Irregular Warfare Quotes

In the future, we should anticipate seeing more hybrid wars where conventional warfare, irregular warfare, asymmetric warfare, and information warfare all blend together, creating a very complex and challenging situation to the combatants; therefore it will require military forces to posses hybrid capabilities, which might help deal with hybrid threats.

The history of irregular media operations is complex and fractured; generalizations are difficult. Yet it is possible to isolate three large and overlapping historical phases: First, throughout the nineteenth century, irregular forces saw the state's telecommunications facilities as a target that could be physically attacked to weaken the armies and the authority of states and empires. Second, for most of the twentieth century after the world wars, irregulars slowly but successfully began using the mass media as a weapon. Telecommunications, and more specifically the press, were used to attack the moral support and cohesion of opposing political entities. Then, in the early part of the twenty-first century, a third phases began: irregular movements started using commoditized information technologies as an extended operating platform. The form and trajectory of the overarching information revolution, from the Industrial Revolution until today, historically benefited the nation-state and increased the power of regular armies. But this trend was reversed in the year 2000 when the New Economy's Dot-com bubble burst, an event that changed the face of the Web. What came thereafter, a second generation Internet, or "Web 2.0," does not favor the state, large firms, and big armies any more; instead the new Web, in an abstract but highly relevant way, resembles - and inadvertently mimics - the principles of subversion and irregular war. The unintended consequence for armed conflicts is that non-state insurgents benefit far more from the new media than do governments and counterinsurgents, a trend that is set to continue in the future.

He believes the world has entered “an era of perpetual irregular warfare.

Like many good military leaders, Lawrence had an ability to grasp quickly the heart of the matter, the essential element. And like the best strategists, Schneider notes, Lawrence was a “master learner,” endlessly curious and reflective to a fault. Also, his background in military intelligence gave him an advantage in prosecuting a campaign of irregular warfare, in which information usually is more important then action.

Military analysts use the term irregular warfare to describe conflicts that involve nonstate armed groups: combatants who don’t belong to the regular armed forces of nation-states. More broadly, the term irregular methods (sometimes asymmetric methods) describes techniques such as terrorism, guerrilla warfare, subversion, and cyberwarfare, which typically avoid direct confrontation with the military power of governments.

The future threat won’t be neatly divisible into the categories we use today (state versus nonstate, domestic versus foreign, or war versus crime). As the Mumbai, Mogadishu, and Kingston examples illustrate, future threats will be hybrid: that is, they’ll include irregular actors and methods, but also state actors that use irregulars as their weapon of choice or adopt asymmetric methods to minimize detection and avoid retaliation. Neither the concept nor the reality of hybrid conflict is new—writers such as Frank Hoffman, T. X. Hammes, and Erin Simpson have all examined hybrid warfare in detail. At the same time, Pakistan’s use of the Taliban, LeT, and the Haqqani network, Iran’s use of Hezbollah and the Quds Force, or the sponsorship of insurgencies and terrorist groups by regimes such as Muammar Gadhafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the Soviet Union, go back over many decades.

He complained to his superiors at ‘being shot at from behind hedges by men in trilbys and mackintoshes and not allowed to shoot back’. But those men in trilbys taught him a lesson he would never forget: irregular soldiers, armed with nothing but homespun weaponry, could wreak havoc on a regular army.

This is the story of a rather unorthodox department known as M.D.1. (Ministry of Defence 1). Born at the War Office early in 1939 with a staff of one commissioned and one non-commissioned officer charged with the task of devising special weapons for irregular warfare,

Governments such as that of the United States that draw sharp distinctions between warfare and law enforcement and between domestic and overseas legal authorities will experience great difficulty, and may find it impossible to act with the same agility as irregular actors who can move among these artificial categories at will. Capabilities that combine policing, administration, and emergency services, backed up with military-style capabilities so that police can deal with well-armed adversaries—capabilities traditionally associated with constabulary, gendarmerie, carabinieri, or coast guard forces—may be more effective against these hybrid threats than civil police forces alone, and less destructive than unleashing the military.

