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Betz, David J. "Insurgency and Counterinsurgency." The International Studies

Encyclopedia. Denemark, Robert A. Blackwell Publishing, 2010. Blackwell
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Introduction
Insurgency and counterinsurgency are two sides of the same coin. The salient
feature of this form of conflict is the gross disproportion of insurgent political
aims to their military means relative to those of the counterinsurgent. In its
classical form, insurgency possesses most or all of the following
characteristics: limitations on the commitment of political will and military
resource by one or more of the belligerent parties, and a consequent restriction
of some operational techniques and capabilities (although this is often the case
in conventional conflicts, it is particularly prevalent in unconventional ones);
participation of a nonstate group (sometimes backed by an external state
power) fighting against a state authority with the aim of achieving certain
political, social, or economic gains; a nature that is protracted and politically
complex; and predominant occurrence in the Third World. Contemporary
scholars are divided on the extent to which these characteristics of classical
insurgency still pertain to the transnational or global insurgency that has
dominated the interest of the field in the first decade of the twenty-first
century, though the trend is to the view that a major rethinking is warranted
and that insurgency has evolved beyond its classical form, possibly into
qualitatively new types of conflict.
Most armed forces have historically regarded the practice of, and the study of,
insurgency and counterinsurgency to be a niche area despite the fact that
these have been the most prevalent forms of conflict since 1945 (Holsti 1996).
Indeed, pinning it down in the literature can be difficult because of the variety
of terms used to describe the subject, which include, inter alia, low-intensity
conflict, small wars, irregular wars, guerrilla wars, revolutionary wars,
as well as the awkward mouthful MOOTW or Military Operations Other than
War. The latter is a particularly telling formulation illustrating how insurgency
has tended to be conceived as a phenomenon that exists outside a traditional
understanding of proper war (Smith 2003). The post9/11 wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq changed all that: the United States, navely, did not expect to fight an
insurgency in either place until this was forced upon them by events that they,
and a handful of their major allies, had failed to control. The result has been an
enormous increase in interest in insurgency as a field of academic study and as
a matter of practical concern to armies that are now racked by debate about
whether and how to adapt their structures to meet the challenge. The study of
insurgency and counterinsurgency has been thrust into the limelight because
the norm of regular conflict now looks decidedly irregular a trend that looks
likely to continue for some time (Evans 2003; Gray 2005).

Strategy and Insurgency

Insurgency emerged in the modern military lexicon during the era of
decolonization when countering the myriad wars of national liberation
preoccupied Western powers for a time (Moran 2006). O'Neill's (2005:15)
definition of it is widely accepted both US and UK doctrine use an
approximation of it:
a struggle between a non-ruling group and the ruling authorities in which the
non-ruling group consciously uses political resources (e.g., organizational
expertise, propaganda, and demonstrations) and violence to destroy,
reformulate, or sustain the basis of legitimacy of one or more aspects of
politics.
But another useful definition is Mackinlay and Al-Baddawy's (2008:5) which
emphasizes insurgency's three essential characteristics. The first two of
these (insurgency is an expediency of the weak which uses a mixture of
subversion and military pressure to defeat a stronger power) are in accord with
the above, but the third highlights an important adaptation of insurgency to the
highly networked human society that is now just emerging: insurgents redress
military weakness by exploiting their environment, which could be empty
wilderness, a rebellious city, a disaffected community, or, in the prevailing era
of mass communications, the virtual territories of the mind. Andrew Mack
famously (1975) argued that when big nations lose small wars (which, it
bears pointing out, they rarely do) it is because a fundamental asymmetry
exists between insurgents and intervening counterinsurgents: for the former,
the war is total; whereas for the latter, the war is limited. The limited stakes for
the intervening power place constraints on the level of force it is prepared to
apply, as well as the time it is prepared to remain engaged. Arregun-Toft
(2005) clarified and extended Mack's thesis. What matters is the interaction of
insurgent and counterinsurgent strategies, which he places into two broad
categories direct and indirect: the former aims to destroy the other side's
force; the latter aims to destroy the enemy's will. In the case of sameapproach interactions on both sides (i.e., direct offense vs. direct defense, or
indirect offense vs. indirect defense) the stronger power will win. But in the
case of opposite-approach interactions (direct offense vs. indirect defense,
and indirect offense vs. direct defense) the weaker power will win by
protracting the conflict exhausting the patience of the larger power, although
again it is important to note that there is no guarantee with this strategy; most
proto-insurgencies fail (Byman 2007) and are consigned to history as rebellion
or crime. In short, strong actors may lose against weaker actors when they
adopt the wrong strategies. This is a useful frame of mind to have, for while it
is tempting to view the challenges that insurgency presents as largely tactical
(for example, as a particularly tricky problem of target selection), the overriding
issues in counterinsurgency are political and strategic (see also Merom 2003;
Record 2007).

Insurgency before Mao

There is nothing new about the use of guerrilla tactics per se; asymmetry is a
recent buzzword for something which is, in fact, inherent to war in all periods of
history. Herodotus, the father of history, wrote of the Persian warrior king
Darius in 512 BCE struggling unsuccessfully to subdue Scythian tribes who
used scorched earth and guerrilla tactics to force him into retreat from their

