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11. The Inadequacies of Traditional Warfare
We have just studied ways to react against an opponent employing the methods of modern warfare on our own territory. But the means prescribed provide only for the destruction of forces the enemy has introduced or organized within our frontiers.
The enemy, however, before moving to open warfare, will attempt to assure himself of the support of one or more friendly, nonbelligerent foreign nations. There, he will set up important bases for training his troops and will install reserves of war materiel. This territory will very often serve as a base of departure for attacks launched into our territory. It is there that the enemy will, at the opening of hostilities, set up his command structure, and will shape it gradually into the provisional government he hopes to set up on our territory as soon as there is a large enough area conquered.
The fact that the state which supports our adversaries is a nonbelligerent one seems to place these bases beyond our range and leave the enemy completely free to receive without interruption the men and materiel that will permit him to supply his battle on our territory.
As long as this considerable war potential is not destroyed or neutralized, peace, even if completely restored within our own borders, will be precarious and in continual jeopardy.
The enemy's freedom of action beyond our frontiers is one of the factors determining the duration of the conflict. Material support and the assurance of strong and continuing aid from abroad are essential to maintaining a high morale among those fighting in our interior. Without external aid and the hope of an Allied landing, most of the French maquis under the occupation would not have been able to hold out under the pressure of the German attacks. And several more recent examples also demonstrate the importance that the support of a nonbelligerent state in modern warfare can have on the outcome of a conflict.
Greece was unable to crush the Communist attack until Yugoslavia, having left the Soviet camp, no longer served as a support base to the armed bands fighting on Greek soil. The principal error of the French in Indochina was not to have made enough of an effort to gain a victory before the arrival of Chinese Communists at the Tonkin frontier. From then on, the Vietminh were able to make use of important bases in China, where they could freely provision themselves and where their large units could be formed and trained. The character of the war immediately changed. It was lost for the French, who were no longer capable of supplying, so far from home, a theater of operations that had so increased in complexity.
The destruction or neutralization of enemy bases on foreign territory is essential if we are to hasten the end of hostilities and ensure a durable peace.
The simplest solution is to obtain diplomatic assurances that neighboring states will not contribute assistance to the enemy. But since the Spanish Civil War, in particular, different ideologies have divided the great world powers into opposed camps. Our ideological opponents will, under various guises, give our enemies greater or lesser aid, according to their capabilities and their geographic situation, but, in any case, they will support them.
Moreover, by the very fact of the present interdependence of nations, any revolutionary movement in any country will be exploited by others for their own ends. The Soviet bloc, in particular, will do everything possible to feed a conflict susceptible of weakening the opposing camp. The enemy will undoubtedly seek support in a country where diplomatic action will have no chance of success.
Moreover, by the very fact of the present interdependence of nations, any revolutionary movement in any country will be exploited by others for their own ends. The Soviet bloc, in particular, will do everything possible to feed a conflict susceptible of weakening the opposing camp. The enemy will undoubtedly seek support in a country where diplomatic action will have no chance of success.
In a defensive endeavor of this kind, the task of the navy is to guard the sea frontiers. Guided by an effective intelligence service, it is able to intercept suspect ships, even on the high seas. Its action can thus considerably interfere with the enemy's supplies. But this will not succeed in cutting off contraband in arms and other war materiel indispensable to him. To keep a close watch on the ports and coasts is the responsibility of the civil authority. But this involves great problems because of the number of administrative areas concerned, and because of the volume of the traffic to be controlled, particularly in the large ports. Also, rigorous regulation delays a country's own supplies and for this reason is not practical.
By day, the air force can ensure the effective surveillance of land and sea frontiers, and can even attack enemy supply convoys when they cross the frontier. At night, however, its role is much reduced. It cannot stop parachute drops of materiel or agents, not even in closely watched areas, which can escape our control for sufficiently long periods.
Guarding the frontiers on the ground is even more difficult to realize. We know that guerrillas use essentially light war materiel and use it sparingly. Even if we succeed in cutting off their main penetration routes, there are still the little mountain paths known only to experts. We can rarely cut them off entirely.
Even the fortified perimeter along the edge of the Tonkin delta, established at great cost by General de Lattre in 1950-51, did not succeed in impeding regular exchanges between the Vietminh units infiltrated into the delta. They continued to receive all their military provisions from the outside, and saw to it that their comrades, installed around the perimeter or in the Upper Region, got their needed rations of rice. We were never able to stop that traffic.
