Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits

In a series of actions the Gideon Force continually outmaneuvered the Italians, always taking the tactical offensive against them, even when greatly outnumbered. This was a further development, on a somewhat larger scale, of the methods Wingate had begun using in Palestine.

And what of conflicts in which one side is markedly superior, as in the countless nineteenth-century struggles between advanced, imperial powers and indigenous peoples? The long history of warfare is replete with such unevenness. Parity, as existed between the leading states at the outset of World War I in 1914, is rare. In a world of unfair fights

1 War “Out of the Dark” War is among the most complex and perilous of human undertakings. Its complexities include those introduced by nature itself, as conflicts are conducted on virtually every type of terrain, on and beneath the surface of the sea, in the skies, and, perhaps one day soon, in outer space. Then there are the challenges posed by we

And so on. This is a book filled with hard-fought and fascinating duels, played out over raids, ambushes, and cordon-and-sweep counters to them. The stories are replete with evidence that irregular warfare operations often proved crucial to the outcomes of the larger wars of which they formed component parts—far more so than general military histor

Another supporting character who comes close to Churchill’s half-century-plus of involvement in irregular matters is Jan Smuts, who started out as a Boer insurgent but later ran the British East African campaign against von Lettow-Vorbeck during World War I. He reappears again during World War II as a bureaucratic thorn in the side of Britain’s mas

Robert Rogers led his rangers through unimaginable hardships in the wilderness war in North America. A generation later during the Revolution, Nathanael Greene lost virtually every pitched battle he fought, yet he kept coming at Lord Cornwallis and his Redcoats to distract them and create new and better opportunities for his dispersed guerrilla for

The action itself ranges across the world, beginning in the eighteenth-century North American wilderness. There the opening markers are the deaths of British general Edward Braddock and more than a thousand of his troops in 1755, ambushed by a very small Franco-Indian force, and the formation of a colonial ranger unit better able to wage such wilde

Yet when it comes to the great captains of irregular warfare, the same can hardly be said. While there are many accounts of daring commando raids, and more thoughtful works that explore the complex relationships between elite military advisors and friendly indigenous fighters, there is precious little study of the principles that might be distilled

Afghanistan. Yet the salient fact about the ongoing conflicts of our time is that all are irregular in nature. That is, they are primarily conducted through acts of terrorism or more classic guerrilla hit-and-run tactics. Those who face insurgents and terrorists have learned—as the Americans did in Iraq—that conventional responses will not suffice.