6. Mercenaries, Guerrillas, Militias, and the Defense of Minimal States and Free Societies

Joseph R. Stromberg

WAR AND ECONOMICS

Ludwig von Mises, founder of neo-Austrian economics, saw economics as part of praxeology—the deductive science of human action. His student, the late Murray N. Rothbard, once drew up a list of possible subfields of praxeology. One such field was the analysis of hostile action.¹ Our topic lies where economics and hostile-action studies meet. Historians and sociologists often bring only second-hand economic theory into their work, although ideally, in Mises’s words, “[g]eneral sociology … approaches historical experience from a more nearly universal point of view than that of the other branches of history.”² Thus, historical sociology grounded on sound economics could usefully address issues of war, peace, and statism.

Conflict theories of the state are found in Herbert Spencer, Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, Franz Oppenheimer, Max Weber, Alexander Rüstow, Hugh Nibley, and recent writers like Rothbard, Charles Tilly, and Robert Carneiro.³ Public choice theory rounds out a potential synthesis, along with the newer critical literature on “public goods” and the British post-Marxist sociology of John A. Hall, Anthony Giddens, Michael Mann, and Sir Ernest Gellner.⁴

SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES REGARDING PROVISION OF SECURITY OR DEFENSE

Does provision of protection—security, defense—truly require a territorial monopoly of violence in the hands of the state? Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jeffrey Hummel, Dan Garrett, and others suggest that security is divisible and manifold and that the “free-rider” problem “proves” far too much. Hoppe states the central problem as follows: “A tax-funded protection agency is a contradiction in terms and will lead to ever more taxes and less protection.”⁵ The sheer number of people killed by states in the twentieth century—up to 100 million, with more killed in peacetime “social reconstruction” than in wars—makes one suspect that state-provided security is extremely expensive in all respects and that meaningful alternatives have been overlooked. One proposal in the literature⁶ is for market-based defense undertaken by competing insurance companies which, in time, replace states.

TYPES OF WARFARE

We may leave aside tribal and feudal warfare with their cattle raiding, personalism, and epic poetry. In Europe, traditional war in a system of contending states featured maneuver and battle between professional “standing armies” commanded by aristocratic officers in the service of kings. Such warfare was less costly to both sovereign and society than modern war. Even the fierce competition of Early Modern times—with larger armies resting on public debt—did not completely alter this picture. According to John U. Nef, in the eighteenth-century war of Don Carlos—fought on Italian soil between Austria and a coalition of France, Spain, and Sardinia,

the rival armies met in a fierce battle outside the town [Milan, and later, Parma]. In neither place were the sympathies of the inhabitants seriously moved by one side or the other. Their only fear was that the troops of either army should get within the gates and pillage. The fear proved groundless.⁷

The French Revolution overthrew the old order in warfare and, as Pierre van den Berghe writes, “spawned a lethal monster, the Jacobin, nationalist state.” Today, we think of war as necessarily involving mass conscript armies, ideological manias, and an ever-growing array of “weapons of mass destruction.” As Hoppe writes, this pattern grew up with “democracy,” where professional politicians not subject to traditional monarchical restraints control the monopoly of defense provision.⁸ The democracies’ twentieth-century rivals—mass-incorporating totalitarian regimes bent on social engineering—also broke the bands of the Old Regime and the laws of war. Other military models—mercenaries, militias, and guerrillas—coexisted, however, with royal armies and mass conscript armies.

SECURITY PROVIDED BY HIRED FORCES

Mercenaries played an important role in the politics of Renaissance Italy, where wealthy merchant oligarchies in citystates provided for their defense by hiring soldiers. A number of benefits flowed from this system. The thrifty bourgeois who hired mercenaries could dismiss them when their work was done. The soldiers had no great incentive to kill or be killed, and their commanders would jockey for advantage and surrender when they lost it. As British jurist F.J.P. Veale wrote, “soldiering became a reasonable and comparatively harmless profession.” Rules were followed, including one “that a town could only be sacked if it offered resistance.”⁹

Jacob Burckhardt writes of Jacopo Sforza, a famous mercenary “captain” (chieftain) who served many local strongmen or condottieri, that

in monetary affairs Jacopo was thoroughly trustworthy; even after his defeats he found credit with the bankers. He habitually protected the peasants against the license of his troops, and disliked the destruction of a conquered city.

He had three rules: “Let other men’s wives alone; strike none of your followers, or if you do, send the injured man far away; don’t ride a hard-mouthed horse, or one that drops his shoe.” This seems pretty reasonable for a warrior, but Jacopo’s son, Francesco Sforza, took political power at Milan, an outcome which illustrates the downside of Italian mercenary warfare.¹⁰

The career of John de Hawkwood, an English veteran of the Battle of Crécy, is illustrative. Hawkwood’s famous White Company fought from the 1360s into the 1390s. While Hawkwood kept his contracts and did not switch masters until his job was done, he did become territorial lord over two great estates given him by the papacy in lieu of money payment. Many mercenary captains aspired to become outright political rulers—men on horseback—rather than mere subcontractors in the business of security provision. As H. Hearder and D.P. Waley state, “[t]he interests of employer and employed were divergent. The condottiere sought wealth, fame, and a territory of his own.”¹¹ Worse, cities sometimes felt bound to pay for more soldiers than were actually needed, to keep their mercenaries from switching allegiance.

