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Nonstate Warfare: The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords, and Militias - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Nonstate Warfare: The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords, and Militias

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How nonstate military strategies overturn traditional perspectives on warfare

Since September 11th, 2001, armed nonstate actors have received increased attention and discussion from scholars, policymakers, and the military. Underlying debates about nonstate warfare and how it should be countered is one crucial assumption: that state and nonstate actors fight very differently. In Nonstate Warfare, Stephen Biddle upturns this distinction, arguing that there is actually nothing intrinsic separating state or nonstate military behavior. Through an in-depth look at nonstate military conduct, Biddle shows that many nonstate armies now fight more "conventionally" than many state armies, and that the internal politics of nonstate actors—their institutional maturity and wartime stakes rather than their material weapons or equipment—determines tactics and strategies.

Biddle frames nonstate and state methods along a continuum, spanning Fabian-style irregular warfare to Napoleonic-style warfare involving massed armies, and he presents a systematic theory to explain any given nonstate actor’s position on this spectrum. Showing that most warfare for at least a century has kept to the blended middle of the spectrum, Biddle argues that material and tribal culture explanations for nonstate warfare methods do not adequately explain observed patterns of warmaking. Investigating a range of historical examples from Lebanon and Iraq to Somalia, Croatia, and the Vietcong, Biddle demonstrates that viewing state and nonstate warfighting as mutually exclusive can lead to errors in policy and scholarship.

A comprehensive account of combat methods and military rationale, Nonstate Warfare offers a new understanding for wartime military behavior.

ISBN-13: 9780691216669

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Publication Date: 07-26-2022

Pages: 464

Product Dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Stephen Biddle is professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton).

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Not since Clausewitz’s On War has a book so powerfully illustrated how war is politics by other means. Nonstate Warfare moves beyond prevailing explanations of insurgent fighting to highlight the role of internal politics in how nonstate actors fight and whether they win. The brilliantly curated case studies offer a tour de force test for the book’s causal logic."—Fotini Christia, author of Alliance Formation in Civil Wars



"Biddle advances a provocative argument that models state and nonstate conflict behavior along a single spectrum, and explains it with a persuasive theory that combines material and domestic political variables. The result is an elegant tour de force and a requisite point of departure for future scholarship."—Peter D. Feaver, author of Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations

"Once again, Biddle revolutionizes how we understand conflict. In Nonstate Warfare, he teaches us that long-standing distinctions between conventional and irregular warfare are fatally misconceived. This book should transform how scholars study civil war and how nations prepare for it."—Jacob N. Shapiro, author of The Terrorist’s Dilemma and coauthor of Small Wars, Big Data

"This is one of the best books in the past decade or so to look at military history and policy from a theoretical perspective. Advancing a novel and well-developed argument, and using case studies that are truly extraordinary, Biddle illustrates the challenge of modern nonstate warfare."—Allan C. Stam, coauthor of Why Leaders Fight

Table of Contents

List of Figures ix

List of Tables xi

List of Maps xiii

Preface xv

1 Introduction 1

2 The Fallacy of Guerilla Warfare 22

3 Materially Optimal Behavior 46

4 Politically Achievable Behavior 74

5 Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon Campaign 107

6 The Jaish al Mahdi in Iraq, 2003-8 147

7 The Somali National Alliance in Somalia, 1992-94 182

8 The ZNG, HV, and SVK in the Croatian Wars of Independence, 1991-95 224

9 The Vietcong in the Second Indochina War, 1965-68 263

10 Conclusion and Implications 292

Appendix 315

Notes 337

Index 425