MAIN IDEA:

This book is about a specific way of conducting a war, and here is how the author defines the general meaning of war:” Whether those ways are conventional/unconventional, regular/irregular, symmetric/asymmetric, overt/covert, Napoleonic/Fabian, or any other diametric word pairing is irrelevant at the level of analysis dealing with war itself. War is a sovereign weapon expressed through organized violence between parties clashing over incommensurable policies.”. The author defines the objective of the book this way:” This book will accomplish two things: I will show that existing theoretical frameworks are insufficient to understand and explain irregular wars and I will present a novel theory that can. To do so, let us begin with a technical definition of irregular war. Irregular war is the apotheosis of conflict between the people and the state, a violent dialectic between a faction and a sovereign expressed outside existing political institutions.

The author nicely summarizes his theory in a few graphic representations:

MY TAKE ON IT:

The author based the discussion of this book mainly on examples of colonial wars, such as the French in Algiers, or wars of external support for unpopular regimes, such as the American war in Vietnam. I think the author underestimates the role of external support for the irregular side of the war. There would be no serious resistance in Algiers or Vietnam without Soviet and Chinese support, which provided resources and save heavens for regrouping, rest, and resupply. When such support was weak or nonexistent, as was the case for Ukrainian and Baltic states’ resistance against the Soviet Union, the colonial power always won, even if it took a few years.  The problem was that the Western powers tended to overcomplicate situations and overly rely on pseudo-expert opinion (pseudo because these “experts” often did not even know the local languages). Most importantly, they typically defined unrealistic objectives and tried to fit reality into the rigid framework, either turning Algier into France despite the huge cultural gap between populations or winning the hearts and minds of Muslim tribesmen in Afghanistan for American-style democracy. The realistic objective would be to eradicate whoever supports hostile, terroristic actions as quickly as possible and get out. If, after that, terrorist activities resume, come back, repeat, and get out.  After a few repetitions, the normal evolutionary process would work out, leaving in place peaceful survivors who hate the very idea of terrorism and its inevitable consequences. There should be no attempts to impose on people values that are not acceptable to them, such as Western civilizational values of individual freedom and democracy.