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A thought provoking essay on the possible implications of irregular warfare in national military strategy.
What explains differences in soldier participation in violence during irregular war? How do ordinary men become professional wielders of force, and when does this transformation falter or fail? Regular Soldiers, Irregular War presents a theoretical framework for understanding the various forms of behavior in which soldiers engage during counterinsurgency campaigns—compliance and shirking, abuse and restraint, as well as the creation of new violent practices. Through an in-depth study of the Israeli Defense Forces' repression of the Second Palestinian Intifada of 2000–2005, including in-depth interviews with and a survey of former combatants, Devorah Manekin examines how soldiers come both to unleash and to curb violence against civilians in a counterinsurgency campaign. Manekin argues that variation in soldiers' behavior is best explained by the effectiveness of the control mechanisms put in place to ensure combatant violence reflects the strategies and preferences of military elites, primarily at the small-unit level. Furthermore, she develops and analyzes soldier participation in three categories of violence: strategic violence authorized by military elites; opportunistic or unauthorized violence; and "entrepreneurial violence"—violence initiated from below to advance organizational aims when leaders are ambiguous about what will best serve those aims. By going inside military field units and exploring their patterns of command and control, Regular Soldiers, Irregular War, sheds new light on the dynamics of violence and restraint in counterinsurgency.
From Afghanistan to Angola, Indonesia to Iran, and Colombia to Congo, violent reactions erupt, states collapse, and militaries relentlessly pursue operations doomed to fail. And yet, no useful theory exists to explain this common tragedy. All over the world, people and states clash violently outside their established political systems, as unfulfilled demands of control and productivity bend the modern state to a breaking point. This book lays out how dysfunctional governments disrupt social orders, make territory insecure, and interfere with political-economic institutions. These give rise to a form of organized violence against the state known as irregular war. Research reveals why this frequent phenomenon is so poorly understood among conventional forces in those conflicts and the states who send their children to die in them.
Since the launch of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—now the longest wars in American history—the US military has struggled to recruit troops. It has responded, as Matt Kennard’s explosive investigative report makes clear, by opening its doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, gang members, criminals of all stripes, the overweight, and the mentally ill. Based on several years of reporting, Irregular Army includes extensive interviews with extremist veterans and leaders of far-right hate groups—who spoke openly of their eagerness to have their followers acquire military training for a coming domestic race war. As a report commissioned by the Department of Defense itself put it, “Effectively, the military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism.” Irregular Army connects some of the War on Terror’s worst crimes to this opening-up of the US military. With millions of veterans now back in the US and domestic extremism on the rise, Kennard’s book is a stark warning about potential dangers facing Americans—from their own soldiers.
The United States has failed to achieve strategic objectives in nearly every military campaign since Vietnam. This memoir describes how the United States can begin to build the American way of irregular war needed for success in modern conflict.
Examines the relevance of the changes in the media environment for the conduct of armed conflict and war, particularly as it relates to irregular warfare. Argues that new media provide an advantage to unconventional forces and discusses the reactions that regular forces should have in order to temper this advantage.
Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), which conducted sabotage campaigns and supported resistance movements in Axis-occupied Europe and in Asia, is often described as Winston Churchill’s brainchild. But as A. R. B. Linderman reveals in this engrossing history, the real genius behind Britain’s clandestine warriors was Colin Gubbins, a British officer who forged the SOE by drawing on lessons learned in irregular conflicts around the world. Following Gubbins through operations he studied and participated in, Linderman maps the evolution of the SOE from its origins to its doctrine to its becoming a critical institution. Part biography, part intellectual and organizational history, Rediscovering Irregular Warfare is the first book to explore the origins of a substantial force in the Allies’ victory in World War II. Although popular history holds that Britain entered World War II with no prior knowledge of or experience with underground warfare, Rediscovering Irregular Warfare tells us otherwise. Linderman finds ample precedent in the clearly documented work of Gubbins and his fellow clandestine organizers. He traces Gubbins’s career from 1914 through World War I and such irregular conflicts as the Allied intervention in Russia, the Irish Revolution, and conflicts in British India. To these firsthand experiences, Gubbins added the insights of colleagues who had served with him and in Iraq, as well as what he learned from the Second Anglo-Boer War, the Arab Revolt led by T. E. Lawrence, the German guerrilla war in East Africa, the revolt in Palestine between the world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second Sino-Japanese War. The two booklets that Gubbins wrote based on his accumulated knowledge offered the first synthesis of British unconventional warfare doctrine: practical guides that emphasized the centrality of local populations; the collection, protection, and use of intelligence; the necessity of cooperating with conventional forces; and the use of speed, surprise, and escape in ambush operations. In 1940, when Gubbins joined the newly created SOE, the experience and know-how codified in his guides formed the basis of Britain’s approach to irregular warfare. The history of the SOE’s doctrinal origins is Colin Gubbins’s story. By telling that story, Rediscovering Irregular Warfare amplifies and clarifies our understanding of the Second World War—and of doctrines of unconventional warfare in the twentieth century.
How three key figures in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran built ruthless irregular warfare campaigns that are eroding American power. In Three Dangerous Men, defense expert Seth Jones argues that the US is woefully unprepared for the future of global competition. While America has focused on building fighter jets, missiles, and conventional warfighting capabilities, its three principal rivals—Russia, Iran, and China—have increasingly adopted irregular warfare: cyber attacks, the use of proxy forces, propaganda, espionage, and disinformation to undermine American power. Jones profiles three pioneers of irregular warfare in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran who adapted American techniques and made huge gains without waging traditional warfare: Russian Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov; the deceased Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani; and vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission Zhang Youxia. Each has spent his career studying American power and devised techniques to avoid a conventional or nuclear war with the US. Gerasimov helped oversee a resurgence of Russian irregular warfare, which included attempts to undermine the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections and the SolarWinds cyber attack. Soleimani was so effective in expanding Iranian power in the Middle East that Washington targeted him for assassination. Zhang Youxia presents the most alarming challenge because China has more power and potential at its disposal. Drawing on interviews with dozens of US military, diplomatic, and intelligence officials, as well as hundreds of documents translated from Russian, Farsi, and Mandarin, Jones shows how America’s rivals have bloodied its reputation and seized territory worldwide. Instead of standing up to autocratic regimes, Jones demonstrates that the United States has largely abandoned the kind of information, special operations, intelligence, and economic and diplomatic action that helped win the Cold War. In a powerful conclusion, Jones details the key steps the United States must take to alter how it thinks about—and engages in—competition before it is too late.
This book offers an analysis of key individuals who have contributed to both the theory and the practice of counterinsurgency (COIN). Insurgencies have become the dominant form of armed conflict around the world today. The perceptible degeneration of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan into insurgent quagmires has sparked a renewal of academic and military interest in the theory and practice of counterinsurgency. In light of this, this book provides a rigorous analysis of those individuals who have contributed to both the theory and practice of counterinsurgency: ‘warrior-scholars’. These are soldiers who have bridged the academic-military divide by influencing doctrinal and intellectual debates about irregular warfare. Irregular warfare is notoriously difficult for the military, and scholarly understanding about this type of warfare is also problematic; especially given the residual anti-intellectualism within Western militaries. Thus, The Theory and Practice of Irregular Warfare is dedicated to analysing the best perceivable bridge between these two worlds. The authors explore the theoretical and practical contributions made by a selection of warrior-scholars of different nationalities, from periods ranging from the French colonial wars of the mid-twentieth century to the Israeli experiences in the Middle East; from contributions to American counter-insurgency made during the Iraq War, to the thinkers who shaped the US war in Vietnam. This book will be of much interest to students of counterinsurgency, strategic studies, defence studies, war studies and security studies in general.