Making Riflemen from Mud: Restoring the Army's Culture of Irregular Warfare
.....Raising local troops and working closely with local and tribal leadership to suppress insurgency and lawlessness in loosely governed or newly conquered areas was not carried out by special troops or elite units, but was the norm throughout the Army. Any officer could be expected to either raise local scouts, or work with existing tribal organizations to accomplish his unit’s goals. Yet since the Second World War a connection to indigenous or tribal soldiers has increasingly become the sole province of the Special Forces, and until quite recently the conventional Army has almost totally shunned the idea of such affiliation or cooperation; the exigencies of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have only just begun to break down the barriers. These developments have occurred in spite of the fact that aside from the relatively brief periods of large-scale high-intensity operations from 1917-18, 1941-45, 1950-54, and the Gulf War of 1991, since 1900 the Army has been operating and will continue to operate more and more in areas and situations where the ability to raise, train and cooperate with local, tribal and other non-state armed groups is, if not a prerequisite, certainly a central factor for military and political success.....