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...
...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...
...strong" power, guerrilla wars are extraordinarily demanding. Guerrillas typically melt away into the general population, either because they have political support there or because they terrorize civilians into protecting them. (My guess is that in Iraq today both conditions are met.) So the strong power has to hunt the enemy not on the battlefield but in towns and villages. The risks are twofold: an ambush like that in Mogadishu or a gradual alienation of the local population leading to unbearable political pressure to end a war - which is how the French were forced out of Algeria. In the 1950s...
...just the armed forces that will have to adapt to guerrilla warfare. So will the public. Americans like their wars to have clean endings, with ticker-tape parades and a memorial on the Mall in Washington. But guerrilla wars aren't like that. Parents of fighting men in the old colonial powers got used to hearing that their sons had died in sordid skirmishes whose names nobody had heard of or - like the six Americans killed when their helicopter crashed in Afghanistan last week - in accidents far from home. Guerrilla warfare may have fine American antecedents, but we have always...