Tho was Buffalo Bill Cody? Most people know, at the very least, that he was a hero of the Old West, like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson-one of those larger-than-life figures from which legends are made. Cody himself provided such a linkage to his heroic predecessors in 1888 when he published a book with biographies of Boone, Crockett, Carson-and one of his own autobiographies: Story of the Wild West and Campfire Chats, by Buffalo Bill (Hon. W.F. Cody), a Full and Complete History of the Renowned Pioneer Quartette, Boone, Crockett, Carson and Buffalo Bill. In this context, Cody was often called "the last of the great scouts." Some are also aware that he was an enormously popular showman, creator and star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a spectacular entertainment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been estimated that more than a billion words were written by or about William Frederick Cody during his own lifetime, and biographies of him have appeared at irregular intervals ever since. A search of "Buffalo Bill Cody" on amazon.com reveals twenty-seven items. Most of these, however, are children's books, and it is likely that many of them play up the more melodramatic and questionable aspects of his life story; a notable exception is Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's Buffalo Bill, which is solidly based on fact. Cody has also shown up in movies and television shows, though not in recent years, for whatever else he was, he was never cool or cynical. As his latest biographer, I believe his life has a valuable contribution to make in this new millennium-it provides a sense of who we once were and who we might be again. He was a commanding presence in our American history, a man who helped shape the way we look at that history. It was he, in fact, who created the Wild West, in all its adventure, violence, and romance. Buffalo Bill is important to me as the symbol of the growth of our nation, for his life spanned the settlement of the Great Plains, the Indian Wars, the Gold Rush, the Pony Express, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the enduring romance of the American frontier-especially the Great Plains. Consider what he witnessed in his lifetime: the invention of the telephone, the transatlantic cable, the automobile, the airplane, and the introduction of modem warfare, with great armies massed against each other, with tanks, armored cars, flame-throwers, and poison gas-a far cry from the days when Cody and the troopers of the Fifth Cavalry rode hell-for-leather across the prairie in pursuit of hostile Indians. Nor, though it is not usually considered

Unlike the traditional paradigm of warfare, in which the military object is the destruction of enemy battalions, divisions, and corps, in the paradigm of irregular warfare the security objective is the population itself.

The simple fact of the matter is that wars can not be won in this way. Militias can play an important role in defending the gains of a revolution, in organizing irregular warfare within a circumscribed region, and in suppressing counter-revolutionary activity within the zone of a revolution. But without a regular army of its own the revolution can not hold back the advances of an invading army.

The rules of warfare seem to go in cycles alternating from neat rows—the Roman square, the French knights at Agincourt, the fixed battles of the early eighteenth century, the trenches of 1915–18, and the Maginot/Siegfried lines—to rules that stress mobility, irregularity, adaptability—Attila the Hun, the English longbowmen at Agincourt, the colonial guerrillas in 1776, both sides in our Civil War, the German panzers, the Viet Cong, and the Afghan guerrillas.

In a battle which might interest scholars of modern urban warfare, the Conduit Street Comanche whipped the tar out of an irregular band of crybaby destitutes who pledged allegiance to the Watson’s departed mucker-wallah.

Whenever a regular army finds itself engaged upon hostilities against irregular forces, or forces which in their armament, their organization, and their discipline are palpably inferior to it, the conditions of the campaign become distinct from the conditions of modern regular warfare.

experts in the field—and even the soldiers themselves—generally don’t understand guerrilla warfare because they are trapped in a world dominated by conventional militaries, and their conventionally-minded leaders.

In light of the currently minimal protest at top diplomatic and multilateral levels, Israel, together with the United States, will continue to define its military practices as the new normal in asymmetric warfare. Israeli and U.S. military operations, legal jurisprudence, and scholarly interventions will add to the state practice and opinio juris constitutive of customary law. This means that as customary law on irregular combat continues to crystallize, Gaza's besieged population, and Palestinians generally will continue to bear the devastating consequences of its experimentation.