Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits Read Online Free PDF

clear signs that it will be a time replete with, if not dominated by, irregular warfare. Of the few dozen conflicts ongoing around the world as this book is being written, almost all feature insurgents and terrorists posed against harried militaries trying to learn the ways of irregular warfare to counter them. But even as the soldiers catch up conceptually, the insurgents and terrorists make new advances. In short, the age-old pattern of action and reaction in military affairs persists, placing a premium on those with the greatest aptitude for the unconventional. The chapters that follow recount the stories of many of the great masters of irregular warfare. The lessons to be derived from their campaigns retain a signal value in this new age of conflict.
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    FRONTIERSMAN:
ROBERT ROGERS

Artist unknown
    What Winston Churchill once described as the true “first world war” 1 was at its height some 250 years ago. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) featured major field operations in Europe, where Britain’s hard-pressed ally, Frederick of Prussia, strove to fend off Austrian, French, and Russian armies. In India, French and British forces vied for control of the subcontinent, each side augmented by large—and surprisingly well-armed—indigenous fighters. In each of these theaters the battles were for the most part traditional, with serried ranks on both sides standing to and unleashing massed volleys of musketry at each other, punctuated by artillery barrages that cut gaping, bloody holes in the ranks. It was war as it had been known for some centuries since the advent of firearms. But in North America, where British and French regulars squared off yet again, and each side also had colonial levies and Indian allies, something else happened to warfare: it became highly irregular. While there were some pitched battles and sieges, there were also countless small engagements across a wilderness land the size of Western Europe. An army operating here had to master bush fighting.
    This meant, in the main, learning to move swiftly and stealthily over great distances through near-trackless forests, and by means of canoes and bateaux along lakes and rivers. In battle it meant setting ambushes and taking careful aim from covered positions, and staging lightning hit-and-run raids. How different this was from the set-piece massed field formations and the formal drill that attended the synchronized volley fire of proper European armies. Each side faced the challenge of this new mode of conflict, knowing from early on that mastery of the wilderness would decide the outcome of the war; but each met the challenge in different ways.
    French army regulars never developed much capacity for irregular warfare, retaining to the end their reliance on conventional fighting. This served them well in early battles and sieges but quite ill in the crucially important defense of Quebec (1759), where the Marquis de Montcalm chose a stand-up fight and lost both the city and his life. When it came to irregular operations, the French relied on the efforts of their numerous Native American allies and, to a lesser extent, on their own colonists—who were few in number, compared to the British settlers, 2 but better schooled in the ways of the forests. Despite these skills, many French-Canadian settlers were siphoned off to augment the conventional forces as “colonial regulars.”
    Thus a kind of divided force structure emerged, in which the irregulars engaged in reconnaissance and terroristic raids, and also served as protectors and guides for the regulars as they moved about the wilderness, among and between the line of forts that defended New France, and out from them on offensives against the British settlements. In pitched battles their Indian allies and colonial woodsmen were sometimes used in a manner that accentuated their unconventional strengths; but on some occasions they were employed in conventional fashion and performed not as well.