Niccolò Machiavelli, republican theorist and militia organizer, condemned mercenaries out of hand. From his standpoint, mercenaries were base individuals outside society. J.G.A. Pocock writes that, for Machiavelli, “[a] soldier who is nothing but a soldier is a menace to all other social activities and very little good at his own.”¹² Even if this objection is met, there remains the conceptual problem previously noted—territorial monopoly—even if these bourgeois were successful, for a time, in cutting their costs.

“Sometimes,” Lewis Mumford writes,

the cities employed professional mercenaries to assert their mastery over their rivals: the Pisans were among the first to hire professional soldiers in war against Florence; and their success was so humiliating that the latter city began to lose faith in its boasted citizen army. Florence, a free city, contracted to surrender its freedom a second time, in 1322, to the King of Naples, in return for his protection.¹³

Militarily successful cities readily gave in “to the temptations of a predatory and parasitic life … alternately repeating the political mistakes of the Spartans and the Athenians, if not the Romans.”¹⁴

In the end, the Italian city-states—whether defended by mercenaries, militia, or feudal levies—succumbed to the intervention of larger territorial states. French invasion of the Kingdom of Naples in September 1494 marks the beginning of the new era. Bruce Porter comments:

The debacle of the Italian city-states shows the difficulty of such small “firms” surviving unbridled war, whereas the case of the Swiss Confederation indicates that economy of scale was not a absolute condition of survival: a small state could survive if its territory was defensible and its population highly cohesive.¹⁵

Before the French Revolution showed states how to tap deeply into manpower reserves, even large territorial states sometimes employed mercenaries to supplement their regular armies. A well-known instance is British use of Hessian mercenaries in the American Revolution. In late modern times, states have typically condemned the use of military force by any “private” and “unauthorized” bodies. In the last two decades of the cold war, for instance, the Soviet bloc in the U.N. consistently demanded that mercenaries be defined as “criminals” at the same time they called for extending the protections of the laws of war to guerrillas whom they were supporting.¹⁶

With modern mercenaries (perhaps most noted for their activities in post-colonial Africa), the problem of “who pays”— actual individual consumers of security or territorial-monopolistic states?—remains central. One suspects that covert agencies of imperial states that wish to dodge responsibility for certain actions constitute much of the “market” for today’s mercenaries. A recent “defense” of mercenaries by the novelist Frederick Forsyth is set in the same framework; Forsyth apparently hopes that Western interventionist states afraid of suffering casualties among their regular forces will enroll mercenaries rather than give up intervening in other countries’ affairs.¹⁷ This would seem to have little to do with the security, protection, and defense of real individuals and their families and properties.

MILITIAS AND SECURITY

Militia systems characterize republics. Greek city-states and republican Rome equated citizen and warrior. Citizens had a personal obligation to take part in war. Republican military systems, which typically combined “middle-class” infantry with aristocratic cavalry, departed from an older Indo-European model, which (ideally) excluded economic producers from war. The writings of Aristotle, Titus Livy, and Polybius—and their successor, Machiavelli—are the seedbed of republican theory. Their ideas were taken up by eighteenth-century Americans, in whose war of secession from Britain’s empire both militia and republican ideology played a role. The Second Amendment to the American Constitution reflects the practical and ideological background, although the amendment also enshrines an individual right of self-defense which grew out of English law and practice.¹⁸

In a survey of colonial and early U.S. legislation, Hummel concludes that local conscription underpinned the militia system until the Jacksonian period, when genuinely “volunteer” units came into being. Given the effectiveness of volunteers in the Mexican War (1847–1848)—albeit in temporary regular army units—Hummel asks whether coercion had been necessary for militias.¹⁹

GUERRILLA WARFARE AND SECURITY

There is no absolute distinction between militias and guerrillas. “Guerrilla warfare” refers to tactics and style rather than to preexisting force-structure. It is the way of the weaker side, whether in “internal” war, wars of secession, or wars against foreign domination. Mao Tse-tung provided this summary: “When the enemy advances, we retreat! When the enemy halts, we harass! When the enemy seeks to avoid battle, we attack! When the enemy retreats, we pursue!”²⁰

Guerrilla strategists allow the enemy to advance into the interior, where his supply lines are longer, where he lacks popular support, and where partisans can harass his overextended armies. They force the enemy to exhaust his manpower and resources holding ground—until a decisive “battle of annihilation” against the weakened invader becomes possible (Yorktown, Dien Bien Phu). Militias, with their smaller size and greater mobility, are well suited for such warfare.

Guerrilla tactics are as old as organized warfare. The Roman consul Fabius “the Delayer” raided and harried Carthaginian invaders until Roman forces could launch decisive battles. The Peninsular War, in which royalist juntas fielded guerrilla bands against Napoleon, is a later example.

