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Insurgency has existed throughout history, undercutting regional stability, drawing outsiders into direct conflict and spawning humanitarian disasters.
The strategic significance of insurgency ebbs and flows with the world political situation: The lower the chances of direct armed conflict between great powers, the greater the tendency of those powers to sponsor insurgency as a form of surrogate conflict, and the greater insurgency's strategic significance. When war between great powers is likely, insurgency may simmer on, but it becomes strategic background noise.
Today, with sustained, large-scale conventional war between major powers unlikely, at least in the near term, insurgency is again strategically significant and is likely to remain so for at least a decade.
Although counterinsurgency support has been part of American strategy since the 1960s, applying the strategies, doctrine and operational concepts from several decades ago to 21st-century insurgency is a recipe for ineffectiveness or failure. Insurgency is mutating, and the U.S. military, as well as other components of the government, must confront insurgency's new variants and distinguish them from its enduring characteristics.
Definition and context
Insurgency is a strategy adopted by groups too weak to attain their political objectives through conventional means or by a quick seizure of power. It is characterized by protracted, asymmetric violence, ambiguity, the use of complex terrain (jungles, mountains, urban areas), psychological warfare and political mobilization - all designed to protect the insurgents and eventually alter the balance of power in their favor.
Insurgents may attempt to seize power and replace the existing government (revolutionary insurgency) or they may have more limited aims such as separation, autonomy or alteration of a particular policy. They avoid conventional battlespaces - where they are weakest - and focus on those in which they can operate on more equal footing, particularly the psychological and the political.
In a broad sense, insurgencies take two forms.1 In the first form, "national" insurgencies, the primary antagonists are the insurgents and a national government that has at least some degree of legitimacy and support. The distinctions between the insurgents and the regime are based on economic class, ideology, identity (ethnicity, race, religion) or some other political factor.
National insurgencies are triangular in that they involve not only the two antagonists but also a range of other actors who...