Asymmetric Wars Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Asymmetric wars are historically armed conflicts in which one actor has significantly more power, usually a larger military or navy, which subsequently compels a weaker opponent to undertake unconventional strategies or tactics to overcome the quantitative or qualitative power deficit. Asymmetric wars were typically guerilla conflicts that emphasized the use of insurgent attacks to disrupt supply lines and weaken an enemy’s morale. Small groups would use the weapons or materials at hand to attempt to inflict the maximum political and military damage. Consequently, asymmetric warfare involves the use of limited resources to result in attacks or impacts that are largely out of proportion to the weapons used. In contemporary military doctrine, asymmetric warfare is defined as any conflict in which an actor seeks to exploit the weaknesses of an opponent by concentrating resources or weapons against vulnerabilities.

The History Of Asymmetric Warfare

Throughout history, people have reacted to invasion and occupation by powerful actors by engaging in armed insurrections and attacking outposts or by small deployments in battles in which the rebels could gain numeric equality, or even superiority. Such maneuvers came to be known as “hit-and-run” tactics. While asymmetric warfare is not synonymous with guerilla campaigns, insurgency groups typically used these tactics against occupying powers or domestic governments.

Chinese author Sun Tzu wrote in the sixth century BCE about asymmetric wars in his classic treatise on military conflict, The Art of War. In the second century BCE, the Parthians used asymmetric warfare against the Seleucid Empire (and later the Romans). During the Middle Ages, Scottish knight and resistance leader William Wallace effectively combined guerilla tactics with conventional warfare against the English. After the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), nation-states gained a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and the customs and rules of military conflict became increasingly formalized. Native Americans used asymmetric warfare against the better-armed European colonial forces, and their tactics were subsequently used by both sides during the French and Indian War (1754–1763) and by the Americans during the Revolutionary War (1775– 1783). In the Napoleonic Wars (1795–1815), small units of Anglo-Spanish forces conducted raids and attacks on French posts during the Peninsula Campaign, prompting the deployment of ever-larger numbers of troops.

Through the imperial era of the 1800s, colonial forces endeavored to counter hit-and-run tactics by indigenous fighters through superior weapons, scorched-earth policies, and attrition. During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the Boer conventional troops were initially defeated by the British, but then launched a guerilla campaign with between twenty thousand and thirty thousand fighters, forcing the continued deployment of five hundred thousand imperial soldiers. Victory was achieved only through a ruthless strategy of concentration camps and destruction of crops. British adventurer, scholar, and soldier T. E. Lawrence popularized asymmetric war as a viable strategy against a conventional enemy during the Anglo-Arab campaign against the Ottoman Empire in World War I (1914–1918). The national liberation conflicts of the post–World War II era were mainly asymmetric wars, pitting insurgents using guerilla tactics against better armed and trained colonial conventional forces. Through the cold war, both superpowers supported subnational combatants in a series of proxy wars. During the Vietnam War (1961–1974), the U.S. military devoted considerable efforts to develop countermeasures against asymmetric tactics, with limited success. The Soviet Union likewise failed to counter an insurgency movement in Afghanistan during its occupation in the 1980s.

Asymmetric Warfare And Terrorism

Terrorism evolved into the most substantial asymmetric threat in the 1990s and 2000s. A range of substate actors used political violence against civilian and military targets in low-intensity conflicts in areas such as Northern Ireland, Spain, and the Middle East. By the late 1990s, catastrophic attacks, including the 1998 twin bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attested to the growing capability of terrorist groups to inflict substantial damage to civilian targets (and were an extension of the main point of asymmetric wars, the targeting of the enemy’s greatest vulnerabilities). The September 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks on the United States, which killed more than three thousand people, were the deadliest and most devastating strikes against the continental United States in recent history. The attacks demonstrated the ability of a small band to inflict major losses against a more powerful opponent by using materials often not perceived as weapons (hijackers turned aircraft into flying missiles that used the kinetic energy in the buildings to expand the devastation of the strikes).

In Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001 and 2002, the U.S. military and its coalition partners used asymmetric warfare to defeat the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that had harbored the leadership of the al-Qaida network. Allied military forces used tactical air power and missile strikes, in combination with the indigenous anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, against the numerically superior Taliban conventional forces. The Taliban was overthrown after two months. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 employed a similar mix of precision-guided weaponry and an invasion force of 168,000 that was outnumbered by the defending Iraqi forces (more than 430,000 troops, including paramilitary forces, but not reserves). While the coalition quickly achieved a military victory, a widespread insurgency, combining both traditional hit-and-run tactics and terrorism, proved the continuing utility of asymmetric tactics against conventional forces. Other contemporary examples of asymmetric warfare include the tactics used by Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel or the attacks of Chechen rebels against Russian troops.

Bibliography:

Arreguin-Toft, Ivan. How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Asprey, Robert B. War in the Shadows:The Guerilla in History. New York: William Morrow, 1994.
Barnett, Roger W. Asymmetrical Warfare:Today’s Challenge to U.S. Military Power. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2003.
Mack, Andrew J. R. “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars:The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict.” World Politics 27 (January 1975): 175–200.
Metz, Steven, and Douglas V. Johnson II. Asymmetry and U.S. Military Strategy: Definition, Background, and Strategic Concepts. Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute/U.S. Army War College, 2001.