Max

I will read in detail, and happy to discuss my thoughts once done.

I will caution though, that concepts like legal legitmacy vs. political legitimacy and how they interact with the dynamic of insurgnecy is so fundamentally vital that it can literally be that proverbial horseshoe nail that caused the kingdom to be lost.

Insurgency is a difficult topic to have a fair and balanced discussion about in any audience. There is a bias on the part of government and governmental actors (who will always be the legal actor, just as the insurgent will always be the illegal actor) that is both natural and crippling to getting to good understanding of the problem.

Add to this the tremendous inertia of thought, lessons learned and effort from centuries of colonial operations and decades of containment operations. That is a lot of fat to distil off of any concept.

Another big obstacle is that so many insurgencies tend to employ violent tactics that overwhelm civil security forces. This results in the problem being punted to the military, and not surprisingly the military then casts it as a form of war and warfare, and seeks to identify a threat to defeat in order to "win." I will concede that a resistance insurgency following the defeat of ones government and military by a foreign force is a continuation of warfare. If one wants to dominate that place one must defeat those people. Grant understood this in his strategy for decisively ending the Civil War. But if it is an internal revolutionary insurgency designed to coerce through illegal means change in whole or part on their own government, it is a very different genus and species of competition, and is probably best thought of as a form of civil emergency rather than as a form of warfare.

Insurgency, IMO, must have the following 4 components or it is not insurgency:
1. Internal to some system of governance (CvC's Army-Gov't-People)
2. Populace-based (must be rooted in some distinct segment of the population)
3. Illegal
4. Political challenge in primary purpose.

Of note, thought of this way:

1. The only difference between democracy and insurgency is legality.

2. There is no such thing as "criminal insurgency." All insurgency is criminal, but if the primary purpose is for profit it is not insurgency no matter how much it challenges governance. Why? because the cure for profit-based opertions are completely different than those for political-based opertions.

In short, we must understand things for what they are, not what we wish them to be as seen though the lens of our respective institution, and not in the context of the tactics applied, activities engaged in, or effects produced. Many dissimilar things look similar at times, or can create similar effects.

Anyway, it's Friday and I need to run. Cheers! Bob