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IF WE LOOK AT THE 20TH CENTURY ALONE we are now in Viet-Nam faced with the forty-eighth "small war." Let me just cite a few: Algeria, Angola, Arabia, Burma, Cameroons, China, Colombia, Cuba, East Germany, France, Haiti, Hungary, Indochina, Indonesia, Kashmir, Laos, Morocco, Mongolia, Nagaland [an Indian state on the Burmese border], Palestine, Yemen, Poland, South Africa, South Tyrol, Tibet, Yugoslavia, Venezuela, West Irian [Indonesia, on New Guinea], etc. This, in itself, is quite fantastic.
The Century of "Small Wars"
In fact, if a survey were made of the number of people involved, or killed, in these 48 small wars it would be found that these wars, in toto, involved as many people as either one of the two world wars, and caused as many casualties.Who speaks of "insurgency" in Colombia? It is mere banditry, apparently. Yet it has killed 200,000 people so far and there is no end to it. The new Viet-Nam war, the "Second Indochina War" that began in 1956-57 and is still going on, is now going to reach in 1965, according to my calculations, somewhere around the 200,000-dead mark. Officially, 79,000 dead are acknowledged, but this is far too low. These may be small wars as far as expended ordnance is concerned. But they certainly are not "small wars" in terms of territory or population, since such countries as China or Algeria were involved. These wars are certainly not small for the people who fight in them, or who have to suffer from them. Nor are they small, in many cases, for the counterinsurgency operator.
One of the problems one immediately faces is that of terminology. Obviously "sublimited warfare" is meaningless, and "insurgency" or "counterinsurgency" hardly define the problem. But the definition that I think will fit the subject is "revolutionary warfare" (RW).
Let me state this definition: RW = G + P, or, "revolutionary warfare equals guerrilla warfare plus political action." This formula for revolutionary warfare is the result of the application of guerrilla methods to the furtherance of an ideology or a political system. This is the real difference between partisan warfare, guerrilla warfare, and everything else. "Guerrilla" simply means "small war," to which the correct Army answer is (and that applies to all Western armies) that everybody...