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08.08.2015 Feature Article

The African Military at the Age of Unwinnable Wars

The African Military at the Age of Unwinnable Wars
08.08.2015 LISTEN

September AD 9. To many historians, this is the year of the most decisive military battles in history. As the world’s sole superpower, Rome cast 20.000 men of his unmatchable military might into far distant frontiers in order to quash insurgents in the Teutoburg Forest in Germania. The imperial governor, Publius Quinctilius Varus, well reputed beyond the empire for his wanton cruelty through crucifixion of insurgents headed the legions into battle against the anti-Roman coalition. Resorting to innovative guerrilla warfare tactics, an alliance of Germanic insurgents led by Arminius, ambushed and destroyed the quasi totality of the professionally well trained Roman Legionaries. On a new battlefield landscape, an unconventional force brought about “Rome’s greatest defeat” ever, with far-reaching consequences for military culture for ages to come. As surrogate visionaries, radical war charlatans preaching the gospel of pure military power from well furnished tables at the imperial court have always been a permanent danger in national defense circles. “Veni, vidi, vici”! The triumphant martial motto of the golden age in conclusive and swiftly military campaigns turned out an obsolete battle credo. Henceforth, equating military victory to superior firepower in warfare took a downturn test of confidence.

Consonantly, today’s battlefields offered us a solid test about the enduring Teutoburg Forest battle’s legacy. For the past decades, as the world’s most expensive military machine, the U.S. has been harvesting the bitter grapes of martial frustrations in its major wars. To this day, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria echo the tales of battlefield stalemates and fiascos. In Afghanistan alone, over 430.000 coalition troops have almost confessed their queasily fatalism on subduing the Taliban fighters. Killing a handful of rag-tag insurgents and their leaders is no highway to military victory for a professional army.

Unbeknownst to many,the obsessive resolve to wiping out insurgents from the African continent ended up in the labyrinth for military amateurism, be it in Nigeria, the DR Congo, Mali, Sudan, and Somalia. Most tellingly, for over two decades now, conventional African armies have been unable to win a battle against insurgents. Somalia has become a familiar textbook for military fiascos. In October 1993, the US-led Operation Restore Hope landed 440 elite troops from Delta Force and the U.S. Rangers to capture the warlord, General Aidid, in Mogadishu. Led by General William F. Garrison, these special forces were placed into a new battlefield environment with poor training about urban fighting and civilian crowd control. The Battle of Mogadishu wound up becoming the deadliest firefight the U.S. military experienced since Vietnam. Within the space of seventeen-hour battle, 18 U.S. elite forces were killed along 84 wounded, on top of the infamous Black Hawk down. The bodies of dead U.S. militaries were dragged and paraded throughout the streets of Mogadishu. In response to the military intervention fiasco, President Clinton quickly withdrew the American troops from Somalia. Thereafter, successive military operations in Somalia have been unable to disentangle from the abyss of martial frustrations against the insurgents. In 2013, at least 3.000 peacekeepers from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISON) died through the war of attrition of Al-shabaab. Despite the 22.000 strong peace-enforcement soldiers from the African Union Mission in Somalia, Al-Shabaab, with an estimated 9.000 militants in 2014, is still raining down a conflagration of violence in Somalia.

Furthermore, anchoring resolutely its reputation as the graveyard of unwinnable wars, DR Congo has been fighting insurgents and rebel groups to the stage of a national chronic vertigo. Starting in the 1990s to this day, eastern Congo has been the cradle of the most deadliest conflict since World War II with over 5.4 million dead and more than 2 million displaced. Thanks to the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DR Congo (MONUSCO), Congo is home to the world’s largest and expensive U.N. peacekeeping mission to date. The MONUSCO manages at least 20.000 personnel with a yearly budget of $1.4 billion. Endless rotation of conventional military forces had failed to score a military victory against local militias. Against all odds, eastern Congo is well established as the Mecca of militias and mushrooming insurgents snubbing government troops and international peacekeepers.

To little avail, the rising tides of marching conventional armies against insurgents in trans-Sahara Africa has taken a certified path to preemptive military suicide and fiascos. We have long entered the age of unwinnable wars. With all due respect to the hedonists of pure military power, let us recall the wisdom of General D. MacArthur who once boldly confessed: “there is no substitute to victory” in military campaigns.

Narcisse Jean Alcide Nana is the author of a newly released book on military strategy and geopolitics,Virus Militarisés (Edilivre, Paris, June 2015)

Bibliography

  • Dominic Tierney, The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts (New York, Little, Brown & Company, 2015)

  • Fergus M. Bordewich, “The Ambush that Changed History,” in Smithsonian Magazine, September 2005, pp. 74-81

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