To complicate matters further, guerrilla war slides over into “revolutionary war.” Sometimes the revolutionary goal is political secession or avoiding outsiders’ rule. Even here, a social revolutionary aspect creeps in, as in the American Revolution, where a well-defined libertarian-republican ideology led to reforms that ran alongside the military struggle. Elsewhere, ideologically motivated cadres (especially Marxists) have supplied political doctrine as part of military struggle.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND GUERRILLA WAR

William Marina writes that the American Revolution was a successful instance of “people’s war.” The British never grasped what the Americans were up to. George Washington, who leaned toward stylized European warfare and disliked militias, “arrived at his strategy to ‘protract’ the war,” Marina writes, “[a]lmost by accident.” Even “regular” American forces were not very regular to European eyes, and the role of militia units has been greatly undervalued. Americans took advantage of familiar terrain—forests, mountains, etc.—and lived off the land while harassing the overstretched foe. They enjoyed mass support. Where they did not, the war became a social struggle between local “Tories” and “patriots.” Thomas Paine articulated the Americans’ instinctive tactics, which the British likened to those of “Red Indians,” and Charles Lee developed both the theory and practice of revolutionary war. Guided by republican theory, the Americans preferred militia-based forces to the standing armies associated with British imperial rule. They would raid often enough to confuse the enemy, go home to farm, and then resume the war. Compare Truong Chinh: “When the enemy comes we fight, when he goes away we plough.” This may not have looked like war to the British, but it was effectively the basis of victory.²¹

CONFEDERATE GUERRILLAS AND RAIDERS (1861–1865)

Southerners may have lost their war for independence by not taking up revolutionary war. The conventional view has been that Confederate authorities failed to centralize sufficiently to keep large armies in the field. As Confederate commander-in-chief, Jefferson Davis followed a strategy of “offensive defense,” which, by requiring large regular forces to meet invaders or even to invade enemy territory, likely sacrificed natural Southern advantages. These included a large interior, favorable terrain, a population familiar with firearms able to live off the land, existing militia infrastructure, and popular support. Davis’s critics—Vice President Alexander Stephens, J.D.B. DeBow, Governor Joe Brown of Georgia, and Robert Toombs—lamented the government’s rejection of the guerrilla option. Historians like Robert Kerby, Grady McWhiney, and Jeffrey Hummel now second the critics’ view. By squandering limited manpower and resources in massive, suicidal frontal attacks on entrenched enemy forces armed with modern rifles, Confederate leaders “wore themselves out whipping the Yankees.” They also wore out the Confederate people. This refusal to embrace workable tactics has been attributed to fear of social revolution, which would have unraveled existing racial relations—and not just slavery, which some Confederates were willing to sacrifice for independence. Kerby holds that guerrilla war suited the habits and political ideals of Southern society—individualism, personalism, republicanism, and decentralization—far better than the West Point war pursued from Richmond.²²

In the Confederate west, Quantrill’s Raiders practiced guerrilla warfare and tied down significant numbers of Union troops. In Missouri, the war was personal and brutal—one reason, perhaps, why Robert E. Lee called partisan war “an unmixed evil.” In the east, the successes of Captain John Hunt Morgan and Colonel John S. Mosby with highly mobile cavalry led Union commanders to brand them “outlaws.” This was essentially guerrilla war on horseback and a more intelligent use of horsemen than heroically colorful cavalry charges to wrap up colossal infantry battles.²³ Morgan and Mosby’s gentlemanly bearing spared them the opprobrium generally assigned to Quantrill.

Davis’s last message called on Confederates to go on fighting, freed from the burden of holding cities and territory.²⁴ It came far too late. As Stephens said, conservative Southern leadership had sidetracked the people’s revolutionary instincts and wasted their enthusiasm.

AFRIKANER COMMANDOS IN THE SECOND ANGLO-BOER WAR (1899–1903)

Guerrillas can be defeated by an enemy even more willing to wage total war than was Abraham Lincoln. This was the case in South Africa. Afrikaners were good horsemen, superior marksmen, and tough frontier dwellers capable of waging protracted war. They had a preexisting militia institution, the commando, led by field-cornets, who had both civil and military duties.²⁵ These institutions had developed on the Boers’ frontier of occupation for 200 years.

When war broke out in October 1899, Transvaal and Orange Free State commanders spent their forces in large-scale attacks and sieges. Britain prevailed in short order. As the British prepared to relax, Boers took up guerrilla war, changing the equation. As an ideology, Boer nationalism proved hardier than the underdeveloped Confederate nationalism. Afrikaner units soon put the British where American colonialists had put them two centuries before (as memorably stated in Edmund Burke’s “Speech on Conciliation”): they could hold territory but not govern. They were not safe outside their strongholds.

