This is the first major work to be published which analyses the phenomenon of revolutions based on a Maoist model, namely Thailand, the Philippines, Peru and Sri Lanka. Unlike the Vietnamese Communists, however, all these insurgencies modelled on Mao have failed, having been successfully contained by their governments. The question is how did the world's strongest power - America - fail where Third World governments have succeeded? The author seeks to provide the answers in order to learn not only about the Maoist 'people's war' and counter-insurgency, but also to identify the factors which contribute to a revolution.

This is the first major work to be published which analyses the phenomenon of revolutions based on a Maoist model, namely Thailand, the Philippines, Peru and Sri Lanka. Unlike the Vietnamese Communists, however, all these insurgencies modelled on Mao have failed, having been successfully contained by their governments. The question is how did the world's strongest power - America - fail where Third World governments have succeeded? The author seeks to provide the answers in order to learn not only about the Maoist 'people's war' and counter-insurgency, but also to identify the factors which contribute to a revolution.

Perspectives on the American Way of War examines salient cases of American experience in irregular warfare, focusing upon the post-World War II era. This book asks why recent misfires have emerged in irregular warfare from an institutional, professional, and academic context which regularly produces evidence that there is in fact no lack of understanding of both irregular challenges and correct responses. Expert contributors explore the reasoning behind the inability to achieve victory, however defined, and argue that what security professionals have failed to fully recognize, even today, is that what is at issue is not warfare suffused with politics but rather the very opposite, politics suffused with warfare. Perspectives on the American Way of War will be of great interest to scholars of war and conflict studies, strategic and military studies, insurgency and counterinsurgency, and terrorism and counterterrorism. The book was originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Far from being an anachronism, much less a kit-bag of techniques, people's war raises what has always been present in military history, irregular warfare, and fuses it symbiotically with what has likewise always been present politically, rebellion and the effort to seize power. The result is a strategic approach for waging revolutionary warfare, the effort "to make a revolution." Voluntarism is wedded to the exploitation of structural contradiction through the building of a new world to challenge the existing world, through formation of a counterstate within the state in order ultimately to destroy and supplant the latter. This is a process of far greater moment than implied by the label "guerrilla warfare" so often applied to what Mao and others were about. This volume deals with the continuing importance of Maoist and post-Maoist concepts of people's war. Drawing on a range of examples that include Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan, the collection shows that the study of people's war is not just an historical curiosity but vital to the understanding of contemporary insurgent and terrorist movements. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

This ground-breaking book spans 60 years of modern Chinese history from the much neglected non-communist perspective. Concentrating on Wang Sheng's career in relation to Chiang Kai-Shek's extraordinary son Chiang Ching-Kuo, it shows that the KMT were perfecting the methods that were to make Taiwan an East Asian Tiger' economy at the very point that they lost' the mainland. The book also provides a fascinating insight into Taiwan's efforts to aid South Vietnam and Cambodia from 1960 as the Indochina war unfolded.

Far from being an anachronism, much less a kit-bag of techniques, people's war raises what has always been present in military history, irregular warfare, and fuses it symbiotically with what has likewise always been present politically, rebellion and the effort to seize power. The result is a strategic approach for waging revolutionary warfare, the effort "to make a revolution." Voluntarism is wedded to the exploitation of structural contradiction through the building of a new world to challenge the existing world, through formation of a counterstate within the state in order ultimately to destroy and supplant the latter. This is a process of far greater moment than implied by the label "guerrilla warfare" so often applied to what Mao and others were about. This volume deals with the continuing importance of Maoist and post-Maoist concepts of people's war. Drawing on a range of examples that include Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan, the collection shows that the study of people's war is not just an historical curiosity but vital to the understanding of contemporary insurgent and terrorist movements. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Perspectives on the American Way of War examines salient cases of American experience in irregular warfare, focusing upon the post-World War II era. This book asks why recent misfires have emerged in irregular warfare from an institutional, professional, and academic context which regularly produces evidence that there is in fact no lack of understanding of both irregular challenges and correct responses. Expert contributors explore the reasoning behind the inability to achieve victory, however defined, and argue that what security professionals have failed to fully recognize, even today, is that what is at issue is not warfare suffused with politics but rather the very opposite, politics suffused with warfare. Perspectives on the American Way of War will be of great interest to scholars of war and conflict studies, strategic and military studies, insurgency and counterinsurgency, and terrorism and counterterrorism. The book was originally published as a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Insurgency-the use of protracted low intensity violence and political warfare against a government-has been one of the most pervasive and strategically signifi cant forms of asymmetric confl ict for the past century. In some instances, it actually has succeeded in overthrowing regimes or forcing occupying powers to withdraw from a state, thus redrawing the strategic landscape and altering the course of history. Few other forms of asymmetric confl ict can make this claim. Just as HIV is a particularly dangerous pathology because it integrates with other diseases, insurgency tends to meld with other forms of confl ict, be they terrorism, ethnic struggles, separatism, class struggle, ideological confl ict, narcotraffi cking, or other forms of organized crime. This makes it both a complex and a particularly dangerous opponent, always challenging to the strategist who must deal with it. The United States is once again challenged by insurgencies, this time connected to the Global War on Terrorism.

A sea-change has occurred in troubled Colombia, as detailed in this monograph. For the first time in 40 years, cautious optimism pervades discussions of Bogota's seemingly intractable situation. Drugs, terrorism, and insurgency continue in their explosive mix, but the current government of President Alvaro Uribe has fashioned a counterinsurgency approach that holds the strategic initiative and has a chance of negating a long-standing security threat to the state. This is critical if Colombian democratic and economic advances are to continue. Colombia has become synonymous in the popular mind with an intractable war waged against narco-terrorists. Not as understood is the strategic setting, wherein the illegal drug trade is not just linked to terrorism but rather is an integral part of a leftwing insurgency that continues to talk the language of the Cold War. This insurgency is the greatest threat to Bogota and to Washington's interests in the region.