A lot of professional historians have said that the proper model for understanding at least US actions in the current messes is the Phil. insurrection, but that is even an overdrawn historical parallel IMHO.

The real problem with trying to "use" history for these issues is the cherry picking that goes on. Looking at any "small war" in history can lead one to find the Eureka! moment: "We should do X because Y did it and they won in Z." One of the great tropes is that history repeats itself. People repeat themselves, often to inimical effect. Remember, history not an exercise in lessons learned and case studies like the military's pathetic attempts at PME suggest (remember, PME is to education what air guitar is to music).

I just had a student in the Norwich MA in Mil Hist program write his end-of-program (we don't call it a thesis because it is not) on why the US military continues to conflate the terms UW, FID, revolutionary, guerrilla, COIN, LIC, IW, spec ops, etc. His argument fell partly on the point that the people responsible for writing the doctrine for those operations do not have the proper training in history. Instead, they cherry pick and think reading some stuff on the web will do the trick. Alas, it ain't so.