Paradigm shifts and the Malayan Emergency
I'm currently half-way through a fascinating book called The Utility of Force by the retired general Rupert Smith. I'll blog about it at greater length when I've finished it, but for now, here are a couple of IITESKAs to warm up:
Paradigm Shifts: On the one hand, probably everyone's heard of these. On the other hand, it's possible that the term has been so debased by its use as a management buzzword that the actual content of the idea has been lost. The idea was introduced in Thomas Kuhn's much-cited but little-read 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and goes something like this: a paradigm is the overarching theory used by practitioners in a scientific discipline to make sense of their subject-matter. An example would be Newtonian physics, or rather the Newtonian conception of space, time and matter. If you like, it's the meta-theory on which they hang all their other ideas. This being science, there will always be anomalies - observations that don't really fit with the paradigm - but these will largely be ignored or explained away. After a while the anomalies build up until they can't be ignored (or one or two dramatic results turn up), and the whole paradigm is thrown into crisis. At this point other paradigms are tried out, and there is a struggle for acceptance among the new candidate paradigms. This process is usually not pretty - defenders of the old paradigm are usually very unhappy about these unnecessary-seeming newfangled ideas, and they're the ones with the power and respect. But eventually, the merits of the new paradigm become accepted (often when the last hold-outs of the old way die), and it becomes the standard world-view of practitioners in the field. The field is then said to have undergone a paradigm shift. Until one day, the anomalies in the new view build up to a point where they can't be ignored, and then...
The classic example is the change from a Newtonian world-view to a relativistic world-view at the beginning of the twentieth century: new observations were found to be increasingly difficult to integrate into Newtonian theory, and eventually our whole conception of the nature of space and time had to be re-thought. There are other examples, such as the change from a Ptolemaic (geocentric) view of the cosmos to a Copernican (heliocentric) view - the trials suffered by Galileo could be considered an extreme case of the difficulties suffered by all advocates of new paradigms. There are some more examples at the Wikipedia page, which to be honest probably explains the whole thing better than I've done.
Kuhn himself stressed that his theory (paradigm?) of paradigm shifts only applied to the hard sciences, but it can be useful as an approximation to other fields. The thesis of Smith's book is that warfare has undergone a paradigm shift since 1945: the old paradigm of interstate industrial warfare has given way to what he calls "war among the people". Unfortunately, Western militaries and (in particular) Western politicians are still thinking in the old paradigm, whereas our enemies have adapted much more successfully. This explains why Western militaries keep losing to forces that are so inferior in technology, firepower, etc. He makes an excellent case for a Kuhnian interpretation of the history of warfare, and an equally excellent case that there was a paradigm shift in response to the Napoleonic Wars - in order to counter Napoleon's strategic innovations, the allies (and in particular the Prussians) were forced to completely change the way they thought about war and force structure. michiexile may be amused to hear that the equivalent of the Michelson-Morley experiment was probably the Battle of Jena :-) This new thinking was formalized by Carl von Clausewitz, and spread throughout the European armies (in response to the 0wn4ge that the Prussians were able to exert).
Smith's view doesn't seem to be universally accepted among military thinkers: this morning on the radio some Air Chief Marshal* whose name I didn't recognize was saying that Britain's defence spending as a percentage of GNP is now at the lowest it's been since 1920, and this is impacting our ability to conduct "high-intensity warfare", which he claims is the essential use-case. Smith would no doubt claim that high-intensity warfare is basically obsolete as a result of nuclear weapons, and we ought to be thinking about restructuring our forces to deal with war among the people (and possibly saving money as we do so - aircraft carriers - hell, all surface ships - are probably obsolete, for instance). Anyway, then Tim Garden (a retired Air Marshal himself) came on and made the not-unreasonable suggestion that our forces are currently horribly overstretched and have been for the last seven years, and we should (a) decide how much we want to pay for our Armed Forces and (b) only conduct the military operations we can afford.
