Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 143
BOOK REVIEWS
and, instead, used collective punishment, forced resettlement, prisoner abuse, and arbitrary execution
to cow the target population into submission.
Gen. George Erskine is typically cast as the hero
of the Kenyan campaign. He arrived to lead East
Africa Command in June of 1953 and is usually
credited with giving the counterinsurgency effort
a badly needed strategic vision while, at the same
time, eliminating the worst excesses among the
security forces.
Bennett asserts that Erskine did indeed initially
seek to moderate the violence but quickly realized
that investigating and prosecuting those officers
and men who operated outside the law would lose
him support of his own chain of command and
might even risk mutiny among his soldiers. Erskine,
Bennett claims, thus compromised by turning a
“blind eye” to the brutal methods his men used to
suppress the Mau Mau while investigating only
the most egregious abuses. In doing so, the general
apparently acted to shield his troops from the intrusion of civil oversight.
The resulting campaign saw atrocities on both
sides. While Bennett believes that most British soldiers acted honorably in fighting the Mau Mau, he
finds that the British Army’s experience in Kenya is
hardly a ringing endorsement of the kind of progressive techniques espoused in the U.S. Army’s
FM 3-24, Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies.
In fact, Bennett concludes there is no such thing as
“soft COIN.”
His disturbing conclusion: “Because intelligence
about who insurgents are and [because] shifting
political loyalties cannot be surmounted, it may be
that counter-insurgencies will always be brutal.”
Fighting the Mau Mau is recommended although it is hardly a smooth read. The author
chooses a thematic chapter structure rather than
a chronological account, and that, along with his
close adherence to the documentary record, sometimes makes for a choppy narrative. Nevertheless,
his book is significant both for what it tells us
about the British “small wars” experience and how
it might shape the U.S. Army’s ongoing debate on
counterinsurgency.
Scott Stephenson, Ph.D., Fort Leavenworth,
Kan.
MILITARY REVIEW January-February 2015
WARRIOR GEEKS: How 21st Century Technology
is Changing the Way We Fight and Think about War
Christopher Coker, Columbia University Press, New
York, 2013, 384 pages
I
n this book, Professor Coker, head of the
Department for International Relations at the
London School of Economics, explores the human dimension of war and warfare and the changes
that may occur in the future if technological advances
separate man from the West’s morals and ethics. He
examines war’s changes from possible technological
and medical advances that alter the human warrior, or
by using surrogate warriors such as autonomous systems (SKYNET), or some combination of both in the
post-human environment. Describing his own intent,
the author says—
What I have tried to do in this book is to
examine the likely impact of early 21st century technologies—digital, cybernetic, and
bio-medical—upon our understanding of
how war and our humanity will continue to
co-evolve.
Coker begins with a discussion of warfare as
understood by the ancient Greek philosophers as the
“human thing.” As contrast, he &