A BRIEF HISTORY OF GUERRILLA/TERRORIST WARFARE

Max Boot, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (New York & London: Liveright, 2013) ("What follows might be called Twelve Articles. It sums up the lessons of Invisible Armies. 1.  Guerrilla warfare has been ubiquitous and important throughout history." "2. Guerrilla warfare is not an 'Eastern Way of War'; it is the universal war of the weak." "3. Guerrilla warfare has been both underestimated and overestimated." "4. Insurgencies have been getting more successful since 1945 but still lose most of the time." "5. The most important development in guerrilla warfare in the last two hundred years has been the rise of public opinion." "6. Conventional tactics don't work against an unconventional threat." "7. Few counterinsurgents have ever succeeded by inflicting mass terror--at least in foreign lands." "8. Population-centric counterinsurgency is often successful, but it's not as touchy-feely as commonly supposed." "9. Establishing legitimacy is vital for any successful insurgency or counterinsurgency--and, in modern times, that is hard to achieve for a foreign group or government." "10. Most insurgencies are long-lasting; attempts to win a quick victory backfire." "11. Guerrillas are most effective wen able to operate with outside support--especially with conventional army units." And "12. Technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war--but that may be changing." Id. at 557-567. "From the bookjacket: "Narrating over thirty centuries of 'unconventional' military conflict, ... Max Boot has created a work that traces guerrilla warfare and terrorism from antiquity to the present. Challenging the conventional wisdom that irregular warfare is the historical exception, Boot demonstrates that loosely organized partisan or guerrilla warfare is the norm, and that it is the clash of conventional, uniformed military forces that is the historical anomaly." "Beginning with the first insurgencies in the ancient world, great powers--from Alexander the Great to Imperial Rome--discovered that guerrilla armies were much harder to defeat than regular troops. This was a lesson taught by the nomadic raiders from the Persian highlands, who brought down the first empire on record, in Mesopotamia, and by the relentless Hun raiders who helped bring down the Roman Empire." "In the modern era, Boot deftly shows that, despite the proliferation of powerful national armies, guerrilla and terrorist campaigns not only persisted but also reached new heights. A dramatic chapter on the militiamen dubbed the "American hornets' illustrates how the American revolutionaries were the quintessential 'unseen enemy,' striking and the disappearing into the general population. It was also the Americans who pioneered the use of propaganda to defeat a stronger enemy--a strategy that future insurgents would emulate to fight the United States itself. Boot expands his analysis of liberal revolts to include the Haitian slave uprising led by the 'Black Spartacus' Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Greek War of Independence, and the campaign for Italian unification spearheaded by the charismatic Giuseppe Garibaldi. Terrorist campaigns waged in areas like Belle Epoque Paris, tsarist Russia, and the Reconstruction South carry the narrative into the late nineteenth century." "Perhaps nowhere is the Invisible Armies narrative more dramatic than in the calamitous twentieth century, when the power of public opinion and the transformation of guerrillas into celebrities and almost superhuman figures changed the calculus of warfare for both insurgents and their enemies. Men such as the archaeologist-turned-military adviser T. E. Lawrence; Vietnam's General Vo Nguyen Giap, a self-taught soldier who routed the French and the later the Americans form Indochina; and the 'Quiet American,' Edward Lansdale, form a diverse tapestry of characters,whose personalities and ability to harness public opinion came to define these conflicts." "Effortlessly waving back and forth through history in a way that contextualizes the guerrilla and terrorist challenges of the twenty-first century, Invisible Armies is a definitive work on unconventional warfare, 'a must-read for scholars, military and government professionals and a fascinating journey for the general public' (General Jack Keane).").