Real Che Guevara on Guerrilla Warfare

Introduction.

Ernesto Guevara and de la Serna, who signed as «Che» the Banco Nacional of Cuba money bills, was an educated, young, disciplined and methodical man. He was capable of analyzing the «military» path of the Cuban revolution from 1956 to 1958. And he extracted a few characteristics of how it developed this way and why it triumphed. His mistake was to extrapolate them to all the geographical places in his «Guerrilla warfare». As if those qualities were trustworthy, confirmed and, especially, immutable ideological and military principles.

The operative characteristics of the Cuban political guerrilla process, surprisingly rapid, and easy and slightly bloody, were very particular. Because that one was helped and stimulated by a very combative urban insurrection. That supported the weight of the merciless repression of the Batista’s bailiffs. Guevara, guerrilla in the Sierra and foreigner, took those characteristics as the axioms of action for an uprising people. Without giving neither value or usefulness to the civilian fighting, civic or armed. So important always in the Cuban nationalist political process. Following this way, the ideas of other «orthodox» violent revolutionaries of the epoch, but from other parts of the world, like Mao, Giap or Ho Chi Minh.

The Che’s guerrilla experience in Bolivia. The author applied his social military asymmetric theories, far from favorable Cuba.

It is not advisable to try to create a guerrilla focus, applying Guevara’s ideas. In Social Sciences the efficiency is a measure of the kindness of the applied methods and principles. To save the effort and the life, it is necessary to remember how this «strategist and tactician» of the «rural guerrilla warfare, in an underdeveloped Spanish-American country», gentleman ended.

The reading of his «Diary of Bolivia» allows us to learn from a strange, painful, and progressively insurmountable and asphyxiating, reality. Otto von Bismarck, the German Iron Chancellor (chief of the Government) was saying that the intelligent man was also learning with other people’s experience. We know the guerrilla path of the Che in Bolivia. The «scientific» guerrilla method he discovered, took all them to the disaster in Bolivia. The Bolivian Communist party (Mario Monje was his General Secretary) gave him the back. Because the opportunism is a common communist quality. The general Fulgencio Batista and Zaldívar was the candidate for President of the Republic of Cuba with the Popular Socialist party (since 1944, the new name of the Cuban Communist party) in 1940. The Party, in any country and circumstance, always theoretically justifies his acts, saying that the objective conditions for the masses action exist or do not exist. His «scientific» political method, based upon the dialectic materialism, would be very badly tested in the Grecian postwar revolutionary experience, as we will see downwards.

And the armed group with the Che turned finally into a group of «errant rebels». According to Mao Zedong, it is the worst thing that can happen to the irregular armed revolutionaries. That need to be established in a more or less isolated and protected zone with certain safety. And that cannot be indefinitely changing refuge, becoming fruitlessly and rapidly exhausted. They need the «bases» to be able to extend from them their doctrine among the popular masses, always with a certain degree of military constraint. Though only it would be for their armed active presence. And to be able to obtain from them the logistic support, refuge, information, personal help and indispensable recruits.

This way, the guerrilla sedentary and semi fixed bases turn, in turn, into one of the scanty military «hard» goals that the rebels offer to the military forces that fight them. The destruction of the guerrilla bases of the Communist party in the north of Greece by the Greek and British armies in 1949, supposed the end of a long (from 1946), hard and difficult insurrection armed in Greece. Placed around the cities of Vitsi and Grammos, in the border zone with Albania and Yugoslavia triangle, where the guerrillas were getting the supplies and recruits, the bases turned simultaneously in vital and very vulnerable for the guerrillas. The Greeks communists were getting support and energy from the anti nazi war popular crescent force.

The opportunity, extension and qualify of his irregular military rebel doctrine.

At the beginning of January, 1959, in a rapid consideration and synthesis of the guerrilla Cuban process, newly finished, Fidel Castro, got enthusiastic with his social military operational «discovery», was defining categorical: «Without training, without war tactics, we manage to conquer that Army …» «No professional Army (in America) would have forces to offset the activities of revolutionary guerrillas». «In any other (geographical) stage, with the same political conditions that ours, the popular guerrillas are invincible». See Carlos Franqui. Diario de la Revolución Cubana. Ediciones R. Torres. Barcelona, 1976. Pages, 703 and 704. Simultaneously published in France (he lived in Paris) and Italy.

With all this statement, he was who first established the social ideological operational theoretic basis of the Spanish-American guerrilla warfare. Afterwards Guevara developed, with scientific aspirations, its military guerrillas lived ideology. It was wrote in his «Guerrilla Warfare» book. He centered it on two postulates. That he was claiming the Cuban guerrilla warfare had absolutely (undoubtedly and without deviation) demonstrated in practice. «The popular forces can win a war against the Army» Indeed, this has happened in other occasions in History. «Not always it is necessary to wait that all the conditions for the revolution are present. (He was thinking in Mao’s theory of protracted warfare). The rebel revolutionary focus can create and develop them». His tragic end would give the «relative, local character, questionable, personal and conditioned» measure of his principal military «discovery».

Guevara dedicated great part of the forty thousand words of «The Guerrilla Warfare», to the study of the men who were forming the guerrillas and to giving advises on the life in the mount. But the work is slightly extensive in the study of the guerrilla tactics and strategies. As for value the opportunity and quality of his technical «offers» in his work: We only have to look at any photo, even of 2 or 3 decades ago, of armed irregular military rebels in some uneasy country in the World. They all generally have an assault rifle and an antitank rocket launcher. That usually are an AK-47 and a RPG-2 or RPG-7, all of Soviet design. Guevara speaks about a «grenade-launcher» designed by the Cuban guerrillas. Its propellant is a hunting cartridge, without pellets, adjusted to a wood rod. In its free end is adjusted a proper tin, full with gunpowder and grapeshot, and provided with a time fuse. It is fired off with a cut away shotgun, adequately inclined. Their guerrillas long arms were Springfield 1903 cal. .3006, with some American M-1 and Dominican San Cristóbal cal. 30 short carbines, some Thompson 1928 model cal. 45 machineguns and a few semiautomatic Garands cal. 3006. A superficial examination of the American FM Improvised Ammunition Devices, will give you better and abundant ideas to use in an undeveloped, hostile and without logistics support rebel asymmetrical environment.

The facts from which Guevara extracted his conclusions: The development of the insurrection against the usurpation of the political power by Batiste, after his coup d’état of March 10, 1952.

In the violent fighting against Batista, there were two radically different manifestations in their conception, techniques, tactics and strategies: the rural guerrilla and the urban commands for «action and sabotage», both of the Movimiento «26 de Julio». There in the Sierra, Fidel, with a militarily insignificant guerrilla rebel group, turned into the permanent and admired symbol of the resistance against Batista. Being kept in his little accessible «summons base», with an unique magnetism, he was orientating the Cuban public opinion towards his political option and, in these moments, amorphous ideologically.

The small urban groups presented against the regime a discontinuous, appropriate and dangerous battle, using 3 different tactics: attempts, sabotages and bombs and claiming petards. The price paid for these operations was high. Fighting in inferiority of forces, inside populations totally dominated by the men of Batista, whom did not lose their crushing control until January 1, 1959. And if the Police were not always capable of doing an effective preventive task, she followed the strategy of not leaving without response any suffered reverse. And we know that she was not going with considerations at the moment of select and apply the repression. Let’s indicate an example of each one.

On Monday, the 23rd of December, 1957 was «executed» by a «26 de Julio» command the colonel Fermín Cowley, chief of Holguín’s military district, in a hardware store of the city, at the north of Oriente. He was direct responsible of the massacre of the «Corinthia» invaders and a bloody repression against urban members of the Movement. Carried out in the previous Christmas, immediately after the pro-Castro invasion from Mexico in the «Gramma» little motorship.

On Tuesday, the 28th of May of this year took place the destruction of an important electric power conduction knot, in Suárez street at Havana downtown. The used technique was very known from then: rent of a building low floor, excavation of a tunnel up to the goal and placement and detonation of the explosives. As result of the sabotage, extensive zones of the capital were without light up to 3 days.

Every night, at 9 p.m., in La Cabaña fortress over Havana bay, a cannon-shot was going off, to indicate the Havana inhabitants an exact hour to facilitate the adjustment of their clocks. It was a useful custom preserved from the colonial epoch. Along 1957 and 1958, it was frequent to hear 5, 10 «cannon-shots of the nine», in the period that goes from five of nine to five after nine. When we all were more or less attending for the hourly sign. In general, it was tried that these «petards» were not causing body injuries.

The great revolutionary attempt of the urban and democratic «26 de Julio»: the general strike of April, 1958.

The general strike coordinators were Faustino Perez, national delegate of the Movement «26 de Julio» and Manuel Ray, chief of the Civic Resistance. Its organization was in charge of the strike committees, hierarchically integrated from the local level. They were constituted by members of 2 mentioned organizations, with a workers representative, member of the pro-Castro Frente Obrero Nacional (FON). The accomplishment of the strike was in charge of the «action and sabotage» commands of «26 de Julio». The instructions to the population, transmitted in proclamations, leaflets and radio emission, were demanding an active, even violent participation, of the people in the strike.

Strategically everything was outlined as an attempt of the «26 de Julio», to get the people to an urban, fulminating and decisive action, against the government. It was the last opportunity of the liberal and democratic line of the Movement, in wide majority in its ranks. Opposite to the radical and squalid line that was agglutinating in Sierra Maestra and Sierra de Baracoa. Because what was questioned in the later analysis of the facts by the National collegiate Direction of «26 de Julio», was the validity of an ideology (the liberal democratic one) for the failure of a badly applied tactic (to confront too directly the tyrant).

The principal Workers’ Federation of Cuba (CTC) abstained from helping the strikers and the Popular Socialist party was specifically excluded. The FON, the other labor force, without too many capacity of dialog with the employers and without sufficient penetration among the workers, failed in the organization of the strike. The order for the general strike was begun to transmit to the people by the radio at 11 a.m. of Wednesday, 9th of April, 1958, surprising all in their works and occupations. It failed the correct mobilization of the people, in altars of the security of the complex operation. Nevertheless, in March, the «26 de Julio» emitted a Manifest calling to the strike and existed a «rising» of sabotages in the cities, that were encouraging its members for its «summit final operation». For example, in the night from March 15 to March 16 only in Havana exploded nothing less than hundred bombs and petards.

