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In his “Lectures on Small War” held at the Prussian War College in 1810 and 1811, Clausewitz analyzed small-unit warfare by studying the rebellion in the Vendée (1793–8), the Tyrolean uprising of 1809, and most prominently, the then ongoing Spanish insurrection in the Peninsular War against Napoleonic France. The lectures discuss the organization of small units and the various tactics of small-unit warfare—including the role of advance guards, forward posts, ambushes, and forms of insurgency—and relate these to larger strategic goals and a war’s purpose. Many of the ideas later developed in On War find their first expression in the “Lectures on Small War.”

This chapter examines the development of military doctrine on stability operations. The introduction of the 1935 Marine Corps manual Small Wars Operations, which detailed stability operations from 1940s to the mid-1960s was an important milestone. The chapter considers subsequent doctrines during the post-Cold War period, followed by millennial doctrines that introduced the concept of “full spectrum operations,” consisting of offensive, defensive, stability, and civil support. Moreover, the chapter describes doctrines FM 3-24, which was written as response to the inadequacy of doctrine available for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and FM 3-07 for integrating stability operations tasks into any kind of operation anywhere along the spectrum of conflict.

This chapter chronicles the role that counterinsurgency played in the development of U.S. Marine Corps doctrine between World War I and Vietnam. The World War I–era Marine Corps amalgamated the military and political components of counterinsurgency in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. Despite the succeeding release of the Small Wars Manual, counterinsurgency doctrine fell by the wayside as the successful implantation of the Fleet Marine Force concept in World War II and the Korean War solidified the Marine Corps' steadfast dedication to amphibious assaults and conventional warfare. Thus, the Combined Action Program in Vietnam did not emerge directly from Marine Corps training and doctrine. Rather, the Marine Corps conceived the Combined Action Program in 1965 when commanders such as Lewis Walt began to realize that the conventional training of the previous decades did not fit the strategic landscape of Vietnam. Walt wanted Marines under his command closer to the indigenous population, rather than rampaging through the unpopulated jungles to annihilate the seemingly nonexistent enemy guerrilla forces.

In early November 1928 the Marines oversee a peaceful national election in Nicaragua, which Liberal candidate José Moncada wins. After the election, Feland remains in Nicaragua, and the campaign against Sandino and his followers continues. Feland initiates a survey of Marine Corps practices in Nicaragua and distributes a questionnaire among his subordinate officers, some of whom, in the 1930s, will develop a Marine Corps Small Wars Manual. Admiral Sellers and General Feland clash with Minister Eberhardt and Elias Beadle, the Marine Corps officer who heads the Guardia Nacional and reports to the Nicaraguan government (much to Feland's dismay). Other controversies erupt, including one involving Feland's aide-de-camp, Arthur Challacombe. Eventually Feland, Sellers, Beadle, and Eberhardt move on to new assignments. Katherine Feland travels to Nicaragua to accompany her husband when he returns to the United States in April 1919.

The Indian Army defeated the Italians in Abyssinia and played a crucial role in containing Erwin Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika in Egypt–Libya in 1941–2. The Indian troops proved themselves masters of mountain warfare in the rolling hills of Abyssinia, in Tunisia, and also in Italy (1944). The pre-1939 Indian Army had a template of war which was geared for conducting Small War along the mountainous tracts of the North-West Frontier. Some of its elements were useful for the Indian units while fighting in the mountainous regions of Ethiopia, Tunisia, and Italy. However, in the course of the various campaigns, the Indian Army also absorbed certain new elements (such as cooperation with aircraft, anti-tank guns and tanks, use of concentrated artillery fire in fluid battlefield scenarios, etc.) for conducting conventional warfare. For instance, use of superior artillery and close air support in a quick and efficient manner at Second Alamein, Tunisia, and in Italy were some of the tactical techniques which functioned as force multipliers.

(237words) This chapter explores the deepening during World War one of colonial interest in the military, labor and political potential of those it categorized as ‘primitive’ populations. Among these were the ‘hill-men’ of India’s North-East Frontier deployed for militarist border-making both as porters and as informal auxiliaries. But work gangs for road building and expeditionary columns were also drawn from so- called ‘Santhalis’ or ‘aboriginals’, strung along the path of migration eastwards from Bihar and Orissa. Keen to highlight the importance to empire of the North-East Frontier, considered less significant than the North-West Frontier, the Assam government offered to raise ‘primitive hill-men’ labor companies for France. Some ‘hill-men’ chiefs feared the depletion of their retinues, others saw new opportunities unfold. Recruitment set up circuits between local conflicts and new theatres of war, resulting in the prolonged Kuki-Chin uprising of 1917-1919 along the Assam –Burma border. War also intensified the extractive drives of state and capital over forest and mineral resources, as illustrated in a small uprising in Mayurbhanj in Bihar and Orissa in which ‘Santhalis’ were held to be very prominent.. At both sites officials concluded that the resistance of ‘primitive’ populations to war- drives which subjected their persons and re-shaped their environments arose from ‘millenarian’ dreams of autonomy. However ‘primitivity’ also offered rich possibilities for the post-war reconstruction of imperial legitimacy. It was the ground on which certain tracts inhabited by ‘backward populations’ were excluded from the scheme of responsible government introduced in 1919.