Thanks to Steve Clemons for pointing me to "Sic Semper Tyrannis," a faacinating military/security weblog. Today's post--on "An Arab Guerilla Army"-- is not exactly radical: it folds neatly stuff that others have written about "new" (or not quite new) techniques of warfare. It dovetails with Thomas X. Hammes "The Sling and the Stone," a more comprehensive account of "Fourth Generation Warfare"--"4GW" in Hammes' jargon. Hammes does a fine job of setting the background to explain why, e.g., the Israelis have one so many wars and find themselves still so far behind the line of scrimmage. Sic Semper (the proprietor is one W. Patrick Lang, otherwise unknown to me) does a good job of stitching Hammes-type ideas into today's headlines.
Hammes and Lang deserve to be read with "The Rise and Decline of the State," a much more ambitious accout of state disintegration, from Martin van Creveld, an extaordinarily original and thought-provoking military historian (and an Israeli to boot).
Researching this note, I ran across a Frontline transcript of Hammes discussing "Private Warriors"--a topic that seems to link van Creveld's work with his own. I hasten to read it now.
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