It's the Tribes (merged thread)

[Ray Levesque]

If you haven't seen it yet you may want to take a look at a new book out this year:

Shultz, Richard H., and Andrea J. Dew, Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, 316 pp.

The strength of this book is its attempt to lay out a framework for analyzing tribal-based insurgents, terrorists, and militias in layman's terms. It presents a methodology for militarily analyzing how and why tribal-based groups fight.

They recommend the following criteria as a substitute for traditional Military Capabilities Analysis: the tribe's concept of warfare; its organization and command and control; its areas of operations; the types and targets of its operations; its constraints and limitations; and the role of outside actors. The authors make their argument by first discussing the differences between the western way of war and "primitive warfare," and then assessing the way wars have evolved since the end of the cold war.

It's a pretty good food for thought book.

Ray

[marct]

Thanks for posting this, Ray. It sounds like they are updating the old Ft. Bragg military-culture briefings.

Marc