lands. Nor is there anything uniquely irregular about such tactics: concealed
movement, ambush, raiding these are all core functions of regular forces.
Asprey (2002) exhaustively documents the prevalence of guerrilla war
throughout history, but guerrilla tactics do not equal insurgency. The distinction
is well made by Beckett, who argues that it is only in the mid-twentieth century
that guerrilla warfare became revolutionary in both intent and practice with
social, economic, psychological and, especially, political elements grafted on to
traditional irregular military tactics [] (2001:viii).
Not all will agree with Beckett. Perhaps the most salient change was that in the
nineteenth century, when not fighting each other, the Western powers were
fighting to build empires through conquest, whereas in the twentieth they were
struggling to police them (and ultimately to retreat from them with the least
loss of dignity). There are, however, hints of modern insurgency, particularly in
the nineteenth century, which are worthy of consideration. Clausewitz, for
instance, was chiefly interested in guerrilla warfare as a strategy within a
conventional military framework, but he did write on people's war in On War,
which he described as a kind of nebulous vapoury essence, never
condens[ing] into a solid body []. Friedrich Engels, a serious student of
military affairs as were many early communists from Marx to Lenin and
Trotsky also wrote perceptively about irregular warfare: insurrection is an art
quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain rules of proceeding,
which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them, he
wrote in Revolution and Counterrevolution in Germany (1852), advising
insurrectionists that their meager strengths amounted to not much more than
surprises and possession of the moral ascendant.
We can see in these studies of guerrilla warfare some basic precepts which
have a degree of timelessness: animation of the people by some passionate
cause ideally resistance to occupation; tactics which rely upon surprise;
and, above all, the avoidance of setpiece battle. However, the first and,
arguably, the most influential theorist of insurgency was T.E. Lawrence
(Lawrence of Arabia) whose insights stemmed from his almost certainly
exaggerated exploits in the Middle East in World War I (for romantics, see
Lawrence of Arabia [1962, directed by David Lean]; for sober history, Wilson
1992). His book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926/1997) has undeniable
aesthetic and philosophical merit, but the gist of his thoughts on insurgency is
succinctly expressed in an essay The Science of Guerrilla Warfare (1929). His
characterization of the relationship of the regular and irregular mindset is still
germane: Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished
through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where they
listed (Lawrence 1926:182).
Lawrence described insurgency as a moral contest not a physical one (which is,
of course, what Napoleon said about war in general another illustration of the
difficulty of finding the truly distinctive threads in this subject). He recognized
that insurgent strength derived from strategy, not tactics: Arab strength lay in
flexibility and patience not combat power; they had strategical rather than
tactical strength (1929). Moreover, presaging later theorists of insurgency,
Lawrence spoke of the necessity of a cause to motivate the insurgents. As
much as many were motivated by the prospect of loot, it was conviction
ultimately that motivated the fighters: Their only contract was honour

(1929). Perhaps Lawrence's most prescient observation, however, concerned

the centrality of political subversion in insurgency: The printing press is the
greatest weapon in the army of the modern commander [] (1929). That is to
say, the key terrain of insurgency is psychological and the means of shaping it
propaganda.
Propaganda has become a thorny subject. On one hand, it is merely
communication of ideas designed to persuade people to think and behave in a
desired way (Taylor 2006:6); on the other, it is a term for a wartime function
that dare not speak its name. What gives propaganda its controversial nature is
that it is communication meant to convey an idea, message, or ideology that is
in the interest of the persuader and not necessarily the persuaded, although a
convergence of interests is quite possible. As Taylor (2006:9) puts it:
If war is essentially an organized communication of violence, propaganda and
psychological warfare are essentially organized processes of persuasion. In
wartime they attack a part of the body that other weapons cannot reach in an
attempt to affect the way in which participants perform on the field of battle.
The importance of this stems from Mack's (1975) observation that
counterinsurgencies are characterized by an asymmetric level of commitment.
Propaganda operates on the individual level of the unconscious a condition of
the success of propaganda is that the subject must not know that he or she is
being shaped by outside forces largely by appeal to, and manipulation of, the
deep psychosociological bases of society (Ellul 1965). In a war of survival, this
is easy because people unconsciously welcome propaganda which aims to
sustain morale and determination at home, while undermining the same things
in a dangerous enemy. But in a war of choice particularly in the case of a third
party intervention to prop up an unpopular foreign government the
unconscious predisposition of individuals to be propagandized is much less.
Propaganda is a vital aspect of insurgency and counterinsurgency; whether it is
a more powerful tool for the insurgent than it is for the counterinsurgent is a
good question. Galula (1964:14) argues that it is:
The asymmetrical situation has important effects on propaganda. The
insurgent, having no responsibility, is free to use every trick [] Consequently,
propaganda is a powerful weapon for him [] The counterinsurgent is tied to
his responsibilities and to his past, and for him, facts speak louder than words
[] For him, propaganda can be no more than a secondary weapon, valuable
only if intended to inform and not to fool.
There is much wisdom in what Galula says: that the counterinsurgent must not
lie too boldly, if at all (lest long-term pain is caused to the counterinsurgent's
credibility for short-term gain), ought to be regarded as something akin to a
scientific law. However, what Galula says also represents probably the most
fundamental and widespread theoretical mistake in the entire literature. Facts
speak louder than words for both sides; in crude terms, the job of the
counterinsurgent propagandist is to make the insurgents stand up for their
actions (Bolt and Betz 2008:19).
Propaganda of the deed is a distinctive subtype of propaganda which is
usually understood as simple terrorism but it is more than that; in fact,
propaganda of the deed is an act of political communication a dramatic act of
insurgent violence which is designed for, and mindful of, its impact on media
audiences within a larger campaign of strategic communications aimed at

mobilizing populations in a long-term struggle for ideological ends. In the

insurgency context, the point of the propaganda of the deed attack is not to
cause damage per se, and even the force multiplying effect of fear may be
seen as more or less a side benefit; rather, it is to motivate others to join the
cause or to delegitimize the authorities by dramatizing their inability to prevent
such acts from occurring. Paradoxically, it does this through an act of
spectacular violence designed to provoke the state into overreacting with
violence and repression of its own, thereby undermining its legitimacy and
support.
Propaganda of the deed is a symbolic act which is why insurgent propagandists
choose victims who are rich in symbolic meaning, whose victimization will
resonate pleasingly with partisans of the cause (Crelinston 1989) while causing
fear (and desire for revenge) in others. There are many historical and
contemporary examples of this from the Anglo-Irish War of 191622, in which
the Irish Republican Army deliberately launched a reign of terror in order to
make government impossible and provoke the British authorities into
overreaction, to Fallujah, Iraq in 2004 where the public defilement of the bodies
of American military contractors by insurgents precipitated a hasty American
attack that proved both ineffective and a public relations disaster (on the IRA,
see Selth 1991; on Iraq, see West 2005; Ricks 2006). The reason for this
consistency is simple: the paradoxical logic of propaganda of the deed
generally works. It takes an unusually disciplined force under an unusually
unflappable commander not to rise to the bait; normally, insurgent violence
begets counterinsurgent violence in a cycle that more often than not redounds
to the benefit of the former.
It is possible to see in the nineteenth and early twentieth century small wars
of Britain and the United States in uncivilized countries the beginnings of a
hearts and minds approach to counterinsurgency. There are important
lessons to be drawn, for instance, from reading Callwell's Small Wars (1906),
Gwynn's Imperial Policing (1934), and the classic United States Marine Corps
Small Wars Manual (1940/2004), but they are accompanied by caveat. What
similarities exist must be considered in the strategic context that pertained to
the actions of an imperial power bent on acquiring and directly ruling by
force, if necessary the territory of other people which is somewhat different
from the strategic context of modern counterinsurgency: nowadays
expeditionaries seek to create governments (usually in their own image) which
are favorable to their interests which makes the politics similar, but their ability
to do so is lessened by the fact that they wish to depart as soon as possible a
disadvantage the true imperialist did not have.
We can see this in the way that Callwell (1906:267) divided colonial
campaigns into three categories: conquest, pacification, and retaliation. Only
the second category is cognate with modern counterinsurgency. Noteworthy is
his clear injunction concerning small wars of this second category: where
possible, avoid them because as a general rule the quelling of rebellion in
distant colonies means protracted, thankless, invertebrate war (1906:26).
This, of course, resonates in modern ears, and we may see repeated such
views with metronomic regularity by practically every generation of officer,
American and British, from Callwell onward. His suggested course of action
when at war with an enemy who has no organized army to overthrow

