George Jonas: How the Little Guy Wins, from Goths to Genghis

George Jonas  is a Hungarian-born Canadian writer and columnist.

What’s unexpected in our historic quest for better ways to kill our enemies is that improving martial technology doesn’t necessarily lead to commensurate success on the battlefield. Advances in weaponry, tactics, strategy and military organization don’t invariably produce more effective warriors.

From antiquity to our own times, there have been recurring examples of nomads, barbarians, or indeed “savages” successfully raiding more highly developed civilizations, or defending their ancestral territories against the advances of technologically superior enemies. From the nomadic Medes teaching the arrogant Assyrians a lesson in 7th century B.C. to the barbaric Visigoths trouncing the far more sophisticated Romans nearly a thousand years later, examples of low-tech troops getting the better of high-tech troops abound in military conflicts.

In Afghanistan, a high-tech Western coalition has been battling the low-tech Taliban for a decade. How are we doing? Not well. Hirsute warriors riding mules around the peaks and valleys of the Amu Darya have held out four years longer against the combined forces of America and Europe than the Axis of the Third Reich and the Empire of the Rising Sun did against the Allies in the last century.

Well, aren’t the Taliban religious fanatics? Yes, they are, but that doesn’t explain much. The Nazis were pretty fanatical, too, to say nothing of the Japanese kamikazes.

Others say: No comparison. We haven’t made the effort. We haven’t fought the jihadists the way we fought the Nazis.

Precisely. In asymmetric warfare, the high-tech side almost never does. That’s one reason it so often loses…