Unconventional Wars and Weapons

Guerrilla Warfare

Guerrilla warfare got its name from the Spanish armed resistance to Napoleon's armies. Guerrillas are soldiers who live among the civilian population, usually supported by them (willingly or not), and operate by small, fast attacks against "conventional" forces and by sabotage. A conventional army usually has trouble defeating a guerrilla force because guerrilla soldiers disappear into the population when they aren't fighting.

Because it's often hard to tell the soldiers from the civilians--or, as in Vietnam, impossible--war against guerrilla forces (called "counter-insurgency warfare") doesn't involve battles as we usually understand them. A counter-insurgency force attacks not only the guerrilla forces, but the population which supports them. So, for instance, crops were destroyed in Vietnam to try to cut off the guerrillas' food supplies. Jungles were "defoliated" (sprayed with a powerful weed killer) to make it harder for the guerrillas to hide. Entire villages were evacuated and destroyed. And so on. The same kinds of tactics have been used by Soviet armies in Afghanistan, the Rhodesian army before majority rule in that country, and the South African army.

This isn't surprising. Many military experts think that one guerrilla can defeat as many as ten conventional soldiers by using stealth, harassment, and civilian support. Many others think that fighting guerrillas will be part of the main work of Western armies in the future. This is true not only of people in the peace movement, who oppose counter-insurgency war, but even of military thinkers who support it.

Terrorism

Political analysts often say that another form of unconventional warfare is terrorism. Terrorists and terrorist groups try to create fear by acts of random (or seemingly random) violence. It is an old political tactic with long historical roots (the "Assassins," for example, whose name gave us the word assassin, were a medieval Islamic terrorist group). In today's world, terrorists may use explosives, guns, or other modern weapons to attack buildings, political leaders, or innocent bystanders.

Terrorist attacks are not war by this book's definition, but as a CO you may be asked what you would do about terrorism. You don't have to have a solution to the problems of terrorism, political violence, and other violence in order to be a CO. Nobody really knows what to do about these problems.

Unconventional Weapons

Part of the rationale for the Persian Gulf War was the fear that Iraq had developed chemical (gas) and biological (germ) weapons and was trying to develop nuclear weapons. United Nations inspectors found no proof that Iraq had developed germ weapons, but in the late 1980s the Iraqi government actually used poison gas to suppress a revolt among its own people.

Iraq, however, was neither the first nor the only country to experiment with or use gas warfare. Armies on both sides used gas in World War I. Though outlawed by a Geneva convention following that war, gas remained in the arsenals of many countries. As this book went to press, the United States maintained a large stockpile of poison gas. The US military used tear gas in Vietnam. And both sides in the Cold War developed deadly gas for use in combat.

During the Cold War period the US also funded extensive research on germ warfare. Because much of this research was carried on in secret, no one knows exactly how extensive it was or what stockpiles, if any, of biological weapons the US maintains.

Both gas and germ warfare violate international law. Both would kill indiscriminately, and neither could be controlled once begun. Gas would eventually disperse into the air, polluting the atmosphere, but would cause a great deal of damage before it did. Disease, once launched on the population, might spread out of control and cause an epidemic. And, though both may never be used, they pose a threat to the public even if merely maintained in storage. A gas leak, for example, would cause great destruction without regard for whether it was wartime or peacetime.