Much British military thought was merely a slavish imitation of continentalist thought, and while imperial requirements were the dominating factor at all stages in the army's development, it was only in the 1880s that the compelling doctrine of the imperial role was finally articulated. Even then, it was not accepted in all quarters, as Maguire's observation indicates. Moreover, David Charters and Tom Mockaitis have rightly spoken of the British army since 1945 as lacking an institutional memory and possessing historical amnesia when it came to insurgency, repeating the same old mistakes and learning the same old lessons over and over again as each crisis began from the 1940s through the 1960s. The new British doctrinal emphasis of the 1980s was directed toward the operational level of war on the conventional battlefield at almost precisely the moment that the Berlin Wall was beginning to crumble.

Such an attitude toward low-intensity conflict was not simply a matter of institutional conservatism but also a product of the very nature of such conflict from the earliest times. In November 1763, for example, one William Smith wrote of the prospects of the coming campaign against the Pontiac rebellion in the Ohio Valley in a letter to a friend: "The war will be a tedious one, nor can it be glorious, even tho' attended with success. Instead of decisive battles, woodland skirmishes-instead of Colours and Cannons, our Trophies will be stinking scalps. Heaven preserve you, my Friend, from a war conducted by a spirit of murder rather than of brave and generous offence."

Similarly, the celebrated 19th-century military theorist, Baron Henri de Jomini, remarked of the French war against guerrillas in Spain between 1808 and 1814: "I acknowledge that my prejudices are in favour of the good old times when the French and the English Guards courteously invited each other to fire first"-as at Fontenoy-preferring then to the frightful epoch when priests, women, and children throughout Spain plotted the murder of isolated soldiers.

No Short Cut to Victory

The reality of insurgency, of course, as suggested by these quotations, has always been distinctly unglamorous and offers no short cut to a triumphant ride through Persepolis. Results will not be obtained quickly and, in any case, success often cannot be measured in conventional military terms of decisive battles won when the essence of the insurgent's traditional "hit-and-run" methods is to avoid battle with superior forces. The Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960 is regarded as a successful counter-insurgency campaign; yet, when the state of emergency was finally revoked, insurgent groups still remained at large in the jungle along the frontier with Thailand. Indeed, the veteran leader of the Malayan Communist Party, Chin Peng, only emerged from the jungle to reach an agreement with the Malaysian authorities in 1989.

Above all, what General John Galvin has nicely called "uncomfortable wars" confront soldiers with both political and societal pressures to a far greater extent than most other forms of conflict. It is in the nature of this type of conflict that the insurgent should merge with and hide among the civilian population, often using women or children as a screen. Moreover, low-intensity conflict is invariably a product of the exploitation of political or socioeconomic grievances and, as such, requires an appropriate politically driven response. The necessity for security forces to maintain a considerable measure of restraint in the wider interests of "winning hearts and minds" while under attack puts enormous pressures upon soldiers. It is also evident that media pressure upon the security forces is far greater in insurgencies than in conventional conflicts. The media has been well recognized as a key weapon by insurgents for at least the last 40 years.

It is not surprising, then, that US military author Rod Paschall has suggested that the counter-insurgency role is so destructive to what he termed "military norms" that it should be contracted out to commercial security organizations. To some extent, recent experiences in Sierra Leone have borne out Paschall's prediction, but, of course, the "New World Order" has also ushered in seemingly greater commitments to low-intensity conflict in terms of peacekeeping and peace-enforcing on the part of Western armies. There seems, therefore, to be little prospect that the "poor man's war" will not remain the most prevalent form of conflict in the modern world, in which case armies must continue to grapple with the particular problems it poses.

With insurgency and counter-insurgency, the past is not another country. Indeed, the past of guerrilla warfare and insurgency represents both the shadow of things that have been and of those that will be.