Children At War I

“We have young boys that are more familiar with a gun than with school.”
Afghan warlord

A copious, systematic look at the alarming combination that rips societies, nations and even regions apart, P.W. Singer’s “Children At War” makes a serious contribution to the layman’s understanding of the emergent child soldier doctrine. Not only is it “probably the worst unrecognized form of child abuse” but the utilization of child soldiers endangers international stability like few other developments in warfare. Singer lays out the facts of child soldiers in serious detail (its global in scope (across the developing world) and massive in number (somewhere between 3-4 million children serve with militias, insurgents and government security forces), skillfully probes the roots and results of the doctrine’s development and then offers a round of thoughtful suggestions, ideas and observations for how to respond to its terrible consequences (the focus of the second post about this book).

“Socioeconomic changes, technological developments, and base avarice within the changing contexts of war have created the circumstances, the opportunity, and the motivation for children to be turned into soldiers.”

As a destabilizing evolution of warfare that breaks millenia of cultural norms for most societies, child soldier doctrine is in play wherever decay, destruction and death may prevail; whether it be the slums of Sadr City, the urban, beach and jungle battlegrounds of Sri Lanka or the vast expanses of lush jungles along the porous borders of Colombia. The costs are enormous, not only in the lives of combatants and civilians, but in the effects the participation of children have on extending the length, brutality and potential reflash of conflicts. After the violence, the physical, emotional and mental scars the children carry hinder their contributions to society, not to mention the years of education and childhood they lost. Singer identifies geographical clusters (West Africa for one) of child soldiers where “demobilized” children from one conflict move on to participate in other conflicts or help initiate new ones (another aspect of the doctrine is the lowered barrier to conflict when anyone with an eye to plunder or power can kidnap enough children to form a fighting force and beat most 3rd World armies).

“Sometimes, when I was angry, I’d kill some of my fellow rebels. If we fell into an ambush and these bigger boys made a mistake, we’d kill them”.

P. Age Twelve (Singer deftly uses quotes from interviews he conducted with child soldiers around the world within the book to maximize the impact and scope of the problem).

Singer clears up a number of misconceptions, first and foremost that children cannot be skilled fighters. Indeed, in the era of the readily available AK-47 (only nine moving parts), it takes most children only 30 minutes to learn how to use it. From there, intense, violent training and psychological warping ensues, and a child soldier is born. Quickly dispatched is the myth that the use of child soldiers is “accidental” or “haphazard”. Rather, groups like the LTTE in Sri Lanka use sophisticated computer databases to track children in villages for indoctrination and the LRA in Uganda sets numeric goals of captured children for raiding parties to adhere to. Child solders can also grow in time to be strategically savvy (targeting the forces of weaker nations in coalitions as in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan), tactically lethal (the Tamil “Leopard Brigade” defeated a Sri Lankan special operations force and the West Side Boys held their own for hours against the British SAS), and ready and willing to take advantage of the moral and operational dilemmas they present as child soldiers to their opposition.

A defining book about a grave subject few understand, “Children At War” is an excellent read for those wishing to understand instability in developing countries and the kinds of challenges developed militaries face now and in the future.

The quality of the ideas, suggestions and information provided within the latter half of the book to address the dilemma of the child soldier doctrine demands a separate post, which will be forthcoming.