Hi stockman_scott; Read this fascinating Air Force article on the importance of legitimacy in counterinsurgency operations, written before the ongoing guerilla war, and the absence of WMDs became obvious, but after the early part of the war went well:
airpower.maxwell.af.mil
Also, this fascinating document by T E Lawrence "Of Arabia", describes exactly what the Arabs are doing to us:
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We had won a province when we had taught the civilians in it to die for our ideal of freedom: the presence or absence of the enemy was a secondary matter.
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Our ideal was to keep his railway just working, but only just, with the maximum of loss and discomfort to him.
Accordingly, I put in a few damages to the line, enough to annoy the enemy without making him fear its final destruction, and then rode back to Wejh, to explain to my chiefs that the Arab war was geographical, and the Turkish Army for us an accident, not a target. Our aim was to seek its weakest link, and bear only on that till time made the mass of it fall.
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Our tactics were always tip and run, not pushes, but strokes. We never tried to maintain, or improve an advantage, but to move off and strike again somewhere else. We used the smallest force, in the quickest time, at the farthest place. If the action had continued till the enemy had changed his dispositions to resist it, we would have been breaking the spirit of our fundamental rule of denying him targets.
...
www-cgsc.army.mil
-- Carl |
