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Guerrilla Strategies


Auteur : Multimedia
Éditeur : University of California Date & Lieu : 1982, Berkeley - Los Angeles - London
Préface : Pages : 354
Traduction : ISBN : 0-520-04444-4
Langue : AnglaisFormat : 140x215mm
Code FIKP : Liv. Eng. Cha. Gue. N° 464Thème : Général

Présentation
Table des Matières Introduction Identité PDF
Guerrilla Strategies

Guerrilla Strategies

Gerard Chaliand

University of California Press

Here is a unique anthology of writings on revolutionary warfare and counterinsurgency, covering almost all the major struggles of the modern world. The editor, who has had firsthand experience with guerrilla movements in Asia (most recently in Afghanistan), Africa, and Latin America, provides a concise yet panoramic overview of political and military strategies in revolutionary warfare, noting their strengths, limitations, and pathologies.
“The best balanced and most thoughtful collection that I have seen, one that should be consulted by every serious student of the subject.” — Richard Sklar, UCLA
“Chaliand has made a superb choice of materials.
… This collection is the best that I have seen.”
— Daniel Chirot, University of Washington


Gerard Chaliand divides his time between field research, travels, writing, and teaching. He is the author of numerous works, the most recent of which are The Struggle for Africa: Strategy of the Major Powers (1981) and People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (1980).



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research has been done without the support of any grant or organization. I want to thank the following for their help: the Library of Congress (Washington, D. C.), la Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris), and the British Museum (London). Christoph Bertram, Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, and his staff have provided invaluable assistance, for which I extend my warmest thanks. I would also like to thank my translator, Mike Pallis, and, at the University of California Press, my friend Alain Henon for his enthusiastic support of the project and Rebecca Stein for her fine editorial work.

Finally, many thanks to the original publishers of the works that follow for their permission to reprint.



Introduction

Guerrilla warfare has been particularly important ever since the Second World War. This book is concerned less with the history and more with the strategy of this kind of war, analyzing its underlying principles and their connection with the ultimate goal, political change. This is not to say that guerrilla techniques and tactics are a new phenomenon. On the contrary, they go back to the dawn of history. Guerrilla warfare has consistently been the choice of the weak who oppose the strong, for it enables them to avoid direct decisive confrontations and rely on harassment and surprise.

Guerrilla techniques are recorded in ancient Egypt and China. They are mentioned in the Bible and described, sometimes at length, by classical historians, notably Polybius, Appius, Plutarch, Flavius Josephus, Herodotus, and Tacitus. While Rome was still expanding its empire, in the two centuries before Christ, there were long and bitter guerrilla wars in Spain and, later, during the first century a.d., in North Africa. Throughout the Middle Ages and afterward, religious movements made use of guerrilla techniques, as did the peasants who fought in innumerable revolts, the classical example being the peasant war in sixteenth-century Germany. In the Ottoman-dominated Balkans, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, socially or nationally oriented bandit groups and movements were based entirely on guerrilla tactics. The most famous guerrilla war, fought by the Albanians against the authority of the Turkish sultan, was simply on a much larger scale.

This type of warfare has been characteristic of social and religious movements and has even enabled people to avoid taxation, but it has also been one of the most important forms of resistance to aggression and foreign occupation, notably during the expansion of the Roman, Ottoman, and Napoleonic empires and during the European expansion in the nineteenth century. Guerrilla tactics played a not unimportant role in the American War of Independence, as fought by Marion, also known as the Swamp Fox. Apart from the Vendee uprising during the French Revolution, however, the real “classics” of this period were the wars of national resistance in the Tyrol (1809), in Russia (1812), and in Spain (1808-1813)—giving us the term “guerrilla.” More than any other ideology, modern nationalism managed to extend guerrilla warfare beyond regional or local confines.

Military theoreticians, particularly French and German, have not overlooked the peculiarities of the “little war.” It was analyzed as early as the eighteenth century, but there was no treatment of the subject as a whole until Le Miere de Corvey wrote his Des partisans et des corps irreguliers. The two great theoreticians of the nineteenth century, Clausewitz and Jomini, gave it some attention. For Clausewitz, influenced as he was by the emergence of nationalism, popular warfare was a war of peasant resistance to a foreign aggressor. Several other theoreticians of the period just preceding the 1830s, notably the Italians, wrote on the subject, sometimes displaying an appreciation of its political potential. But, at the time, guerrilla warfare was quite rightly regarded as only a minor technique that could not carry the day and that was best used to back up a regular army.

In fact, if one leaves aside the Carlist Wars of Succession in Spain and the Italian Risorgimento, guerrilla warfare was a minor and very marginal feature of the post-Napoleonic period, the main examples having been the Polish insurrections and the Greek War of Independence. Indeed, from 1830 until the end of the nineteenth century, as socialism became more influential, urban insurrection came to be considered a better means of gaining power. Rapid urbanization, mass proletarianization, the conservatism of the peasantry, and the increasing centralization of the state apparatus within the capital all seemed to confirm this viewpoint, which found explosive expression in 1830, 1848, and 1871. It was only the Italians and the Poles who felt that studies on guerrilla warfare were particularly relevant.

As in the United States, Latin America’s Wars of Independence, led by Bolivar and San Martin, were essentially fought by regular armies. The exceptions were in Mexico, in Venezuela (where the Llaneros gave considerable support to Bolivar), and in the Plata (especially in Uruguay, where the montoneros were active). In Peru (1809-1816) a major insurrection was crushed. The astonishing saga of Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti provides another instance of guerrilla activity in Latin America.

A little later, two major guerrilla offensives against Spanish domination were launched in Cuba (particularly in Oriente) from 1863 to 1878 and from 1895 to 1898. The outcome was that the island ceased to be a Crown dependency; in the process, the Spanish General Weyler learned to take the technique of counterinsurgency farther than ever before.

European Expansion and Guerrilla Resistance

The longest, most numerous, and most important guerrilla wars were fought in response to European colonial expansion in Asia and Africa. Examples of such struggles against the British include the bitter, long drawn-out campaigns in Burma (1824-1825, 1852, 1885), the endless wars fought by the Afghans, the Sierra Leone Campaign, the Boer War (1899-1902), and the Somalia Campaigns that dragged on from the turn of the century until just after the First World War. The French fought in Algeria from 1830 to 1847. The conquest of Vietnam took them ten years. Gradually, they perfected political and military counterinsurgency techniques, and they fought on, in Madagascar (1844-1895) and in West Africa, where they encountered stiff opposition (1882-1898). Bitter campaigns were fought by the Dutch in Java and by the Germans against the Herreros of South West Africa. The Portuguese Wars in Angola and Guinea-Bissau continued for more than half a century. The Russians had to overcome the guerrilla forces led by Sheikh Shamyl before they could control the Caucasus (1836-1859).
American colonization of the Philippines was bitterly resisted. Finally, full-scale guerrilla struggles erupted repeatedly in nineteenth-century China.
…..




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