America has just withdrawn its B-1 bombers from their base at RAF Fairford, retreating in the face of a threat that remains unclear. Nobody has shot the bombers down, nobody has attacked the base and Iran denies that it was planning to do so. But intelligence suggesting that the aircraft and the people operating them might be attacked was apparently enough to persuade the Americans to move them back across the Atlantic. The most powerful military in the world has been forced to change the way it fights by an enemy which has no conceivable prospect of defeating it in a conventional war.
This isn’t the first time this has happened.
For most of the period between the Seven Years’ War and the Second World War Britain was the world’s dominant military power, and we were remarkably good at it. Not invincible, obviously; the British Army suffered some spectacular defeats, we made a complete mess of Afghanistan, the Boers embarrassed us at Majuba Hill and, most significantly, we lost thirteen colonies on the other side of the Atlantic. But from Pondicherry to Waterloo, and across an empire which eventually covered almost a quarter of the world’s land surface, Britain won an extraordinary number of the wars it fought. More importantly, it usually managed to achieve whatever political objective had persuaded it to go to war in the first place.
Then, after the Second World War, America replaced Britain as the dominant military power and something odd happened. America started losing wars. This is particularly strange because America enjoyed a level of military superiority Britain could only have dreamed of. Britain usually had better ships, better organisation, more money and increasingly better weapons than the people it was fighting, but the difference was nothing like the gulf between the United States and the Taliban. America had satellites, nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, stealth bombers, drones, cruise missiles and precision-guided weapons. The Taliban had Toyota Hiluxes. Twenty years after America drove them out of Kabul, the Americans left Afghanistan and the Taliban drove back in. So what changed?
Mao and Protracted War
Oddly enough, part of the answer can be found in a book written by Mao Zedong in 1938. I read On Protracted War at university, which sounds considerably more impressive than it actually is, because the important idea in it is remarkably simple. If the people you are fighting are much stronger than you are, don’t fight the war they want you to fight. You don’t actually have to defeat a more powerful enemy on the battlefield, you have to stop them winning. Keep your army alive, keep fighting, make the war expensive and difficult and wait until the other side decides that whatever it hoped to achieve isn’t worth the cost of achieving it. Time becomes a weapon.
There is another part of Mao’s strategy which is just as important, but tends to get rather less attention: the anti-Japanese base areas. When the Red Army liberated an area from the Japanese, the soldiers didn’t just hide in the hills waiting for the Japanese Army to turn up again. They repaired roads, helped farmers and established local administration. This wasn’t simply Mao being nice to peasants, it was military strategy. If the local population thinks your presence makes their lives better, they are considerably less likely to tell the occupying army where you are. More importantly you have begun to create an alternative state. The enemy may control the capital, the railways and the main roads. It may have aeroplanes and artillery you cannot hope to match. But if you control what happens in the villages, things start to become rather more complicated.
Mao Was on Our Side
There is also something we tend to forget about Mao in 1938. He was on our side. China was fighting Japan and Mao’s Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists had temporarily stopped fighting each other because both were fighting the Japanese. When America entered the Second World War, Mao and Roosevelt found themselves with the same enemy. The American commander in China was General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who developed an almost magnificent contempt for Chiang Kai-shek, whom he privately called “Peanut”. Stilwell thought Chiang was saving his best troops and American equipment for the civil war he knew would restart once Japan had been defeated, and he was much more impressed by what Mao’s forces were actually doing.
American observers were eventually sent to Mao’s headquarters at Yan’an as part of something called the Dixie Mission, partly to find out whether the Communists could make a bigger contribution to defeating Japan. Edgar Snow had been telling a similar story to Western readers since Red Star Over China appeared before the war. There is a wonderful painting by the Chinese artist Shi Xinning called Yalta No. 2, which recreates the famous photograph of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, except that Mao is sitting there with them. Mao wasn’t at Yalta, obviously, but that is why the picture is so clever. The history it depicts is false, but not quite as absurd as it initially looks. Mao really was fighting on our side, and the military strategy he developed while fighting our enemy was about to cause the West an enormous amount of trouble.
Vietnam
The person who demonstrated that most effectively was Võ Nguyên Giáp. The Vietnamese took Mao’s ideas and used them first against the French and then against the Americans. Once again the difference in military power was ridiculous. The Americans could bomb North Vietnam almost at will. They dropped millions of tonnes of bombs across Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and killed vastly more Vietnamese than the Vietnamese killed Americans. None of that answered the important question: how did America win? North Vietnam didn’t need to invade the United States, sink the US Navy or destroy the American Army. It needed to still be there when America decided it had had enough. America left in 1973. Two years later North Vietnamese tanks entered Saigon.
By then the trick was out of the bag. You didn’t have to be a Communist, or even have read Mao, to understand it, although, amusingly, we know that some of al-Qaeda’s military thinkers actually had read Mao and Giáp. The ideological distance between Chinese Communism and Islamic fundamentalism apparently wasn’t enough to prevent them borrowing useful ideas from one another. The Soviet Union then discovered the same problem in Afghanistan. The Mujahideen never defeated the Red Army in anything resembling a conventional war, they simply made Afghanistan sufficiently expensive and unpleasant that after nine years Moscow decided to leave.
