T.E. Lawrence And the Mind of An Insurgent

Army,  Jul 2005  by Schneider, James J

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In 1946 French Gen. Raoul Salan onducted several interviews vith Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who planned and directed the military operations against the French that culminated in their defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Salan was part of a post-World War II negotiating mission established to finalize the return of French authority to Vietnam. Later he would command the French Expeditionary Corps in Vietnam from May 20,1951, until May 1953, conducting the last successful military action against Ho Chi Minh. In an action designated Operation Lorraine, Salan's forces swept through the Red River Valley and the jungles of North Vietnam on October 11, 1952. The following year he turned over his command to Gen. Henri-Eugene Navarre, the ill-fated commander at Dien Bien Phu. During the 1946 interviews, Salan was struck by the influence of one man upon the thinking of Giap; that man was Thomas Edward Lawrence. Giap told Salan: "My fighting gospel is T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I am never without it."

The essence of Lawrence's theory of guerrilla warfare that Giap refers to can be found in two places. The first and most accessible is in any of the many editions of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, especially chapter 33. The second place is in an article entitled "The Evolution of a Revolt," published in October 1920 in the Army Quarterly and Defence Journal. The two pieces are based on Lawrence's practical, hardheaded assessment of the situation then confronting the Arab forces in the Hejaz region of the Saudi desert during March 1917. Up until this time Lawrence had spent more than a year fighting beside the Arab Bedouin against the Turk. From this experience he derived two theorems of guerrilla warfare that form a theoretical foundation and point of departure for the rest of his insights related to conducting an insurgency. Lawrence asserted first that irregular troops are unable to defend a position against conventional forces; and, similarly, irregular troops are incapable of effectively attacking a heavily defended position. If these theorems were correct, Lawrence wondered, then of what value were his irregular forces in the first place? This became the basic question that he first sought to unravel.

Turning inward, Lawrence understood that like any other officer schooled in Western military thinking and traditions, his attitude toward war was dominated by the dogma of annihilation: an obsession that "the ethic of modern war is to seek the enemy's army, his center of power, and destroy it in battle." Yet it occurred to Lawrence that while no battle of annihilation had taken place, the Arabs were still winning the war: "As I thought about it, it dawned on me that we had won the Hejaz war. We were in occupation of 99 percent of the Hejaz. The Turks were welcome to the other fraction. ... They were harmless sitting [at Medina]; if we took them prisoner, they would cost us food and guards in Egypt. ... On all counts they were best where they were, and they valued Medina and wanted to keep it. Let them!"

Lawrence wondered, then, if there were not other wars, different in kind from the war of annihilation that French generals like Ferdinand Foch and other contemporaries advocated and wrote of so enthusiastically. He concluded, following a recollection of his study of Clausewitz, that there was indeed more than one kind of war, that the determining factor was the aim for which the war was being fought in the first place.

It was simply not within the compass of Arab interests, nor even within their capability, to annihilate the Turks. Rather, the Arab aim was geographic: to occupy as much of the Arabic Middle East as possible.

Now if the aim of the Arab was one of geographic interest rather than the destruction of the enemy's forces, it put the role of the irregular in an entirely new light. Given the validity of the two theorems, what role did the Arab insurgent have in a war of occupation?

In order to address the latter question, Lawrence developed a simple conceptual framework. A conceptual framework is nothing more than a kind of mental pegboard to hang concepts or ideas in relation to each other, yet with sufficient structure to think of the ideas altogether as a coherent whole. Lawrence's pegboard consisted of three concepts or categories of analysis. Lawrence termed these three conceptual hooks the algebraical, the biological and the psychological.

By algebraical Lawrence meant those factors that are fixed in space and time and subject to calculation. Thus he began to calculate the size of the area that the Arabs would have to conquer and how many Turks it would take to defend it. Lawrence determined that it would require at least 600,000 troops to defend this territory adequately. The Turks had but 100,000 men and most of these were concentrated in and around Medina. Lawrence further recognized that the Turks, with their mental baggage filled with ideas about battles of annihilation, would approach the rebellion from the perspective of absolute war. But this would be a mistake because making war "upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife."