When taught "Method of Instruction" in Gagetown all too many years ago, I was told to try and restrict myself to three points, confirm everything in the lesson-plan, and to bring up these points in my introduction and conclusion. Later, my first civilian boss said to always begin a speech with a joke. A girlfriend who taught kindergarten told me that I should really work on classroom participation above all.

I’d now like to ask you for a show of hands...

• How many of you were involved at Oka, Ipperwash or Gustafson Lake?
• How many of you were ever in Bosnia, Croatia or Kosovo?
• Were any of you in Somalia or Rwanda?
• Anybody here been in South Lebanon, Namibia or Cambodia?
• Anyone on any peacekeeping deployments I haven’t mentioned?

Speaking for myself, I was a Reservist in those sedate years when we thought that maybe, perhaps, the Soviets just might invade Western Europe. Otherwise, as one of our songs put it: "What this army needs is tanks, yet all our wars are fought with blanks." Since leaving the Army I have been shot at by Mohawk smugglers, been in the middle of a couple of riots, received a mail bomb from some Anarchists and been stalked by the Tamil Tigers. Like some of you, I know that our Post-Cold War World is not all that safe.

In the 1890s, the first edition was published of Colonel Callwell’s book Small Wars (the more definitive 1906 edition was republished a few years ago). The book was a review of the lessons learned from a century of soldiering by European and American armies against the rest of the world.

In peacetime, a soldier of the nineteenth Century colonial powers could do either of two things: Stay at home as a creature of the parade grounds, or be out on the frontiers.

Those who did the latter could end up in Somalia or the Sudan, chasing down religious fanatics who were slaughtering townspeople and foreigners. They could serve on the edge of Afghanistan, trying to restrict the local arms trade. They might end up fighting bandits in Burma, slavers in West Africa, or raiders in the Sahara. Their soldiering might take them to the frontiers of an unstable local power -- like the Punjab or the Zulu Kingdom -- to restore order.

They could fight guerrillas with more modern firearms than their own, stare down fighting men who were tougher than they were, and operate in a tangle of conflicting political orders, unsure policy objectives, mixed public opinion and under the scrutiny of the press.

Much of this must sound familiar to you. Many 19th Century soldiers did a lot of things that many of you have -- often in the same parts of the world. They went peacekeeping, engaged in counter-insurgency operations, protected humanitarian missions, put down riots and disorder and generally worked to keep things quiet.

This wasn’t a unique situation either. Battles and campaigns are not the sum of military history. If you look back at one of the Pharaoh’s Charioteers, a Han Chinese crossbowman, or a Roman Legionary -- you might find that big wars were the exception for them too. Day to day soldiering for most of their lives would have been on the frontiers: Keeping the smuggling down, being a deterrent to raiders, and generally keeping order.

On the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, Martin van Crevald, an Israeli Professor of military studies, published his book The Transformation of War. Although events in Iraq and Kuwait seemed to prove him wrong, the rest of the 1990s bore up his observations. He pointed out that "war" as Western societies see it, is a highly unusual affair for most of humanity. The Trinity outlined by Clausewitz, where formed armies are employed as an instrument of government, with the support (willing or otherwise) of a people, is not all that common.

The European/Western view of war as a formal or "different" set of relations between one set of trinities and another is the exception, rather than the rule.

Martin van Crevald argued that most war is "Non-Trinitarian", in that one or more of the three elements of military, government and people are missing. Instead, warfare is commonly undertaken by informal organizations for a wide variety of reasons.

Aside from the 1991 Gulf War, the Kosovo bombings, and a limited border conflict between Peru and Ecuador, the 1990s saw dozens and dozens of Non-Trinitarian conflicts. Even in the former Yugoslavia, we never -- quite -- had Serbia engaged in deliberate and open warfare against another former state.

There is quite a long list of Non-Trinitarian conflicts in the 1990s.

Taking a shortcut from A to Z, we can see that Afghanistan is still a hotbed of conflict — between tribal militias, a group of religious extremists backed by a foreign power, and is host to malcontents supporting terrorism or conflicts elsewhere in the world. Algeria has seen Islamic Fundamentalists (initially with broad public support) pitted against a government and military that lacked it.

Leaping ahead to Zaire (or the Congo, or whatever it is today), we have a mix of Tribal militias, seven different armies from six nearby nations; criminal gangs, private security groups, guerrillas supported by a refugee population... and a situation where alliances change with little notice. Going on to Zimbabwe, last year saw a government at war with its own people — using mobs of political cadres to commit arson, rape and murder, while its military was busy over the border in Zaire.

Elsewhere in the world, there are bandits and pirates, armed criminal cartels, terrorists, insurgents, tribal militias, guerrillas and a host of other armed groups. There are militaries that serve no governments and governments that fight their own people. The purposes and methods of all these different combatants are as varied as the rules they operate under.

You can imagine -- or have been in -- situations where one faction is an ally in the morning, hostile in the afternoon, and neutral at night. Or you’ve been where you need the cooperation of Faction A, but they are opposed to Faction B, who support Faction C, who belong to the same Tribe as Faction D, who are coreligionists with Faction E, who supply Faction A with the proceeds of narcotics grown by Faction F. Is all that clear? Now it is 2000 Hours, and a drunken party of scruffy individuals with rusty AK-47s is approaching your checkpoint…

Many people like to believe that warfare is a modern development, and that people who are outside of the reach of Western civilization are innately pacifistic and gentle with each other. Some New Age writers hold, for example, that all of the First Nations of the Americas were peaceful peoples who lived in spiritual harmony with each other and with nature, until the dirty, hairy corrupting Europeans showed up.

Lawrence Keeley, a Professor of Anthropology, noted how ancient Neolithic village sites in Europe often were surrounded by a ditch and palisade… but these were often interpreted to be "ritual enclosures". Arrowhead studded skeletons from California were seen as being the occasional tragic victims of homicide, for surely, the local hunter-gathering peoples of 1000 years ago were incapable of war.

Keeley is among the many recent scholars who have taken off the rose-tinted glasses to realize that warfare is endemic in all human societies. Indeed, his book War Before Civilization observed that even an adult male citizen of Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany was far more likely to die a peaceful death than most humans in most "simple" primitive societies.

Moreover, the anthropological literature suggests that our view of war as a matter for soldiers in pursuit of political objectives is virtually unique. Elsewhere, people fight because they like it. One reason why Martin van Crevald’s book received less than critical acclaim was that he pointed out the same thing. Warfare is a favorite pastime with most people.

In our own society, war is something to be avoided. The tradition of war in Western civilization first appeared among the Classic Greeks (as described by Victor Davis Hanson in the Western Way of Warfare). Greek Hoplites saw violence being pushed to the extremes of human tolerance — and then some. In order to condition people to the stage where they can both unleash and withstand such extremes of stress, we turn them into soldiers in formed militaries and keep them under control — sometimes with the results outlined by Norm Dixon in The Psychology of Military Incompetence. Our capacity for violence, when unleashed, can even frighten many of our most bellicose compatriots.

You might have heard the joke about the two generals on a battlefield, and the one who asks his aide to fetch him his red-cloak to hide his wounds — prompting the other to send his aide for brown pants. That joke first surfaced in a play by Aristophanes 2400 years ago; and he knew what it was like to march in lock step towards the clash of spears.

Although the connection between you and a Greek Phalanx or Roman Legion is not a continuous one, the emotional state of a Hoplite or Legionary would have been broadly identical to those of our fathers or grandfathers at Vimy Ridge or in the Normandy Summer of 1944. We believe warfare is something terrible, and to be avoided -- because we have made it so.

We forget that there is a clear distinction between the soldier and the warrior. The traditional warrior will not stand in pipe-clayed ranks waiting to be lashed by a volley of musket fire. He will not "fly straight and level" over Tokyo or the Ruhr for 30 seconds. He will not go over the top to breast a tide of machinegun fire. He doesn’t need the discipline of the soldier, because he will not do these things.

He is however, fully capable of sniping at a soldier from an alleyway. He will, if reasonably sure he will not be shot at, throw rocks at riot police. He will have no problems parking a car bomb outside a convenience store or medical clinic. With his fellows, he will have no problems shooting an elderly couple in an isolated house, or in gang-raping their granddaughter. It might take him a little time to work up to this stage, but — with practice — it becomes easier.

It could be argued, with a considerable weight of evidence, that all people can be Warriors if they decide to engage in collective acts of violence.

Indeed, soldiers often underestimate the ability of other people to become extremely violent — much more than soldiers permit themselves to be. Murder gets increasingly easy after the first one, especially when people condition themselves to really hate someone else. Off hand, it is easy to remember the two British soldiers who were beaten to death by a mob of IRA-Supporters at a funeral in 1995, or the two Israeli reservists who were literally torn apart by a mob of Palestinians in September of 2000.

As Hanson, Keeley and van Crevald point out, war is not so difficult for those who do not care to take severe or prolonged risks when fighting. Anthropologists have found tribes that war on the same tribes that they get their wives from (actually, this seems forgivable…). There are peoples who peacefully cooperate in daily life and religious rituals, and then spend a few days engaged in warfare. There are other groups that put out one signal when they wanted to trade, and another when they wanted to fight.

If you are reasonably certain that you are not going to get killed in the next day or so, then violence becomes fun — even gratifying. It is an easy way to get resources, get laid, get some prestige with your friends, and gain some status. Westerners just have a difficult time recognizing this. The idea that violence is so easy and rewarding is alien to most Western intellectual traditions — Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Blood Rites is only one of the clumsy attempts to understand why this is so.

But… look back at the Mohawk Warriors, or people in other Aboriginal "Warrior Societies". The idea of military-style clothing and potentially violent confrontations is attractive because it gives purpose to otherwise empty or troubled lives. Remember some of the Warriors inside the final compound at Oka? Many were kids, often from the edge of Mohawk Society, who believed that this would give them the standing they would never get otherwise.

Some of you might remember Arkan, and how he embraced the wars attending the break-up of Yugoslavia as a chance to pose as a hero, prove his "Serbian-ness", and get rich from loot. He certainly wasn’t alone in doing this.

In other cases, being a warrior is a traditional activity in some cultures or a customary way of getting through hard times. Banditry, for example, is still experienced in parts of southern rural Italy. The return of Moro pirates off the Philippines is another example of a traditional activity re-appearing a century after the British Navy and the American Army cleaned out their nests.

We even have new kinds of bandits: Groups like the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or FARC in Colombia who wear the trappings of insurgents, but are largely focused on organized criminal activities. They want power and influence, largely to protect criminal enterprises, but don’t really want the burden of government. Both groups are awash in money from narcotics and other fundraising techniques, often have better equipment than the local Army, and have hired expert help. Warriors do not have to be simple.

In many ways, the Warrior manifests himself with the rioter, with the organized criminal, and with the terrorist. This does not mean he is less harmless than the soldier, and soldiers who have treated warriors with contempt have paid for the mistake: just ask George Armstrong Custer. A warrior may know his home turf extremely well, can be very adaptable in exploiting weaknesses, and can fight extremely well under some circumstances. However, he does have shortcomings.

Warriors seldom are paid professionals — they may have their families nearby and rely on them for logistical support. They tend to abhor discipline and are unlikely to be found standing around for days in a muddy trench in wintertime. If they see that there is no profit or personal gratification in staying with a particular situation, they will leave it. Additionally, they will not risk their lives on a daily basis.

The Warrior does not want the stress that attends constant fear in a high-paced environment. While he can be highly adaptable, he tends not to be quick. If confronted with a rapid pace of operations, he tries to disengage, depart or hide until he can regain the initiative.

Returning to Colonel Callwell, his book repeats three solid pieces of advice time after time. When soldiers had to deal with warriors, the experience of the 19^th Century was simple: Waste no time; never display indecision or a lack of confidence; and — once an objective is identified — pursue it as vigorously as possible.

Callwell understood that each situation was different, and merely trotting out the Maxim guns was often the worst way to settle a particular problem.

One could suppose that the good Colonel also raised dogs, and surmise that his attitude to any canine disciplinary problem was to immediately march on the dog, swat it on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and say "bad dog" in a firm voice. This does work and has the virtue of simplicity. But the Colonel lived in simpler times.

For a start, you may have to answer to both New York and Ottawa — both of whom are uncomfortable with the idea of using rolled up newspapers. CNN and Reuters are around looking for a chance to critique your style (with "talking head" experts like me back home ready to offer our two cents worth). Moreover, you have other contingents with you — and the Bangladeshis have shown up without a rolled up newspaper and would like to borrow yours. Meanwhile the Ukrainian contingent are quietly selling rolled-up newspapers to the dogs, and — being Canadian — your rolled up newspaper is a bit old and should be replaced with a newer one.

Oh, and the Dogs now have lawyers and press agents.

As the History Channel reminds us with almost every promotion, Conflict is a constant in human history. War is always present somewhere. While state versus state warfare is always possible (only a complete fool — or a treasury board -- would think otherwise), conflict between soldiers and warriors is inevitable.

However, this contest is never a simple one, and is quick only if the soldier truly has political will behind him. The results suggest that the soldier usually wins, but not always and often at great expense. But if the Soldier does not — or cannot — exploit the weaknesses of the Warrior, you can be sure that the Warrior will exploit those of the soldier.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca