David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

fight the British straight up and lost. The
list of failures is endless. In the 1940s,
the Communist insurgency in Vietnam
bedeviled the French until, in 1951, the
Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap
switched to conventional warfare—and
promptly suffered a series of defeats.
George Washington did the same in the
American Revolution, abandoning the
guerrilla tactics that had served the
colonists so well in the conflict’s early
stages. “As quickly as he could,”
William Polk writes in Violent Politics,
a history of unconventional warfare,
Washington “devoted his energies to
creating a British-type army, the
Continental Line. As a result, he was
defeated time after time and almost lost