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Guerrilla warfare during the Peninsular War, by Roque Gameiro, depicting a Portuguese guerrilla ambush against French forces. Guerrilla warfare is a form of unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military, such as rebels, partisans, paramilitary personnel or armed civilians, including recruited children, use ambushes, sabotage, terrorism, raids, petty warfare or hit-and-run ...
In some cases, the use of terrorism can be an aspect of guerrilla warfare. Terrorism is used to focus international attention on the guerrilla cause, kill opposition leaders, extort money from targets, intimidate the general population, create economic losses, and keep followers and potential defectors in line.
Asymmetric warfare is a form of irregular warfare – conflicts in which enemy combatants are not regular military forces of nation-states. The term is frequently used to describe what is also called guerrilla warfare, insurgency, counterinsurgency, rebellion, terrorism, and counterterrorism.
In the third phase, conventional fighting is used to seize cities, overthrow the government, and take control of the country. Mao's seminal work On Guerrilla Warfare, [12] has been widely distributed and applied, nowhere more successfully than in Vietnam, under the military leader and theorist Võ Nguyên Giáp.
Terrorism is a criminal act, but it is more than mere criminality. To overcome the problem of terrorism it is necessary to understand its political nature as well as its basic criminality and psychology. The United Nations needs to address both sides of this equation. [21] Yet another conflict of definitions involves insurgency versus terrorism.
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. [1] The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants. [2]
Lumpers define terrorism broadly, brooking no distinction between this tactic and guerrilla warfare or civil war. Terrorist splitters, by contrast, define terrorism narrowly, as the select use of violence against civilians for putative political gain. As Abrahms notes, these two definitions yield different policy implications:
Counterinsurgency (COIN, or NATO spelling counter-insurgency [1]) is "the totality of actions aimed at defeating irregular forces". [2] The Oxford English Dictionary defines counterinsurgency as any "military or political action taken against the activities of guerrillas or revolutionaries" [3] and can be considered war by a state against a non-state adversary. [4]