demonstrative use of force and not showing weakness on the logic that
uncivilized peoples understand and respect the rifle and the sword
(1906:401) is also not infrequently expressed still.
Yet, at the same time, Callwell observed that some tactics were more
exasperating than others and to be avoided because depredation causes
enmity which is sometimes contrary to the strategic purpose of the war. Later
in the book, he talks about operations in Burma where great care was taken to
separate marauders from the people in order not to exasperate the latter
(1906:1478). Hence the temptation to suggest that in a rudimentary way
Callwell observes the essential rule of counterinsurgency that the vital thing
that armies require to prevail in this sort of warfare is the good will (or at least
neutrality) of the host population. On the other hand, the advice not to engage
in pointless depredation is more than balanced by advice on when and how to
engage in deliberate, putatively educative, and necessary depredation.
His most important contribution, however, is to recognize the aforementioned
principle observed by Lawrence that the fundamental asymmetry of insurgency
lies in the fact that, while tactics favor the regular army, strategy favors the
irregular. This is because, says Callwell,
In spite of sea power, in spite of the initiative, in spite of science, and in spite of
the wealth, of the reserve of fighting strength and of the resources at their
back, the trained and organized armies of the civilized country have
undoubtedly the worst of it as regards strategical conditions, and that it is so is
actually in a large degree traceable to the very causes which establish their
tactical superiority, and which eventually lead as a rule to the triumph of the
forces of civilization. For it is the elaborate organization of the regular troops
which cramps their freedom in the theatre of war, and it is the excellence of
their armament and the completeness of their kit which over-burdens them
with non-combatant services and helps to tie them to their base.
(1906:85)
This observation of Callwell's alone makes it worth bracketing any study of
counter-insurgency with him. But the British approach to small wars in
something relatively close to its modern form is delineated more or less
comprehensively in Charles Gwynn's Imperial Policing (1934). The essential
principles are these: civil power is supreme; force must be used discriminately
(Gwynn actually talks of minimum force exercised in a timely way but
discriminate force captures the essence of both); and coordination of civil
and military instruments is vital.
The United States Marine Corps Small Wars Manual (1940) shows a lot of
commonality with Callwell's and Gwynn's work: all recognize the inherent
complexity of small wars, the absence in them of anything like a frontline, the
problems of obtaining good intelligence, the importance of not alienating the
population through excessive force and discourtesy, the need for an integrated
political-military approach, and, perhaps most importantly, that success in
counterinsurgency is more likely achieved through political rather than military
means. However, while there is a recognition of the need for the modulated use
of force, there remains, as Beckett (2001) puts it, a certain obsession with
firepower which is a characteristic of the American way of war often observed
by scholars.
Also important is the French tache d'huil or oil spot strategy which has a

distinctive history and political-military approach. At root, Callwell and Gwynn's

approach, as well as that expressed in the Small Wars Manual, is enemycentric to use an inelegant modern term in which the object is to find and kill
the enemy. The French oil spot method is somewhat different, at least in
theory; its aim was not so much to defeat and destroy the enemy as it was to
subordinate and pacify him. The distinction is important, although arguably a
matter of emphasis rather than intent: French razzias or raids practiced as
reprisals against dissidents and unruly tribes in North Africa, for instance, were
no different from British butcher and bolt operations in Afghanistan.
The essence of the oil spot method, as described by Louis Hubert Gonsalve
Lyautey, was that conquest of a region would proceed not by mighty blows,
but as a patch of oil spreads, through a step-by-step progression, playing
alternately on all the local elements, utilizing the divisions between tribes and
between their chiefs (Porch 1986). In theory, the military would establish
control of an area through force and then maintain it by an effective
administration that would eventually win over the population. Such views are
prevalent in our own time where such population-centric ideas as that
insurgents are out-governed not out-fought are increasingly apprehended. In
practice, however, the oil spot strategy was not faithfully applied, and the
hearts and minds element of the oil spot had more to do with the public
relations needs of the army with the French public than it did with a workable
military formula for counterinsurgency. This, too, has a contemporary ring.
By the interwar period, Britain and the United States had adopted what might
be called a rudimentary hearts and minds approach to counterinsurgency,
while France, though it may not have practiced what it preached, had a similar
understanding of the need for nonmilitary measures in the pacification of
regions beset by guerrillas. This is not to deny that these countries had
practiced slaughter and other forms of intimidation in order to cow recalcitrant
populations in the past (and would try the same again); it is only to say that, by
the early part of the twentieth century, it had begun to seep into their thinking
that insurgencies had to be solved politically and that treating indigenous
peoples in a hostile and overtly superior manner could be counterproductive to
one's strategic ends.

Maoist Insurgency

Thus far we have been at pains to observe a distinction between guerrilla

tactics, which are as old as war itself, and insurgency, which is a form of
conflict that is principally psychological in nature with strictly military
considerations of considerably less significance than those in the political
dimension. Fall (1965) succinctly captured the distinction in his definition of
Revolutionary War (which he considered a more apposite term than
insurgency) as: RW = G + P or revolutionary warfare equals guerrilla warfare
plus political action. The truism that insurgency is 80 percent political and 20
percent military is often repeated. The unique contribution of Mao Zedong, to
whom we now turn, was figuring out how and with what to fill that 80 percent:
mass subversion and political organization. When analysts speak of classical
insurgency what they mean is Maoist insurgency.
Katzenbach and Hanrahan (1955:327), in a brilliant essay on Maoist
insurgency, argued that its strategic essence was the substitution of
propaganda for guns, subversion for air power, men for machines, space for

mechanization, political for industrial mobilization. It is important to note that