In March, Batista appointed the effective and bloodthirsty army brigadier Pilar García as chief of the National Police. The government was kept calmed. For a time he did not realize roundups of hostile elements. But soon he began to act. There was done an extensive and intense use of false strike callings, in the days he had up to its beginning. Managing to poison the communication between the urban rebels and the people, and that this was beginning to suspect in the genuineness of the pro-Castro summons. Police agents, equipped with the red and blacks bracelets of «26 de Julio», were used extensively in actions of popular confusion and of attack and smashing the commands of action and sabotage.

The result of the efforts to initiate and extend the general strike, made concrete in a number of unconnected, isolated and costly actions and successes. That did not manage to involve the popular masses in the violent facts. In the Great Havana, most of the trade business, the public transport and the industries, did not follow the strike. In Santiago de Cuba, in Santa Clara happened similarly. In Holguín, the commands burned out the thermal plant. In Havana was confirmed the assault to several radio stations, a gunfire in the suburbs, the assault to an armory and the destruction of an electrical transformer, which left a part of the capital without electric light. The number of dead men happened in these urban encounters exceeded the hundred, which in great majority were rebels.

On Saturday, the 3rd of May, 1958, the National Direction of «26 de Julio» celebrated a tense meeting of almost 6 hours, close to Altos de La Plata. There was realized a hard self-criticism process, which take to a radical change of the operational postulates. There were purged Faustino Perez, the chief of the urban castristas commands and the principal leader of the FON, as maximums responsible of the disaster. The dismissed passed to occupy important places in the guerrilla organization. The urban commands remained restricted to a tactical support mission of the operations of the guerrilla columns. The control of the Movement went on totally to hands of the guerrillas, being modified the structure and the composition of the National Direction. This remained presided by a Secretariat with 6 members, presided by Fidel Castro.

The two prominent campaigns in the Cuban guerrilla insurrection: the army’s offensive in the spring summer of 1958 and the final «26 de Julio» counter-offensive, progressively and rapidly occupying the whole Island.

In March, 1957 the pro-Castro guerrilla in Sierra Maestra was approximately formed by 80 men, rest of the invaders of the «Granma», urban members of «26 de Julio» and local peasants. In April, 1958 existed approximately 300 guerrillas. In Sierra Maestra were approximately 180 rebels, distributed in two columns. And in the Sierras del Cristal, Baracoa and Nipe, adjacent with that one, were other 120 «bearded».

In May, 1958 general Eulogio Cantillo Porras was appointed as chief of operations in Sierra Maestra. He took charge to direct the unique important offensive for the destruction of the principal focus of the guerrilla. He got around 6 thousand soldiers joined in 14 infantry battalions, 1 light tanks company (14 Tm. with a 37 mm cannon), 2 75 mm. cannons batteries and 5 infantry independent companies, supported by two fighters and bomberfighters squadrons and several navy vessels. The military aviation, dependent on the army, was called Fuerza Aérea del Ejército (FAE). Between 3 and 4 thousand additional men, of the Rural Guard and the army, simultaneously realized protection of properties and infrastructures and public order missions in the Oriente province. The operations plan was more proper of the regular orthodox war. It was foreseeing to attack simultaneously, with two columns of reinforced infantry, from the north and the west, the «zone under rebel influence» of the Sierra, of around 2 thousand Km2, placed at the west of Santiago de Cuba’s basin. Formed the rebel’s rejection front, another infantry column would progress from the south over its rear, looking for breaking up the enemy resistance. And working together, pushing and squashing it up to its last positions. There would be kept a fixed siege of the operations zone, occupying the mountains spurs, to avoid guerrilla support movements and escapes of beating guerrillas.

Castro, who knew the loss of enthusiasm of the enemy troops, after the first skirmishes, followed a protracted resistance operational strategy. The enemy columns met a defense in depth, in a favorable ground for it. Destined to scourge them to the maximum and removing away from them the victory. And eluding the guerrillas an irreversible tie down in the fights and skirmishes. From the ends of April, the rebels devoted themselves to organize the Sierra’s entrances and its internal routes and to store in their zone all the equipment, weapon and supplies that they could, among these approximately 10 thousand bovine beasts. Around La Plata, Seat of the Comandancia, was established a quadrilateral rhomboid of approximately 100 Km2, framed by the Turquino peak, its mountain chain, Altos de La Plata and Agua Alrevés, as final rebel redoubt, where the commands and the reserves placed.

On May, 25, the troops initiated their advance over the rebel security vanguards, formed usually by short range shotgunners, «escopeteros», in the first Sierra entrances. The military men managed to approach with some of their advance spears, employing reinforced battalions, deployed in companies, to La Plata, but already without really combat force or operational capacity. The military advances were realized without the coordination that was demanded in their plans, attacking always in isolated advance sectors. This allowed the rebels, moving in interior lines of known and wild territory, to successively center in the enemy repulse. Only a maximum of 800 to 1000 soldiers attacked each time, of the whole of those who were operating. This way, the battalions were beaten by parts, even surrounded sometimes for a time, and repelled one after other. The second line units that occupied the zones invaded in May and June, were expelled from the Sierra, by the second ten of August, 1958. Approximately 36 combats, secondary actions and skirmishes took place in the campaign. The rebels suffered in whole approximately 35 dead and 45 injured men and captured more than 450 soldiers. No «bearded» rebel fell down prisoner.

Finished this campaign, Castro extended on August 18 an «order of march» to the commander Camilo Cienfuegos. In it, he was ordered to drive his rebel column «Antonio Maceo» n º 2, with approximately 120 men, up to the province of Pinar del Rio, in the western end of Cuba, at distance of approximately 1000 km. To establish there a guerrilla base, after crossing freely the island. On August 21 another order of the Comandancia arranged that the commander Ernesto Guevara, at the head of his rebel column nº 8 «Ciro Redondo, approximately 150 men strong, was moving to the province of Las Villas, in the center of Cuba, at approximately 500 km. His mission was to paralyze the passing movements of the military governmental forces through this province. The operational rebel strategy was offensive, supposing: an immediate harassment on the Santiago de Cuba basin, by the remaining rebel columns, directly directed by the Comandancia. And the invasion of Pinar del Rio and Las Villas, distant in the distance and in the guerrilla operational capacity. Which were the other two Cuban provinces that were possessing mountainous chains for possible guerrilla refuge.

At the beginning of September, the castristas guerrillas were reaching the thousand men. In the Oriente’s Sierras were operating approximately 700 men and the invading columns had approximately 300 men. At the end of 1958, more than 15 guerrilla columns, almost all of recent creation, had between 3 and 4 thousand men, operating many as auxiliary and of garrison forces. The rebel operations essentially consisted in a successively pushing aside, disarming and detaining, their always very superior enemies in number and equipment. But, without morale, courage, stamina and commitment with their professional duty. The offensive speed of advance over Havana, was dictating by the guerrilla columns’ scanty capacity of advance and maneuver. Each with power similar to a company of irregular infantry, partially motorized.

The Cuban dead soldiers during almost two years of guerrilla campaign were approximately 170-180 men. During this period the rebels approximately lost 125-130 men. In the revolt final period, the Cuban armed forces were increased up to 45 thousand men. The mortality of the Cuban population, according to the census of 1953, was 6 deaths each year for every 1000 inhabitants. According to all that, we can affirm that the Batista’s military men profession during war time was certain safe.

Cuba, simply, was changing from bad personal tyrant to worse institutional tyrant. In his speech of May 1, 1960, during the official acts on the occasion of the Labor Day, Fidel attacked publicly and for the first time, the electoral democratic system, as official channel of the sovereign expression of the people will. There he was shouted repeatedly by the ad hoc concentrated masses with shouts of: «Elections, what for?». With it was enthroned semiofficially and permanently in Cuba the system of «hand lifted at all sight and, poor who dissents!». That is proper of the democratic Marxists Leninist assemblies. And everything what from it was stemming for the government and the personal and collective rights of the Cuban people.

 

 

The Hamas’ defense in the Gaza strip

It is not easy to manage and defend the repulsing urban zones. Its employment demands high requirements to the Hamas combatants:
An enough motivation, which encourages them to follow the armed way and risking their lives for its cause. That appeases and rationalizes them the inevitable fear for the fighting in the nearby distances with a superior enemy, until the seniority offers to them new impulses. A good training in the infantry fighting, which gives them trade and confidence. A successful cooperation between the small units that garrison the zones, that guarantees them a cohesion without fissures in their tenuous and lean deployment and that allows and facilitates the command conduction and the accomplishment of his plans. To get iron nerves tempered by everything previous, that accustom them to fight in solitary or in small groups, refusing to flee in face of the implacable threat of the heavy Israelis military fire.

To all this «professional» tension that these irregular fighters support, there joins the tension created by a civil fierce fight. That they keep, for their will, intermingled with their unarmed families and homes, which turn out to be equally threatened and attacked. For all this, among the two tens of thousands of existing Hamas militias, not more than 20 % of them can in these moments use this kind of defensive fight.

These urban irregular enemies protect themselves extending their defensive positions beyond what would be necessary in a conventional defense. Covering this way a major occupied surface. In the defense zone they establish several reinforced delaying points. These protect the most critical positions of the zone, incorporate in the defense the buildings with steel structure , specially resistant, and form fire bags to ambush the Tsahal soldiers that gets through. But there are very few resistant buildings in the crushed and mistreated Hamastan. The resistance nests have in the Gaza zone more importance, provided that the occupation of the zone of defense is more tenuous, they cannot strengthen the positions too much for not stand out them to the Tsahal, the sights are more short and exist numerous approximation routes. They depend on the delaying points and they fall back to them, if are invaded or destroyed. Numerous alternative or exchange positions exist, more of the habitual in this kind of fight. This allows to deceive the Tsahal about the forward limit of the defense position, its real extension, the limits of the sectors that form it, the intentions of the rebel command of the zone about its defense and to disperse the heavy fire of the attacker. In the edges of the urban zones they never establish these fixed positions. Those are occupied by combat advanced parties which mission is to receive the possible explorers or civil observers, to avoid surprises and to deceive about the real tracing of the defensive zone. The occupants of combat advanced positions, distributed in pairs of sentries and some very small mobile patrol, fall back in their moment towards the more interiors delaying points.

