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Countering Stephen Biddle’s “Fallacy of Guerilla Warfare” in His Book, Nonstate Warfare (2021)
My father, who had been in Army Counter-Intelligence(CIC) during the Korean War, with an IQ his commanding officer called “off the charts,” later became a small-town District Attorney, during which he used to wax rhapsodic about various subjects and would come up with some one-liners that our family quotes to this day.
Some of them cannot be repeated here, but one of them still rings in my ears: “You can be smart as hell, but your lack of common sense can make you a few sandwiches short of a picnic.”
Recently I received a review copy of Stephen Biddle’s book, Nonstate Warfare: The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords, and Militias (2021). As I flipped to the Table of Contents, I was immediately drawn to the chapter, “The Fallacy of Guerilla Warfare,” which was immediately of interest, given I had just been finishing a book on the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN). The ELN has been a non-state, guerrilla combatant since the 1950s, following La Violencia in Colombia.
Underestimated, under the radar given the vastly media-savvy and ubiquitous presence of FARC/FARC-EP in the international press, the ELN is now, during FARC’s failing Disarmament, Demobilization, Reintegration (DDR) process with the Colombian government, the primary…