Mathematics, I think, undergoes paradigm shifts: for instance, the isolation of the concept of groups prompted one, as did the invention of topology (which was considered deeply suspect for a long time after its invention). I reckon that pure maths is currently undergoing a shift from a set-theoretic paradigm to a category-theoretic paradigm, but then as a category theorist, I would think that :-)
Now, this next bit is way outside my area of expertise, but here goes:
The Malayan Emergency: This is the textbook example of Counterinsurgency Warfare Done Right. Literally textbook: as one of the very few examples of counterinsurgency wars where the counterinsurgents actually won, it's studied in military academies all round the world for the lessons it can teach. The details are here, but for our purposes the following summary is adequate: it was a guerrilla war in the Malayan peninsula from 1948 to 1960, between the British, Malayan and Commonwealth forces and the armed wing of the Malayan Communist Party, dubbed the CTs ("Communist Terrorists"). The Commonwealth forces basically did everything right:
[Lest anyone think I'm being too jingoistic, I should point out that at the same time we were fighting the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, which was pretty much a textbook example of how not to do counterinsurgency - summary executions, concentration camps, Dogs of War-style irregular forces, torture, rape used as a weapon of intimidation - nasty stuff.]
* For those of you not familiar with the RAF rank structure, an Air Chief Marshal is an Air Force officer equivalent in rank to a full general or admiral.
** War Nerd is Gary Brecher, the War Correspondent for the expat magazine exile.ru. By his own account, he's a fat guy in California with an internet connection and an unhealthy interest in all things military. Some of his beliefs are pretty unpleasant, but he consistently manages to out-guess all the pundits, and provides well-informed background on modern-day and historical conflicts. Go read.
Paradigm Shifts: On the one hand, probably everyone's heard of these. On the other hand, it's possible that the term has been so debased by its use as a management buzzword that the actual content of the idea has been lost. The idea was introduced in Thomas Kuhn's much-cited but little-read 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and goes something like this: a paradigm is the overarching theory used by practitioners in a scientific discipline to make sense of their subject-matter. An example would be Newtonian physics, or rather the Newtonian conception of space, time and matter. If you like, it's the meta-theory on which they hang all their other ideas. This being science, there will always be anomalies - observations that don't really fit with the paradigm - but these will largely be ignored or explained away. After a while the anomalies build up until they can't be ignored (or one or two dramatic results turn up), and the whole paradigm is thrown into crisis. At this point other paradigms are tried out, and there is a struggle for acceptance among the new candidate paradigms. This process is usually not pretty - defenders of the old paradigm are usually very unhappy about these unnecessary-seeming newfangled ideas, and they're the ones with the power and respect. But eventually, the merits of the new paradigm become accepted (often when the last hold-outs of the old way die), and it becomes the standard world-view of practitioners in the field. The field is then said to have undergone a paradigm shift. Until one day, the anomalies in the new view build up to a point where they can't be ignored, and then...
The classic example is the change from a Newtonian world-view to a relativistic world-view at the beginning of the twentieth century: new observations were found to be increasingly difficult to integrate into Newtonian theory, and eventually our whole conception of the nature of space and time had to be re-thought. There are other examples, such as the change from a Ptolemaic (geocentric) view of the cosmos to a Copernican (heliocentric) view - the trials suffered by Galileo could be considered an extreme case of the difficulties suffered by all advocates of new paradigms. There are some more examples at the Wikipedia page, which to be honest probably explains the whole thing better than I've done.
Kuhn himself stressed that his theory (paradigm?) of paradigm shifts only applied to the hard sciences, but it can be useful as an approximation to other fields. The thesis of Smith's book is that warfare has undergone a paradigm shift since 1945: the old paradigm of interstate industrial warfare has given way to what he calls "war among the people". Unfortunately, Western militaries and (in particular) Western politicians are still thinking in the old paradigm, whereas our enemies have adapted much more successfully. This explains why Western militaries keep losing to forces that are so inferior in technology, firepower, etc. He makes an excellent case for a Kuhnian interpretation of the history of warfare, and an equally excellent case that there was a paradigm shift in response to the Napoleonic Wars - in order to counter Napoleon's strategic innovations, the allies (and in particular the Prussians) were forced to completely change the way they thought about war and force structure. michiexile may be amused to hear that the equivalent of the Michelson-Morley experiment was probably the Battle of Jena :-) This new thinking was formalized by Carl von Clausewitz, and spread throughout the European armies (in response to the 0wn4ge that the Prussians were able to exert).