These Hamas urban «fortresses» are diffuse, secret and imperceptible to the strangers. Only in a few hours their previous works are reinforced and occupied. It is necessary to enter in the houses to detect perforated walls and to find alleys under a furniture or a carpet. Its communication routes need more working time to get done, but also are less evident. Their firing positions are not complex. They need a few interlaced firing sectors, an immediate protection against the Israelis irruption in mass or with commands, a few covers against the heavy normal fire and a sufficient concealment that keeps them away from the sights of the enemy probable successive positions and his approximation avenues. The obstacles and the mines, even false in certain percentage and always distantly to not betray them, will serve to break in parts the enemy assault and to offer to them more static targets, for example for the mortars, which will have registered its fires. The destruction that generates the ample heavy fire support without aiming to a precise target, reinforces the rebel combat positions, surrounding them with debris that divide and impede the accesses of the military, except when they are reached by a ordnance direct impact. To operate this defensive net structure the Hamas militias have prepared numerous and narrow tunnels, dragging trenches and gaps in garden walls and interior walls of the buildings. In such a way that, away from the enemy sights, allow them to occupy the combat and observation positions at wish, to defend them more or less time or not, to move among them and to reinforce the most threatened or pressed positions.

Generally the Hamas irregulars would try to shoot from the front, with isolated or couples snipers preferably armed with the SVD sniper rifle, at individual and small groups of Tsahal infantry soldiers. And to attack from the flank or the rear at the enemy units that penetrate in their defensive zone, which already are disintegrated in squads or platoons with one or two armored vehicles in close fire support. Those prepared communications aforementioned allow them to appear, always in small number, behind or at the flanks of the Israelis units, while these stop, regroup, ask or receive instructions, or decide where to advance, and to erode them, causing some casualties. For example, from a basement or a floor, through an irregular hollow in a yard or garden wall, under a parked or destroyed vehicle in the street, where emerges a narrow tunnel with a covered and disguised mouth. From these positions the armed rebels fire some RPG-7V rockets or several short blasts, always aiming, of the Soviet RPK light machine gun or the obsolete RPD, but which always appear with irregular rebels. The interior houses courts serve them to place the mortars, which constitute their the only «heavy fire» fighting source, protected by a near infantry position. They fired them with the maximum angles on the abundant, large and always excessive Israelis concentrations. The usual mortar is the 82 mm. Russian modern M-1937 model. Here that the attacker presents three times more men (in fighting means the proportion must be 20 to 1) neither favors nor facilitates their labor. But this offers the persecuted Hamas defenders more targets against use their exiguous fire power. Especially because, in a given moment, is small the attackers’ proportion that are putting in real distress the defenders. Similar positions, protected by the houses and the interior courts environment and surrounded by innocent and unarmed inhabitants, are those that they use to stubbornly launch their free flight rockets, the Kassam and the Iranians, more modern and with more operational range which receive dismantled, on the Israeli nearby populations at the north of the Gaza strip.

The crucial moment for the defense comes when the Hamas zone commander decides to evacuate it, after having stopped and delayed the enemy assaults for some time. Trying to cause him losses as high as possible, but without been exposed excessively to a fighting in the close distances, or to be outflanked or to lose his freedom of action. This is inexorably tied to the transfer of space to the Israelis enemies. For it, the Hamas militias avoid and get through in opportune moment (using the night or a stop in the enemy attacks), the direct assault of their enemy, not his extensive or vague bombardment, without precision. The militias have enough exit tunnels directed to not very nearby buildings (often official and even respectable (mosques), offices, companies and some houses) or dry riverbeds (wades) and not evident bushes in the open land. From there they could disperse through the outside in very small groups towards friends reception positions, in the first moments. The protection of the evacuation is therefore vital and both entrances or exits from these tunnels are always covered by resistance nests, which take to end their rigid defense.

Some tactical and operative conclusions for this defense fighting.

The ground defense of Gaza is very difficult to maintain through the time. The strip lacks geographical space to be able to establish a flexible defense deployed in depth. This is necessary to give power, solidity, continuity and support to the rejection fight.

On the other hand, the external supply of weapon, ammunitions and military equipment to Hamas is strangled by Israel. That has bombarded accurately the zone of communication tunnels around Rafah, at the south of the strip, which were concealing crossing the border with Egypt. To guarantee its complete sealing, the Tsahal has established, at least, two «military locks» managed by mechanized infantry and tanks, near Netzarim and Tel Katifa and transversely to the land strip. Which practically prevent the transit (traffic is merchandising) of military equipment proceeding from Egypt.

Hamas’ «military» structure socially agrees with the local Palestinian clans. Its tactical top unit is a reinforced «battalion» of about half a thousand men, for giving it a practical «name». In its elite units, Hamas tries that the formation, training and equipment of the infantry militias are homogeneous. The mutual support of the sectors of the defense during an Israeli assault, is this way difficult and precarious. It is more difficult yet to realize counterattacks, not sectorial countershocks, over the ground Israeli penetrations against the Gaza strip.

Those will attack following 2 or 3 different and convergent directions. Seeking to disperse the Palestinian rejection fire, to disturb the command conduction of the defense and to break the coherence and consistency of all the position. With the first assaults, as unexpected as possible, on the edge of the populations, to obtain a few advanced depart positions and to be already on their interior. To continue then their difficult systematic work of advance and sweep. There are two Israeli indispensable infantry mechanized brigades in this operation: the Givati and the Golani. The first counts with small units trained for the assault with limited objectives in urban zones. The Golani is famous for her fight against the Syrian tanks in the war of the Yom Kipur of 1973, blocking their pass across the Golan Heights, to the plains of Galilee, and forming part of a tactical task force of combined arms of the Tsahal. The Golani has 4 or 5 battalions well trained in the urban war, using training camps very similar to the Palestinian populations.

Hamas, in its desperate fighting, is going to look for the serious enemy erosion (Israel is very sensitive to the men’s loss) in the numerous isolated microcombats that will happen during the irruption and the Israeli advance in the populations. But without being able to give a tactical transcendence, far from it operational, to its present military struggle.

The best thing that Hamas can do now is to leave this Numantian combat, without military hope. Looking for protect and keep its militias and people and to be prepared for another better occasion. Where, its blood’s effort in Allah’s path, this is the sense of the military «yihad», would be more useful and productive tactical and operatively

The defense of the military positions in the asymmetrical counterinsurgency warfare.

The effective defense of the billeting, redoubts and military camps from the attack and harassment of the irregular armed rebels is based on three operative qualities: the initiative, the mobility and the offensive action. These, in turn, are directly determined by the mentality and the combative disposition of the military men (which depend fundamentally on them) and by the military capacity or available means in the operations zone (that depend fundamentally on the politicians and the public managers).

The countless military, social, ethnic and economic guerrilla targets in an asymmetrical conflict.
Almost by definition, the military and police available means in a war against the irregulars are very scanty, and even they can be scandalously insufficient. And this does not depend so much of them not on the established authorities, but it is a direct function of the strategy inherent in a guerrilla right development process. The number of possible, potential goals and targets, which offers an organized modern, more or less developed society, to the operative solvent strategy of an armed insurgency is almost countless and inexhaustible.
Let’s see an expressive, but not exhaustive relation:
Attempts on civil and religious authorities and on isolated members or little groups of the armed forces and policemen.
Destruction and sabotage of the plants and energetic networks: thermal plants, dams, combined cycle plants, wind fields, refineries, fuels deposits, crude oil and gas pipelines, electric transformers and high tension lines and their centers of control and distribution.
Assaults to the lines of communications: television and mobile telephony repeaters, broadcasting stations, radio antennas, telegraphic wires, bridges, tunnels and viaducts, halts and railway stations, railroad track and catenary parts, trains and buses, great tonnage trucks and distribution transport vehicles, temporary obstacles in the roads and railway tracks, covered or not by indirect or direct fire.
Destruction or incapacitation of directly economic means of all sizes and importance: mines, plantations, industries, shops, hotels and resorts, groups of tourists. In these cases the insurgency must value the direct loss of working places and the probable alienation of part of the popular sympathy towards it; the effect is similar if there gets depressed the economic activity, but the employment is not destroyed directly.

The biased political intervention in this kind of social irregular military conflicts is a plague for the military struggle.
Sun Tzu is the real or supposed name of a Chinese author, who wrote The Thirteen Chapters on the Art of War, between 400 and 320 BC The style unit and its originality allow to affirm that it is neither a collective work nor a summary. And the use of the cross-bow did not generalize until 400 BC and the cavalry was not incorporated into the army before 320 BC And, what does Sun Tzu say on the military missions and the political spurious interference on them?
«Normally, when the armed forces are employed, the general first receives the general orders from the sovereign. Later he assembles the troops, and makes the army a quite homogeneous and harmonious unity and installs it in its camp”. Chapter 7, verse 1.
«It is necessary to know the sovereign has three ways of taking his army to the disaster. They consist in proceeding as follows:
To ignore that the army must not advance and order that it should advance, or, to ignore that it must not withdraw and arrange a retreat. This is what is called «to put the army in a difficulty». Chia Lin’s commentary: «there is no major calamity that the orders of a sovereign that resides in the court».
To ignore all the military matters and to take part in its administration. This disorients the officials.
To ignore all the problems of the command and to take part in the exercise of the military responsibilities. This destroys the spirit of the officials » Chapter 3, verses 19 to 22.
«That who has competent generals and protects them from the interference of the sovereign, will be the victor”. Ibid, verse 29. Hsi Ho Yen’s commentary: «In the war hundreds of changes take place in every stage. To say that a general must wait for all the orders from his Superiors is like to inform a Superior that you want to extinguish a fire. Before the orders come the ashes will be cold. And it has been said that in such circumstances it is necessary for  him to consult the General Inspector of the Army! To tie shortly a competent general, while he is asked to suppress a crafty enemy, is like to hold the Black Greyhound of the Han and later give it the order to  catch unattainable hares»
«There are cases in which the orders of the sovereign do not have to be executed necessarily. Chang Yu’s commentary: «The king Fu Chai has said: ‘ If you know which is the conduct to follow, go on; do not wait the instructions».
A general who possesses a perfect knowledge of his trade, knows how to handle the troops. Chia Lin’s commentary: «The general must be sure of being able to exploit the situation in his profit, according to its circumstances» Chapter 8, verses 8 and 9.

