The Origins of Guerrilla Doctrine

Abstract

The huge literature on guerrilla and counter guerrilla warfare published in the nineteen fifties and sixties was based almost entirely on the assumption that this phenomenon constituted a revolution in modern strategy. While it is perfectly correct that 'small war', partisan and guerrilla warfare had fallen into disregard in most industrial countries, it has, in fact, existed for a very long time; guerrilla fighting, for obvious reasons, predates warfare between regular armies.1 It has been argued that the history of guerrilla warfare begins with the Spanish insurrection against Napoleon since the partisans of previous ages were not politically inspired. But it cannot really be seriously maintained that the age of people's wars, of wars of 'national liberation' and of 'wars of opinion' begins in 1808, even if such wars had almost been forgotten in the eighteenth century. The present paper, part of a larger study on the history of guerrilla warfare, deals with the concepts of the theorists of small war between roughly 1750 and 1900, and their views on the utility and the limitations of partisan warfare. To regard these military thinkers as the precursors of modern guerrilla warfare is claiming both too much and too little. Too much, because only a few of them were concerned with the political implications of guerrilla warfare; too little, because from a 'technical' point of view they anticipated most present-day tactics and to regard them as mere forerunners is to belittle their part. The theory of small warfare (petite guerre) has its origins in the seventeenth century, being mainly based on the experience of the Thirty Years War, which, perhaps more than any other, had been a 'war without fronts', the Spanish War of Succession and the Wars of Frederick the Great. These early writings deal with the scope of the activities of relatively small detachments. The American War of Inde-