Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...armed conflict, guerrilla tactics can be an equalizer. They are weapons, China's Mao Zedong once wrote, "that a nation inferior in arms and military equipment may employ against a more powerful aggressor." That's precisely the situation in which Iraq now finds itself. The coalition rules the skies over Iraq--Saddam's tiny air force hasn't once scrambled its jets since the start of fighting--raining down Wagnerian fury on cities and armies. In open combat, Iraq's armored divisions are being annihilated by allied forces. In such circumstances, it is natural for the Iraqis to resort...
...Fedayeen will run with their tails between their legs." If war planners worried about the paramilitaries at all, they assumed the trouble might come in Baghdad. The CIA says it distributed a classified report in early February to policymakers warning that the Fedayeen could be expected to employ guerrilla tactics against U.S. rear units. These Washington intelligence analysts now complain that their views were softened as the report moved up the chain of command. The intelligence was there, an official told TIME, but "I have no idea how much attention they paid...
Adam and his friends were guerrillas--though the word wasn't commonly used until some 40 years later, when Spanish peasants harried Napoleon's army in the Peninsular War. Indeed, the Columbia Encyclopedia notes that guerrilla tactics have been called "the great contribution of the American Revolution to the development of warfare." In this early part of the conflict in Iraq, Saddam Hussein's forces have borrowed heavily from that old American innovation. Now, before you send off enraged e-mail, I'm not suggesting any moral equivalence between the Minutemen and Saddam's thugs. But it is surprising that...
...pointless for American generals to bleat about Iraqi irregulars not wearing uniforms or hiding behind civilians; this is what guerrillas have always done. ("The guerrilla must move among the people as a fish swims in the sea," said Mao.) Our leaders in uniform would serve us better if they explained that, increasingly, guerrilla wars are the ones we will have to fight...
...more relevant to our future than a full shelf of books on the World War II heroics of the "greatest generation." Given the conventional power of the U.S. military, any probable adversary will choose unconventional tactics. The fighting in Afghanistan, for example, has settled into a classic pattern of guerrilla warfare, with hit-and-run attacks on U.S. bases followed by search-and-destroy missions by small units of American forces...