A vivid example of a right camp defense taken from the Vietnam’s war.
2 º battalion of the 28 North American infantry regiment carried out in March, 1966 the operation Cocoa Beach, of “search and destroy” units of the Viet Cong, in the Ben Cat district, Binh Dueng province of South Vietnam. The battalion, at lieutenant colonel Kyle M. Bowie’s orders, moved afoot on March 2 from the base of its brigade in Lai Khe up to the Lo Ke rubber plantation. There it established a strong defensive perimeter, in a flat and free of bushes area, except for some hedges and elephant grass spots. West of the plantation a thick jungle was raising. The time was good.
The following day, the companies A and B initiated their missions, remaining the company C in garrison. In its return, company B located an enormous trench of several km, which was passing in North and North-East directions from the US camp. And that had been occupied recently by an important enemy force, as the new excavations in it were proving.
Colonel Bowie supposing that a great Viet Cong force was in the vicinity, coordinated with the 3 ª brigade to assure himself the air and artillery supports. The fighting positions of his men in the camp were improved and protected everything possible. Bowie also established three observation and combat positions, each for a reinforced section, advanced by each company, at approximately 500 m. out the camp perimeter.
Around 06:00 on March 5, the second lieutenant Robert Hibbs, company B, in positions with his section on the perpendicular crossing of the routes Blue and Red, at the northwest of the camp, observed a group of armed women and children carrying ammunition. They were moving slowly through the Red route (parallel to the trench) and stopped at approximately 100 m. from the patrol.
Immediately he detected a company of the Viet Cong advancing from north to south in the Blue route, which stopped at approximately 50 m. of his position. Three Viets went to the group of civilians. The patrol used the delay to direct all her Claymore grenades on the Blue route. Finally, the guerrilla company continued the march. When its main body was at approximately 6 m. of the patrol, this one detonated her Claymore and threw hand grenades, dispersing finally the rest of the Viets with the fire of the M-16s. On having heard the explosions colonel Bowie ordered Hibbs to return. In her way of return, the patrol reached the rear of another enemy company, deployed already to attack. The American patrol attacked the enemy and crossed its assault deployment, routing it totally. Hibbs died trying to recover with his sergeant a wounded straggler. Before falling down definitively, hurt several times, he destroyed his night vision devices. Honor’s Medal of the Congress was granted to him.
The patrol of the company A was operating south of the camp. Soon she was totally surrounded by Viet Cong columns, which ignored her presence and which were going towards the American battalion. The patrol stuck at the end of an enemy squad, to go approaching the perimeter. Already near it, this way out was made initially shooting and launching grenades over the nearby guerrillas, slipping towards the camp.
Bowie withdrew patrol C. Around 07:00 the battalion was occupying his defense positions almost in full force.
The opportune detection of the enemy intention, the premature dislocation of part of his attack deployment, the precise support by the brigade heavy fire and the defensive positions in depth of the battalion were decisive. Around 12:00 the enemy assault, by the 272 regiment of infantry of the Viet Cong, reinforced by a heavy weapon battalion in war subordination, had vanished with the most serious losses.

One example from the Iraqi counter insurgency war. The  Spanish base in Diwaniya
On August 28, 2003 an Spanish infantry brigade assumed the control of the sector centered in Diwaniya, as part of the Hispanic Polish division, deployed in the south center of Iraq. Diwaniya, city of approximately 100 thousand inhabitants, is the capital of Al-Qadisiya’s province.
Scarcely come to the power in April, 2004, one of the first orders of the Spanish Chief of the Government Rodríguez was the retreat of our forces of Iraq. The following one was to grant the Great Cross of the Military Merit to the minister of Defense, for the above mentioned withdraw operation. The shame of his family made resign Mr. Bono the above mentioned high decoration. On May 21 were transferred officially the control of our three barracks, Spain, Al-Andalus and Santo Domingo, in Diwaniya to the North American forces.
The North American command initiated this April an offensive in this zone against the so called Army of the Mahdi (the guided by Allah) of the imam chií Muqtada al-Sadr (see our article » Iraq Hoy” in this blog) and they requested the active Spanish help. As our forces did not have a Parliament “mandate” to take part in attack operation, the continuity of their mission in the reconstruction and stabilization of Iraq was staying in precariously indefinitely.
The situation had deteriorated so much that the Iraqi governor of Al-Qadisiya, more extensive than Estremadura Spanish province and with approximately 800 thousand inhabitants, had just deserted and to form a band of approximately 40 followers, to make worth) his master of the war’s rights.
Diwaniya’s facilities, where were lodging our more than thousand men, remained turned into Fort Apache’s imitation. Because the Iraqi rebels are not in the habit of estimating these subtleties like: «I am here, but I do not attack you» or «I am white, rich and use Kevlar helmet, but I am not Yankee». We were an easy and comfortable target for their fury and hatred to a not Islamic democracy and to the winning Christians occupants.
During more than one month the irregular rebels chiíes realize a permanent harassment of our barracks, tremendously defended (sensors, pits, wire fences and fortifications) against the islamist suicides assault bombs. But it happens that these suicides, who are illuminated but not silly fanatics, attack enemies groups not protected sufficiently, searching as passport to the Houris Garden, to take with them the major possible number of dead or mutilated enemies. There was not even a suicidal attempt against us.
The majority of the days of wait up to the announced retreat, our billetings were scourged by automatic fire of light weapon and mortar shells, with an average of 10 grenades for assault. In order to remove the origin of the indirect fire, our forces realized assaults with limited aims, expelling the irregular mortars up to the other side of the river. In the encounters and ambushes suffered, we killed approximately 20 rebels. We suffered a dozen of injured men in the whole process and several Arabic collaborators died. We do not have any news or help from the chií battalion of the Iraqi Army that we were training. And whose colonel was asking formally us not to return to Spain.

Some possible right fighting missions for this type of defense.
The gravity center of the active defense of the military fixed positions resides in the observation and the control of the approximation routes. That in rural zone can be a semi flooded rice field; in mountainous area, a heights line below the military crest; in urban zone, the streets orientated towards them, from certain distance, and in a road, a verge. All this compounded by the climate and the day hour.
The observation and fighting positions can consist from the couple of snipers up to a platoon, according to the characteristics of the area and the intentions and capacities of the enemy. Those are apart of the perimeter defense and of the patrols who cross it randomly, that constitute a part of the camp static defense.
The enemy is in the habit of exploring, at least initially and also in fluid fighting conditions, by observation. It is important to locate and to eliminate these reconnaissance positions. The patient observation is the way. Bearing in mind that if the exigency is intense, every 30 minutes the observer must be replaced, because he looks, but already not sees.
If additional means exist for it and as complement, it is very necessary to use the energetic patrolling (see our article “Irak, hoy” in this blog) against the enemy, moving away much more.
A passive defense, limited to rejecting the assaults, with the initiative and the election of the moments in hands of the enemy, is almost the most solvent of the combat morale that can experience a force, leaving apart a defeat. Ask about it to the Frenchmen who were defending multitude of redoubts and positions in Indochina before Dien Bien Fu in 1954 and to the nationalistic Chinese until 1949.

The urban guerrilla war in Iraq

Stalingrad (1942) and the Iraqis cities (2007). Are they two «parallel battles»?

In the description that follows, our intelligent reader will be able to see the similarities and the differences of these urban battles. And to extract his conclusions and possibilities. They are separated in the time by 65 years, but they are sensitively equal in the fighting forms. In they the defensive starts with a qualitative advantage. Only they are really separated by the different commands´ intentions and the capacities of both defenses.

Stalingrad.

In the summer of 1942, 6 º German army, advancing in the direction Volga, initiated the assault of the city of Stalingrad. The sweeping German advance through the wide Soviet steppes (of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine) during the good time, was stopping to take Stalingrad. Placed in the right bank of the low section of the Volga, near the river mouth but without controlling it, Stalingrad was lacking the strategic importance of the Caucasus, as crude oil production zone, or Moscow, as the most important railroad communications hub in the USSR, at the west of the Urales.

Promptly Hitler is going to concentrate obsessively on its occupation. Probably as result of his decisive leading role in the direction of the war, from his armchair general’s place, many hundreds of km from the running drama. From the Wehrmatch’s headquarters or from the wolf’s shelter or the Alpine fortress, the supreme command was not perceiving the differences of equipment, motivation and combative availability between the armies of the Axis deployed in the European USSR. In the maps of general situation, the units and big units of the different national armed forces, were only distinguished by the color of the representative figures or flags, that were indicating their geographical deployment. In certain occasion, the Spanish ambassador Agustín de Foxá, count of Foxá, was present at an invitation in Rome. During it, the count Ciano, son-in-law of the Duce and Italian Secretary of State, with the distorted intention of treading on ourselves and to laugh, asked him: «Certainly, Foxá, when does Spain think to finally join the international struggle against the Bolshevism, which we are supporting?» Don Agustín answered him: «Count Ciano, do you believe that the Reich can permit to have another military ally?» The following day Foxá was indicated that he should leave Italy.

As consequence of all this, 6 º German army, the major «great unit» of its class of the whole Wehrmatch or German armed forces, is going to waste its operational advantages of movement with flexibility and agility. Which were allowing it to keep the freedom of action and the initiative in its offensive actions, as strategic decisive principles. And it in exchange for using only tactically its fire and of combat in the close distances capacities, to reduce an enemy arranged already fiercely not to yielding any more land, to resisting up to the death in the defense of the city. An enemy whose chiefs and high commands were encouraged only by the hope that their Stavka or high central staff get time to assemble and deploy the enough reserves, to crush the insufficiently protected flanks of the German strategic deployment, around 6 º army, defended by the 3 º and 4 º Romanian armies. A hard and tough enemy, to support the tremendous efforts and hardships, by the fatalism, the sobriety and the conformity of his Slavic idiosyncrasy, represented in the motto chosen by his commands, «there is no land for us beyond the Volga».

