Word: guerrillas
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...strong" power, guerrilla wars are extraordinarily demanding. Guerrillas typically melt away into the general population, either because they have political support there or because they terrorize civilians into protecting them. (My guess is that in Iraq today both conditions are met.) So the strong power has to hunt the enemy not on the battlefield but in towns and villages. The risks are twofold: an ambush like that in Mogadishu or a gradual alienation of the local population leading to unbearable political pressure to end a war - which is how the French were forced out of Algeria. In the 1950s...
...just the armed forces that will have to adapt to guerrilla warfare. So will the public. Americans like their wars to have clean endings, with ticker-tape parades and a memorial on the Mall in Washington. But guerrilla wars aren't like that. Parents of fighting men in the old colonial powers got used to hearing that their sons had died in sordid skirmishes whose names nobody had heard of or - like the six Americans killed when their helicopter crashed in Afghanistan last week - in accidents far from home. Guerrilla warfare may have fine American antecedents, but we have always...
...military operation, Brezhnev was told, would be over in three or four weeks. Two weeks later, the Soviets began an invasion that was to last nearly a decade and chill U.S.-Soviet relations for years. By the law of unintended consequences, the U.S. decision to back an anti-Soviet guerrilla force of mujahedin was to rebound disastrously with the rise of Islamic terrorism, when Osama bin Laden eventually found in the shattered Afghanistan a vital haven. --By Johanna McGeary
...hands of overmatched enemy forces that nevertheless tried to fight off the invaders. Allied troops found themselves in fire fights near the cities of Samawah, Basra and Nasiriyah. Some Iraqi soldiers left their positions, put on plain clothes and vanished into the populace, raising concerns that they would stage guerrilla attacks on Western troops as they drew closer. Despite signs of weakening Iraqi morale, the mass surrenders witnessed at the end of the first Gulf War had yet to materialize. "We think they're coming," a senior Pentagon official said late last week. "We've really only been bombing...
Urban combat, chemical weapons, civilian casualties, guerrilla warfare, humanitarian crises in the south, instability in the north--whatever the unknowns that lurked ahead, the war machine was undeterred, as evidenced by the various units rolling across the desert, preparing to deliver the ultimate blow to the Iraqi regime. While each day that the war drags on gives the Iraqis a chance to regroup, it also grants allied forces the opportunity to reload. As the 3rd Infantry Division made its way past Nasiriyah, a long column of the 101st Airborne Division barreled out of Kuwait into the desert on a parallel...