“Flies vs. Hammers: How Asymmetric Warfare Works,” by Pericles, Daily Kos, 31 July 2006, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/7/31/172013/456 (from Daily Kos).

An exceptionally (and I mean in the “Deviating widely from a norm” sense) good article on Kos on asymmetric warfare. Some excerpts:

In a successful insurgency, warriors are only the tip of a large iceberg. Even though the number of active warriors may be small, a much larger segment of the population is at some earlier stage of recruitment. Some sympathize with the insurgents silently; they know who the warriors are, but chose not to tell the occupiers. Some help in small ways, by delivering messages, holding money, or even hiding weapons. Some harbor warriors and help them hide from the occupiers. Some will not fight, but will act as look-outs and report the movements of occupying troops. A successful insurgency is always losing warriors (sometimes by intentional suicide attacks), but the pipeline of recruitment is full of people moving to ever greater levels of commitment.

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All effective anti-insurgent strategies involve drying up the supply of recruits by isolating the insurgents from the larger population.

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In order to disrupt that supply, the occupier need not be loved. It need only convince the population that ending the occupation is not worth dying for.

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Think about it: Suppose the insurgents sat on their hands for a year while they waited for us to withdraw. Iraq, in other words, gets a year of peaceful governance and reconstruction. Roads and power plants are built. Businesses are started. Pipelines transport oil without interruption while tens of billions of petrodollars flow into the country. People rebuild their homes, get jobs, enroll their children in school. And most of all, old wounds recede ever farther into the past.

What happens to the insurgent recruitment pipeline during that year? It collapses. In the course of that year, many people who thought they were willing to die would realize they had something to live for. No insurgent leader could allow it.

Read the whole thing. (The companion article on asymmetric politics is good, too. Of course, it cribs tdaxp…)