Chasing U-Boats and Hunting Insurgents: Lessons from an Underhand Way of War

Just over a century ago, a British admiral condemned the newly invented submarine as an underhand, unfair, and damned un-English weapon. The officer underscored his disdain for the craft by urging that submarine crews be treated as pirates and hanged. Winston Churchill, then the Royal Navys political head, was not willing to go quite that far, yet at one point during World War I, he ordered that captured U-boat crews be treated as criminals, not prisoners of war. Churchills action was symptomatic of the professional naval attitude toward this below-the-belt weapon sinking merchant ships without warning was not legitimate warfare as behooved a civilized power. Those sentiments of long ago have a familiar ring, albeit in a different context insurgency warfare. Regular soldiers have historically looked on insurgency warfare as underhanded and unfair and, a U.S. combatant in Iraq might add, damned un-American. From the Soldiers perspective, the insurgents war-making methods are neither those of a civilized opponent nor in accordance with the laws and customs of war. Particularly objectionable is the insurgents stealthiness the man, or woman, who appears to be a peaceable citizen but who may at any moment become a spy, a brigand, and assassin and a rebel. Fighting and defeating the submarine is the business of antisubmarine warfare ASW counterinsurgency is its counterpart in irregular war. This essay compares the problems of ASW and counterinsurgency. It explores in particular the strategic and operational similarities, as well as the different, yet strikingly similar, solutions to which antisubmarine and counterinsurgency warriors have resorted. In the end, it considers a final similarity between these forms of warfare namely, the penchant for sailors and soldiers to repeatedly unlearn the lessons of the underhand and unfair ways of war.