At the end of August, 1942 the German forward guards began to operate against Stalingrad. Two months later the Soviet positions in the city were diminishing to a few isolated zones, full of debris and rubbles, of not more than 275 m. in depth, hugged to the right bank of the Volga. These resistance islands, purified in the oven of the privations and the resistance to numerous German assaults, turned in uncompromising. Two were their structural secrets: the Germans never managed to isolate the city from the left bank of the river and in the mentioned zones the rigid defense was anchored in buildings of metal framework, covered with metallic plates. The grains elevator close to the trains station (too narrow and isolated to resist indefinitely), and several factories Red October (of light infantry weapons), Barricade (of artillery tubes of great calibre) and Dzerzhinski (of tractors, reconverted to make the T-34 model 41), from south to north, are the examples. The 6 º army became exhausted. The campaign ended on February 2, 1943, with the surrender by Fieldmarshall von Paulus of the remains of his army, turned into an enormous mass of armed men without operational capacity.

The confronted rivals in the cities of Iraq.

In Baghdad, Samarra, Faluya and other Iraqi populations confront two very unequal and different enemies. The American troops are prepared to fight against a military regular enemy, endowed with a masses army or even more modern, with means technologically more elaborated and men better trained, to support the loneliness and tensions of the current battle fields. Definitively, its «environment», its performance space, is the direct and opened clash in presence of a great profusion of probable enemy targets. Its instrument is the attrition, the destruction of the targets that the enemy shows and that could be detected and acquired in all the depth of his march, assemble, defense or attack deployments. The last two enemy echelons, nowadays increasingly remote or deep, are reached by the long range tactical support aviation or with the ballistic or of free flight rocketry of medium range.

But, what does happen with a weaker in means and equipment rival, always evasive by need and method and with another cultural and social idiosyncrasy? That is not worry if he needs to move back or to hide in front of a superior enemy. Without for it feeling unworthy, loser or defeated. in these frustrated and incomplete combats. But he avoids the fighting that is unfavorable for him, waiting for a better opportunity to use his sparing and effective means with 40 years of design. Knowing that his enemy tomorrow will continue presenting numerous targets, more or less easy to scourge, irritating and hurting. Since the vehicles and the military patrols swarm everywhere, looking for a kind of «zone saturation», but generally measuring the used times, in labors of vigilance, escort, billeting and successive marches, almost routine, evident and too massive all. A rival who does not seek to win so much battles, but erode and spoil, to be a nuisance and to enervate finally. And that knows that the time is working in his favor in his own land. And that only has to resist and wait, keeping a critical volume of military annoying activity, which could confirm before all, native and foreign, inside and out of Iraq, his presence in force and his determination in the fighting struggle. Acting as a harmful, odorless and colorless gas, subtle and light by its physical nature, that everything it reaches, penetrates and damages.

The Iraqi society.

In Iraq, the Islam is a principal factor of social cohesion and national integrity, independently of the sunn’i or chií Islamic branch that people belong to. The Islam is, in its simpler and popular meaning, a simple faith provided with external and social definite well rites, that integrate the individuals in it, easy to follow and observe. An Islamic democracy, always based on the Umma or social religious community, the Koran or direct revelation from Allah, the sunna or the Prophet tradition and the Sharia or its derivative civil and penal laws, is not equal to the western democracies. Where scarcely resists and survive today in day some moral or social value, facing the all-powerful asymmetric avalanche of the individualized freedoms, dedicated as source of Law, without any juridical consideration of the duties.

The obedience is a personal and social quality very established in the Islamic societies. The sheik or chief of the families of the clan is obeyed in the attaining things to the social order. The familiar chief or father is obeyed within the family. And the God’s will is obeyed and respected as a vital rite in the Islam. This social obedience is wealth-producing and protective, not solvent or sickly by itself. In the madrasas, the Koran is learned by memory, with constant recitation throughout the years of education. Since it is the God’s Word got down from Allah, where it existed from always, there is neither slanted interpretation nor malicious acceptable critique, out of its literal. It is possible that the Muslim modern societies are envious of the economic western development. But also they despise sincerely the loss of real human values that the Christian and lay societies have unnecessarily suffered, in their way towards it.

Finally, we must not forget the structure of tribes, regional and local clans and families, which supports the Iraqi society. That one gives the real value and practical sense to the loyalties and the interests, always relative and still opportunists, of the Iraqis. Graphical, synthetic, paradoxical (for going abreast against the real Islam education) and always excessively, we might express it this way: «My tribe and I, against the world; my clan and I against the tribe; my family and I, against the clan; my brother and I, against the family; I, against my brother».

The different armed Iraqi insurgents types.

Depending on their religious ideology and their active membership in one or another armed rebel faction, the insurgents act of very different forms.

Across Syria they are infiltrating (since they avoid the controls or they disguise themselves) more than half of the suicidal muhaydines. These are very angry sunnis, persuaded for their short role, very little militarily trained and devious religiously fanatical. Soon they leave the struggle and do not look for the armed clash, but the individual and redeeming action. That assures them a passport to the «Houri’s garden», far already of this » tears’ valley», with the visa of «causing the major possible number of dead and mutilated enemies».

The smallest and worse organized bands, that are the great majority, though they are belonging to the big rebel groups, cannot aspire to face openly the soldiers. Their offensive actions consist of scourging, kidnapping, torturing and mutilating, putting bombs and detonate them from distance, to do sabotages, to damage the small enemy units and to hurt or to kill isolated authorities, military men and policemen. Deciding the timing moment to act on the weakness, the carelessness and the negligence of their enemy and having always a high probabilities of fleeing and vanishing. They protect themselves mixing with the civil submissive population, favorable or compelled. They defend themselves from the military unexpected or deliberate assaults, trying to elude them and slipping from the threatened zone, which, till now, is never occupied permanently by the troops. To shelter temporarily or to be established in the surroundings: another neighborhood, another small population in the region or province.

In Iraq the rebel bases are always in the cities and populations most favorable to the activity of the different rebel armed groups. And surrounded or mixed by the military local and foreign forces and allies. In January, 2004, the North American intelligence intercepted a memorandum of 17 pages written by Abu Musad al-Zarqawi (the previous regional chief of Al-Qaida) and directed to Osama bin Laden, in which he was expressing to Osama his worry for his survival: «In Iraq there are not mountains where we could shelter, nor forests in which thickness we could hide. There are spies eyes everywhere. Our backs are exposed and our movements are realized in view of all». For it, not all the populations are defensible of the powerful military means, not even the rebels have the intention of doing it. Here do not exist Numantine or die-hard ways of military fighting without hope.

The urban active defense of the insurgents positions in Iraq.

It is not easy to use and defend the urban zones of repulse. Its employment demands high requirements to the rebel combatants:

A sufficient motivation, which encourages them to follow the arms way and risking their lives for its cause, and appeases and rationalizes them the inevitable fear of the fighting in the nearby distances with a superior enemy, until the seniority offers to them new impulses.

A good training in the infantry fights, which gives them trade and confidence. A successful cooperation between the small units that garrison the zones, that guarantees them a cohesion without fissures in their tenuous and lean deployment and that allows and facilitates the command conduction and the accomplishment of his plans. To get iron nerves tempered by everything previous, that accustom them to fight in solitary or in small groups, refusing to flee in face of the implacable threat of the heavy military fire. For all this, among the few tens of thousands of armed rebels existing, not more than 15 % of them can in these moments use this kind of defensive fight.

These urban irregular enemies are protected extending their defensive positions beyond the necessary in a conventional defense, covering this way a major occupied surface. In the defense zone they establish delaying points, more or less reinforced. These protect the most critical positions of the zone, incorporate in the defense the buildings with steel structure , specially resistant, and form fire bags for the enemy that gets through. The resistance nests have here more importance, provided that the occupation of the zone of defense is more tenuous, they cannot strengthen the positions too much, the sights are more short and exist numerous approximation routes. They depend on the delaying points and to them they fall back if are invaded or destroyed. Numerous alternative or extras positions exist, more of the habitual in this kind of fight. This allows to deceive the military enemy about the forward limit of the defense position, its real extension, the limits of the sectors that form it, the intentions of the rebel command of the zone about its defense and to disperse the heavy fire of the attacker. In the edges of the urban zones they never establish these fixed positions. Those are occupied by combat advanced parties which mission is to receive the possible explorers or civil observers, to avoid surprises and to deceive about the tracing of the defensive zone. The occupants of combat advanced positions, distributed in pairs of sentries and some very small mobile patrol, fall back in their moment towards the more interiors delaying points.

These «fortresses» are diffuse, secret and imperceptible for the strangers. In a few hours the previous works are reinforced and occupied. It is necessary to enter the houses to detect perforated walls and to find alleys under a furniture or a carpet. Its communication routes need more working time to get done, but also are less evident. These positions are not complex. They need a few interlaced firing sectors, an immediate protection against the enemy irruption in mass or with commands, a few covers against the heavy normal fire and a sufficient concealment that conceals them from the sights of the enemy probable successive positions and his approximation avenues. The obstacles and the mines, even false in certain percentage and always distantly to not betray them, will serve to break the enemy assault and to offer to them more static targets, for example for the mortars, which will have registered its fires. The destruction that generates the wide heavy fire support without aiming a precise target, reinforces the rebel combat positions, surrounding them with debris that divide and impede the accesses of the military, except when they are reached by a ordnance direct impact. To operate this defensive structure the rebels have prepared numerous and narrow tunnels, dragging trenches and gaps in garden walls and interior walls of the buildings. In such a way that, away from the enemy sights, allow them to occupy the combat and observation positions at wish, to defend them more or less time or not, to move among them and to reinforce the most threatened or pressed.

Generally they try to shoot from the front, with isolated or couples snipers armed with the SVD sniper rifle, at individual and small groups of enemies. And to attack from the flank or the rear at the enemy units that penetrate in their defensive zone, which already are disintegrated in squads or platoons with one or two armored vehicles. Those prepared communications allow them to appear, always in small number, behind or at the flanks of the units, while these stop, regroup, ask or receive instructions, or decide where to advance, and to erode them, causing some casualties. For example, from a basement or a floor, through an irregular hollow in a yard or garden wall, under a parked or destroyed vehicle in the street, where it emerges a narrow tunnel with a covered and disguised mouth. From these positions the armed rebels throw some RPG-7V rockets or several short blasts, always aiming, of the RPK light machine gun or the obsolete RPD. The interior houses courts serve them to place the mortars, which constitute their the only «heavy fire» source, protected by an infantry position. They fired them with the maximum angles on the abundant, large and always excessive military concentrations. The usual mortar is the 82 mm. Russian modern M-1937 model. Here that the attacker presents three times more men (in means the proportion must be 20 to 1) neither favors nor facilitates their labor. But this offers the persecuted defender more targets to be able to use his exiguous fire power. Especially because, in a given moment, is small the attackers’ proportion that are putting in real distress the defenders.