Mao came to this strategy through exigency and opportunity as much as
genius. Exigency came from the fact that China's communists had already tried
the urban revolution that Marxist orthodoxy told them was the place to start,
and it had failed. Opportunity came from the fact that China was a physically,
psychologically, and economically wrecked country. It had been occupied and
economically exploited by foreigners and corruptly and rapaciously governed
by its own despots. It was the sick man of Asia, ridden with tension and ripe
for revolution among a vast peasantry eager for some sort of change which
would improve their own circumstances and those of their children and
grandchildren. Mao's innovation was to realize that if he could convince the
peasantry that the Red Army's soldiers were different, that they were not just
the enforcers of the latest warlord but a way to end the cycle of depredation
and impoverishment, then he could harness an immense source of potential
energy (Zarrow 2005). This realization is the source of Mao's famous three
rules and eight remarks given to his soldiers:
Rules: All actions are subject to command. Do not steal from the people. Be
neither selfish nor unjust.
Remarks: Replace the door when you leave the house. Roll up the bedding on
which you have slept. Be courteous. Be honest in your transactions. Return
what you borrow. Replace what you break. Do not bathe in the presence of
women. Do not without authority search those you arrest.
(Mao Zedong 1937: ch. 6)
It was not just a set of tactical rules, however. What Mao hit upon was a
concept for the relationship of the guerrilla and the people aimed at the
achievement of a political goal: guerrilla warfare basically derives from the
masses and is supported by them, it can neither exist nor flourish if it separates
itself from their sympathies and co-operation, he wrote (Mao Zedong 1937:
ch. 1). It also bears noting that Maoist insurgency, as described in Problems of
Strategy in China's Revolutionary War (Mao Zedong 1936), is essentially about
changing the correlation of forces between the insurgent and the government
in three strategic phases (the defensive, stalemate, and offensive) which
ultimately will meet in conventional battle. The decisive condition that must
exist before the insurgent commander switches to conventional operations is
the support of the population. This is the salient factor because Maoist
insurgency is not a system of military tactics but a system of political
organization, societal mobilization, and mass subversion. As Mao wrote in On
Protracted War (1938: para. 66):
To win victory, we must persevere in the War of Resistance, in the united front
and in the protracted war. But all these are inseparable from the mobilization of
the common people. To wish for victory and yet neglect political mobilization is
like wishing to go south by driving the chariot north and the result would
inevitably be to forfeit victory.
A good discussion of the phases of Maoist insurgency is to be found in O'Neill
(2005:4955). For purposes of this discussion of the evolution of insurgency,
what is worth reiterating is the centrality of population support. Also, it is worth
noting that the longstanding principle of avoiding setpiece battle, or strategic
retreat as Mao put it, continued to define phases one and two of Maoist
insurgency.

A good analogy for the way in which classical insurgency works in a body politic
is the way cancer works in a living organism. What starts as just a few
malignant cells slowly metastasizes, spreads throughout the body, eventually
killing. Robert Taber famously described this as the war of the flea:
The flea bites, hops, and bites again, nimbly avoiding the foot that would crush
him. He does not seek to kill his enemy at a blow, but to bleed him and feed on
him, to plague and bedevil him, to keep him from resting and to destroy his
nerve and his morale. All of this requires time. Still more time is required to
breed more fleas. What starts as a local infestation must become an epidemic,
as one by one the areas of resistance link up, like spreading inkspots on a
blotter.
(2002:489)
There remain, however, three other intertwined elements of classical insurgent
technique that ought to be discussed: parallel governance structures;
intelligence; and, narrative. What is in contest in insurgency is the consent of
the population to be governed. What the insurgent must do, therefore, in order
to detach the population's loyalty from the state, is demonstrate a greater
capacity for governance by providing public goods in society which are
normally provided by the state (such as justice, health care, and other social
services) intimidation is also used in combination. Good intelligence is
therefore crucial because the insurgent needs a detailed knowledge of the
population's sympathies, interrelationships, and assets in order to know who to
intimidate, co-opt, and tithe. Fall (1965) illustrates this logic nicely, pointing out
that insurgent violence is not so much aimed at destroying the government
forces (because that is beyond their means) but at establishing a competitive
system of control over the population. And, finally, there is the narrative,
which is both the story from which the group's aims are derived, as well as the
way in which they are expressed a story that is continuously reshaped in
order to remain resonant with the target population. The narrative of Irish
resistance to Britain, for instance, depended on absorbing new political ideas
into successive generations of insurgent message: across two centuries of
republicanism, tangential, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes separate,
themes as distinct as Romantic nationalism, land rights, republicanism,
socialism, sacrificial Catholicism, anti-constitutionalism, and secession from the
imperial occupier were woven into the narrative.
Now let us explore briefly the doctrines that emerged to counter Maoist
insurgency. One French view of counterinsurgency, which we see in Trinquier's
(1964) work, is uncompromising and strongly enemy-centric no doubt
because it emerged during the wars in Indochina and Algeria, two of the
hardest fought insurgencies of the postcolonial era (Horne 1977; see also
Windrow 2004). As the French Army saw it, Algeria could not be lost because
they were in a fight, as one officer put it, to halt the decadence of the West
and the march of communism. That is our duty, the real duty of the army. That
is why we must win the war in Algeria. Indochina taught us to see the truth
(quoted in Horne 1977:165). What is characteristic of this view is the tension
between the recognition that in counterinsurgency the population is the
strategic prize and the determination to employ expedient tactics which
undermine the satisfaction of that objective.
Given such ends as noted above, all means were considered justified. Victory

will be obtained only through the complete destruction of [the insurgent]

