555 Review Part two of the book analyses modern threats in contemporary war and concepts to combat these. The first essay traces the evolution of the concept of irregular warfare from guerrilla war to insurgency, also exploring the themes of revolutionary war, the people’s war, etc. This evolution has taken place parallel to the reality experienced on the ground, which is the case of the revolutionary wars in China, Palestine, Algeria and Vietnam and the insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. These chapters address, respectively, insurgency, terrorism, counterinsurgency, effects-based operations (EBO), Network Centric Warfare and Transformation, that is, unconventional warfare. The aforementioned topics have given rise to the great schools of operational thinking which have tried in recent decades to address the strategic issues of conflict; in short, the counterinsurgency, technophile and “airpower über alles” schools. Looking back over the recent past, it is not surprising that responses to strategic issues have focused on targeting, operational doctrines or science fiction, without forgetting what has been coined “the Global War on Terrorism”. Another example in this case, but which was not covered in the book for reasons of time, is NATO’s current concern about the hybrid warfare used by the Russians in Ukraine, which demonstrates that the organisation continues to search for operational responses to geopolitical and grand strategy issues. The last part of the book invites readers to reflect on and analyse conflict from other perspectives. From the standpoint of the three final essays, contemporary war is not really modern at all and the author highlights the danger of looking for the Holy Grail in technology. Finally, using the metaphor of the “ladder of tribes”, Kilcullen explains the advantage of approaching conflict through an analysis of the nature of the actors. Conventional warfare is less common that what is known as irregular warfare. In short, the message of this book can be encapsulated in Don Quixote’s message to Sancho after the windmill scene: “for matters of war are more subject than any other thing to continual change” and also with the dictum of Clausewitz that “Nobody starts a war (…) or, rather, no one in his senses ought to do so, without being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it”.
REVISTA IEEE 4
To see the actual publication please follow the link above