C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (1896) - Credit to A. Bradley Potter, Johns Hopkins University SAIS, Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy

The roots of modern counterinsurgency strategy are deep. As far back as Roman times historians like Tacitus recorded accounts of regular forces battling local guerrillas, and from these origins a long tradition of studying these peculiar types of conflicts was born. One of the most historically significant efforts to encapsulate lessons from irregular wars, or “small wars,” comes from the pen of British officer C. E. Callwell. When the British Empire of the 19^th century stretched across the globe, Callwell gained first-hand experience fighting insurgencies on two continents. He went on to chronicle lessons from those experiences, as each offered multiple opportunities to consider and reconsider how best to wage counterinsurgencies. Today the term “small war” has taken on a broader definition, but it was Caldwell’s exploration of this type of warfare that yielded what remains one of the most insightful treatments of insurgency and counterinsurgency. While his work is a far cry from modern population-centric visions of counterinsurgency, it represents an important starting point in the development of modern counterinsurgency strategy and tactics.

Few of the British strategist’s generation had the combination of experience and scholarly temperament to undertake such an effort. Callwell was a British army officer who served in a series of colonial wars, including the Second Anglo-Afghan War and the First and Second Boer Wars, wrote widely on military and strategic issues (Moreman 2004). While his final postings as a major general during World War I focused on intelligence and logistical issues, he is best known for his studies of counterinsurgency. In summarizing Callwell’s life, one biographer writes that the British officer “was an accomplished linguist, a skilled intelligence officer, and a prolific writer of quality on a wide range of military affairs and on military history throughout his career” (Moreman 2004). These characteristics served him well while examining small wars, though perhaps not in leading troops. Callwell held only one significant command position, during the Second Boer War, in which he was not especially successful. Ultimately, “he was perhaps more accomplished as a theorist than as a soldier,” and while his writings are dated by a particularly patrician view of the non-Western world and an outmoded discussion of logistical issues, his general insights into the nature and strategy of small wars are timeless (Moreman 2004)…

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