organization. This is the master concept [], wrote Trinquier (1964: ch. 2).
Tactically, this is sound, but it proved a cul de sac strategically because, if
victory in counterinsurgency is the achievement of political legitimacy, it is
impossible (at least for democracies) to kill one's way to success. Most
controversially, this no-holds-barred approach to counterinsurgency admitted
the need for the widespread use of torture, which is generally seen as the vital
flaw in the French campaign against the Front de Libration Nationale (FLN).
Torture broke the link between tactical and strategic success so that having
beaten the FLN tactically, the French had no choice but to abandon the fight to
them strategically (Di Marco 2006). While true, this characterization needs to
be contextualized in relation to the primary tactical reality of the Algerian war
the FLN's terrorism (see Moran 2009). Moreover, monocausal explanations of
French defeat centered on torture perhaps obscure the larger picture. The
political objective was compromised even without it: in the era of
decolonization, there was simply no way in which France could engage formerly
subject peoples with a message of recolonization (Porch 2008).
In contrast with Trinquier stands another French view of counterinsurgency
that of David Galula. His personal account of Pacification in Algeria (1963) is
highly instructive. Among the factors of rebel strength there he lists the tides
of history. Basically, the age of empires was done; defeat was political and
strategic in origin: Give me good policy and I will give you good revolutionary
war! he wrote (1963:262) a sentiment echoed in Porch's conclusion on the
causes of French defeat. For Galula, the population's support of the established
order and submission to the law are objects for both the counterinsurgent and
the insurgent: the insurgent's activity is aimed at undermining these things; the
counterinsurgent's job is maintaining them. And the truth is that the insurgent,
with his organization at the grass roots, is tactically the strongest of opponents
where it counts, at the population level (Galula 1964:745). Galula is not
squeamish about the means employed in counterinsurgency all wars are
cruel, the revolutionary war perhaps most of all but he recognizes that the
techniques of the insurgent will not usually work for the counterinsurgent: The
counterinsurgent is endowed with congenital strength; for him to adopt the
insurgent's warfare would be the same as for a giant to try to fit into a dwarf's
clothing (1964:73). Generally, however, French classical counterinsurgency
was distinctive in omitting the principle of minimum force (a central feature of
British counterinsurgency on which more below) probably because French
military thinkers were convinced that the only way to counter insurgent
commitment, moral resolve, and ideological fervor was through greater
commitment, resolve, and fervor of their own (see Paret 1964).
But, for the counterinsurgent, acting outside the law tends to be self-defeating
because it drains away the legitimacy which is what the fight is about. Thus we
may note another basic point: that insurgency is a lethal ailment for
persistently malgoverned states, whereas moderately well-governed states
generally shake them off (see Mackinlay 2002; Byman 2007). As Galula put it,
an incompetent bureaucracy plays into the hands of the insurgent (1964:30).
Counterinsurgency is ultimately more a civil than a military affair. Nowhere is
this more prevalent than in British counter-insurgency not that the British
way is theoretically unique but because Britain is perceived historically to

]
]
]
]
]

have been relatively consistent in putting the theory into practice (Mockaitis
1990; also Nagl 2005).
The case for British excellence in counterinsurgency rests largely upon its
success in the Malayan Emergency against which an unfavorable contrast is
usually drawn with American performance in Vietnam. Nagl (2005), for
instance, argues that the British Army prevailed in Malaya because it was more
tactically and mentally flexible and a better learning organization than the
American Army in Vietnam. This probably overstates the case for British
capability as more recent studies of Malaya have illustrated the uneven
implementation of counterinsurgency there (Stubbs 1989); and, Malaya aside,
examples of British counterinsurgency in Palestine, Aden, and Kenya were
hardly stellar achievements (Townshend 1986; Newsinger 2001; Walker 2005).
It is the case, nonetheless, that Malaya looms large in the counter-insurgency
literature mainly due to the contribution of Sir Robert Thompson whose semitheoretical handbook Defeating Communist Insurgency (1966/2005) became
something of a counterinsurgency bible from the 1960s onward. He outlined
five principles of counterinsurgency which have been very influential:
1 The counterinsurgent must act within the law because governmental
legitimacy inheres from being seen to do so.
2. The counterinsurgent must have a clear political aim in order to be
able to meaningfully refute insurgent propaganda and narratives.
3. The counterinsurgent must have an overall plan in order to align the
efforts of all involved civil and military, intelligence and police.
4. The counterinsurgent must give priority to defeating the insurgent's
campaign of political subversion, not the physical destruction of the insurgent
per se.
5. In the guerrilla phase of the insurgency, the counterinsurgent must
secure its base areas first (as in an oil spot manner) because the government
cannot be everywhere at once.
At the heart of this concept of counterinsurgency, says Mackinlay (2007), lies a
simple equation:
Which can be explained as (I) the insurgent, having won over by subversion the
support of the population (POP), becomes greater than the sum of the opposing
security forces (SF) and the government (GOV). The key to success or failure
was (and probably still is) the disposition of the population. Thompson's
overriding concern was to protect the population and insulate it from insurgent
subversion which was to be achieved through the tactic of clear and hold. In
his own words: winning the population can tritely be summed up as good
government in all its aspects [] (1966/2005:11112).
Frank Kitson covers much of the same ground as Galula and Thompson in his
book Low-intensity Operations (1971) which sets out his own principles of
counterinsurgency. Most frequently remarked upon is Kitson's emphasis on
good intelligence, a topic addressed by the others cited above (Galula was very
aware of its importance and how to get it: through the population, naturally
another reason for his focus on them as the critical objective), but Kitson more
than any other developed the argument in detail a theme that is picked up
very strongly in current US doctrine: Without good intelligence,
counterinsurgents are like blind boxers wasting energy flailing at unseen

opponents and perhaps causing unintended harm. With good intelligence,

counterinsurgents are like surgeons cutting out cancerous tissue while keeping
other vital organs intact (United States Army and Marine Corps 2007:123).
But perhaps even more noteworthy is his stressing of the importance of
coordinated government machinery which has proved as vexing to
contemporary counterinsurgency as obtaining good intelligence.

Insurgency in Transition

Now let us look at insurgency in transition in the 1960s through the 1990s from
the classical Maoist form which we have been considering thus far to an
evolved form with somewhat different characteristics. That the Maoist form of
insurgency evolved is not surprising, for as we have already observed
insurgency is a quintessentially bottom-up form of warfare hence the term
people's war; it is axiomatic, therefore, that insurgencies reflect the societies
from which they emerge. After World War II, there were four sociotechnological
developments that interest us cheap jet air travel, mass communication, the
acceleration of urbanization, and the availability of modern arms because,
taken together, they have driven the evolution of insurgency. In the days of
vacuum tubes and steam ships, insurgencies had generally been confined to
particular countries or regions if only because of the low speed of
transactional flows of people, goods, and ideas. In the days of global media and
cheap air travel, however, insurgencies began to transcend distance in ways
that raised the question of which population was the center of gravity, the one
in theater, the one at home, or both? As Hammes (2004a:74) noted of the
Vietnamese defeat of the United States:
The insurgents continually lost on the battlefield, yet they won the war.
Strategically, they shifted the focus from the battlefield to the political arena
[] We consistently sought big battles against those forces. As a result we
virtually ignored the key battle for political credibility and strength essential in
this new form of warfare.
This brings us back to the question of why strong democratic powers often lose
small wars. According to Merom (2003), it is because their domestic structures
prevent them from escalating the conflict to the levels of violence and brutality
needed to secure victory. There would seem to be two important conclusions to
be drawn at this point. The first is that democracies, in particular, struggle with
counterinsurgency. The second is that the feedback mechanism, which
connects what the armed forces are doing in distant theaters of war and what
the public at home knows and feels about it, which Hammes and Merom
highlighted as vital (in different ways), is the media.
Another development which had, and continues to have, a transformative
effect on insurgency is urbanization. Insurgency, typically, has been seen as a
rural phenomenon hence the longstanding correlation in the public
consciousness of insurgency with steaming jungles or impenetrable mountains.
But, actually, insurgency has had a strong urban orientation for a long time;
indeed, the Battle of Algiers was an urban phenomenon as may be seen in
the eponymous classic film (The Battle of Algiers, 1966, directed by Gilles
Pontecorvo). The urbanization of insurgency is often erroneously connected
with the career of revolutionary icon Che Guevara ironically, given his
notoriety, spectacularly ineffective, as an insurgent; his theory of insurgency,
foco, failed everywhere that it was tried, including in Bolivia where he met his