Also they possess an effective and increasing anti-aircraft defense of short range. From other courts and roofs, always protected by a nearby infantry resistance nest, several teams of light anti-aircraft rocket shoulder launchers carriers are arranged. Their location in the deployment is done depending on the most probable and most dangerous aircraft approximation directions for the defense. If they are sufficient and shoot skilful, they could use two nearby, but not contiguous launchers, whom form a team, and that shoot successively and rapidly (the SAM-18 flies at 2 Mach) against an aircraft or towards an enemy air formation in immediate approximation to its target. A typical rocket would be the soul-air n º 7, called «grail» and «strela» (arrow) in not Cyrillic Russian. It had successive improvements and today is replaced in the military arsenals by the soul-air missile n º 18 former mentioned, that has a useful attack height of 3,5 km (the double), and guides, a fuel rocket, an explosive head and a bait detector improved. Its appearance among the Iraqi rebels would indicate, almost surely, that they were facilitated by Syria. The shoulder carrier limits himself to direct the launcher already loaded towards its target, wait until the missile confirms the target’s acquisition and then squeeze again the trigger. And going hide.

The crucial moment for the defense comes when the zone commander decides to evacuate it, after having stopped and delayed the enemy for some time. Trying to cause him losses as high as possible, but without been exposed excessively to a fighting in the close distances, or to be outflanked or to lose his freedom of action. This is inexorably tied to the transfer of space to the military enemies. For it the rebels avoid in opportune moment the direct assault of their enemy, not his extensive or vague bombardment. The rebels have sufficient exit tunnels directed to not very nearby buildings (often official and even respectable (mosques), offices, companies and some housings) or dry riverbeds (wadis) and not evident bushes in the open land. From there they could disperse through the outside in very small groups towards friends reception positions, in the first moments. The protection of the evacuation is therefore vital and both entrances or exits from these tunnels are always covered by resistance nests, which take to end their rigid defense.

THE BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

ITS REAL POSSIBILITIES AS TERRORISTS’ USABLE WEAPON AND IN THE MODERN WARFARE. ITS INSTRUMENTS AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT.

The biological warfare is the military use, as war weapon, of the living pathogenic, animal or plant organisms, and of the natural poisonous products, called toxins. Since the germs and the bacteria are used in it, it is also called germ warfare, though this term only incorporates a part of the biological agents capable of being used aggressively against the men.

The biological warfare is the military use, as war weapon, of the living pathogenic, animal or plant organisms, and of the natural poisonous products, called toxins. Since the germs and the bacteria are used in it, it is also called germ warfare, though this term only incorporates a part of the biological agents capable of being used aggressively against the men.

The biological warfare is the military use, as war weapon, of the living pathogenic, animal or plant organisms, and of the natural poisonous products, called toxins. Since the germs and the bacteria are used in it, it is also called germ warfare, though this term only incorporates a part of the biological agents capable of being used aggressively against the men.

The biological warfare is the military use, as war weapon, of the living pathogenic, animal or plant organisms, and of the natural poisonous products, called toxins. Since the germs and the bacteria are used in it, it is also called germ warfare, though this term only incorporates a part of the biological agents capable of being used aggressively against the men.

The military use of the pathogenic microbes.

The pathogenic organisms, which produce diseases in the man, can classify in 4 big categories or types: the fungi, the bacteria, the virus and the rickettsia, an intermediate entity between these 2 last ones, in its nature, size and characteristics.

The bacteria are unicellular organisms of spherical (they take the suffix coco in the name), cylindrical (the bacilli) or spiral (the espirilium) forms. They reproduce by transverse repeated division and, often, the partial microbes remain united forming a chain. Many of them can move by means of their whips or eyelashes (shorter). According to Lauria, the virus is a genetic element constituted by ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid, suitably to move from cell to cell and capably of synthesizing with the available amino acids its particular proteins, which will form then the infective viral particles. It is not known neither its origin nor the date of its appearance, since the existence of fossils virus is ignored. Elford, in 1931, managed to measure its size, which varies between 10 and 300 microns. Also the virus classify in vegetables, animals and bacteriafhagous, every type with their specific characteristics. Their vital cycle has, among others, 5 important phases for us: fixation to the cellular surface, penetration inside the cell, multiplication of the virus at the cost of the components of that one, liberation of the new viral individuals and their dispersion in the environment.

The military employment of the pathogenic microbes is difficult, because they are living organisms. The military usual vectors, the conventional (explosive grenades) and the reactive artillery (rockets with ballistic path, without autonomous direction) and the air bombs, turn out to be too aggressive and destroy them before their dispersion in the target. To eliminate these serious limitations, bombs with ceramic cases have been developed, which has been tried satisfactorily with flies infected with the bacterium yessinia pestis, the cause of the bubonic pest. Also it has been tried its dispersion through the air, using dispensers means of several types. But its control and the estimation of the effect on the target are very difficult. During the 40s of last century, biological desiccated and freezing of the microbes technologies were improved. With them it was seeking to prolong their life and to increase their resistance, allowing them a major storage time, their dispersion using explosives and to achieve a longer exposure in the environmental conditions.

Their real employment by means of not military transmitters has been more common. In 1763, during the war in North America between Great Britain and France for the control of all the European colonies, the military British command decided to try to infect with smallpox the hostile Indians. With this motive 2 sheets and a handkerchief from the room of infected by smallpox in a British hospital, were delivered to 2 Indian chiefs. The disease spread soon among the tribes.

Soon after the suicidal air raids on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, in September, 2001, some packages and letters supposedly containing anthrax spores, active or in vitro, acquired or stolen in pharmacological investigation laboratories began to appear in the USA, in the post offices and the addresses. The collective paranoia of these tragic moments helped to increase the extension and the importance of these facts. And it constituted a multiplier of the propaganda perverse effect in any type of individual or collective terrorism aggression. Whose purpose is the terror extension, generally using violent indiscriminate actions and the threats of repeating them. That do that all the members of the attacked collectivity considering themselves to be possible or probable, according with the cases, goals of these future actions.

The toxins as a warfare weapon.

The toxins are poisons naturally produced by the plants or the animals, so much the big or visible as the microscopic ones or microbes.

The toxins have certain advantages for their employment as war weapon. They are natural, not more or less complicated, costly and unstable synthesis chemical products. This facilitates their production in pilot or manufacturer plant scale. Some of the biological toxins are among the most poisonous products that are known. Their effect is made without the presence of the producing agent. This one, as an alive organism, presents problems in its manipulation, as being more unstable or perishable than toxins. That is to say, they can be preserved and spread easier, by means of explosive special grenades or with aerosols or atomizers dispensers, boosted by inert or neutral gases.

The enterotoxin B of the golden estafilococo is the responsible of the majority of the food human poisonings. This bacterium can grow in multitude foods and on having done produces the toxin, which is consumed by the consumption. In general, the enterotoxin B is not lethal, but a dose of only 50 micrograms already causes vomits and diarrheas in the adults. The deliberate use of this toxin is possible. For example, during a siege by the irregular rebels, always relaxed and no hermetic, to military defensive positions, and trying to scourge and to debilitated the vital enemy resistance. The sharp sound effect produced by the operating toxin is called almost onomatopoeically «the whistling sound».

A more terrible toxin, which it is possible also to find in the food, is the butolinic A toxin, produced by the clostridium butolinic bacteria. It is the most powerful known poison, a microgram kills an adult. The normal appearance of the bacterium associates with the badly preserved food, as the expired or badly sterilized during its manufacture tinned vegetables. It is a neuroagent that causes that the nervous system accumulates in excess during its functioning the acetilcolin, in a similar way that do the of nervous type agents used in the chemical warfare.

The castor toxin exists in the seeds and the leaves of the common castor plant. Its use by the secret service Bulgarian agents known as the umbrellas’ assassins, was confirmed in the 70s. In the free ends of those were concealed a mechanical launcher, which was projecting a pellet impregnated with the castor toxin and capably in the short distance of going in the naked meat. Two Bulgarian dissidents fled from the communist regime in their country, were positively identified of having being murdered this way in London.

Its appearance in the History. Modern situation.

From very ancient the pathogenic agents and the toxins have been used with military purposes. The poisoning of the enemy water fountains or to throw the infectious patients corpses over the enemy defensive walls, are military methods used by Alexander the Great or the Mongolian. It is only in the modern times when the use of biological agents in the war has acquired a stigma character. This way, no modern nation has admitted its employment in combat against her enemies.

We have an extreme example of how the use of biological agents by profane persons can go away of control, in the siege of the Genoese city of Kaffa, today called Feodosiya, placed in the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. During in it the biological harmful effects were reasonably circumscribed inside the walls of this city. In the middle of the XIVth century the Mongolian were besieging the city. The Mongolian were throwing over her walls, using catapults, the dead men’s bodies by the bubonic pest. It is thought that some Genoese ships that departed from the city towards their metropolis, could carry the plague’s bacillus, which was habitually lodging in the rates. Hereby the bubonic pest could reach Italy, and begin the massive and fulminating epidemic known in the History as the Black Death, which almost depopulated the European continent in that century.

From the 80s of last century, the genetic engineering and the biotechnology have turned into technically industrial instruments destined to improve the life conditions of the humanity. One of its possible applications is the development of vaccines against the pathogenic agents, both the natural and the reinforced by genetic actions on the first ones. This can allow the most developed countries to acquire a certain more or less widespread immunity, which is never absolute, against these biological attacks. Whereas their potential enemies, less technologically developed and with fewer economic resources, except the crude oil producers during the expansion phase of the sales cycle, would be defenseless against the biological military agents.

Its military use is punctual and restricted.

