Casebooks on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare

Peter J. Munson — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 22:49:36 +0000

US Army Special Operations Command and Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory National Security Analysis Department have put together a useful reference for small wars students and practitioners entitled "Casebook on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare Volume II: 1962-2009." The resource is available for download in PDF format here. If you are wondering where Volume I is, that government document covers post-World War I insurgencies and revolutions up to 1962 and can be downloaded in PDF here. The original was published by the Special Operations Research Office at The American University in 1962.

Volume II is broken down by conceptual categories as can be seen by the table of contents:

I. REVOLUTION TO MODIFY THE TYPE OF GOVERNMENT........... 1

1. New People’s Army (NPA).............................................................5

2. Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC)..........39

3. Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path)............................................71

4. 1979 Iranian Revolution............................................................113

5. Frente Farabundo Martí Para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN)...151

6. Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA)................................195

II. REVOLUTION BASED ON IDENTITY OR ETHNIC ISSUES........ 229

7. Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)...............................233

8. Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO): 1964–2009............277

9. Hutu–Tutsi Genocides...............................................................307

10. Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA): 1996–1999............................343

11. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA): 1969–2001...379

III. REVOLUTION TO DRIVE OUT A FOREIGN POWER.................. 423

12. Afghan Mujahidin: 1979–1989..................................................427

13. Viet Cong: 1954–1976................................................................459

14. Chechen Revolution: 1991–2002..............................................489

15. Hizbollah: 1982–2009................................................................525

16. Hizbul Mujahideen....................................................................569

IV. REVOLUTION BASED ON RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM.... 605

17. Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ)......................................................609

18. Taliban: 1994–2009....................................................................651

19. Al Qaeda: 1988–2001.................................................................685

V. REVOLUTION FOR MODERNIZATION OR REFORM................. 725

20. Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND)....729

21. Revolutionary United Front (RUF)—Sierra Leone.................763

22. Orange Revolution of Ukraine: 2004–2005..............................801

23. Solidarity.....................................................................................825

The original was broken down regionally and included chapters on Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaya, Guatemala, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Tunisia, Algeria, French Cameroon, Congo, Iraq x 2, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Korea, China, Germany, Spain, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

This project has been the vision of Paul Tompkins, a retired Special Forces Warrant Officer who works in the USASOC G3 and has had the support of the senior Army SOF leadership (see forwards from LTG Mulholland and MG Sacolick). This is the first of several products that will be published on human factors In revolutions and insurgencies as well as undergrounds and auxiliaries.

"In a rare spare moment during a training exercise, the Operational Detachment-Alpha (ODA) Team Sergeant took an old book down from the shelf and tossed it into the young Green Beret’s lap. “Read and learn.” The book on human factors considerations in insurgencies was already more than twenty years old and very out of vogue. But the younger sergeant soon became engrossed and took other forgotten revolution-related texts off the shelf, including the 1962 Casebook on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare, which described the organization of undergrounds and the motivations and behaviors of revolutionaries. He became a student of the history of unconventional warfare and soon championed its revival as a teaching subject for the US Army Special Forces. When his country faced pop-up resistance in Iraq and tenacious guerrilla bands in Afghanistan during the mid-2000s, his vision of modernizing the research and reintroducing it into standard education and training took hold.

This second volume owes its creation to the vision of that young Green Beret, Paul Tompkins, and to the challenge that his sergeant, Ed Brody, threw into his lap."

H/T to Dave Maxwell

Peter J. Munson Mon, 07/09/2012 - 6:49pm