end. A theory of urban insurgency was developed by another South American,

the Brazilian Carlos Marighela, whose Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla was
published in 1969, the same year that he was killed in a gun battle with police.
But the exemplar of urban insurgency is again Algeria where many aspects of
an evolved insurgency type were present: the rebels had no base area, there
was no phase three conventional denouement or outside intervention, yet
still they prevailed. This insurgency type caught on in South America in large
part because the sort of geographically isolated spaces where Mao's insurgency
was able to mature were generally not present.
Marighela talks in the Minimanual about seeking the participation of the
people in the struggle against the dictatorship, but there is no clear sense
given of the mechanism by which this is supposed to happen. The implicit logic
would seem to be that of propaganda of the deed provocation and media
spectacle but, divorced from a substantial political movement, urban
insurgency looks a lot like simple terrorism, in defiance of the rule that
insurgency is 80 percent political and 20 percent military. Marighela wrote,
today, to be violent or a terrorist is a quality that ennobles any honourable
person, thus epitomizing the wearying clich that one man's terrorist is
another man's freedom fighter the zeitgeist of West European terrorist chic
movements, such as Germany's Red Army Faction, Italy's Red Brigades or the
17 November movement in Greece, which possessed no or rudimentary
political organizations and whose adherents tended to belong to the intellectual
elite.
However, the use of terror, while a part of the insurgent mtier, is not a thing
which defines insurgency. That role, as we have seen, is played by political
organization and subversion because insurgencies are essentially political
movements which aspire to popular support. Terrorism may be conceived as a
method of insurgency and of war in general (for more, see B. Hoffman 2006).
More interesting is the transnationalization of insurgency by Palestinian groups
using terror methods to further their local cause. The attack on the 1972
Munich Olympic Games, which caused the death of 11 Israeli athletes, is
particularly important in this respect because before September 11, 2001 there
is no better example of the power of terrorism to generate huge media
spectacle in order to rocket an insurgent cause onto the international agenda.
The attacks were widely decried even by the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) which feared that the Palestinian cause had been damaged by the
atrocity yet they were also hugely successful. As Black September boasted:
we have made one of the best achievements of Palestinian commando action.
A bomb in the White House, a mine in the Vatican, the death of Mao Tse-Tung,
an earthquake in Paris could not have echoed through the consciousness of
every man in the world like the operation at Munich.
(quoted in B. Hoffman 2006:70)
Following the Munich attacks, Palestinian groups received a flood of volunteers,
Yasser Arafat was invited to address the United Nations (which granted the PLO
observer status), and the PLO ended up with more international diplomatic
recognition than did Israel. In this view, therefore, the attack was a success
(although the downside also should be considered: sympathy among the Third
World membership of the United Nations came, but so too did a loss of ground
with opinion among the major powers and also, more subtly, in the Middle East

whose major states were weary of the whole mess the name Black
September comes from a bloody Jordanian crack-down on Palestinian
organization in September 1970). The point, however, is not whether terrorism
works (diverse opinion exists on the matter, see Pape 2003; Abrahms 2006);
the fact is that it is a main tactic of insurgency which has increased in
importance from roughly the 1960s onward in line with the growth of the mass
media. Yet it bears repeating that the trend exists over many decades. Even
looking at Marighela's Minimanual, we see that the essential operational
technique of the urban insurgent was not the causing of fear and damage
locally (these were secondary objectives): the primary objective was the
attraction of the media spotlight which was believed to have a force multiplying
effect.
The British campaign in Northern Ireland against the Provisional Irish
Republican Army (PIRA) from 1967 until the signing of the Good Friday
Agreement in 1998 represents a fascinating case study of the use of the media
by insurgents, in part because arguably the most effective PIRA attack
involved no violence. The death of the PIRA's Bobby Sands in 1981 on the sixtysixth day of his hunger strike in a British prison manufactured a media image
which had an impact far beyond the explosive and fragmentation radius of any
bomb. In Athens, Antwerp, Milan, Oslo, Brisbane, and Chicago there broke out
anti-British street demonstrations; 110,000 American longshoremen refused to
man any British ship for 24 hours. And the New York Times would write: By
willing his own death [] Bobby Sands has earned a place on Ireland's long role
of martyrs and bested an implacable British Prime Minister which led the
Boston Globe to lament: He is myth now, part of an elaborately cultivated
contrivance about the past (O'Malley 1990:45).

Hybrid Wars

Martin Van Creveld's The Transformation of War (1991), published just at the
end of the Cold War, was the first of many books that have sought to
understand the increasing irregularity of warfare. The gist of Van Creveld's
argument was that regular war that is, high intensity and interstate was
dead for two main reasons: first, changes in the way we think about territory,
nationality, and identity have made wars of conquest nigh on impossible; and,
second, the proliferation of nuclear weapons has had a prophylactic effect on
conventional warfare between states who rightly fear its escalatory potential. In
its place was a proliferation of wars between states and organizations other
than states. Van Creveld concluded that, for the most part, the advantage in
this new era of warfare lies with the nonstate actor.
Around the same time, in a Marine Corps Gazette (1989) article, William S. Lind
introduced the concept of Fourth Generation warfare (4GW), a putatively new
form of warfare which was said to work by collapsing the enemy internally
rather than physically destroying him. Rather like Van Creveld, Lind saw this
development as being driven by broader historical changes, notably: the
decline of the nation-state's monopoly of violence; the rise of cultural, ethnic,
and religious conflict; and technological innovation, particularly the use of off
the shelf or dual purpose technology by insurgents for warlike purposes. 4GW
has many contemporary adherents. Noteworthy among these is T.X. Hammes
(2004b), whose seminal article War Evolves into the Fourth Generation
specified its characteristics: 4GW does not attempt to win by defeating the

