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A review by mburnamfink
The American Way of Irregular War: An Analytical Memoir by Charles T. Cleveland, Daniel Egel
3.0
The American Way of Irregular War is a frustratingly vague entry in the counter-insurgency literature. General Cleveland knows what he's talking about, with a 37 year Army career in the Special Forces spanning field operations in South America to the senior levels of CENTCOM during the War on Terror and the Pentagon. His argument, that the United States government and military is poorly organized for irregular warfare, is undoubtedly true. But despite his long experience, he's unwilling to talk about what irregular warfare actually involves in a way that matches this civilian's understanding of the field.
Irregular Warfare is defined by a negative. It's anything short of mechanized industrial total warfare. Irregular warfare is population-centric, political in nature, and has major divisions between helping an allied state suppress militant groups, and supporting local opposition to states we oppose. The basic instrument of American irregular warfare is training and technical support, with the caveat that small groups of American soldiers are heavily armed enough that they make poor targets for hostile locals.
The best chapter of the book concerns Cleveland's involvement in the invasion of Panama. In 1989, dictator Manuel Noriega crossed over from CIA asset to liability, and was overthrown and arrested as the target of a US invasion. This worked because the US had longstanding relationships with many elements of Panamanian society, and were able to present the action as limited to Noriega's immediate ruling clique. There was even a democratically elected opposition president with wide support able to step in.
Conversely, the long and expensive War on Drugs has had a much more mixed outcome. While most South American countries are relatively peaceful and stable, in a strategic sense the drug cartels seem mostly unimpeded from doing business. It might not be the excesses of the 1980s, but drugs have won. And then there is the bleeding ulcer of West Asian policy, with trillion dollar failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, fiascos in Syria and Libya, a war in Yemen prosecuted by the Saudis with US weapons, and a general sense that the whole area is one crisis away from general conflagration.
In short, while the Special Forces have tactically never lost a battle, aside from the friendliest terrain their long-term campaigns have been inconclusive at best to outright failures. And while no one could have saved the Bush administration's criminally incompetent Iraq strategy, the lack of an institutional home for irregular warfare definitely makes Cleveland's job harder.
The recommendations, that irregular warfare should be promoted to either an independent armed service on par with the Marines or Space Force, or even an independent agency like the Office of Strategic Services which would subsume civilian irregular warfare task current run by CIA or the State Department, are okay, if you accept that the problem is basically bureaucratic and a better bureaucracy would do it's thing better (shades of Robert Komer).
Except, regardless of the label, I think the problem with irregular warfare is personal and political. Doing it well requires a certain kind of person, someone willing to live overseas for months to years in areas of great personal danger, someone capable of working with foreign politicians, soldiers, businessmen, criminals, terrorists, and war criminals, and getting them to sign on to American foreign policy when even a cursory reading of history shows that working with the Yankees is a great way to get hung out to dry. And ultimately, it requires the center of American hegemony to let these people drift away from stateside norms, without crossing the fatal line of Congressional oversight.
And until the American people stop lying to themselves about the shape of the American Empire which rules the world in their name, we'll keep screwing up the kinetic actions at its borders. It's easier to turn SOCOM into a targeted killing factory, or dump missile systems on Jihadists with an 'oops, we did it again', than it is to admit what America is.
Irregular Warfare is defined by a negative. It's anything short of mechanized industrial total warfare. Irregular warfare is population-centric, political in nature, and has major divisions between helping an allied state suppress militant groups, and supporting local opposition to states we oppose. The basic instrument of American irregular warfare is training and technical support, with the caveat that small groups of American soldiers are heavily armed enough that they make poor targets for hostile locals.
The best chapter of the book concerns Cleveland's involvement in the invasion of Panama. In 1989, dictator Manuel Noriega crossed over from CIA asset to liability, and was overthrown and arrested as the target of a US invasion. This worked because the US had longstanding relationships with many elements of Panamanian society, and were able to present the action as limited to Noriega's immediate ruling clique. There was even a democratically elected opposition president with wide support able to step in.
Conversely, the long and expensive War on Drugs has had a much more mixed outcome. While most South American countries are relatively peaceful and stable, in a strategic sense the drug cartels seem mostly unimpeded from doing business. It might not be the excesses of the 1980s, but drugs have won. And then there is the bleeding ulcer of West Asian policy, with trillion dollar failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, fiascos in Syria and Libya, a war in Yemen prosecuted by the Saudis with US weapons, and a general sense that the whole area is one crisis away from general conflagration.
In short, while the Special Forces have tactically never lost a battle, aside from the friendliest terrain their long-term campaigns have been inconclusive at best to outright failures. And while no one could have saved the Bush administration's criminally incompetent Iraq strategy, the lack of an institutional home for irregular warfare definitely makes Cleveland's job harder.
The recommendations, that irregular warfare should be promoted to either an independent armed service on par with the Marines or Space Force, or even an independent agency like the Office of Strategic Services which would subsume civilian irregular warfare task current run by CIA or the State Department, are okay, if you accept that the problem is basically bureaucratic and a better bureaucracy would do it's thing better (shades of Robert Komer).
Except, regardless of the label, I think the problem with irregular warfare is personal and political. Doing it well requires a certain kind of person, someone willing to live overseas for months to years in areas of great personal danger, someone capable of working with foreign politicians, soldiers, businessmen, criminals, terrorists, and war criminals, and getting them to sign on to American foreign policy when even a cursory reading of history shows that working with the Yankees is a great way to get hung out to dry. And ultimately, it requires the center of American hegemony to let these people drift away from stateside norms, without crossing the fatal line of Congressional oversight.
And until the American people stop lying to themselves about the shape of the American Empire which rules the world in their name, we'll keep screwing up the kinetic actions at its borders. It's easier to turn SOCOM into a targeted killing factory, or dump missile systems on Jihadists with an 'oops, we did it again', than it is to admit what America is.