Narrow definitions fail to account for the complexities...
From wikipedia
Quote:
A blockade is any effort to prevent supplies, troops, information or aid from reaching an opposing force. Blockades are the cornerstone to nearly all military campaigns and the tool of choice for economic warfare on an opposing nation. The International Criminal Court plans to include blockades against coasts and ports in its list of acts of war in 2009.
Blockades can take any number of forms from a simple garrison of troops along a main roadway to utilizing dozens or hundreds of surface combatant ships in securing a harbor, denying its use to the enemy, and even in cutting off or jamming broadcast signals from radio or television. As a military operation, blockades have been known to be the deciding factor in winning or losing a war.
Operational vs. Strategic
I'll grant that the Vietnam conflict was not won by the insurgency, but it certainly started as one when the VietCong communists staged uprisings against the oppressive Diem government. It then became a civil war between North and South, and the North had the political will to continue a fight that the South may have won had they been able to establish a viable government. Unfortunately, we were caught in the middle because of our policy to support anyone who was anti-communist, no matter how corrupt.
That said, I never suggested wars were won without casualties. Like you alluded, Clausewitz cautions repeatedly against strategists who believe war can be won without bloodshed. He also states the only difference between war and other great conflicts of nations is that war is settled with bloodshed. However, there are plenty of examples of "wars" between princes in the era of Machiavelli that ended when their private mercenary armies either came to a resolution on the battlefield without actual fighting, or one side capitulated after maneuvering to a severe disadvantage.
I will also grant that a moderate solution cannot be reached until one side is convinced they cannot prevail on their terms, which often involves killing a lot of people. But the Algerians didn't just kill Frenchmen and pied noirs, they killed a lot of their own Muslim population just to spread a sense of terror, which is why the French were unable to establish a legitimate government. This is a very difficult problem to solve...when your enemy is suicidal, killing them is just giving them what they want and massive reprisals against a population you aren't familiar with just creates more radicals.
Insurgencies and irregular warfare take a lot of time and energy and require intimate knowledge of the entire political, economic, cultural and military situation in order to defeat the enemy. In that way, IW is not just about killing, though I agree, you have to root out and eliminate the radical, sometimes there are people you can convince to be on your side without killing them.
I still say that the only reason war is about land is because people need to live and practice their ideas somewhere. If we could live in a bubble in the sky, people would fight over the bubbles too.
Did someone mention Scotch?
I've been content to just read SWJ for a while, but the single malt gauntlet has brought me out of the woodwork.
It seems that many definitions of conventional and irregular warfare focus too much on tactics, types of forces involved, and legal definitions rather than focusing on the distinctions between the ways the modes of warfare are intended to work. Agreed, both are intended to either force your opponent to accept your will by either 1. killing him, eliminating his vote, 2. forcing him to accept the reality that resistance is futile, or 3. actually converting him to your cause by making him a stakeholder in the new status quo. Agreed, that violence or the threat of violence is implicit in either conventional or IW approaches, but is not mutually exclusive nor necessarily the most important aspect compared to "soft" approaches in every case.
The current Joint Operating Concepts discern between the modes of warfare based on the populations we focus on, with conventional focusing on the enemy's military forces and IW focusing on the population. In a comprehensive theory of war, both types focus on the population, but the conventional definition acknowledges that one subset of the enemy population, the military, presents a significant "speedbump" in the road to convincing the rest of the population to agree with or at least acquiesce to your point of view. Could we look at the difference in the modes of warfare in terms of strategies based on the relative military strengths of the opponents, and how the combatants choose to deal with them within a given amount of time?
Conventional warfare: Direct confrontation against the opponent's military strength, primarily using attrition to force a political decision in the short term.
Irregular warfare: Using multiple, short duration acts of violence against enemy weak spots to bypass an opponent's military strength, primarily using exhaustion to force a political decision in the long term.
OK, feel free to start shooting holes in these, but I think the key points are that 1. one mode confronts the enemy's military strength directly while the other avoids it, and 2. time has got to be part of the distinction between the modes of warfare.
Ready for your spears...
DJL
Conflict - Conventional and Non Conventional
Below is from a thesis I wrote on Unconventional Operations in 1994-95 when I was trying to describe the Post Cold War World. Obviously not a definition but a description:
Conflict is defined as "an armed struggle or clash between organized political parties within a nation or between nations in order to achieve limited political or military objectives." This definition, though somewhat more ambiguous than war, is still rather straightforward and simple to understand. However, non-conventional conflict is something even more ambiguous and difficult to understand. It extends the continuum of conflict. Conflict in the conventional sense begins when the armed struggle begins; however, non-conventional conflict encompasses all of the types of conflict listed above, starting with the threat or possibility of conflict and extending past conflict termination, because the conditions that gave rise to hostilities in the first place may still remain, though not visible or easily recognized. It also includes armed clashes by unorganized groups that are not seeking to achieve any political or military objectives.
Non-conventional conflict encompasses the lawlessness of a society in which the governmental system has collapsed, but no organized group has risen to take its place. Violence and terrorist-like activity can occur out of frustration with no identifiable purpose. This type of conflict is non-conventional, because it is difficult to determine the objectives and methods of the actors, perhaps difficult to even determine the actors, and thus it is difficult to apply conventional elements of power. This is the sensitive and complex environment in which operations may increasingly take place. Although the situation may not be a traditional insurgency, there will likely be many of its characteristics present. In these types of non-conventional environments it is the issue of perceived legitimacy by the people and the political powers involved that places new stresses on military forces whose legitimacy is no longer a matter of fact.