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I saw this fantastic “ask the basic question” thread at SWJ this morning due to a comment by SWC member Ken White:

 Frank Hoffman – An IW “Bottle of Scotch” Challenge

I loved the paper by a team of guys trying to tackle a thorny issue – Irregular Warfare: Everything yet Nothing by Lieutenant Colonel (P) William Stevenson, Major Marshall Ecklund, Major Hun Soo Kim and Major Robert Billings.

In over a year of effort, and two separate meetings of OSD’s most senior officers; we failed to come up with a good solid definition for Irregular Warfare (IW). It’s like porn, we know IW when we see it. I do take exception to the unfounded statement made about historical research. The IW JOC (Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept) may not show it, but there is a lot of good history referenced by both the IW team and counterinsurgency guys, with lots of cross fertilization and common members. We may not have gotten it right, but it wasn’t due to a lack of intellectualism. I’ll be a bit blunter, people who live in glass houses, need to be careful where they throw their rocks. That said, I agree with the conclusion that we could use a better definition.

….All in all – the beginnings of a good debate. Yes, we need a definition better than what we have. Yes, concur with the point about populations (very COIN centric). But out of a dozen or so definitions that exist in the foreign literature, and the six or so developed by OSD, Army, Booze Allen etc, this is not an improvement. Sorry about that – so it’s back to the white board. I will put up a bottle of scotch to the best definition.

Great comments in this thread – read the whole thing here.

Irregular warfare historically coexists with conventional warfare to varying degrees whether we are discussing the Civil War, Vietnam War or even WWII where, for example, the Ukranian Nationalist partisans of Stepan Bandera could field reasonably large semi-regular units with light artillery or fight in classic guerilla syle. WWI is of course, famous for COIN patron saint Lawrence of Arabia’s campaign against the Ottoman Turks in his advisory capacity to the forces of the Sherif of Mecca and his allied Bedouin tribes of the Nejd.

Real change requires budgets, bureaucratic platforms and visionary leaders who can be both champion and evangelist. Having successfully lobbied for the retention of Secretary Gates, the small wars/COIN/military reform/strategic security community should capitalize on the logical political momentum and not be afraid to ask for the moon. This and many other things.

The United States and the world are at the kind of crystallizing flux point – where paradigm shifts have been recognized but the policy responses have not been decided – that comes once in a half century or more. Many things are fluid right now in different domains that were once regarded as certainties. Time to push while doors and minds are open.

People, like Secretary Gates, who “get it” need to be put in critical positions ASAP. Broadly speaking, what gets decided in the next 6 months may impact all of us for the next 60 years.

I lack sufficient depth and familiarity with the Indian political context to comment intelligently on the origins and ultimate aims of the shadowy Islamist group that carried out the Mumbai Massacre. I’d love to hear Olivier Roy speculate on the ideological aspect but in terms of organization, I’d bet heavily on a “modular” structure of transnational and indigenous personnel – a strategic alliance between groups or a hybrid operation.

What I can comment sensibly on is the use of “Spree killings” as a tactic by terrorist groups. Spree killings are an attractive tactic because they are easy to initiate, impossible to anticipate and can be massively effective in driving media attention.

Spree killers like Andrew Cunanan or John Muhammed  “the DC Sniper” riveted the attention of an entire nation or acheived international news coverge. Cunanan, while on the run from a national manhunt for earlier murders managed to assassinate celebrity designer, Gianni Versace before committing suicide; Muhammed and his junior partner managed to murder ten people in a metropolitan area blanketed with local, state and Federal law enforcement despite having gandiose plans that were the product of a confused and agitated mental state. “School shootings“, another form of spree killings, have almost become a macabre rite of Spring in the United States and the late 1990’s bank robbery gone awry in Los Angeles, that featured a heavily armed, body armored, pair of criminals holding off dozens of police in a savage shoot-out that may have been inspired by a scene in the Robert DeNiro movie Heat.

Spree killings, though rare, have previously been used to forment terror both by non-state actors as well as by states. A few examples:

 In 1997,  Gamaa Islamiya massacred 58 foreign tourists at Luxor, Egypt an action that led the Egyptian regime of Hosni Mubarak to crush Egyptian Islamist groups as harshly as Nasser had once cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1990, the Tamil Tigers killed 147 Muslim men and boys at four mosques in  Katthankudi, Sri Lanka ( the Tigers are a highly effective and innovative terrorist-insurgency, having pioneered both suicide bombing and naval-terror operations).

In 1941, the radically fascist and fanatically anti-semitic Iron Guard in Romania attempted a coup d’etat against the nationalist dictator and Nazi ally, Ion Antonescu, which featured wild street violence by Legionaires and a ghoulish pogram against Romanian Jewry so horrific that even German SS commanders on the scene in Bucharest were appalled. Despite having made use of such tactics himself in the Kristallnacht and the Night of the Long Knives and having his own genocidal program for the Jews, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht and SS to assist Antonescu in crushing the Iron Guard revolt.

Spree killings have almost never produced long term positive effects for the groups using them and we can expect that the Mumbai massacre will have negative consequences for both Pakistan as well as Indian Islamist groups. Despite this, we can expect that the likelihood of spree terrorism will increase when groups become sufficiently radicalized because any semi-open society presents almost ubiquitous oportunities for random mass-murder on a modest budget and the terrorists’ own extremism blinds them to how their actions will be interpreted or perceived.

From an email with security expert Steve Schippert of Threatswatch.org, ( see Schippert’s Mumbai commentary here and here ) I learned that the terrorists in Mumbai were unable to or never targeted any systems in India’s center of capitalism – water, power, internet, road arteries etc. – were left untouched. That in my view is a future danger, terrorists using the all-consuming attention generated by spree terrorism as a trojan horse or distraction to conceal a strategic systems-level attack.

India is definitely not my bailwick but what is unfolding in Mumbai is not, I will wager, an entirely indigenous operation. Here are my recs for commentary:

Top Billing!  Shlok Vaidya at Naxalite Rage

Second Best!: The Counterterrorism Blog 

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Nothing like a change in administrations to generate a string of excellent books on strategy and national security.

I’ve just ordered Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy by  Dr. Steven Metz  of the Strategic Studies Institute ( and also of the Small Wars Council ). As I do not yet have a copy of Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy, which also contains a foreword by Dr. Colin Gray, I will yield the floor to the comment  of Lt. General Paul K. Van Riper:

“Two institutions failed the American people in the run-up to the ongoing war in Iraq. Neither the Congress nor the media provided oversight of the Executive Branch, which is constitutionally required of the first institution and expected of the latter. As a consequence a fundamentally flawed strategy was implemented by an equally flawed military plan. The results have been tragic and costly. Dr. Steven Metz does our nation a great service by exploring the causes of this U.S. strategic debacle, one that may well exceed that of the Vietnam War. Recognizing a problem and its cause are the first steps in setting things right. In this book Dr. Metz identifies the problem, explains what caused it, and most importantly, shows us a better path for the future.”

One for the top of your bookpile.