Free Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits by John Arquilla

the ability to recover from reverses and misjudgments, as Greene did again and again, and relentlessly to exploit the enemy’s errors, which he also did.
    It might be argued that Greene’s achievements are diminished by the rebels’ use of the American rifle, which gave an edge in the war, both conventionally and in partisan settings. It is true that American soldiers tended to be better marksmen. Many frontiersmen were skilled hunters, and rebel riflemen tended to train at longer ranges than their British counterparts. And in firefights, British losses were often higher, at the margin. But the Redcoats had many rifle units of their own to complement their smoothbore “Brown Bess” muskets, they prevailed in many pitched battles, and they got much the better of the guerrillas on numerous occasions. No, Greene’s success cannot be written off by overemphasizing the American edge in rifle fire.
    Instead he won because of his conception of a superior strategy, which enabled him to prevail DESPITE his tactical inability to win decisive conventional battles. He won because of the skillful blending of regular and irregular forces and operations. And he did so against some of the best field commanders the British employed in North America. In his time Nathanael Greene’s contribution to victory was well and widely understood for these reasons, especially for how tactical defeats contributed to strategic victory. John Adams wrote of the ultimate strategic gains in the wake of Greene’s loss at Eutaw Springs that the battle was “quite as glorious for the American arms as the capture of Cornwallis.” 15
    Lacking Adams’s more refined capacity for insight, the general public’s instincts were nonetheless the same. Great crowds rallied and cheered at every stop as Greene made his way back to Rhode Island at war’s end. Soon after, the state of Georgia voted to reward him for his services with the gift of a beautiful plantation outside Savannah called Mulberry Grove. Greene found running this operation in some ways more difficult than his campaign against Cornwallis. His situation was further complicated by the sizable personal debts he had accumulated during the war. Run down by years of campaigning in the field, unrelenting hard work, and loans coming due, Greene soon fell gravely ill and died in the summer of 1786. He was just forty-four. What may have died with him was an important strand of thought about irregular warfare in American strategic culture. As we shall see, however, many other cultures would soon demonstrate their considerable capacities for waging unconventional warfare.
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    GUERRILLERO:
FRANCISCO ESPOZ Y MINA

Galleria de Militar
    A million French soldiers died during the Napoleonic Wars, one-fourth of them in Spain. Of these quarter million dead, a bit more than half fell in set-piece battles against British, Portuguese, and Spanish regular troops, including losses incurred on the march to these fights or from wounds suffered in them. The rest of the French losses, amounting to somewhere between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand, came in the bitter “small war” that was waged for nearly five years (1808–1813) between Spanish guerrillas and French imperial regulars. It was characterized by an endless series of vicious, close-quarters clashes. French patrols, isolated small garrisons, and supply convoys were among the favorite targets of the guerrillas. But the insurgents’ impact was also felt on the major battlefields of this war, as their very existence forced the French to disperse widely their troops in Spain—at one point numbering more than four hundred thousand—leaving them unable ever to concentrate overwhelming numbers against the coalition forces led by the Duke of Wellington. Thus British ability to hurt the French in the field, with a force of Redcoats never exceeding sixty thousand, was greatly enhanced by the power of the guerrillas to distract and disrupt their occupiers.
    In