The British adopted counterinsurgency tactics, driving Afrikaner women and children into concentration camps (where 26,000 died), and burning and destroying Afrikaner homesteads, livestock, and other property. Boer commanders— facing the destruction of their entire society—made peace and reasserted their nationalism politically (fatefully in the 1948 election—a political Majuba Hill for England). As a Boer prisoner put it: “You English fight to die: We Boers fight to live.”²⁶

GUERRILLA WAR THEORIZED

There are other wars in which guerrillas played an important role. One thinks of communist-led guerrillas in Yugoslavia, Greece, China, and Vietnam, the Irish Republican Army, and the PLO. These did not all achieve victory, but guerrillas do create major problems for those geared to conventional war. A hard-nosed hegemonic power will follow counterinsurgency doctrine and tactics to defeat such enemies. This will involve war on the guerrillas’ supporters—reconcentración, “strategic hamlets,” massive air campaigns (generally counterproductive unless mere murder is rational), and the like. The Power then rails at the “bandits” and “terrorists” for forcing it to behave so badly.

It is said that guerrillas, by not answering to higher authority, immediately turn to savagery, lower the moral tone, and undermine the rules of warfare. This argument is not exhaustive. When partisans do conform to the rules, their enemy typically proclaims them “banditti” and “outlaws” liable to be shot if captured, thereby giving them no incentive to follow the rules. Certainly in the twentieth century, it has been states which notoriously have scrapped “laws of war” built up over several centuries—witness starvation blockades, unrestricted submarine warfare, ethnic persecutions, and terror bombing in the two world wars. Do guerrillas commit atrocities? Of course. Can they commit them on the scale of centralized states? Generally, no.

In the nineteenth century, there were few partisan wars to stimulate military thought. In the twentieth century, the bond between anti-colonial revolution and guerrilla war has led to much theorizing about the latter. Here I shall only mention Michael Collins and Tom Barry, Ernesto Ché Guevara-Lynch (said to have carried Barry’s Guerilla Days in Ireland with him on campaigns), Régis Debray, Mao Tse-tung, Lin Piao, Ho Chi Minh, and Vo Nguyen Giap.²⁷ A counterinsurgency literature developed as well, some of which ran aground in Vietnam.

It is true enough that guerrilla warfare can be brutal, but that is no great recommendation of official organized war. It is said that guerrillas never win without allies. The American and Vietnamese revolutions are mooted. The Confederates’ and Boers’ lack of foreign support is noted. But the American Revolution—certainly—did not need France to provide the margin of victory.²⁸ The Chinese Revolution succeeded with little real aid from its ideological allies. Victory or defeat for guerrillas depends more on morale, exploitation of advantages, weaponry, inventiveness, and the enemy’s character. Anyway, foreign assistance comes with strings attached. It has been remarked that American revolutionary militias were effective locally but no good for invading Canada. This localism of militias is actually an argument in their favor—provided one only wants defense.

THE ANOMALIES OF “DEFENSE”: IMPLICATIONS FOR SECURITY PROVISION

The late Enoch Powell, classical scholar and Tory MP, wrote that American “defense” policy in Europe had rested on two pillars. The first held that Soviet Russia was “bent upon the invasion and conquest of Western Europe”; the second, that “the invasion had been averted, and still continued to be averted” by the Americans’ commitment to nuclear suicide. This was like “[t]he proof that elephants roam the railway lines because throwing bits of the Times out of the carriage window keeps them at bay.” Both were “contrary to reason and observation.”²⁹

Lost in cold war “thinking about the unthinkable” was provision of security for real people, their families, property, and societies. Now we are back at the beginning. If states are unreliable providers of security—if, indeed, they are often the main danger to freedom and security, not only for foreigners but for “their own people”—how do we provide security while maintaining a free society and avoiding the trap built into state territorial monopoly? As Jeffrey Hummel has suggested to me, this is much the same question as how states arose in the first place.

Toward the end of his magisterial history of republican thought, Pocock writes that abandoning republicanism would be “the end … of the quarrel with history in its distinctively American form”—the end, that is, of efforts to prevent constitutional decay. “But what would succeed that perspective is hard to imagine—the indications of the present moment point inconclusively toward various kinds of conservative anarchism—and its end does not seem to have arrived.”³⁰

Classical liberals and republicans knew that military organization presents grave threats to social peace and freedom. The inadequacy of their chosen solution—written constitutions— has long been apparent. Mass movements to “restore” constitutions—in the United States or elsewhere—are extremely unlikely and would not address territorial-monopolistic provision of security. At most, such efforts might buy us a few decades off from living in “interesting times.”

What is at stake is whether we can achieve Mises’s “free and prosperous commonwealth,” without seeing it fall back into state monopoly “centralysis.” In any imaginable world, building free societies involves extreme decentralization, secession, free markets, and free trade. Radically free societies under law have existed: ancient Ireland, medieval Iceland, and colonial Pennsylvania are examples.³¹

DEFENDING ORDERED FREEDOM AGAINST RISING STATES

If we could live in an ordered “anarchy”—or a federal republic so decentralized as to be a “near-anarchy”—how would we keep ourselves, our properties (our several territories), and our society safe from external and internal threat? Economic theory sets the problem out with utmost clarity. It cannot solve it unaided. It is here that we look to our liberal and republican forebears and historical “lessons.”

