Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
a South African small wars course. So, professor, will the teaching methodolgy be Sandhurst or West Point ?

Seriously, I think it's a good idea (esp. since your first author spoke well of John McCuen - a better student of Mao-Giap than were Galula et al).

Back in the day, I followed SWA/Namibia/Angola (and your Rhodesian thing) on roughly a monthly basis. Generally, I'm stupid on things African - so, it's nice to have you provide the syllabus and sources I can download to my harddrive (already did that for a bunch of Rhodesian stuff).

Regards (from one of your students in the peanut gallery)

Mike
None of the above.

I think it is important for everyone to figure it out for themselves.

There are certainly lessons to be learned from the South African experiences in SWA/Namibia/Angola.

The political war in Namibia was never going to be won (I mean how could they have sold apartheid to the majority African people of that country?) so the best South Africa could hope for was to offer independence and hope to end up with moderate state on her northwestern border.

What the military did was to adopt a COIN strategy which went as far as they humanly could given the political restraints and because the required safe haven the insurgents thought they had in Angola was being dominated by South African/Unita alliance it was probably close to a situation where South Africa could have achieved a military victory.