Recognizing Distinct Types of Insurgency - "Know the type of conflict you are in."

[TheCurmudgeon]

This leads to the problem (and point of strategic disagreement I have with my good friend Bill Moore - we argue this over beers as well as on line) - everything that looks like war is not war. War is a specific form of violence between two or more separate political entities. As many brilliant military theorists note, "the nature of war is constant as it is rooted in human nature; but the character of war varies widely" (case by case for myriad factors of history, geography, cultures, technology, etc).

Colonel,

The paragraph above points to a logical inconsistency that has bothered me for some time. As you note, the "the nature of war is constant as it is rooted in human nature; but the character of war varies widely". Yet you return to the idea war is a between “two or more separate political entities”. My caution is in the use of “political entities” versus a more generic “separate, discrete, identifiable groups” may severly limit how some people see war.

My reasoning is that, while war's nature has remained constant from the time two groups of hunter-gatherers attacked each other over access to some necessary resource (like women), the “political” realm is a relatively recent addition and has changed radically over our 15,000 years of civilized existence. For example, the Westphalian State is only a recent addition, less than 500 years old, yet it seems like the majority of people are stuck to the Clauswitzian dogma that war has to be between an extension of state politics. Using the term “political” creates a mental cage for some people that makes it hard to understand ethnic or religious violence – where war is based in a clash of identities, not politics.

Using the same logic, a revolutionary conflict can become a war once the disgruntled individuals coalesce into a group that no longer identifies with the larger society. I would argue that this is what happened in the American Revolution, where the population slowly changed from believing they were good English citizens whose rights as Englishmen were being trampled, to Colonist who had an identity separate from the Crown. You can see how this played out after we won independence and the need for a separate identity cause us to change the spelling of certain words, like color (from colour), so that we could have a clearly identifiable language of our own.

Just a thought.