and Chechnya in the 1990s, and Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, irregular warfare has
carried the stamp of extreme violence. The laws of war that proliferated in the twentieth
century made little or no impact upon the conduct of either side in irregular warfare.
Terrorism is a mode of irregular combat, and it may or may not accompany guerrilla
warfare. It is simply a tactic, as is guerrilla fighting. Strategic irregularity is proof of
relative weakness. To choose to fight in irregular modes, with guerrilla warfare and
terrorism, is always a forced choice. Those tactical modes are selected because their
practitioners are unable to compete in regular combat. The belligerent that is short of
fighters and equipment must wage war stealthily, and strictly on its preferred terms, if it
is to endure. If their cause prospers, terrorists will become insurgents. Should they
continue to gain in strength they will mutate from insurgents into regular soldiers able
to confront the forces of the state in open battle. Because of the political context of
irregular warfare, one needs to be careful in the use of terms, all the while recognizing
the subjectivity of characterization of irregulars.
Terrorists, a pejorative label, are regarded and discussed here as soldiers. Since
terrorism is a mode of warfare, this choice is logical. However, all states, and many
experts, prefer to define terrorists as criminals. This is an important matter. If terrorists
are soldiers, or warriors, they are irregular combatants who, under recent developments
in the international law of war (in the 1977 Second Protocol to the Geneva Conventions
of 1949), have combatant rights and duties. They enjoy legal status and, as a consequence,
they are granted a political standing that governments will resist (Roberts and Guelff,
2004: 22–5). Irregular warfare is about the relative political strength of the belligerents.
No government is willingly going to concede combatant status to its domestic enemies,
thereby gratuitously according them political legitimacy. It has been a cardinal principle
of the international political system since the middle of the seventeenth century that the
state should have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The days of private armies
passed into history after the horrors of the Thirty Years War (1618–48). So, for political
reasons, the state must treat the domestic exponents of irregular violence as criminals.
In principle, at least, this means that terrorists have to be afforded the protections of the
criminal law. In practice, those protections often are anything but robust.
There is an important difference between terrorism and an insurgency that employs
terrorism. Strategically viewed, the former should never be able to defeat established
authority, unless that authority panics and overreacts, or loses the political will to stand
firm. The tactic of occasional violence to promote fear (terror) is, in and of itself, nearly
always strategically hopeless. But if terrorism is handled poorly by the state, the official
response will enable, perhaps trigger, mass mobilization of the public. The result will be
the creation of a popular insurgency, probably accompanied by terrorism. Unlike the
terrorist, the insurgent poses a potentially deadly threat to established authority. An
insurgency can even grow in strength to the point where it is able to defeat the regular
forces of the state. Government overreaction to terrorism may even inadvertently aid
recruitment to the terrorists’ cause.
Irregular warfare is so different from the regular kind that the armed forces of states
have to discard their standard doctrinal manuals if they are to wage it competently. They
still require the classic military virtues of morale, training, discipline, leadership and so
forth. But with respect to ‘how to fight’, the subject of tactical and operational military
doctrinal manuals, the demands of irregular warfare are virtually a reversal of sound
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