The gravity of the quest was underscored by Jacob Burckhardt: “An echo of the terrible convulsions which accompanied the birth of the state, of what it cost, can be heard in the enormous and absolute primacy it has at all times enjoyed.” Morton Fried writes that “the emergence of a state quickly catalyzes its hinterland so that a military necessity of defense is precipitated at the moment a state is born.” Thus “the leap to state occurs in a field of such leaps” so that “newly born state A finds itself not too far from newly born state B.”³² Whether referring to the state’s defending itself against the hinterland or the hinterlanders need, now, to defend themselves from that state, the point is well taken.

An interesting test case occurred in South Africa. In 1848, Great Britain proclaimed the Orange River Sovereignty as an extension of Britain’s frontier. A few Boers who saw themselves as loyal emigrants from the Cape Colony supported British rule. Most Boers resisted or ignored British rule. Some simply preferred existing arrangements with the neighboring Sotho King Moshweshwe, from whom they obtained land and with whose people they traded. Many English merchants favored accommodating Moshweshwe. Other Boers, less partial to Moshweshwe, also opposed British authority. By dogged resistance, “disaffected” Boers blocked British state-building, and British officials, who would not spend money and manpower to sustain the Sovereignty, withdrew in 1854. Nonetheless, a “successor state”—the Orange Free State—emerged, controlled by Boers and other (British) settlers who spied the rent-seeking opportunities—despite the recalcitrance of Boers still happy with the patriarchal near-anarchism of their maatskappy organization.³³

That a local state emerged—called forth by interference and example—is not surprising. “Public choice” insights about political plunder doubtless apply. Branding Boers who rejected British rule—or even the rule of fellow Afrikaners—as “free riders” would hardly have fazed them. In their minds, they had provided their security and British offers of “help” rightly seemed mere imperialist rationalization.

REPUBLICAN RESERVATIONS

At this point in our quest, where confederate republicanism and “anarchist liberalism” overlap, we find ourselves admiring militias—though we ask that they be voluntary rather than conscripted. (After all, in Old Testament times, the “faint of heart” were exempted from fighting but, presumably, did something useful for the cause.) Here, we would indeed wish to plan ahead for the resort to guerrilla tactics, against some power’s decision to invade our homes and properties.

This brings us to the Absent Redneck Problem. This was put more elegantly by the great French liberal Benjamin Constant in the 1820s. Constant attacked fellow-liberal Charles Dunoyer’s utilitarianism, which foresaw economic solutions for all problems. As Ralph Raico writes, Constant highlighted “a certain inner contradiction in the free society, which can only be compensated for by bringing into play anti-utilitarian forces, such as religious faith.” Freedom’s very success in bringing prosperity lessens the number of those—Greek Klephtes, Scottish highlanders—who have the skills and personal virtù with which to defend it.³⁴ Many in the American heartland fear that, in the event of a dramatic assault on their freedoms, serious help may not be forthcoming from the Manhattan literati, however “conservative” some may be. They imagine having to do it themselves and wish therefore to keep their means of defense under the Second Amendment.

Absent rednecks may be a problem, but urban environments per se do not prevent creation and upkeep of militias. In the “great secession winter,” it was militia companies (with links to the Democratic Party) in the towns of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York, which floated the idea of a Middle Atlantic Confederacy as a way of avoiding war between North and South. Certainly, Switzerland, as “modern” and urban as it wishes to be, is justly famous for its defensive militia system.³⁵ In any case, an ongoing contest over freedom might bring forth unforeseen allies from sundry social strata.

THE ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE ONCE MORE

Ché Guevara understood the usefulness of decentralized command and tactical flexibility, as his writings show.³⁶ Yet as Cuban minister of economics, he labored under the delusion that socialist economic “planning” and calculation were possible. Edmund Burke famously said that the state is not “a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.”³⁷ Given the actual history of the twentieth century, we might wish to reject Burke’s state-mystification in favor of his idea of loyalty to our own “little platoons.” This latter Burkean theme bears linking up with the economic analyses of Molinari, Rothbard, and Hoppe. Thus we come back to those “unrepublican” mercenaries—now repackaged as security or defense companies.³⁸ But how do we get there? To put it another way, the political and sociological problems still need solving so that the “economic” solution can come into its own.

