Small Wars Big Data

How a new understanding of warfare can help the military fight today's conflicts more effectively. The way wars are fought has changed starkly over the past sixty years. International military campaigns used to play out between large armies at central fronts. Today's conflicts find major powers facing rebel insurgencies that deploy elusive methods, from improvised explosives to terrorist attacks. Small Wars, Big Data presents a transformative understanding of these contemporary confrontations and how they should be fought. The authors show that a revolution in the study of conflict--enabled by vast data, rich qualitative evidence, and modern methods--yields new insights into terrorism, civil wars, and foreign interventions. Modern warfare is not about struggles over territory but over people; civilians--and the information they might choose to provide--can turn the tide at critical junctures. The authors draw practical lessons from the past two decades of conflict in locations ranging from Latin America and the Middle East to Central and Southeast Asia. Building an information-centric understanding of insurgencies, the authors examine the relationships between rebels, the government, and civilians. This approach serves as a springboard for exploring other aspects of modern conflict, including the suppression of rebel activity, the role of mobile communications networks, the links between aid and violence, and why conventional military methods might provide short-term success but undermine lasting peace. Ultimately the authors show how the stronger side can almost always win the villages, but why that does not guarantee winning the war. Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of the local population.

This is the original manual for “small wars,” now known variously as guerrilla warfare, asymmetric combat, and low-intensity conflict. It was first published in 1896 as an analysis and how-to guide for the British Army as it fought to expand the boundaries of the British Empire. Its author, Major General Sir Charles Edward Callwell, collects and distills combat experience from a vast range of British, French, and Russian imperial campaigns and rebellions. Callwell then draws several universal small-war combat lessons that are still true today, including the need for “boldness and vigor” to keep irregular forces off-balance, the vital role of intelligence, the importance of seizing and holding important terrain (most often the high ground), and the final war-winning requirement to “seize what the enemy prizes most.” He also shows that technological superiority alone is not enough, and that logistics and supply can lock an army in place instead of freeing it. Some of the Afghanistan battlefields described in the book are still being fought over today, with much the same disparity in forces, over a century later – it is impossible to miss the lessons of history in this classic work.

This new edition of Frank Ledwidge’s eye-opening analysis of British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan unpicks the causes and enormous costs of military failure. Updated throughout, and with fresh chapters assessing and enumerating the overall military performance since 2011—including Libya, ISIS, and the Chilcot findings—Ledwidge shows how lessons continue to go unlearned. “A brave and important book; essential reading for anyone wanting insights into the dysfunction within the British military today, and the consequences this has on the lives of innocent civilians caught up in war.”—Times Literary Supplement

1. Introduction 2. Military superiority and victory in small wars: historical observations 3. The structural original of defiance: the middle-class, the marketplace of ideas, and the normative gap 4. The structural origins of tenacity: national alignment and compartmentalization 5. The French war in Algeria: a strategic, political, and economic overview 6. French instrumental dependence and its consequences 7. The development of a normative difference in France and its consequences 8. The French struggle to contain the growth of the normative gap and the rise of the 'democratic agenda' 9. Political relevance and its consequences in France 10. The Israeli war in Lebanon: a strategic, political, and economic overview 11. Israeli instrumental dependence and its consequences 12. The development of a normative difference in Israel and its consequences 13. The Israeli struggle to contain the growth of the normative gap and the rise of the 'democratic agenda' 14. Political relevance and its consequences in Israel.

America's "small wars," "imperial wars," or, as the Pentagon now terms them, "low-intensity conflicts," have played an essential but little-appreciated role in its growth as a world power. Beginning with Jefferson's expedition against the Barbary Pirates, Max Boot tells the exciting stories of our sometimes minor but often bloody landings in Samoa, the Philippines, China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. Along the way he sketches colorful portraits of little-known military heroes such as Stephen Decatur, "Fighting Fred" Funston, and Smedley Butler. From 1800 to the present day, such undeclared wars have made up the vast majority of our military engagements. Yet the military has often resisted preparing itself for small wars, preferring instead to train for big conflicts that seldom come. Boot re-examines the tragedy of Vietnam through a "small war" prism. He concludes with a devastating critique of the Powell Doctrine and a convincing argument that the armed forces must reorient themselves to better handle small-war missions, because such clashes are an inevitable result of America's far-flung imperial responsibilities.

By their nature, democracies clearly have greater constraints than autocratic regimes on their freedom of action as they have to meet constitutional, legal and moral criteria in their use of force. This collection analyses a number of case studies showing how democracies have won small wars.

A thought provoking essay on the possible implications of irregular warfare in national military strategy.

The Small Wars Manual is a manual on tactics and strategies for engaging in certain types of military operations created by the United States Marine Corps. The purpose of this work is sharing experience and preserving the achievements of tactics and organization of small wars, or different military operations of the United States in countries where government is "unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such interests as are determined by the foreign policy" of the United States. The book starts with the definition of the term "small war" and continues into more than 500 pages on tactics, personnel structure, communication chain, transportation and logistics, military-civil relationship, psychological side of war, training, and support of native armed organizations and much more. The book is extremely interesting as a manual on tactics, whether it is used for a military operation or any other sort of massive campaign involving a large part of population, like elections. For example, it contains a chapter telling how to plan and organize legally the disarmament of local population. It tells what laws should be issued and what organizations form, what sort of personnel should be involved and what should be their roles. A reader will find guidelines on how to distribute and spare resources needed for a campaign, and how to properly cross a river in a dangerous area. Given the book's organization, structure and abundance of important information, covering different aspects of civil and military campaigns, this volume is a must-read for any person engaged in a state service or a student considering career in serving their country.