both tactical and strategic defensive situations obtain for one of the parties, defeat is unavoidable. That was the situation that FARC was in after 2006 and the reason why it accepted peace talks in 2012.
43. This point is reached when one of the parties loses its strength. From that moment on, further efforts are useless, forcing the attacker to adopt a defensive posture to avoid the destruction of his forces. U.S. forces in Vietnam reached that point due to the reality that none of their military actions could change the fate of the war. FARC was in a similar situation after 2004.
44. The peasant soldiers program was structured to avoid the use of paramilitary forces or armed civilians. Normally, individuals were young males of the town or municipality they were entrusted to defend. They joined the army according to Law 1 of 1945 and were trained in a battalion, normally located close to the town or municipality. There, they became part of a regular company under military leadership. Their training lasted for 3 months, and when done they returned to guard their village for 18 months under military regulations and as part of the area control mission of their battalion. In case of attack, they were supported by the superior unit.
45. “Toribio, the People of War Who Do Not Sleep.”
46. Each was comprised of 1300 volunteer personnel who received much more intensive training than is the norm for draftees. Such units have as a defining characteristic mobility at both the strategic and tactical levels. A BRIM, with four line battalions, was assigned its own air mobility assets. Mobile brigades are perhaps one of the most remarkable products of Colombian doctrine in the struggle against irregular threats, especially FARC.
47. According to official statistics, the number of FARC casualties in 2004 was 5400, which included dead and deserters or captured. This trend continued in subsequent years until the opening of the peace talks in Havana (Cuba) in 2012.
48. Data researched by RCN (National Radio Company). Military figures said 17,000.
49. Some of hostages held by the FARC, such as Police general Herlindo Mendita, had to endure 12 years of captivity in the middle of the jungle while suffering all possible type of disease and humiliations.
50. This operation was launched in 2008. Utilizing electronic intelligence, the Colombian forces were able to deceive FARC through interception and penetration into its communications to the point that members of the Colombian intelligence ordered one FARC’s fronts to gather the hostages in an open area, where they would be transported via helicopter to FARC’s general headquarters. Unaware of the army’s maneuver, the guerrillas moved the hostages to the designated location, where an army helicopter and rescue team, posing as an international humanitarian commission in charge of the mobilization of the hostages, succeeded in putting all onboard, even inviting the group’s leader and the guerrilla in charge of the hostages to join the trip, achieving not only the rescue but capturing the leader and his second-in-command without a shot being fired. Furthermore, when the helicopter was taking off, the complete guerrilla unit turned into a group of well-wishers, waving farewell with their hands. Twenty minutes after the takeoff, they learned through radio breaking news that they have been fooled by the army and had lost their valuable hostages.
51. The lack of strategic guidance from the Secretariat caused the plans and the objectives of this organization to devolve into confusion as each Front advanced its own interpretations. This was another factor that contributed to the demoralization of the guerrillas.
52. Refer to Marks, “Terrorism as Method in Nepali Maoist Insurgency, 1996–2016,” 81–118.