CONCLUSIONS: “NEW MODEL NON-ARMIES”

We start from the truism that defense has the advantage. Already in 1861, McWhiney notes, “the rifle gave defenders at least a three-to-one advantage.”³⁹ And once people are driven to guerrilla tactics, defeating them raises the ratio of attackers to defenders to somewhere between 4-to-1 and 6-to-1, or higher. Successful “pacification” and occupation may require a 10-to-1 superiority. This shifts costs—in all senses—massively to the attackers. This is why Britain drew so much manpower from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia to defeat a few “Dutch” farmers. The final outcome, of course, still hinges on such factors as weaponry, geography, ideology, morale, and leadership, but determined defenders may outlast all but the most powerful, wealthy, and vicious foes.⁴⁰

Much is said about “industrialized” war—from 1861—but a turn toward lighter, more flexible weaponry and organization represents not “de-industrialization” but, instead, different choices of goals, strategy, and tactics. Certainly, defenders of ultra-minimal republics and “anarchies” will use products of modern industry, as available; but resorting to “primitive” means (man-traps, sharpened sticks) falls within praxeology’s formal ends/means logic, which applies available means to problems at hand. This spotlights another advantage of genuine defense: the possibility of “pin-pointing” one’s enemies, about which Murray Rothbard wrote. Guerrillas are able, potentially, to distinguish friend from foe and even friend from neutral. They need not wallow in the moral swamp of Total War, which finds carpet-bombing of civilians morally acceptable.⁴¹

Carroll Quigley wrote in 1966 that “[a]ny drastic increase in the ability of guerrilla forces to function would indicate … an increase in the defensive power of existing weapons, and this, in turn, would indicate an ability to resist centralized authorities and … maintain and defend small-group freedoms.”⁴² Do such weapons exist? I believe they do, and we must recall that when Quigley wrote, the outcome in Vietnam was still in doubt. Certainly, the success of anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan (whatever the role of U.S. assistance) resembles Vietnamese guerrillas’ success against Americans, and both wars struck blows comparable to what Boers did to the British Empire. In each case, defenders shifted significant costs—in the broadest sense—onto the attackers.

Would an announced intention to resort to such methods have a deterrent effect? Probably not, since would-be attackers always think themselves excused from historical pattern. On the other hand, no one has invaded Switzerland lately.

REAL DEFENSE: A SHIFTING REALITY

I assume that minimal states and anarchies can do without nuclear bombs, cruise missiles, stealth bombers, and expensive “systems” suited to world conquest or universal meddling. As for the “force structure” of mere defense, I believe we would see some rough combination of militias and “insurance companies”—perhaps not as mutually exclusive as we think—with resort to mass-based guerrilla war, however and by whomever organized, in extremis.

As for “free riders,” the American Revolution tells the tale. Had we sorted all that out, we would never have fought. Hummel throws a great Rothbardian “So What?” at the problem. He notes that, without free-riding, civilization itself would not exist.⁴³ Successful defense of freedom may require the “anti-utilitarian forces” of which Constant wrote: nationalism, religion, the desire for freedom, hatred of the enemy, social pressure to do the right thing, and so on. Whether this represents “enlightened self-interest” may depend on the selves people have. Some who normally speak for utility-maximizing economic man would be the first to coerce their fellows in wartime. Those who value freedom will forego coercion and use other means to overcome free-riding. Given the costs associated with state-monopoly “defense”—those dead millions for a start—a little free-riding seems a small price.

One might think that having just defeated the strongest power in the world, Americans would have rejected the Federalist song-and-dance about foreign threats and looming internecine war and the consequent need for a more powerful state. They got the stronger state, which then got them periodic wars—proving, doubtlessly, that the new state had saved them from other unknown perils beyond contemplation and enumeration—and elephants do roam the railway lines. It may be that the Federalists craved American empire rather than security—and that the Anti-Federalists, therefore, had the better half of the argument.

A final comment: Some years ago, Samuel H. Beer attempted to prove the Wilson-Story-Lincoln theory that the American union was “older” than the states comprising it. He spied in the Continental Congress the germ of a new “sovereign” power over the states. The slightest look at the Congress’s trials and tribulations puts that theory to rest. But as a center for exhortation, coordination, and the like, the Congress did useful work overcoming the free-rider problem during America’s protracted war.⁴⁴

¹On “praxeology,” see Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 3rd rev. ed. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966), pp. 11–71; for its subfields, see Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1993), p. 65; and “Praxeology: Reply to Mr. Schuller,” American Economic Review 61, no. 5 (1951): 945–46.

² Mises, Human Action, p. 30.

³See Robert Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State” in The Politicization of Society, Kenneth S. Templeton, Jr., ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979), pp. 34–36.

⁴See especially Michael Mann, “States, Ancient and Modern,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 18, no. 2 (1977); 262–98, and idem, “The Autonomous Power of the State,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 25, no. 2 (1984): 185–213.

⁵See Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Private Production of Defense” (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, n.d. [Essays in Political Economy]), pp. 1–16; quote from p. 5; Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, “National Goods Versus Public Goods: Defense, Disarmament, and Free Riders,” Review of Austrian Economics 4 (1990): 88–122; and Dan Garrett, “Public Goods and the Justification of the State: Review of David Schmidtz, The Limits of Government,” Humane Studies Review 7, no. 2 (Spring 1992).

⁶See, e.g., Hoppe, “Private Production of Defense”; Murray N. Rothbard, “Society Without a State,” Nomos 19 (1978): 191–207; and Linda and Morris Tannehill, The Market for Liberty (Lansing, Mich.: Tannehill, 1970).

