Asymmetric warfare
This type of warfare often, but not necessarily, involves insurgents, terrorist groups, or resistance militias operating within territory mostly controlled by the superior force.
Such struggles often involve unconventional warfare, with the weaker side attempting to use strategy to offset deficiencies in the quantity or quality of their forces and equipment.
The popularity of the term dates from Andrew J. R. Mack's 1975 article "Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars" in World Politics, in which "asymmetric" referred simply to a significant disparity in power between opposing actors in a conflict.
By the late 1990s, new research building off Mack's works was beginning to mature; after 9/11, the U.S. military began once again to grapple with asymmetric warfare strategy.
Urban areas, though generally having good transport access, provide innumerable ready-made defensible positions with simple escape routes and can also become rough terrain if prolonged combat fills the streets with rubble: The contour of the land is an aid to the army, sizing up opponents to determine victory and assessing dangers and distance.
The "state" consisted of fortresses (such as the Alamut Castle) built on strategic mountaintops and highlands with difficult access, surrounded by hostile lands.
In the American Revolutionary War, Patriot Lieutenant Colonel Francis Marion, known as the "Swamp Fox," took advantage of irregular tactics, interior lines, and the wilderness of colonial South Carolina to hinder larger British regular forces.
Over the next four years, they slowly forced their enemies back, recovering population centers and resources, eventually growing into the regular Yugoslav Army.
This allowed supplying troops to be possible without incurring heavy losses from American airstrikes, who could not effectively identify or track their movements from the air.
This was true to such an extent that the US employed defoliation methods such as the use of Agent Orange and extensive Napalm use to make forested areas visible from the air.
He emphasized the adoption of indigenous techniques, which prioritized small, mobile and flexible units which used the countryside for cover, in lieu of massed frontal assaults by large formations.
In the 1920s, Harold Murdock of Boston attempted to solve the puzzle of the first shots fired on Lexington Green and came to the suspicion that the few score militiamen who gathered before sunrise to await the arrival of hundreds of well-prepared British soldiers were sent to provoke an incident which could be used for Patriot propaganda purposes.
John Paul Jones became notorious in Britain for his expedition from France in the sloop of war Ranger in April 1778, during which, in addition to his attacks on merchant shipping, he made two landings on British soil.
[33][page needed] From 1776, the conflict turned increasingly into a proxy war on behalf of France, following a strategy proposed in the 1760s but initially resisted by the idealistic young King Louis XVI, who came to the throne at the age of 19 a few months before Lexington.
Political implications of this broken 1820's compromise were nothing less than the potential expansion of slavery all across the North American continent, including the northern reaches of the annexed Mexican territories to California and Oregon.
The pro-slavery land grabbers began asymmetric, violent attacks against the more pacifist abolitionists who had settled Lawrence and other territorial towns to suppress slavery.
The abolitionists would not return the attacks and Brown theorized that a violent spark set off on "the Border" would be a way to finally ignite his long hoped-for slave rebellion.
[34][time needed] Brown had broad-sworded slave owners at Potawatomi Creek, so the bloody civilian violence was initially symmetrical; however, once the American Civil War ignited in 1861, and when the state of Missouri voted overwhelmingly not to secede from the Union, the pro-slavers on the MO-KS border were driven either south to Arkansas and Texas, or underground—where they became guerrilla fighters and "Bushwhackers" living in the bushy ravines throughout northwest Missouri across the (now) state line from Kansas.
The worst act of domestic terror in U.S. history came in August 1863 when paramilitary guerrillas amassed 350 strong and rode all night 50 miles across eastern Kansas to the abolitionist stronghold of Lawrence (a political target) and destroyed the town, gunning down 150 civilians.
The Confederate officer whose company had joined Quantrill's Raiders that day witnessed the civilian slaughter and forbade his soldiers from participating in the carnage.
[39] While targeting McKinley motivated the revolutionaries in the short term, his victory demoralized them and convinced many undecided Filipinos that the United States would not depart precipitously.
[39] For most of 1899, the revolutionary leadership had viewed guerrilla warfare strategically only as a tactical option of final recourse, not as a means of operation which better suited their disadvantaged situation.
The Philippine Revolutionary Army began staging bloody ambushes and raids, such as the guerrilla victories at Paye, Catubig, Makahambus, Pulang Lupa, Balangiga and Mabitac.
20,000-30,000[ambiguous] Boer guerrillas were only defeated after the British brought to bear 450,000 imperial troops, about ten times as many as were used in the conventional phase of the war.
The British began constructing blockhouses built within machine gun range of one another and flanked by barbed wire to slow the Boers' movement across the countryside and block paths to valuable targets.
[44]) The aid given by the U.S. to the Mujahideen during the war was only covert at the tactical level; the Reagan Administration told the world that it was helping the "freedom-loving people of Afghanistan."
Israel has a powerful army, air force and navy, while the Palestinian organizations have no access to large-scale military equipment with which to conduct operations;[47] instead, they utilize asymmetric tactics, such as taking hostages, paragliding, small gunfights, cross-border sniping, indiscriminate mortar/rocket attacks,[48] and others.
[53][54][55] The use of MAGURA V5 unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) to attack Russian Black Sea Fleet ships such as the Tsezar Kunikov has been cited as example of asymmetrical warfare by analysts.
