Overdue Recommended Reading

Sean Meade:

September 10th, 2008 at 12:34 am

thanks for the link, Mark! 🙂

Seerov:

September 10th, 2008 at 1:14 am

Bill Lind made the argument that the Baltic States should create a territorial defense strategy that would be a mix of Al-Qaeda and Switzerland.  Basically the Baltics would have regional militias where every man would be trained to use a rifle, make IED’s, and shoot shoulder fired weapons.  Of course, this Baltic "insurgency" force would be rural, as opposed to the urban type we see in Iraq. 
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I made this argument the day this war started[1], but I do think we should think about what this entails: 
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First, if we ran a government, how widespread would we want the knowledge for building IED’s to be?  Having this knowledge isn’t the same thing as knowing how to shoot a shoulder fired missile or shooting a rifle.  Bomb making is a potentially dangerous skill to have out there, and I’m pretty sure that its not hard to find old artillery shells in the ex-USSR if someone really wanted them?
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Second, Lind said in his article that "every man" should be in the militia.  What about a country like Latvia that has almost 30% of its population as ethnic Russians?  Its no secret that quite a bit of stress exists between Latvians and Russians in Latvia.  Many Russians refuse to learn Latvian, and its pretty well known that Moscow supports Russian rabble rousers within Latvia.  If I were an ethnic Latvian, I don’t know how confident I’d feel about my Russian "countrymen" if a war with Russia started?  In fact, judging by what happened in Georgia, its safe to say that Russia would probably use ethnic Russians in Latvia to take key terrain before the Russian armour forces arrived.  So demography complicates things greatly. 
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Next, I’m interested in how these regional militias would operate during mobilization?  I assume that this strategy would require strategically placed arms rooms, where militia members would meet for training and in the event of war?  The Russians would most likely use airstrikes on these sites in the early part of the invasion?  This is pretty much unavoidable, as its really not possible to let the fighters keep their weapons at home (especially if this force uses IED’s).  It would appear then, that this would require underground storage areas with Vietnam-style tunnel systems to keep these places hidden.  I don’t even know if everyone in the unit should know about the locations of these places for security reasons? And when you add the large Russian population into the mix, things get even more complicated. 
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Last, despite the claim that insurgencies are 4GW, insurgencies sometimes require an element of attrition warfare.  IOW, if you really want to fight a guerrilla war, you better be willing to take casualties (especially fighting the Russians).  The Vietnamese took 3-5 million deaths.  The Latvian population as a whole is only about 2.3 million people, and only 60% of that is actually Latvians.  I’m not sure if fighting an insurgency is worth if it, if it kills most of the people you’re trying to defend?  There is something romantic however, about the idea of a whole population of people struggling against an outside invader "to the last man." 
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So while this Baltic Insurgency idea seems good at first, it does have its challenges. 
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[10]  http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2008/08/08/russia-invades-georgia.html#comment-117749