⁷John U. Nef, quoted in Murray N. Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, Roy A. Childs, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Libertarian Review Press, 1974), chap. 3, “The Anatomy of the State,” p. 51.

⁸Pierre L. van den Berghe, “Denationalizing the State,” Society 33, no. 2 (January-February 1996): 64. On relative costs of monarchy and democracy, see Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Time Preference, Government, and the Process of De-Civilization” in The Costs of War, John V. Denson, ed., 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), pp. 455–508.

⁹F.J.P. Veale, quoted in Rothbard, “Anatomy of the State,” pp. 50–51.

¹⁰Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: New American Library, 1960), pp. 53–54. Part One, “The State as a Work of Art,” pp. 39–120, surveys the complex mixture of feudalism, republicanism, and private warfare which were hallmarks of Renaissance Italy. See also Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1969), esp. pp. 132–35.

¹¹H. Hearder and D.P. Waley, eds., A Short History of Italy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 78–79. On Hawkwood, see the three chapters by William R. Forstchen in Mercs: True Stories of Mercenaries in Action, Bill Fawcett, ed. (New York: Avon Books, 1999), pp. 20–43.

¹²J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 199–200.

¹³Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. 352.

¹⁴Ibid.

¹⁵Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State (New York: The Free Press, 1994), p. 59.

¹⁶H.C. Burmeister, “The Recruitment and Use of Mercenaries in Armed Conflicts,” American Journal of International Law 72, no. 1 (January 1978): 37–56, esp. 53–56.

¹⁷See the essays in Fawcett, Mercs, pp. 73–281; Frederick Forsyth, “Send in the Mercenaries,” Wall Street Journal (May 15, 2000), p. A50.

¹⁸On republican theory generally, see Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. On republicanism and private weapons, see Robert E. Shalhope, “The Armed Citizen in the Early Republic,” Law and Contemporary Problems 49, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 125–41; and William Van Alstyne, “The Second Amendment and the Personal Right to Bear Arms,” Duke Law Journal 43 (April 1994): 1236–55.

¹⁹Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, “The American Militia and the Origin of Conscription: A Reassessment,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 15, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 29–77.

²⁰Quoted in Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Samuel B. Griffith, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1963] 1971), p. 51.

²¹William F. Marina, “Militia, Standing Armies, and the Second Amendment,” Law and Liberty 2, no. 4 (Spring 1976): 1–4, quote on p. 3; and “Revolution and Social Change: The American Revolution As a People’s War,” Literature of Liberty 1, no. 2 (April–June 1978): 5–39, esp. pp. 21–27. Truong Chinh quoted in Norman Gall, “The Legacy of Che Guevara,” in Revolution: A Reader, Bruce Mazlish, Arthur D. Kaledin, and David B. Ralston, eds. (New York: Macmillan, 1971), p. 436.

²²On these issues, see Robert L. Kerby, “Why the Confederacy Lost,” Review of Politics 35, no. 3 (July 1973): 326–45; Grady McWhiney, Southerners and Other Americans (New York: Basic Books, 1973), chap. 7; idem, “Who Whipped Whom?” pp. 105–27; and idem, “Conservatism and the Military,” Continuity 4/5 (Spring/Fall 1982): 93–126; George M. Frederickson, “Why the Confederacy Did Not Fight a Guerrilla War After the Fall of Richmond: A Comparative View,” Published Lecture (Gettysburg, Penn.: Gettysburg College, 1996); Joseph R. Stromberg, “The War for Southern Independence,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 3, no. 1 (1979): 31–53; Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (Chicago: Open Court, 1996); and Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).

²³See Richard S. Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, [1958] 1986); John Ellis, A Short History of Guerrilla Warfare (London: Ian Allan, 1975), pp. 84–88; Virgil Carrington Jones, Gray Ghosts and Rebel Raiders (New York; Henry Holt, 1956); and James J. Williamson, Mosby’s Rangers (New York: Ralph B. Kenyon, [1896] 1982).

²⁴Davis is quoted in Kerby, “Why the Confederacy Lost,” p. 345.

²⁵F.A. van Jaarsfeld, “Die Veldkornet en sy aandeel in die opbou van die Suid-Afrikaanse Republiek tot 1870,” Archive Yearbook for South-African History 13 (1950); Cmdt. J.J. Retief, “Die Ontwikkeling van die Rangstruktuur van die Boerekommando’s, Deel I: 1715–1836,” Military History Journal 9, no. 4 (December 1993); and “Die Ontwikkeling van die Rangstruktuur van die Boerekommando’s, Deel II: 1834–1902,” Military History Journal 9, no. 5 (June 1994); and Neville Gromm, “The Commando Act of the Orange Free State Republic,” Military History Journal 1, no. 5 (December 1969).

²⁶Quoted in Ellis, Short History of Guerrilla Warfare, p. 119 and Boer War discussed, pp. 118–23. See as well Deneys Reitz, Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War (London: Faber and Faber Limited, [1929] 1975); John Fisher, The Afrikaners (London: Cassell, 1969), esp. pp. 164–67; and Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (New York: Random House, 1979). Frederickson compares the two wars in “Why the Confederacy Did Not Fight a Guerrilla War.”

