LAWRENCE OF ARABIA ON WAR
Dr Robert Johnson discsusses how T.E. Lawrence put strategic theory into practice on the battlefield
Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, famously generated ideas where insurgents could defeat a regular army. In reality, at the time, he was dependent on the intervention of much larger air and land forces. Sent to liaise with Arab irregular forces fighting the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Lawrence is considered the intellectual grandfather of guerrilla warfare. His reputation is legendary, but all of his achievements were limited to the context in which he operated and were never easily transferred to later periods. So are any of his ideas still valid?
Lawrence recognised that the traditional military emphasis was on concentrating maximum force against the strongest element of the enemy, to bring about a decisive battle, and to complete operations in the shortest time in order to avoid the exhaustion of limited resources. Lawrence stood this idea on its head. He minimised the focus on troop numbers and quality of equipment, in favour of pressure on the basic necessities of the enemy (food, water, rest) and even greater stress on the cognitive and psychological. Lawrence tried to use space and time to his advantage, to make his Arab partners elusive by using the depth of the desert, and, ultimately, to make the Ottoman soldier afraid of his environment.
The war in the desert was a hard struggle involving great nerve against a more numerous and better-armed Ottoman adversary under harsh climatic conditions. To survive, Lawrence encouraged raiding against the railway lines that supplied Ottoman forces, while trying to keep his partners out of reach of patrols or larger formations. The campaign was therefore one of hit-and-run raids, dynamiting and sniping. Crucially, the Arab fighters could not be entirely certain of the allegiance of their own people so there was a constant threat of betrayal.
The Ottomans attempted to undermine the insurgents by recruiting Arab partners of their own and by references to Islamic obligations or loyalties to the Caliph. For this reason, alignments in the campaign were fluid. This was a conflict where maintaining morale and local intelligence were critical to success.
The Ottomans responded to Arab raids with reprisals against civilians. The result was a stalemate: Arab revolutionaries could not take the defended settlements the Ottomans chose to hold, but equally the Ottomans could not spare the manpower to inflict a decisive defeat on the Arabs. The deadlock was broken in 1917-18 when British Imperial forces under General Allenby, defeated the Ottomans at Gaza, in the Judean Hills, and finally at Megiddo (the Biblical Armageddon), which turned the tide. While the Arab forces in the south maintained their blockade of the Ottoman Medina garrison, Lawrence and northern Arab forces, now equipped with supporting armoured cars, machine-gun teams and aircraft, severed crucial rail links, made assaults on some defended railway junctions and then attacked the retreating Ottoman forces in the final stages of the campaign.
Lawrence had been successful at winning and sustaining a network of fighters by working through local leaders. Meanwhile, his campaign of deception and demoralisation through attacks on the fabric and infrastructure of enemy resources had contributed to keeping the resistance alive. But raiding was a high-risk activity. Local forces were often very unreliable and there were frequent disputes between them. Ultimately the success of the revolt was really dependent on General Allenby’s vast Egyptian Expeditionary Force. If the Allied conventional forces had been defeated, it is unclear how Lawrence’s resistance could have survived at all.
Lawrence had considered the strengths and weaknesses of insurgents carefully. He believed war was not an entirely random and chaotic activity, because there were systems, or principles, which could be applied. He admitted the importance of a grounding in military theory when he was so inexperienced and had not the ‘intuition’ of veteran officers. Despite making use of a great variety of classical, Medieval and modern texts on war, Lawrence believed there were common linear ‘steps’ and a necessary sequential approach to strategy and operations. He wrote, “Of course, I had read the usual books (too many books) … but I had never thought myself into the mind of a real commander compelled to fight a campaign of his own.”
When the Arab irregulars initially faced defeat at the hands of Ottoman forces in pitched battles, Lawrence advised they move the base of their operations up the coast of the Hejaz where they could be protected by the Royal Navy. He believed this manoeuvre forced the Ottomans to pull back all the way to Medina to avoid their flank becoming threatened. As a result, the threat of Arab irregular attacks on logistics lines was to be used to create an ever-extending flank against the Ottomans. If the Ottoman commanders felt that their lines of communication, which ran from Medina to
Syria, could be cut, they would be compelled to post larger and larger numbers of men to protect them. If the Arabs could remain concealed, and strike at points along this elastic line, then Lawrence believed he could fix the Ottomans and absorb their greater mass in inert defence.
Lawrence’s observations on the psychological effect of guerrilla operations then developed. He claimed that the unfavourable military situation he had observed compelled him to reconsider the relative importance of material and psychological factors. He wrote, “In each [tactics and strategy] I found the same elements, one algebraic, one biological, a third psychological. The first seemed a pure science, subject to the laws of mathematics, without humanity.” This element dealt with time, space, fixed conditions, topography, railways and munitions.
Lawrence calculated that the Ottomans could not defend the 140,000 square miles of Arabia, particularly if the Arab forces were “a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas”. He surmised that armies were “like plants, immobile as a whole, firm rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We [the Arab forces] might be a vapour, blowing where we listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man’s mind, and as we wanted nothing material to live on, so perhaps we offered nothing material to the killing”.
