The Tribal Way Of War

In a post earlier today, I bemoaned, not for the first time, both the bankrptcy of our, the Israelis', indeed the West's, current "grand strategy" for winning its struggle with militant Islam and my own (indeed anyone's) inability to articulate an alternative. Not ten minutes after posting that, I came across a WSJ review of a book by Richard H. Shultz Jr. and Andrea J. Dew entitled "Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias." I obviously haven't read the book (yet), but if the review is accurate, this book may articulate, if not an actual alternative, then at least a persepctive that may be helpful in trying to formulate one.

The review starts with a much more cogent statement of the problem than I have yet been able to muster:

While the U.S. spends billions of dollars on sophisticated defense systems, the dime-a-dozen kidnapper and suicide bomber have emerged as the most strategic weapons of war. While we tie ourselves in legal knots over war's acceptable parameters, international law has increasingly less bearing on those whom we fight. And while our commanders declare "force protection" as their highest priority, enemy commanders declare the need for more martyrs. It seems that the more advanced we become, the more at a disadvantage we are in the 21st-century battlefield.

The reviewer might well have added that, "the more we punish them, the stronger they become."

According to the review, Shultz and Dew make the case that the reason for these apparent paradoxes is that we and our adversaries have very different understandings of the purposes of war and the rules that apply to it. They argue that, if we are to prevail in these conflicts, we need, as Sun Tzu's advised 2,500 years ago, to "Know your enemy" and tailor our strategy appropriately:

Forget Karl von Clausewitz's dictum that war is a last resort and circumscribed by the methodical actions and requirements of a state and its army. Forget Hugo Grotius's notion that war should be circumscribed by a law of nations. As the authors remind us, paraphrasing the anthropologist Harry Turney-High: "Tribal and clan chieftains did not employ war as a cold-blooded and calculated policy instrument. . . . Rather, it was fought for a host of social-psychological purposes and desires, which included . . . honor, glory, revenge, vengeance, and vendetta." With such motives, torture and beheadings become part of the normal ritual of war."

The point of the book, I gather, is that is that, for our current adversaires, what is seen as an appropriate causus belli as well as the rules that govern war once initiated are products of tribal culture and history and bear little relation to what has evolved into the "western way of war." For instance:

The Somali way of war--so startling to U.S. Army Rangers in Mogadishu in 1993--emerged from Somalia's late-19th-century Dervish movement, on which the country's top warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid, based his strategy. What the West viewed as fanaticism was merely the Somali proclivity for judging a man's character by his religious conviction and his physical ability to fight without limits. In the Somali worldview, our aversion to killing women and children was a weakness that could be exploited by using noncombatants as human shields.

"Cleary," the book admonishes, "the task of anticipating the enemy's tactics requires thinking that goes beyond Western moral categories."

I can't tell if the book actually proposes anything more concrete than the admonition to "know your enemy." However, even if not, that admonition coupled with some insight into particlur enemies, may be a starting point.

I have ordered the book.