²⁷See Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War, People’s Army (New York: Bantam Books, 1962); Lin Piao, Long Live the Victory of People’s War! (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965); Michael Collins, The Path to Freedom (Boulder, Colo.: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1996); and Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975). For the point about Guevara, Tom Barry’s Guerilla Days in Ireland (Cork: Mercier Press, 1955), was Ché Lynch Guevara’s bible and source book. (Robert O’Driscoll, “The Aesthetic and Intellectual Foundations of the Celtic Literary Revival in Ireland,” in idem, ed., The Celtic Consciousness [New York: George Braziller, 1982], p. 416.)

²⁸Marina, “Revolution and Social Change,” p. 24.

²⁹Enoch Powell, “The Decline of America,” The Guardian, (December 7, 1988).

³⁰Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 545; my emphasis.

³¹Joseph Peden, “Property Rights in Celtic Irish Law,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 2 (Spring 1977): 81–94; Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1975), vol. I, chap. 55, “‘The Holy Experiment’: The Founding of Pennsylvania, 1681–1690,” pp. 402–11; and David Friedman, “Private Creation and Enforcement of Law: A Historical Case,” Journal of Legal Studies 8 (March 1979): 399–415.

³²Jacob Burckhardt, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 111; Morton Fried, “Tribe to State or State to Tribe in Ancient China?” in The Origins of Chinese Civilization, David N. Keightley, ed. (Berkeley: University of California, 1983), p. 479.

³³See Timothy Keegan, “The Making of the Orange Free State, 1846–54,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 17, no. 1 (1988): 26–54; and M.C.E. van Schoor, “Politieke Groeperinge in Transgariep,” Archive Yearbook for South-African History 13 (1950). And see Joseph R. Stromberg, “Maatskappy, State and Empire,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 14, no. 1 (Winter 1998–99): 1–26. Historians have often noted British unwillingness or inability to spend the money needed to sustain steady imperial expansion in nineteenth-century Southern Africa. See, for example, C.F. Muller, Die Oorsprong van die Groot Trek (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1974), pp. 177–79. It seems likely that the gold standard helped restrain British imperialists in the field, since any increase of imperial expenditures would have required Parliament—and ultimately the public— to accept tax increases in real money. Modern (U.S.) imperialism, resting on fractional reserve banking, can escape this limitation, at least as long as the monetary authorities do not blunder into runaway inflation or depression caused by inflation-driven malinvestment. See Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Banking, Nation States, and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order,” Review of Austrian Economics 4 (1990): 55–87.

³⁴Leonard P. Liggio, “Charles Dunoyer and French Classical Liberalism,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 178; and Ralph Raico, “Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory: A Comment on Professor Liggio’s Paper,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 182–83 (from which the quotation is taken).

³⁵William C. Wright, The Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States (Cranbury, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973); on Switzerland, see Stephen P. Halbrook, Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II (Conshohocken, Penn.: Sarpedon Publishers, 1998).

³⁶Ché Guevara on Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1961).

³⁷Peter J. Stanlis, ed., Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1963), p. 471.

³⁸Gustave de Molinari, “The Production of Security,” J. Huston McCulloch, trans. (Occasional Paper #1, New York: Center for Libertarian Studies, 1977); Hoppe, “Private Production of Defense”; Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty (New York: Collier Books, [1973] 1978), pp. 237–41; David Osterfeld, “Anarcho-Capitalism and the Defense of the Nonstate,” Libertarian Forum 10, no. 2 (February 1977): 7–8; Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty; Jarret B. Wollstein, Society Without Coercion (Silver Springs, Md.: Society for Individual Liberty, 1969); Benjamin Tucker, Instead of a Book (New York: Haskell House, [1893] 1969), pp. 30–38 and 326–27; and David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1978).

³⁹McWhiney, “Conservatism and the Military,” p. 125: “the Confederates might well have remained on the defensive and exhausted the North. Such a policy of economy would have been in accordance with conservative principles of warfare” (my emphasis).

⁴⁰See Glenn A. May, “Why the United States Won the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902,” Pacific Historical Review 52, no. 4 (November 1983): 353–77, where the failure of the Philippine cause is blamed on its leaders.

⁴¹On “industrialized” war, see William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 144–387; John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1972), esp. pp. 228–31; and Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, [1985] 1987), pp. 222–54. On “pin-pointing” enemies in small-scale warfare, see Rothbard, “War, Peace, and the State,” pp. 72–73; and Hoppe, “Private Production,” pp. 10–11.

⁴²Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 1208–09.

⁴³Hummel, “National Goods Versus Public Goods,” pp. 107–22.

⁴⁴Samuel H. Beer, To Make a Union (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1993), but see Edmund Cody Burnett, The Continental Congress (New York: W.W. Norton, [1941] 1964) for a realistic view of the role of the Congress.