Lawrence was saying, in effect, that as long as a population and a revolutionary force was free to manoeuvre and remain concealed, appearing as ephemeral “as a gas”, it could retain the initiative. The ability to strike at any point would act constantly on the mind of the enemy, but would not trouble the insurgent,
“HIS CAMPAIGN OF DECEPTION AND DEMORALISATION THROUGH ATTACKS ON THE FABRIC AND INFRASTRUCTURE OF ENEMY RESOURCES HAD CONTRIBUTED TO KEEPING THE RESISTANCE ALIVE”
who could choose the time and place of his brief exposure to risk. Where, in conventional war, Lawrence noted that “both forces [are] striving to keep in touch to avoid tactical surprise”, by contrast, he noted that, in guerrilla warfare “our war [was] a war of detachment: we were to contain the enemy by the silent threats of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves to the moment of attack”.
The ‘ways’ of minimising casualties, while still creating the psychological effect, was “unconscious habit of never engaging the enemy at all” and thus not giving the Ottoman troops any targets. The prerequisite was excellent intelligence, and judgment whether to make a strike, or wait until better opportunities arose. In the guerrilla phase of his campaign, in 1917 and early 1918, this was largely true, although he was engaged in some minor skirmishes, and then, in later 1918, his Arab partners were involved in much more sustained conventional fighting.
Bionomics, the supply question, had a part to play in the campaign. Soldiers must eat and drink, and for Lawrence the Ottomans’ supplies were scarce and precious: consequently, his objective was to destroy not the army, but its material support. This included railway lines and bridges, livestock, or water sources to inflict ‘wear and tear’ on the enemy. The biological needs of an army, when affected, could reinforce the psychological effects, which Lawrence believed took precedence. Short of supplies, the Ottoman soldier had to endure the heat, hunger and oppressive silence of the wastes before him, peering endlessly into the shimmering haze or blank night, remaining constantly vigilant, and aware of the ever-present possibility of attack.
Despite the attention focussed on military operations, Lawrence argued that his approach was not really ‘war’ in its classic sense. He speculated that a purely ‘revolutionary’ method might have yielded greater results. The war of detachment, the mobilisation of peoples, and the emphasis on setting an example as the means to educate a population, all these were seized upon by subsequent revolutionary war theorists and some practitioners. Lawrence’s fundamentals of guerrilla warfare had been copied, emulated and adapted ever since, with varying degrees of success.
The greater frequency of insurgencies and guerrilla conflicts after 1919, through to recent times, also gave Lawrence’s ideas longevity. As soldiers, revolutionaries, and political leaders sought to understand the mechanisms of revolutionary warfare, so Lawrence’s ideas were evoked again and again. Lawrence’s views on insurgency and partnering with local forces were especially influential in the United States’ campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001. In the United States Army, one could not escape references to Lawrence’s ‘27 Articles’: his advice for working with indigenous forces. There was an emphasis on the 15th Article, which stated, “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.”
The unfortunate consequence of this mantra is that it may have created a reluctance to act decisively, lead, or direct when appropriate. The problem with all doctrinal codes is that they can be applied dogmatically rather than as a guideline or suggestion. Lawrence’s ideas are invoked at moments that seem far outside of their context. He was all too aware that local forces can be unreliable or pursue their own agendas. Like axioms on war, derived from other thinkers of the past, they cannot be applied unthinkingly.
But here lies Lawrence’s greatest contribution to military thought and practice. He argued for the understanding of war through intense study and condemned slavish adherence to rules. He was compelled to adapt his own theory when confronted by the harsh reality of war. He identified the value of confidence and morale and understood the importance of intelligence. He accepted that guerrillas could only be a distraction and that alternative ways and means had to be found to have the remotest chance of success. His approach was not limited to psychological warfare and an indirect approach, but a deeper consideration of the situation. He believed in challenging the assumptions and made use of a wide variety of historical cases to seek out the optimum solution. If, in his age, conventional war favoured the defensive, in time, he said, it would eventually shift to the offensive, and orthodox assumptions would have to be rethought. “Back and forth we go,” he concluded wryly. He cautioned against simplified and confident assertions based on a handful of selected cases, claiming that his own ideas were the result of “hard brain work” leavened by equally hard experience.
Lawrence was an advocate, not only of irregular war, but of the diplomacy that was required to convert military action into lasting political change. He was compelled, by force of circumstance, to adapt his approach. In both the conflict and in the peace-making, he was dependent on a particular context, namely the scale and influence of the British forces, to achieve his ends, as his own efforts were not successful. Making use of Lawrence in a superficial way can miss this important aspect of the way in which he operated.
Ultimately, he was an advocate of the comprehensive study of war. Knowing human limits and adapting to the context were his critical contributions to our understanding of war. It is for that reason he concluded that, if we must fight “with two thousand years of experience behind us” there are “no excuses for not fighting well”.