You Don’t Have to Beat America
America got a much shorter demonstration in Somalia. Eighteen American soldiers died in Mogadishu in 1993. The United States could have sent another 18,000 soldiers and it could have flattened Mogadishu if it had wanted to, but that wasn’t the point. The question was why it should. The political calculation had changed and the Americans left.
Then came Iraq, where America demonstrated just how extraordinarily good it had become at conventional warfare. Saddam Hussein’s army was destroyed with almost embarrassing speed and Baghdad fell within weeks. On 1 May 2003 George W Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and delivered a speech beneath an enormous banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. There are photographs which improve with age, and that is one of them, because America had indeed accomplished the easy mission. It had destroyed the Iraqi Army and removed Saddam Hussein. It was the difficult mission that was about to begin.
The insurgency that followed produced al-Qaeda in Iraq, which eventually became Islamic State. ISIS took the base-area idea rather literally. Instead of merely hiding among the population it captured cities, collected taxes, operated courts and attempted to run a state. When Western air power made holding that territory impossible, the organisation didn’t obligingly disappear, it reverted towards insurgency. Something similar happened with al-Qaeda in Yemen: capture territory, establish local authority, get driven out by overwhelming firepower, disperse and establish yourself somewhere else. Destroying the base is not necessarily the same thing as destroying the organisation.
Afghanistan remains the masterpiece. America removed the Taliban government in 2001 and then spent twenty years trying to ensure it could never return. The Taliban had no air force, no satellites, no cruise missiles, no aircraft carriers and nothing remotely comparable to the technology available to the United States. What it had was time. Twenty years later America left and the Taliban went back to Kabul. The world’s most powerful military had spent two decades defeating an enemy which ultimately won by refusing to be defeated.
Even Mao Couldn’t Always Make It Work
There is an interesting counterexample to all of this, and it is Mao himself. When China entered the Korean War in 1950 it initially did remarkably well. Chinese forces drove the Americans and their allies away from the Chinese border and prevented the destruction of North Korea, but the war gradually became something much more conventional. When Chinese armies fought the sort of war America’s enormous superiority in artillery and air power was designed for, they suffered appalling casualties for remarkably little territorial gain. Eventually the front stabilised roughly around where Korea had been divided before the war. Even Mao discovered that his strategy worked rather better when the weaker side could determine what sort of war it was going to fight.
George Washington Had Already Worked It Out
There is, however, a rather large hole in my argument, and it is Britain. If Mao had discovered the secret to defeating a much more powerful country in 1938, how do we explain Britain’s biggest defeat 150 years earlier?
The answer is George Washington. Washington couldn’t reliably beat the British Army either, so increasingly he stopped trying. His strategy is usually described as Fabian, after the Roman general Fabius Maximus, who realised that the sensible response to Hannibal was not to keep giving him armies to destroy. Washington could lose New York, he could lose Philadelphia and he could lose battles. The thing he couldn’t afford to lose was the Continental Army. As long as that army still existed, Britain hadn’t won.
Britain had the much harder job. It had to cross the Atlantic, defeat the rebellion and restore effective government across thirteen colonies. Washington just had to stop us doing it. Eventually France joined the war and transformed the military balance, but the underlying problem had already been established: Britain could keep winning battles and still lose the war. Which means America was actually founded using something remarkably similar to the strategy which would cause it so much trouble two centuries later. Mao didn’t invent the idea, he explained it.
Mission Accomplished. Again.
Which brings us to Iran. America’s first problem in Iran is that it isn’t entirely clear what winning means. America followed Israel into the war without anything resembling the sort of clear political objective against which victory could eventually be measured. Was the purpose to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme, its missiles, its ability to threaten Israel, its regional influence or its government? Donald Trump has suggested versions of all of these. This does have one enormous advantage. If you don’t say what victory looks like before starting a war, it becomes considerably easier to declare victory afterwards.
America is unquestionably capable of destroying things in Iran. That has never really been in doubt. The difference in conventional military power is enormous, but Mao would ask a different question: what happens after you destroy them? Over the past few days twelve American B-1 bombers have been removed from RAF Fairford and returned to the United States following intelligence about a possible Iranian-linked attack. Iran denies having anything to do with it. The interesting thing isn’t whether Iran could defeat those bombers, because it obviously couldn’t. It didn’t have to. A sufficiently credible threat from a vastly cheaper form of warfare was enough to make keeping enormously expensive American bombers at Fairford unattractive.
And then Donald Trump said something extraordinary. Discussing the war he suggested Iran could “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego, at roughly the same time as he was telling Americans that the war was nearly over and that they were approaching a tremendous victory. Perhaps they are, but victory over what? Iran doesn’t have to invade Washington, sink the US Navy, destroy the American Air Force or even necessarily stop America bombing Iran. It has to survive, and it has to make whatever America is trying to achieve sufficiently expensive, difficult and unpleasant that eventually America decides it isn’t worth doing.
George Washington understood that. Mao Zedong turned it into a theory. Võ Nguyên Giáp demonstrated that it worked against America. The Mujahideen demonstrated that it worked against the Soviet Union and the Taliban demonstrated that America still hadn’t solved the problem. The strange thing isn’t that the world’s most powerful military keeps losing wars to much weaker opponents. Mao explained how that could happen nearly ninety years ago. The strange thing is that America still seems surprised when it does.