Jesuits: History's Most Effective Special Operators

摘要

Jesuit missions to China, India, and Japan from 1540 to 1773 form a useful model for contemporary U.S. special operators seeking influence in societies infinitely different from their own. The year 1540 coincides with the beginning of the Society of Jesus and their entrance into the missionary field alongside the Franciscan and Dominican missionary orders, all subsets of the Roman Catholic Church. The Jesuits' practice of first establishing respect, then influence, and eventually working for religious conversion proved far more effective than the relatively forceful tack taken by Dominican and Franciscan missionaries. While highly successful, Jesuit missionary techniques sufficiently clashed with the Franciscan and Dominican approaches to arouse the unwelcome interest of several papal inquiries, and contributed in large part to the dissolution of the Society in 1773. Within this era, three regions stand out as most valuable for their historical and biographical abundance, as well as their evolving political structures. India, Japan, and China all experienced significant missionary activity by different Catholic orders while their political systems evolved from feudal to national incarnations. Further, there was no dearth of European economic and political interest in these regions, creating a controversial social backdrop to missionary efforts very similar to that experienced by modern U.S. special operations personnel. Finally, the political, cultural and ideological characteristics are sufficiently varied between regions to permit distillation of a useful political and social influence heuristic applicable in a wide variety of special operations circumstances. The author examines the most successful Jesuit practices, creates a general model of their approach, and draws parallels to similar contemporary challenges to special operations forces.