enemy's military forces. Instead, combining guerrilla tactics or civil

disobedience with the soft networks of social, cultural and economic ties,
disinformation campaigns and innovative political activity, it directly attacks
the enemy's political will (2004a:190).
At the same time, it has been the subject of a great deal of criticism by military
historians and strategists who criticize it for making poor use of history as well
as question the actual novelty of the technique that it describes. That Hammes
is a Marine officer should not be surprising; for it was in the Marine Corps in the
1990s that most of the forward-looking preparation for the new style of
irregular wars was taking place (Terriff 2007). The major figure in this was
Marine Commandant Charles Krulak, who introduced the concept of the Three
Block War in a 1999 Marine Magazine article. The essence of the Three Block
War concept is the idea that the modern battlefield would be composed of
three sorts of military action full-scale combat, peacekeeping operations, and
humanitarian relief all taking place simultaneously in a confined area, quite
possibly three contiguous city blocks. In this short article, Krulak laid out the
major elements of the complex irregular war paradigm that vexes current
strategists: urban operating environments; intervention in failed or failing
states; complex and lethal insurgents are well armed; insurgents hide
amongst the people; and ubiquitous media internationalize events and
introduce a virtual dimension of conflict which transcends geographical
boundaries.
This brings us to what is probably the most significant work of practical war
studies in many years, British General Sir Rupert Smith's book The Utility of
Force (2006). What Smith calls wars amongst the people are wars in which
the function of military force is to establish a condition in which other
instruments of national power can be applied to the achievement of a desired
political end, which is a fair definition of counter-insurgency. They are wars
which take place among the people both in the theater of operations and in the
world at large (Smith 2006:270). Indeed, his belief that the theater commander
actually operates as a kind of producer (as in film or theater) leads to one of
his most insightful observations:
We are conducting operations now as though we are on a stage, in an
amphitheatre or Roman arena. There are two or more sets of players both
with a producer, the commander, each of whom has his own idea of the script.
On the ground, in the actual theatre, they are all on the stage and mixed up
with people trying to get to their seats, the stage hands, the ticket collectors
and the ice-cream vendors. At the same time they are being viewed by a
partial and factional audience, comfortably seated, its attention focused on that
part of the auditorium where it is noisiest, watching the events by peering
down the drinking straws of their soft-drink packs for that is the extent of the
vision of a camera.
(Smith 2006:2845).
As with Van Creveld, Smith is criticized by historians, accused of overstating
the transformation of warfare, playing down the extent to which war has always
been among the people, exaggerating the role of technology, and
understating the extent to which industrial war has continued in different
forms. These are not meritless criticisms; there are certainly weaknesses in the
book the discussion of the historical development of warfare is

undistinguished and occasionally inaccurate. But the final third, in which Smith
logically and self-critically attempts to understand the continuing purpose of his
profession at a time of historical change, is extremely worthwhile.
A final concept that requires mention is hybrid war, an idea that attempts to
capture an apparent change in the character of warfare. The leading figure
behind this concept is Frank Hoffman, who defined it thus: Hybrid Wars
combine a range of different modes of warfare including conventional
capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including
indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder (2007:14). The
distinguishing characteristic of hybrid wars is that the adversary employs all
forms of conflict, conventional and unconventional, simultaneously in a
coordinated manner at the tactical and operational level. Also, such conflicts
take place within complex terrain, amongst the people, and exploit the virtual
dimension to great effect. We can see in this parallels with the other concepts
discussed in this section upon which the hybrid war concept is built. The
essential starting point of the hybrid wars concept is the belief common among
strategists, but enunciated most clearly by Michael Evans (2003:139), that the
future of warfare defies easy categorization:
The merging of modes of armed conflict suggests an era of warfare quite
different from that of the recent past [] The possibility of continuous,
sporadic, armed conflict, its engagements blurred together in time and space,
waged on several levels by a large array of national and subnational forces,
means that the reality of war in the first decade of the twenty-first century is
likely to transcend a neat division into distinct categories, symmetry and
asymmetry.
The concept has been criticized most cogently by Glenn (2009), who argues
essentially that it is old wine in a new bottle, simply describing conflicts which
are as easily explained by existing theoretical constructs but it has captured
the minds of top policy makers in the United States and United Kingdom.
Adapting the armed forces to meet the hybrid wars challenge has met with
institutional resistance within some parts of the American military which fear
the loss of high-end war-fighting capabilities (see point/counterpoint of Gentile
2008 and Nagl 2008; F. Hoffman 2007; also Betz 2007). This debate has yet to
play out in budgeting and policy (Ucko 2008). From an intellectual perspective,
a helpful factor in the hybrid wars concept is its implicit challenge to the
traditional binary thinking that divides war into conventional and
unconventional stereotypes in neither of which is it easy to place most actual
contemporary conflicts.

Post-Maoist Insurgency

This brings us to the War on Terror and its major campaigns (notably Iraq and
Afghanistan) which have generated a voluminous literature. The difficulties of
the American military in, first, apprehending that they were fighting an
insurgency in Iraq and, second, adapting themselves to it afterwards has been
well reported. Less well researched are the British failures of
counterinsurgency, which have also been extensive, and the institutional
response to them which lags behind the American efforts to reform (Betz and
Cormack 2009). As fascinating as these accounts are, they contain relatively
few new lessons about the theory of insurgency; indeed, a main reason the
best are so blistering (especially Packer 2005; Aylwin-Foster 2006;

Chandrasekaran 2006; Ricks 2006, 2009) is that the conduct of both campaigns
violated most, if not all, of the principles of counterinsurgency discussed above.
Indeed, a standard oil spot strategy was posited by the counterinsurgency
expert Andrew Krepinevich in a 2005 Foreign Affairs article as the solution for
the insurgency in Iraq and rejected outright by the Pentagon (Ricks 2009).
Probably the most important book to emerge from the conflict is the United
States Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual FM324 (2005).
However, even its admirers admit that the manual is an elegant codification of
principles that have been well understood for decades (Betz 2007; F. Hoffman
2007) which tends to suggest that the lessons of today's insurgencies are not
altogether different from previous ones and ought not to have had to be
relearned so painfully.
While not entirely new, there are three themes in insurgency research that
have gained more theoretical prominence and empirical grounding as a result
of recent campaigns. The first of these is the notion that sound
counterinsurgency depends upon good cultural understanding of the society in
conflict: counterinsurgency needs to be infused with anthropology, a discipline
invented to support warfighting in the tribal zone wrote Montgomery McFate,
the senior social scientist for the American military's Human Terrain System
(McFate 2005). This is a controversial view in the anthropological community
(as well as the non-anthropological community which is beginning to question
whether the relatively static and ahistorical approach to culture that is typical
of anthropology is all that relevant for military and political purposes). The
second is the issue of reconstruction and development which is increasingly
seen (though the thesis is academically untested) as the sine qua non of
counterinsurgency. There has been a good deal of research on civil military
cooperation (or CIMIC; see Ankersen 2007), and even more on nationbuilding (Ignatieff 2003; Fukuyama 2006), much of which points to the
sobering likelihood that the proliferation of actors in contemporary
counterinsurgencies both governmental and nongovernmental make the
realization of the principle of coordination of civil and military assets practically
unachievable. The third is the aforementioned evolution of insurgency into the
virtual territories of the mind (Mackinlay and Al-Baddawy 2008) caused by
the advent of humanity in general into the Information Age.
Taken together, these developments are worrying for strategists because what
they suggest is that counterinsurgency, which has always been a contingent
and complicated exercise, is now an order of magnitude more difficult.
Bacevich (2006), for example, writes that the apparent advantages of Western
conventional forces have been undercut by new enemies employing a panoply
of techniques including terrorism (i.e., intimidation), as well as propaganda,
subversion, popular agitation, economic warfare, and hit-and-run attacks on
regular forces. His plainly put conclusion: The sun has set on unquestioned
Western military dominance. Bluntly, the East has solved the riddle of the
Western Way of War. But really how new is this? After all, more than a
hundred years ago, Callwell called such wars protracted, thankless,
invertebrate, and advised that they be avoided if at all possible; however,
recognizing that not all could be avoided, it seemed sensible to maintain skills
to fight such wars. In a nutshell, this is still the view of counterinsurgency
experts such as Kilcullen who argue that we should avoid insurgencies

wherever possible because they are costly and rarely very fruitful, but given
our conventional supremacy any sensible enemy will choose to fight us in an
[insurgent] manner and, therefore, we should be prepared (2009:2689).
Indeed, Kilcullen is something of a contemporary Callwell though the parallel
is usually drawn to Lawrence because of Kilcullen's essay Twenty-eight
Articles (2006b), one better than Lawrence's 27 Articles (1917). His major
contribution to the field is the concept of global insurgency (Kilcullen 2005),
which he sees as possibly sufficiently different from classical insurgency as to
require fundamental reappraisals of conventional wisdom (2006a:61415).
Global insurgency, as he describes it, is a popular movement which feeds on
local grievances, integrating them into broader ideologies and linking disparate
conflicts through globalized communications, and which seeks to change the
(global) status quo like all insurgencies through an admixture of terrorism,
subversion, propaganda, and open warfare (Kilcullen 2005). As significant in
the study of global insurgency is Mackinlay who shares with Kilcullen much
commonality. At the center of both analyses is the transnational essence of the
phenomenon, and both remark upon the networked nature of global insurgency
which allows it to act in a concerted manner despite an apparent lack of
structure (a point debated in the literature vociferously by Sageman 2004,
2008; F. Hoffman 2007).
But Mackinlay advances the theory of insurgency further, suggesting that
across a range of categories there is a sea change from Maoist to post-Maoist
insurgency (Mackinlay 2009): Maoist insurgent objectives were national,
whereas post-Maoist objectives are global; the population involved in Maoist
insurgency was manageable (albeit with difficulty), whereas the populations
(note the plural) involved in post-Maoist insurgency are dispersed and
unmanageable; the center of gravity in Maoist insurgency was local or national,
whereas in post-Maoist insurgency it is multiple and possibly irrelevant; the all
important subversion process in Maoist insurgency was top-down, whereas in
post-Maoist insurgency it is bottom-up; Maoist insurgent organization was
vertical and structured, whereas in post-Maoism it is an unstructured network;
and whereas Maoist insurgency took place in a real and territorial context, the
post-Maoist variant's vital operational environment is virtual.
Mackinlay's and Kilcullen's work are the best available syntheses of a number
of important themes that are at the cutting edge of insurgency research. These
include: the examination of global insurgency as Islamic activism, defined as
the mobilization of contention to support Muslim causes by Wiktorowicz
(2008:2), using social movement theory which was originally designed to
explain how more benign movements use various techniques to animate their
adherents to achieve political or social change; analyses of the concept of
globalized Islam and the virtual Ummah (Roy 1994, 2006; Kepel 2004,
2006), the deterritorialized population which is the prize of global insurgency,
and of its relationship with the process of radicalization, particularly of Muslims
in European countries which increasingly face what are essentially domestic
counterinsurgencies amongst a significant non-integrating minority (Neumann
2009); the nature of the virtual dimension of insurgency (Betz 2008) and a
twenty-first century concept of propaganda of the deed (Bolt and Betz 2008);
and detailed studies of the ideology, beliefs, and ideas of the enemy
sometimes referred to as Jihadi studies.

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Online Resources

Abu Muqawama. At http://abumuqawama.blogspot.com/, accessed July 2009.

More irreverent and ad hoc than Small Wars Journal (see below), but it has very
good analyses, is widely read, and has an active group of regular commenters.
Jihadica. At www.jihadica.com/, accessed July 2009. The best blog on Jihadi
studies; it is well informed and thoughtful, with excellent links and analyses.
Kings of War. At http://kingsofwar.wordpress.com/, accessed July 2009. Blog of
the War Studies Department, King's College London; it is not exclusively
focused on insurgency, but rather on war and strategy more generally,
although insurgency is a major interest of its main contributors.
The Small Wars Journal. At http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/, accessed July
2009. The best and most established one-stop shop for insurgency related
researchers and practitioners; part blog, part discussion forum, it also
maintains an extensive library of links to other resources.

About the Author

David J. Betz is Senior Lecturer in the War Studies Department at King's College
London. He is the head of the Insurgency Research Group there, as well as the
Academic Director of the MA War in the Modern World. He has written on
information warfare, the future of land forces, the virtual dimension of
insurgency, propaganda of the deed, and British counterinsurgency in such
journals as the Journal of Strategic Studies, the Journal of Contemporary
Security Studies, and Orbis.