You should read the War Nerd and Global Guerrillas

[clockworkjoe]

http://exiledonline.com/cat/war-nerd/

These dodos always have one thing in common: whether it’s knights charging with lances on very expensive horses or top gun brats like McCain zooming onto carrier decks in history’s most expensive aircraft, you’ll always find that the worst, most over-funded services are always the ones where the rich kids go to show their stuff. Seriously: why are there aircraft carriers? For asses like John McCain to crash on. Why do they keep getting funded long after they’ve been shown up? The same reason knights were galloping around pretending that the longbow hadn’t turned half their friends into pincushions: because it was a way of life for the richest and dumbest people in the country and they weren’t about to let it go.

From: http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/


Mao’s military advisor was a German communist cadre named Otto Braun. He took a Chinese name, Li De, but as you can imagine he wasn’t likely to pass for a local, being a classic German military type, a long skinny skeleton with big glasses and even bigger plans. Mao had been fighting the kind of brilliant rural guerrilla warfare he’d learned from the Hunan bandit chiefs. One of these bandit chiefs told Mao, “All you need to know about war is: circle around, circle around, circle around.” Mao took that lesson to heart, because he discovered if his guerrillas didn’t keep moving away from the Nationalists’ front, they’d get ground up.

Otto Braun convinced the Chinese Communist leadership that these bandit tactics were too low-down and no-count for the People’s Liberation Army. He got them to adopt a “Blockhouse Strategy” which was basically exactly what Hezbollah’s “bunker strategy” was. Only it didn’t work. The Nationalist forces attacked Mao’s bunkers, sustained huge losses but kept attacking, and eventually wore down the Communist defenses. That was the pattern of warfare up to 1945: accept huge losses to take enemy territory, because when you do, you will be able to neutralize those territories for good. So it pays off. You lose, say, 300 men taking a section of Maoist territory by overrunning those blockhouses. You’ve now gained a peasant population of, say, 100,000. You now get the return on your losses: you immediately kill any Communist sympathizers in the region and force all the young men to sign up with your army at bayonet-point. You’ve made good your casualties because, once you control the enemy territory, you change it for good, turn it from red to blue.

You can’t do that now, except once in a while, in remote places like Sudan or Congo where none of the locals have friends in the media. For most other places, where the news cameras are willing to go, this is the era of squeamishness.

From: http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-rules-in-the-era-of-squeamishness/

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/

The small town of Cuauhtemoc, Mexico (pop. 3,700) has a big problem (Dudley Althaus has the story).  It is now the target of 'tribal raids' for hostages and loot by gangs of pistoleros.  In a nearby town of San Angel (pop. 250), 15 SUVs loaded with gunmen recently raided the town and took five men hostage. 
Here's a neo-feudal moment.  To defend themselves (the police and military are unable to provide support), the townspeople have built a moat around the town -- including all access roads.  They even manned the moat with volunteer sentries (since removed due to an acknowledgement that they would be insufficient).  Good luck.

From: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/03/journal-tribal-raids-and-medieval-defenses.html

Henry is a burly man who speaks with a cultured British accent, a consequence of his upper class upbringing and his education in Nigeria's private school system. His mind is another interesting combination: the discipline of engineering, gained through his experience as an engineer in Nigeria's merchant marine, and the believability of a successful salesman that used to sell handguns for personal protection door to door. In short, it is a combination of attributes that made him the perfect guerrilla entrepreneur. Since he moved with his family to the relative safety of South Africa in 2003, Henry was able to accomplish the following. He:

    * amassed a personal fortune through arms sales and oil bunkering in the Niger delta.
    * was able to orchestrate the shutdown of over a half a million barrels a day of Nigerian/Shell oil production for over two years, with a total market value of $29 billion -- a major reason why the global price of oil is currently over $100 a barrel today.
    * pioneered aspects of a system of warfare that will plague nation-states and their corporate allies for decades.

From: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/02/henry-okah.html


War...War never changes