Irregular Warfare Through the Ages

Good wording, that.

Anyhow, does anyone have info on the Australian commandos that fought in Vietnam? From the description I was given of them, they sounded like pure, distilled awesome badass...

edited 22nd Aug '11 10:43:31 AM by USAF713

Don't feed the troll.

Napoleon trying to retain a hold of Spain. It has so many parallels to later insurgencies it's not even funny:

• Starts out with some amount of legitimacy (was invited to replace the insane King of Spain)
• Puts an incompetent guy in charge
• The incompetent guy ends up with a full-blown insurgency on his hands
• When Napoleon decided to handle things himself, the other big foreign power (the British) steps in to counter him
• Created the word "guerrilla"

One of my personal favorites is Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul. He practically wrote the textbook on how to do "clear, hold, build" correctly.

Vercingetorix, up to the loss of the granaries at a major Gallic town (I've forgotten the name; began with an A...) pulled off a textbook guerrilla campaign.

And just what is your point, exactly? That human lives matters nothing so long as you can accomplish your goals? If that is so, you better hope you actually have the power to back up your words, because someone else might very well do the same thing to YOU.

Don't feed the troll.

For what country and in what war...?

Against Julius Caesar, the Gallic wars. He was the head of one of the Gallic tribes, I forgot which one. Ended up being the first and only person to get the Gauls to actually work together as a united group.

You don't know this? This is like, Roman history 101.

edited 22nd Aug '11 10:53:22 AM by GameChainsaw

Bleh... I'm the modern history guy. I know more Roman politics than I do their wars, strangely enough. I know their basic tactics (i.e. the classic shield line), but not their specific campaigns.

I dunno. Roman warfare was never as interesting as their government...

Ah. I'm more interested in military history and my favourite period is the Medieval and ancient eras.

Yeah, I'm the one to ask for American history. Roman history... well, I don't really know much, to be honest. Never really interested me.

Still, anybody know about the Australian SAS? Badass!

Self-thumped, as troll is gone.

edited 22nd Aug '11 10:59:46 AM by ForlornDreamer

USAF: Ofc, they are going to be badass, they are based on the British SAS.

I'm pretty sure the Australian SAS transcends British and American standards of awesome.

When you use your match rations to make an FN-FAL battle rifle fully automatic and are so persistent that the North Vietnamese turn tail and run at the sight of you...

The Australian SAS fought in the Malaya campaign so they have what the Americans badly needed, some jungle fighting experience.

Still: full-auto FN-FAL = holy shit, beast!

edited 22nd Aug '11 11:14:06 AM by USAF713

The North Vietnamese made use of some pretty unconventional tactics, the likes of which would often make other Guerrilla warriors look like amateurs.

For starters

-Infectious spike-pit traps

-Getting teenagers disguised as South Vietnamese to slip armed grenades into a G.I.'s pockets

-Creating homemade explosives and land-mines from dud bombs we dropped.

-100s of miles of underground tunnels and "death-trap" pitfalls.

edited 22nd Aug '11 11:15:16 AM by ForlornDreamer

This isn't really an area of interest for me, but I find the Assassins a particularly interesting case of irregular warfare. If anyone here likes to do reading, then I highly recommend Robert Asprey's War in the Shadows.

@ USAF: I've heard that old trick before — the British Army played with that as well. On the subject, the IRA did a few things including a textbook Ambush:

Warrenpoint

Incidentally, one source of the IRA's arms during this period was Libya.

Gadaffi.

edited 22nd Aug '11 1:14:43 PM by Greenmantle