“Naturally we will come to the aid of our kinfolk,” declared the President of Farchant, pointing to the message that lay on the table before him. The message had arrived from Alpenstein, a province in Schazzen, Farchant’s neighbor to the east. The President glanced around the table at the members of his High Council and continued, “Our friend, the governor of Alpenstein intends to hold a plebiscite in the near future. He is convinced that the Alpensteiners, 70 percent of whom are ethnic Farchantians, will vote to secede from Schazzen and to annex Alpenstein to Farchant. The Hypernationalist Party has...

Guerrilla warfare is as old as history. In the Anastas Papyrus of the fifteenth century B.C., Mursilis, the Hittite king, complains that “the irregulars did not dare to attack me in the daylight and preferred to fall on me by night.”²² Chinese chronicles describe the guerrilla tactics employed by Emperor Huang of the Han Dynasty to defeat the Miao Dynasty around 3600 B.C.²³ In 512 B.C., the Persian warrior-king Darius I, who ruled the largest empire and commanded the best army in the world, bowed to the hit-and-run tactics of the nomadic Scythians and left them to their lands beyond...

Superior intelligence, security, mobility advantage, surprise, sustainment—these are the keys to a successful guerrilla campaign. The ability of a weaker force to survive and overcome a stronger opponent rests largely on how well the weaker force can fulfill these five essential elements of guerrilla warfare. The selection of the right combat environment is therefore critical. A weaker force must fight in an environment where the elements of superior intelligence, security, mobility, surprise, and sustainment are in its favor. Traditionally, guerrillas have fought in the ground environment, seeking out difficult terrain that places the stronger adversary at a disadvantage. But...

Conceptually, air guerrilla warfare is a viable strategy for a weaker air force confronting an adversary with a much stronger air force. A weak force could, given the right conditions, conduct a campaign of protracted aerial harassment through hit-and-run attacks that would enable it to survive and eventually overcome a superior foe. Those “right conditions” are, of course, the key to translating concept into reality—the key to the feasibility of air guerrilla warfare. Feasibility, however, has two meanings: in one sense, it means possible, capable of being accomplished; in the second, it means likely or logical. Thus, for air...

Mao Zedong once described the relationship between the guerrilla and the people as that of a fish to water.¹⁶³ Just as water provides a fish with the basic necessities of life, so the local populace furnishes the traditional guerrilla with the elements essential for a weaker force to survive and overcome a superior foe. The support of the local population and a setting that offers a sufficiently complex terrain are the simple means by which the guerrilla gains the intelligence, security, mobility, surprise, and sustainment he needs to conduct a protracted harassment campaign to coerce a stronger opponent to give...