Alec Worsnop's "Rebels in the Field"

Alec Worsnop is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park where he direct the Military Perspectives Speaker Series and is a Research Fellow in the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rebels in the Field: Cadres and the Development of Insurgent Military Power, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my book walks through the way in which Việt Minh sought to develop a modern military system by selecting a cadre of small unit leaders who could plan effective military operations and train their troops. It comes in a chapter that assesses the performance of various Vietnamese insurgent groups as they countered the French during the First Indochina War (1945-1954). While the victory of the Việt Minh, the predecessor for the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, also known as the Việt Cong), looms large in the 20th century, as the conflict started, the French were less worried about the Việt Minh than many of its competitors.

This page actually touches on one of the core themes in the broader book. Rebels in the Field departs from the existing research into insurgent behavior by explicitly focusing on the military processes involved in deploying force in substate conflicts. To conduct guerrilla warfare, groups have to fight well. While perhaps a weapon of the ‘weak’, guerrilla warfare is not a weapon of the tactically incapable. And the things that help groups to organize in the first place, ideology, religious, social ties, do not necessarily help organizations to fight well, and can actually impair military development.

To fight this way, I argue that insurgents, like any other military actor, need capable small units that can fire and maneuver without suffering extensive losses. To do this, I draw on much research into conventional militaries and hold that a key linchpin in this process is capable small-unit combat leaders. When facing much stronger foes, creative small-unit combat leaders can "punch above their weight." Not only do they lead effective operations, but lay the groundwork for military adaptation and resilience from the bottom-up.

The Việt Minh is an archetypal case of the importance of military development. While their success is often attributed to their Communist ideology, leaders in the organization were painfully aware that ideological commitment did not generate military capacity. As I elaborate on page 99, "General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the commander of the Việt Minh forces, advised that 'it is necessary to carry out regular training systematically and according to plan, proceeding from the rank and file upwards … The army must be trained to master modern techniques, tactical use of arms, coordinated tactics, and modern military service.'"

In this context, the chapter on the Việt Minh helps to explain how the Việt Minh, which looked weak at the onset of the war, developed into one of the most successful insurgent militaries in the 20th century, defeating the French in a set battle at Ðiện Biên Phủ. The chapter ends by quoting a French post-mortem which recognized that the French military had underestimated the immense effort the Việt Minh put into developing a professional military.

The following chapters, covering the US interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, identify similar dynamics. As with the Việt Minh, the groups that fought well did not do so based on their religious, political, and social endowments, but instead developed a cadre of small-unit combat leaders who served as the back bone of their military efforts.

Visit Alec Worsnop's website.

--Marshal Zeringue