The effective, precise in the time and controlled use of biological agents in the modern combat is difficult and its results are also too vague. For the majority of the biological agents, its own nature does that its controlled launch on a target is difficult. Between the effective action on the enemy and the beginning and the development of the disease, it exists an unavoidable delay, due to the inevitable incubation periods, that goes from the hours to days; which is never acceptable in a mobile military operation. Always exist the natural and the acquired immunities (by vaccination or more or less controlled exposure), that prevent from specifying the real probable results, the number of enemy casualties derived from a biological attack. The theoretical estimated effects are diminished by certain climatic conditions, the rain, the fog, the solar luminosity and the extreme temperatures, or altered by the winds, which drag them of the surface target.

For all this, nowadays the military use of biological agents has a restricted employment in the special operations and the more or less concealed harassment of the enemy, technique where the time is not a rigid and critical parameter. This way, the goal of debilitating the enemy, more than eliminate him totally, does that the calculations of the conflicting forces correlation have to be neither so exact nor so punctual in time. The dissemination of the biological agents becomes directly, without the employment of the heavy ammunitions used as vectors. And the time between the exposure and the development of the disease, betrayed by its symptoms, constitutes then a planning factor within the attacking plan.

Its difficult and improbable use by terrorists and madmen.

Attempts have been, as the already indicated about the anthrax spores and this that we report now. In 1980 the French police assaulted a home of the Red German Army Fraction in Paris, placed in n º 41 A, Chaillot street. Those which chiefs committed simultaneously suicide later in their isolation cells in Germany. There they found a simple but effective installation «washing-up basin» type for producing the butolinic A toxin.

A natural repugnance exists in the men to experiencing the diseases, specially the infectious, the disfigurement ones and the extreme debilitating. It is only enough to see the announcements about all kinds of health centers, which offer something like a youth elixir, similar to that Ponce of León looked for in The Florida in the 16th century. The age is inevitable and implacable, but it is sought to keep, almost by all the means, the use and enjoyment of the maturity, which deterioration is one of the most fearsome effects of the diseases. The infectious serious diseases are in the habit of passing with external catastrophic symptoms. The man s attacked from inside in his aspect, in his integrity and in his capacities, by a painful and even disgusting way, up to his infamous death. This is not the death more or less adorned by us, to make it glorious and less disgusting, which is waited for the soldiers in the battlefield.

The manipulation of the pathogenic microbes and their poisonous derivatives imply high pharmacological and chemical technology operations. Here any leak or impurity leads to the failure of the experiment or to an affection of the manipulators (the most nearby and exposed possible carriers). And already we know something of how these pathogenic dwarfs and their organic products operate over us.

The fundamentalist Islamic fanatics do not find in the Noble Koran nor in the Prophet’s sunna any inducement, stimulus or excuse for their employment in the war. The microbes and their humors are in the category of the pork, the dog, the aquatic animals without fins, of the banned by Allah, all of them impure and detestable for the faithful Muslim. When the Book descended from Allah, the «ansars» or Islam’s devout could acceptably died by the sword, the mace, the axe, the lance and the arrows, in defense of the Umma or universal Islamic community and to extend its domains, applying the Jihad or sanctified war in many aleyas or verses of the Koran.

One also speaks about the possible utilization of the most attainable and known for the biological warfare means by the madmen. But a mad is not an demented. The demented has degraded his cognitive and volitional powers, by the physical deterioration of his cerebral tissues, due to the age or certain diseases (ictus, cerebral arteriosclerosis). The mad, for his part, has a portion of his feelings, ideas and concepts affected, upset and missed. But the madman is capable of reasoning specially in the topics that I will call «objectives», which are outside of his deliriums and mental affections. The madman can believe that his more or less individual terrorist actions, will be important to subvert the political regime of a country. But the mad can know how to mix sugar and potassium chlorate (the pills to disinfect the throat) to make a domestic explosive. Though the ETA (Basque revolutionary terrorists) adds sulfur to it, here it is not needed and only reduces the weight efficiency, since the chlorine takes charge connecting with the potassium and forming potassium chloride. In any case, the sulfur can be obtained, as component of the gunpowder, if there exist sensitive products restrictions, treating with commercial chlorhidric acid the sodium bisulphide, a photographic developer. Or how to concentrate the cars batteries liquid, to obtain sulfuric acid, base to obtain nitric acid (for the cotton powder or without smoke powder) and nitrates (the oxygen supplier in the smoke gunpowder, base of the pyrotechnic. And the madman also has very much, a lot of fear, probably more because a hypochondriac specific component, about the degrading diseases, stigmatized by the social group.

The Counterinsurgency War in Iraq

 Possibilities and Faults of the Conflicting Rivals. Why can win the Iraqi authorities?
The whole virulence and force estimated in the Iraqi insurgency are ballasted by his divisions, his divergent or opposite interests, his scanty real combative capacity and his problems to join combative major effective units. The people is neutral in these moments and only a certain degree of constraint, at least suggested, inclines it punctually and temporarily in favor of one or other. The Iraqi army is lacking experience, spirit of body and combative interest; but it is native, not occupant, and does not depart from zero and with the skill and professionalism of his advisors and cadres, it can advance stages rapidly. The cost to pay for all is the time, prolonged in an internal painful and costly struggle.

The Iraqi insurgency and his political-military characteristics.


The Iraqi rebels constitute a strange and not miscible miscellany. Among other factions or groups, they are present: Al-Qaida groups of with nearly autonomous character, coordinated by Abu Ayyub al-Masri; this nickname wants to say, «father of Ayyub, alias The Egyptian», very slightly identifying, except in villages and places in the field. Loyal Baazists (the party had militias that were activated militarily very little before the assault on April, 2003) to Saddam Hussein and former members of his army and administration. Islamic volunteers of several countries. Members of the intelligence agencies of, at least, Syria and Iran. The Sunnis and Chiís social religious local and regional militias. The national resistance Sunni net, principally formed by previous members of the Iraqi administration and army, opposite to the ex-president, but dismissed with excessive wisdom and hurry by Paul Bremer, which are joined now by patriots and religious Iraqis and irritated young unemployed men, before the prolongation of the occupation and the good work of the Coalition forces. Not very much time ago, there were detected common criminals bands. Local groups of clans chiefs and masters of the war, making be worth his political and economic rights.
The Iraqi rebels do not have to win a war. Its principal strategic goal is to remain active with a sufficient wearing intensity. Its forces do not have to return to home. All those of the coalition, yes. Simply not retiring, not losing, they compel the Coalition forces to keep its onerous struggle for a vague, indefinite time or to withdraw and return to house.
Something similar happened in Cyprus. The National Organization of Cypriot Fight or Ethniki Organosis Kipriahou Agonos or E.O.K.A., commanded by general Georgios Grivas, alias «Dighemis», took to end a difficult guerrilla warfare, because the scanty of the field, the force of the enemy and the lack of good hiding places, for the independence of the island against the British domination. Finally, the Enosis or political union with Greece was not obtained, but the independence of the island. Grivas, in his «General Plan for the Revolutionary Action in Cyprus» was emphasizing, «it is not necessary to believe that we, by means of these form and procedures, will get a material and total defeat of the English forces in Cyprus. We rather look for his moral defeat, harassing and upsetting them in such a way that, ultimately, we obtain the goal of the struggle. That one was until the end our strategic goal. We owe the success to the fact of having stuck firmly to it».
The propaganda constitutes a strategic basic aim of all the Iraqi rebels, with which the agencies and the western communications means collaborate filled with enthusiasm. Any rebellious assault successfully and showy is immediately broadcast to the world. This always debilitates the will of permanency of the USA and his allies. His legions called by his families, want to return, to enjoy the varied and superfluous consumption goods and the exotic vacations. The Spartan mothers, something unthinkable nowadays, were saying to her children when they were going out in campaign, when the benign station came and they leave the winter barracks: «you shall return with the shield or on the shield». When they were fleeing, the big and heavy shield of the Greek hoplite, capable of resisting the tremendous blows of the Sarisas or long lances of 5 m., principal weapon of their phalanxes, was a hindrance and they were rejecting it.
The insurgents know that the fight will not finish simply with the returning home of the forces of the coalition. This makes that some Iraqi groups, more worried by the serious and always unforeseeable consequences of a social chaos that could be established then, could be attracted with political and civil arrangements to leaving the weapons. Also, a great majority of the Iraqis do not want the return to the power of the Baaz party and its exclusive repressive methods of government and permanency in power. On the other hand, it is necessary to explain and convince the Iraqi people that the best way, in order that the military foreign presence stops, is the disappearance of the armed general revolt. The constant improvements in trade, services, supply of energies are having positive effects and must be exhibited emphatically by the National administration. Reciprocally, its destruction or sabotage by the rebels must be capitalized always against them by the communications means and agents of the Iraqi state.
The existential and ideological dispersion of the armed rebels does that its military co-ordination is difficult and only temporal, partial and for convenience. This dispersion, in turn, makes very difficult the political fight of the Iraqi government and his foreign allies against an insurgency with multiple and yet opposite interests and political and social aims.

Its operative characteristics.

The armed rebels are elusive, defending themselves by the concealment and, in less measure, with a certain local mobility. Also they possess a higher availability or combative alert during the offensive actions that they tackle. Let’s remember that any military set, from the crew of a tank up to an army, spends most of his time not deployed or ready to fight. His time passes doing labors and operations that will allow him to fight in the chosen moment. So much if he is training, embarking, moving, being equipped, being supplied, being reorganized, waiting or resting, any unit is not in full combat availability.
An autonomous advanced Iraqi band, depending on a chief of sector, consists of ambush groups, execution and kidnapping groups and sabotage groups. His functions are evident. Every functional specialty has a coordinating chief, who depends on the former one. In the cities and related road ways, the components of each group are not numerous, as maximum a few teams. They try to support its communications across a communications point, functionally dependent on the headquarters, which acts as intermediary in them to avoid enemy detection. The “effective modern” electronic follow-up of the mobile phones is deceived with corridors and couriers. In this auxiliary group of the command (a primitive and without logistics S-4, which depends on a civil parallel organization of supply), a primary service of health joins, carry out by male nurses. The most serious cases go to hospitals or particular loyal doctors, if they exist in the zone.
The insurgents nets are secret or latent and operate aggressively only against the mobility of the army and the police, which they surprise, are a nuisance, cause damages, kill and mutilate. The assault from several directions creates bags of fire and enfilade zones on the enemy. This produces besides a synergetic and enervating effect in the attacked one. That is similar to the result of multi traumatism or to that of multiple nº 8 or 9 pellets in a minor hunt piece. They lack of enough punch to give decisive blows or to finish off an important enemy. They erode a military unit (not a small unit or isolated elements), but they do not annihilate it.
Against the prepared military positions established in depth they are not effective, though it exists afraid of the guerrillas and a lot of money is expended protecting them. Their bands lack important combat capacity and are also easily canalized towards approximation avenues with registered heavy fire and medium grazing fire. For the moment, they lack engineers’ training, which would allows them the punctual break of the static protector barriers. And of superior training, to use the crawling individual approximation, without time limitation, in their diverse missions out and inside the military and police camps and facilities.
The logistics is a great disadvantage, especially the supply of equipment and no handmade goods. They possess many small active rears or bases, many full surrounded by their enemies, which activities can be detected always. The supply of the bands is provided by the support organization.

