Previously here, we have reported on various aspects of warfare, both ancient and modern. The tools change all the time. Sometimes, the specific techniques to employ that technology changes, the better to employ the new sets of hardware that come out of inventor’s workshops and laboratories. But the basic rules, as the saying goes, do not change over time.
The proverbial “rag-tag band of rebels” – or revolutionaries, or guerrillas, as the reader prefers – have been a feature of warfare from the very beginning. In fact, a strong argument could be made that such groups were the very first “fighting forces” to appear on the battlefield; “organization” is the basic requirement for “organized warfare,” and that organization had to start somewhere.
But that is lost in the mists of eons.
Organized warfare, as such, waxes and wanes. The Mediterranean Basin and the European continent – south of the Danube, west of the Rhine, and north of Africa’s Mediterranean coast, and even extending into the Black Sea – was dominated by Rome and its army. This was, for the time, the best organized, regularly supplied and funded army in recorded history; the only real comparisons known are the armies of Sargon the Great and Alexander of Macedon…and yet, Rome “collapsed” (at least in Western Europe) in the 5th Century; the final destruction of Rome in the east – what is now better known as “Byzantium” – would take another thousand years.
That Rome collapsed (both times) was not the fault of either form of its armies (that’s a long discussion). There were numerous factors involved in both series’ of collapses; in both cases, the ultimate failures of the Roman armies were merely the final acts. Indeed, it is no stretch of the imagination to say that the highly professional, disciplined and minutely organized Roman and Byzantine armies are what kept their respective states alive as long as they did.
Infantry wins wars, and the more professional your infantry, the faster and more decisively you win, all other things being equal. But, continuing with this historical digression, the battle of Adrianople in 378AD ushered in a perception of the superiority of mounted horse cavalry over professional infantry; whatever the actual historical truth of the battle (the arguments of Oman and Burns aside), the perception held true, and those ideas would lead directly to the rise of the mounted knight as the main military component of the medieval period. Horse-using elites were certainly not new, but they were never truly decisive, no matter how diverse the mercantile and military (YouTube link) trade networks were.
In the aftermath of those Roman collapses, warfare reverted to a more localized and tribal form of organization. Even in the Levant, where the First Caliphate and the later Ottoman Sultanate largely ruled from the 7th Century onwards, government regulation and control were not what they had been under either Roman or Persian rule. Warfare was largely thrown back at least a thousand years, each time.
Technology played a large part in this seesaw. Spears, swords, bows and arrows, and metal armor are all relatively easy for a blacksmith to turn out. As long as armies were small, and some form of “hard tack” (to use the modern term) was set back in a castle of some sort, small armies could maneuver cross-country without too much trouble. Bands of what we would now call “guerrillas” could also maneuver easily, as they generally operated in their native areas, and knew where watering holes and useful resources were located.
The advent of gunpowder changed all of this, however. While developed in Song Dynasty China in the 9th Century AD (on the European calendar), the first use of the formula as a weapon dates to the early 10th Century, in use against Mongol tribes. Once gunpowder became dominant as an infantry weapon in Europe, in the late 15th to the early 16th centuries, the scales that had been tipping slowly back towards infantry dominance slammed down decisively on the infantry’s side: now, as gunpowder weaponry rapidly progressed from the matchlock through to the flintlock, it became comparatively cheap and easy to recruit and train infantry en masse to a level sufficient to return cavalry to their nominal roles of scouting and decisive shock action.
But, that tipping of the scales had consequences, as gunmaking was a very specialized skill, as its requirements were very different from making simple metal objects like blades or horseshoes.
Likewise, the advent of motor vehicles changed the factors of “battle calculus” yet again, by replacing the horse with the motor engine. While the automobile has a host of limitations, those drawbacks are minimal in comparison to those of horse cavalry…
Which brings us, at last, to our core topic: “Ersatz Armies.”
As noted above, “irregular” forces – rebels, guerrillas, etc – have frequently struggled to compete with better-organized and supported “regular” armies. Such groups have to improvise methods of supplying not simply weapons, but food, medicines and other basic needs of a military force. In the past, these services and products were generally stolen from an enemy government, or were supplied directly by a foreign government, supporting the guerrillas. More infrequently than is generally assumed, a guerrilla force might purchase arms from “black market” arms dealers; in those cases, the guerrilla forces were teetering dangerously on the edge of being a criminal gang, more than a “heroic band of fighters for the people.”
But, with the sudden and rapid anarchy taking place in Sudan, another factor has once again reared its head: a deliberately created ersatz army.
In 2003, the Sudanese government in Khartoum recruited a group of tribal militias that coalesced into what is now known as the “Janjaweed”. This grouping of tribal militias went on to commit a host of terrible crimes, encompassing all the worst categories of criminal activities. So bad were these events, both the Sudanese dictator of the time, as well as one identifiable leader of the group, have been formally indicted for war crimes.
In the aftermath of the worst parts of the Darfur Conflict, the Janjaweed was not paid off and stood down by the government of Omar al Bashir – instead, it was expanded, given better training and weapons, had its name changed to the “Rapid Support Force” (RSF) (YouTube link) and was then used a force of “shock troops” to fight in regional wars, such as Libya and Yemen, where they proved willing to do the dirty jobs no self-respecting and –disciplined military would touch.
In effect, al Bashir created his own version of Adolf Hitler’s SA or SS – a powerful armed force, separate from the regular military, willing to do whatever was asked of them. Unlike Hitler, however, al Bashir lost control of his non-Army force; this resulted in the RSF collaborating with the regular Sudanese military to remove him from power. And, as these things almost always do, this resulted in a falling out among thieves, leading to the current disaster in the country.
What makes the RSF different from similar groups in the past, however, is its size and equipment. The RSF is estimated to number around 100,000 men (YouTube link), and have been equipped comparatively cheaply, with the most basic of infantry weapons and gear, as well as the ubiquitous “technical” vehicles. A hundred thousand troops, even if poorly trained, is nothing to scoff at, even if you intend to engage them directly.
Sudan is not unique: while other states may not have armed groups to the extent of the RSF, it is a far cheaper thing to do, than most people think…But these types of forces – with little or no control, nor moral training, but with effective weapons and training – are growing in number.
Ponder that, the next time you hear about drug cartel armies on the south side of the Rio Grande (YouTube link).
