Musings about a military theory framework

[ptamas]

A counter-intuitive, yet promising move is to do something that's likely to be associated with failure and weakness. An army could allow the guerrillas to expand their useful repertoire instead of suppressing it as much as possible. The guerrillas might eventually step over a threshold and turn into a rather conventional force. Once beyond that point, it would be possible to push them back ...

What assumptions does this make about the relationship between guerrillas and the population? In Peru they apparently didn't so much step over a threshold that rendered them susceptible to conventional attack by external forces as their ideology was given the breathing space to manifest contradictions in practice which poisoned the water.

-peter

[Pete]

Fuchs was the one who originally posted that at the start of the thread so I'll let him answer.

[Fuchs]

The part quoted by you fits very well to many failed paramilitary efforts. The Tamil Tigers were the latest example. That lasted a bit longer than a few months.

Another example was the TB defeat in 2001/2002. They were a paramilitary force that had begun long ago to dare pitched battles.


There's no guarantee that the will is broken finally once defeated like that; at least it seems to happen quite often.

Take Roman expansion, for example. There was usually one great rebellion in every conquered province; typically one generation later. This rebellion was allowed to form an army, the Roman reinforcements arrived and a battle defeated the rebellion. There was certainly unrest lingering afterward, but the pointlessness of rebellion was made obvious.
Imagine there had been no battle, just a occupation with many troops. The Romans would either have needed to decimate the population very much or to spend much more on the province than it could earn them for a long time.
The rebellious people would not have learned by demonstration that they won't be able to regain freedom.