Smith's view doesn't seem to be universally accepted among military thinkers: this morning on the radio some Air Chief Marshal* whose name I didn't recognize was saying that Britain's defence spending as a percentage of GNP is now at the lowest it's been since 1920, and this is impacting our ability to conduct "high-intensity warfare", which he claims is the essential use-case. Smith would no doubt claim that high-intensity warfare is basically obsolete as a result of nuclear weapons, and we ought to be thinking about restructuring our forces to deal with war among the people (and possibly saving money as we do so - aircraft carriers - hell, all surface ships - are probably obsolete, for instance). Anyway, then Tim Garden (a retired Air Marshal himself) came on and made the not-unreasonable suggestion that our forces are currently horribly overstretched and have been for the last seven years, and we should (a) decide how much we want to pay for our Armed Forces and (b) only conduct the military operations we can afford.
Mathematics, I think, undergoes paradigm shifts: for instance, the isolation of the concept of groups prompted one, as did the invention of topology (which was considered deeply suspect for a long time after its invention). I reckon that pure maths is currently undergoing a shift from a set-theoretic paradigm to a category-theoretic paradigm, but then as a category theorist, I would think that :-)
Now, this next bit is way outside my area of expertise, but here goes:
The Malayan Emergency: This is the textbook example of Counterinsurgency Warfare Done Right. Literally textbook: as one of the very few examples of counterinsurgency wars where the counterinsurgents actually won, it's studied in military academies all round the world for the lessons it can teach. The details are here, but for our purposes the following summary is adequate: it was a guerrilla war in the Malayan peninsula from 1948 to 1960, between the British, Malayan and Commonwealth forces and the armed wing of the Malayan Communist Party, dubbed the CTs ("Communist Terrorists"). The Commonwealth forces basically did everything right:
- They denied the guerrillas the support of the population, "draining the sea" in which they "swam", by relocating over 400,000 people to secure villages with round-the-clock sentries. Unlike other times this has been tried, however, they granted the inhabitants the ownership of the land on which they now lived, giving them some stake in the new village.
- More generally, they gave the oppressed Chinese minority (who made up most of the CT's supporters) rights that they hadn't previously enjoyed, like the rights to vote and own land.
- They announced early on and credibly that they were leaving when the insurgency was suppressed, and thus held out a more attractive prospect than that offered by the MCP.
- They established a school of jungle warfare to ensure that their troops were able to move and fight in the jungle at least as effectively as the CTs.
- They conducted an extensive hearts and minds campaign, especially among the Chinese minority and the tribes who lived in the deep jungle, so that they would be less likely to support the CTs. I am particularly enamoured of the image of SAS guys materializing out of the jungle, handing out medicine and setting the odd broken leg, and melting away again (the Malayan campaign did much to form the ethos of the post-WW2 SAS).
- They conducted an extensive intelligence-gathering campaign.
- Wikipedia doesn't support this, but I have heard that they made efforts to prevent human rights abuses by their forces: for instance, that off-duty officers were encouraged to sit in on interrogations to ensure they were conducted properly.
- They had long experience of Malaya and the culture and ethnic tensions in the region
- They had recent extensive experience of jungle warfare from fighting the Japanese in World War 2 (so did the CTs, and for the same reason, but hey)
- It was a comparatively small insurgency: only 7000 guerillas were killed throughout the whole war, as opposed to over 50,000 insurgents killed or captured in Iraq in 2004 alone (source: War Nerd, who doesn't give a proper citation; I'd be interested to know how many of those were actual insurgents...) Of course, the fact that the insurgency stayed small can be attributed to strategic success by the Commonwealth forces.
- Best of all, the insurgents and their supporters were almost exclusively drawn from the Chinese minority. Which is to say that the guerrillas looked physically different from everyone else. This is basically as good as it gets.
[Lest anyone think I'm being too jingoistic, I should point out that at the same time we were fighting the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, which was pretty much a textbook example of how not to do counterinsurgency - summary executions, concentration camps, Dogs of War-style irregular forces, torture, rape used as a weapon of intimidation - nasty stuff.]
* For those of you not familiar with the RAF rank structure, an Air Chief Marshal is an Air Force officer equivalent in rank to a full general or admiral.
** War Nerd is Gary Brecher, the War Correspondent for the expat magazine exile.ru. By his own account, he's a fat guy in California with an internet connection and an unhealthy interest in all things military. Some of his beliefs are pretty unpleasant, but he consistently manages to out-guess all the pundits, and provides well-informed background on modern-day and historical conflicts. Go read.