ABSTRACT
The sixteenth-century roots of special operations ‘small war’ The eighteenth-century strategist Capitaine Thomas-Antoine le Roy Grandmaison in his famous treaty about ‘small war’ ( petite guerre) defined the objectives of ‘parties’ (special units) in such operations to include intelligence, small harassment operations, and attacks on small enemy units not least to extract booty, to find food and fodder, and to exact war subsidies from the local populations.1 On the basis of other works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we might add to this any operations on the fringes of battles and sieges to assure the main army’s security by closely observing enemy movements, to provide it with food and fodder while – if the opportunity arose – depriving the enemy of it, to harass the enemy, and to launch small attacks on small enemy contingents.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, small war consisted of skirmishes and limited operations of small detachments of regulars or irregulars that were members of a garrison or a field army, who could not decide wars by themselves, but made their contribution to the final outcome of a campaign.3 This
overlaps with what today one might call special operations, to distinguish it from small war (Spanish guerrilla) in the later sense of ideologically motivated popular insurgency or ‘people’s war’ (in the language of the Prussians Heinrich von Brandt and Carl von Clausewitz, both writing in the 1820s4). This article deals with the question of whether ‘small war’ in the modern sense of ‘special operations’ existed before the term ‘petite guerre’ began to be used in this seventeenth-and eighteenth-century sense.5
