3. Guerrilla or Conventional War

0:00Volume 4, Chapter 3, Guerrilla or Conventional War After their humiliating defeat at Concord, many leading British officers acknowledged their error in being contemptuous of American military prowess. But others accused the Americans of not fighting fairly, according to the rules of conventional warfare. Warfare Instead of marching out on the open field in an extended line to fire volleys at a similarly aligned enemy, the cowardly rascals persisted in hiding inside and behind houses, trees and stone walls, picking off English soldiers with accurate individual rifle fire.

0:46To the European military mind of the day, such actions were sheer murder and therefore Dishonorable. Behind the almost blatant idiocy of such an attitude, there lay the hard core of an extremely important problem. For certainly, here had been warfare that upset all the rules of organized European warfare, in which the armies of the various states were sent out to kill each other in formal mass array. The tactics employed by the Americans at Concord reflected a new type of war, revolutionary war by a people in arms, a war that would naturally take the course unless deflected by conscious purpose of guerrilla warfare, in which individuals among the masses familiar with the terrain employed their advantage of knowledge and mass support to achieve mobility and surprise against an army possessed of of Superior, Firepower.

1:55The Americans at the very outset were therefore faced with a choice of extreme importance in conducting their revolution. Unfortunately, they saw their alternatives but dimly, although here and their leaders could see the vital issues with piercing clarity. Their choice not only determined the outcome and duration of the war, it also determined the permanent complexion and structure of any independent America that might emerge. The colonists might choose either alternative or various admixtures of both. On the one hand they could fight the war in European fashion, gathering together a standard European army, organizing it according to European style totalitarian discipline, conscripting Inventing men and vast supplies to feed and equip the army and then meeting the British in formal open combat.

2:57On the other hand, they could run a new style of war, a radical people's war of national liberation, a guerrilla war resting on individual responsibility, mobility and surprise. A guerrilla war would be enormously less expensive than an orthodox one. For one thing, the guerrillas would not be full-time soldiers, torn away from productive labor to require parasitic feeding from an already harassed and burdened population. They would not be hauled from place to place, region to region. Instead, they would be part-time soldiers, remaining in production, not requiring taxes

4:12Bureaucracy to direct and supply the armies while draining the production of society. A guerrilla war could be run individualistically, relying on the zeal of the individual guerrilla and would entail virtually no central bureaucracy or centralized confiscation of property to finance the war. In brief, a guerrilla war would be the libertarian way to fight a war fully consistent with the American revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality of rights, and therefore the only way to achieve the libertarian goals of the revolution. A European-style, orthodox war would be heavily statist and would inevitably lead to the the resumption of the very statism, the taxes, the restrictions, the bureaucracy which the colonists were waging the revolution to escape. What is more, guerrilla war would be enormously more effective, for that is the way any subjugated people, not only libertarians, can best fight against a better armed but hated foe. The efficiency of guerrilla fighting as against Most European warfare had not only been demonstrated in the unbroken victories of Ethan Allen and

5:35the Green Mountain Boys in the Vermont Revolution, but also in the victory at Concord, a guerrilla engagement so individualistic as to be almost completely leaderless. In contrast stood the slaughter at Lexington, where the Americans had fought in fixed ranks in the Open. Both moral principle and utility therefore required the choice of a guerrilla war, but various factors, certainly including the novelty of the dilemma, dictated a different and Choice.