In Algeria, drawing on past experience, we have managed to set up a fragile, but tight, barrier of indisputable effectiveness. If our opponents are stalemated, if they have not been successful in creating guerrilla units larger than company size, it is in large part because the border fence has not permitted them to receive the supplies vital to the normal development of their activities. The guerrilla operates sporadically, intending more to maintain his hold over the rural population than to disturb the forces of order. It is therefore more toward terrorism in the cities that they have bent their efforts, principally because this type of action calls for a minimum of materiel.
This is why hostilities in Algeria are stalled. The adversary is counting on the proven inability of France to pursue a costly and seemingly interminable conflict, permitting him ultimately to attain his war aims.
But the barrier possesses the serious defect of all defensive organizations. There is no secret about its location; the enemy can observe it functioning and detect its weaknesses.
At irregular intervals, sporadic attacks in small force, never pressed to a culmination, are enough to immobilize large numbers of troops. Moreover, the ease with which these forays can be repulsed develops a false sense of security, which can be very dangerous. We must never permit ourselves to be decoyed. The enemy will profit from these repeated forays to maintain the offensive spirit of their troops and to study our reactions. Only when they have assembled the necessary men and materiel to force the barrier will they really attack.
The lesson of Dien Bien Phu should not be forgotten. The camp's entrenched garrison believed itself secure behind its extensive barbed-wire network, which in some places ran more than fifty yards in depth. The troops readily looked forward to a mass enemy attack, which they thought themselves capable of easily repulsing. By the time their attack was finally unleashed, the Vietminh had had plenty of time to appreciate the true value of the defensive system, and they brought together the means necessary for a breakthrough.
No doubt the barrier has a certain value, but it has no effect on the combat potential the enemy can rally together with impunity along the frontiers.
Formerly, particularly during the nineteenth century, when armed bands crossed the frontier of French overseas possessions they were followed. If necessary, the country giving them refuge was attacked and quite often brought to submission. Agreements among a few of the great powers were sufficient to localize a conflict, usually a simple incident our army had the capability of quickly concluding. Today, because of the power of international organizations and the intricacies of world problems, this kind of intervention would lead to reactions throughout the entire world, and certainly to an unpredictable extension of the conflict.
But follow-up action remains the normal reflex of the traditional military man. Actually, if enemy bases outside our territory are close to the frontiers, sometimes within range of our heavier weapons, they are a tempting target, certainly easy to reach and destroy. Let us consider the effects of an air attack against these bases and a traditional attack by ground forces supported by aviation and artillery.
An air attack offers the advantage of secret preparation and rapid execution. It will, however, have decisive results only if it is massive. Therefore, it requires considerable resources. There is an element of surprise only during the first bombardments; dispersion and then camouflage quickly make them less profitable. Despite precise information, targets will be progressively more difficult to define. They will often be located close to built-up areas, which must bear the brunt of the bombardments.
Finally, aerial attacks do not permit the realization of desired objectives. They accord our enemies complete freedom to present the facts in the manner most favorable to them—the number of civilian victims are considerably exaggerated and the military results minimized. A bombing run is transformed by unfavorable propaganda into a terrorist raid that the enemy press can exploit. Even a large part of the French press exploited the only bombing attack the French Army in Algeria ever carried out—the one in February, 1958, on the F.L.N. base of Sakhiet Sidi Youssef, near the Tunisian frontier.
A conventional attack against enemy bases by ground forces also presents disadvantages. The fact is that the crossing of the frontier of a state by a regularly constituted army is a casus belli. It is equivalent to a declaration of war, and international usage would definitely designate us as the aggressor.
Modern warfare has not been codified. Innumerable attacks can be committed in a country by a powerful enemy combat force; armed bands based abroad can regularly cross a frontier and harass the army of a neighboring country in order to overthrow its regime—and none of these is a casus belli. Terrorists and armed bands can always be deceptive to the eyes of observers uneducated to the conditions of modern warfare, or to persons who are merely of bad faith. But the traditional army with its great numbers of troops, its heavy materiel, slow to move about and impossible to hide, can never pass unobserved.
A ground attack in sufficient strength, carried out with determination, would most certainly produce initial good results. Most of the storage points situated near our frontiers could be destroyed or captured; a significant portion of the enemy forces could be annihilated or captured, but never all of them. Adept at guerrilla warfare, elements we cannot attack or which have succeeded in fleeing, benefiting from the support of the people to whom we appear as the aggressor, would find refuge in areas inaccessible to our heavy equipment.
Without gaining any decisive advantage, we would considerably widen the dimensions of a battlefield we already find difficult to manage. But, above all, we would give the enemy unexpected support on the international plane, support awaiting only a favorable occasion to manifest itself openly against us.
If it is indispensable to destroy these bases abroad that are essential to our enemies, it is certainly not methods of traditional warfare we should employ. Attacked on our own territory with the methods of modern warfare, we must carry the war to the enemy with the same methods.