To win the battle for the favor of the Iraqi people.
The rebels, by force or thanks to their popularity, are capable of being mixed and to be diluted in the civil population. And to hide safe in houses, stores, garages, buildings, caves, etc. Though a part of the population is with them, a degree of constraint exercised by armed rebels exists always. If the Iraqi army is capable of permanently protect a neighborhood or population from the assaults or the presence of hostile irregulars, it also can progressively demand the due national loyalty to its inhabitants. What is inadmissible is that the civil local populations are intermittently subject to the armed pressure of one and another rival. So demanding from them a loyalty that does not offer safety to them. The clearly hostile recalcitrant elements in the different places, can be temporarily re-located in zones assured by the government, to neutralize them. The collective punishments of the populations are never suitable. Probably these are only justified, at least largely, by the immediate safety of the military forces. In any case, it is necessary to explain well the reasons for its application.
The rebels are tactics and operatively semiautonomous. The communications between the bands are moderated and even scanty, both the explicit ones and, especially, the tacit ones. They win the combats fitting their advantages with the weaknesses of the enemy army. The techniques of feigning retreats and establishing ambushes are useful to they against non skilled forces and still not too much motivated. They can choose the place and the moment of their attacks and carry out the necessary training to dominate the skills to be used in those.

Command, control and communications of the bands.
Its high dispersion exercises a considerable tension in its command structure (principally in the middle and high commands), because of its extensive and flat flowchart.
At the same time, this spatial extension allows them to cut temporarily the lines of communications of the enemy, with a psychological important negative effect. The systems of command, communications and control are slightly primitive at the moment, which impedes the regional concentration of bands or groups for more important actions. Its effective real command is divided by the dispersion of the chiefs and groups and the disparity or the antagonism of interests.

The Iraqi Army and its allies.

The abuses against the civil population are always counter-productive in a counterinsurgency struggle and more in an internal revolt. Sometimes, the hurries to form new troops lead to a deficient or incomplete training of these. They are not vaccinated against the stress, specially here the mental one, nor against the frustration of the not fulfilled plans or of the ungrateful enemy surprises. This leads to discharge almost inevitably the anger and the enervating impotence in the civil population, intermingled voluntary or by force with the rebels.
The wars against the armed irregular are by its Nature long, painful and difficult. The prolong character originates from the need that a popular force, departing almost from nothing, develops and spreads. And managing to moral or militarily defeat a regular own or of occupation army. The difficulty and the cruel evil arise from the high civil component that takes part in them. They are wars located in the home courtyard, in the own or occupied rear.
It is necessary, therefore, to avoid the prolongation of the conflict, which is mining the conviction of the own forces and allowing that the enemy should spread, strengthen and prevail.
The basic problem of the new Iraqi army is its lack of democratic convictions in the western style, in order to defend the new regime. It operates, as much, as a civil Police, which is not forced to die in its trade and which normally acts in its operations with overwhelming means superiority. If they do not feel and assume some values, it is not possible to accept the commitment with them. And acquire this way the necessary availability to work actively for them or to die in its defense. Already there have entered in active service several hundred thousands of Iraqi military and police men formed by the North Americans. But they are fundamentally destined to surveillance, custody and garrison labors. Their frame of mind and combative disposition are low and unequal, according to their origin. This is now a mass army.

The American military doctrine. Has it effective application here?
The massive employment of the heavy fire capacity continues being the principal «argument» of the US Army. Its doctrine (Field Manual 100-5, Operations, last edition of 1986) does not emphasize the initiative and rests in reacting to the enemy action from covered positions in the whole operations zone. One of the operative principles that gets force in this renewed doctrine is that of the simultaneity. This one establishes to beat at the same time, with heavy fire of artillery and aviation, the first and the second enemy assault echelons and even its reserve, using then aviation and tactical rocketry. The infantry and tanks forces are designed, in a secondary employment, to counter-attack this beaten enemy in all its depth, to assure the decision.
Here the detection and the selective attack to the enemy weak points don’t exist. Nor the general saving of means (that the contributors pay to the industrial corporations) and human lives. Nor the skilful, risky and fruitful maneuvers of functional or positional dislocation of the enemy forces. The Marshall Von Hindenburg invented the adage: «A battle without Schwerpunkt (principal effort) is like a man without character». Acting the North American army evokes a heavy, forceful mace, hammering and excessive. The Afrika Korps, on the contrary, remembers us an elegant, agile, unforeseeable, sufficient and effective foil.
The pompously so called fourth generation wars are the counterinsurgency wars or guerrilla warfare or irregular wars or armed revolts or liberation wars or organized banditry, which always have existed, coexisting with the conventional variants of warfare. They are those that the USA has lost or not gained lately: Vietnam, The Lebanon (peace disembarkation of “marines”, then demolished in their barrack) and Somalia (the uncontrollable and unforeseeable wasp’s nest of «all against all» by the local lords of the war and the Islamic militias). They are uneven wars (they call them now «asymmetrical warfare») against an enemy of lower technological military level relative to the regular enemy forces, always rooted in the own or occupied civil population and slight militarily intense but very extensive in the space and the time.
With embarrassing frequency, when the human or technological North American «sensors» detect some probable rebellious Iraqi or from the foreign “muyaidin” activity, first they devastate the building, the «block», the zone. Then they go to sweep up and to do the corpses inventory, the «body count», because they are very scrupulous with their statistics. Sometimes among the rubbles they can meet the corpses of an Arabic innocent and numerous family. They abuses of the attrition, which is indiscriminate and perverse when the enemy fuses with the civil ones. They neglect the active, unexpected patrolling, which needs proportionally less material and human means, but more trade, moral courage, freedom of action and creativity in the low and intermediate commands and NCO and in the men.

Effective counter insurgents operations in Iraq.

A complex operation of search, location and combat and destruction of the bands will demand successively to the military forces: to locate them, to converge on the zone, to attack and to defeat them, to be reorganized and reequip and to be dispersed. These seemingly unconnected operations of numerous small units, coordinated by the intention and aims of the high command and by the responsibility in the execution way of the direct commands, they enjoy great initiative, rapidity and maximum flexibility. This allows to the national army to take the freedom of action and to keep the initiative and a high relative mobility with the enemy, during all the offensive decided operations. Technique, tactical and operatively, the Iraqi military men must be, by trade and capacities, more professionals, more actives, better equipped, more lethal, more effective, that the irregular forces to which they search and fight.
During long time yet the air and spatial North American means, as spy satellites, not crewed planes and planes of the system Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), will have serious limitations for the detection and monitoring of small ground forces, even regular ones, in the difficult crossing areas and with possibilities of concealment, as mountains, jungles and forests, marshes and urbanized zones (industrial, of storage and distribution and of housings). These not only offer concealment, but also covered from the heavy and light fire up to the close distances of combat.
An observation and of combat patrols’ net constitutes the fighting system adapted and advised for this type of irregular warfare. Carry out against an enemy trained (it has been given sufficient time for do it), with aroused fanaticism, re-grown by the successful or believed successes and improved by a natural selection (the most clumsy and worse are falling down first, and let’s not say the suicides of only one use, who immediately leave the fighting), but that still has not matured structurally nor operatively. They constitute the natural sensors to detect the operative rebellious activity previous or between offensive actions, so as that the civil Iraqi population accepts and supports moderately well its own army.
In January, 2004, the North American intelligence intercepted a memorandum of 17 pages written by Abu Musad al-Zarqawi (the former Al-Qaida local delegate chief, which has passed away to the Houris Garden) and directed to Osama bin Laden, in which he was expressing to him his worry for his survival: «In Iraq there are no mountains where we could shelter, nor forests in whose thickness we could hide. There are spies on eyes everywhere. Our backs are exposed and our movements, in view of all».

Locating, deceiving and penetrating them.
A necessary complement of the regular net are the false rebels bands. These would be destined to operate in zones inclined to the insurgency, from where some of their members  come from. Their activity and concealment would be favored by the decentralized character of the rebels groups. Their missions would be to obtain information, to prove the loyalty of the civil ones and to annihilate small enemy groups or lone suicidal terrorists. They should not be bigger than a reinforced squad or section, except in combat special occasions.
The false rebels bands were used by enough success in the fighting against the kikuyos of the Mau-Mau in Kenya, against the Soviet guerrillas by the Germans during the World War II and against the Hukbalahap communists of Luis Taruk, the Supreme, in The Philippines by the Philippine army. In Spain the so called «counterparts» were used between 1946 and 1949. Their operative scope was minor. It was a question of «neutralizing» the rural population of the zones where the forces of the hostile «groups” were operating, by means of visits of the simulated guerrillas to the villagers. There came a moment that in the villages all were distrusting of the not habitual bands, that were coming in search of food and other helps, since it was not known if it was a counterpart.
The patrols’ and small military positions net has three operative purpose: to deny the initiative and the mobility to the guerrillas; to cut their communications with their bases, with their collaborators’ net and between the groups; and to frighten away them, like to the hunt, from their protective civil bases and their isolated redoubts.
The official net operatively covers a wide extension and so is capable of receiving the sensitive information. The knowledge of the rebels of its neighborhood and of its zone can be one of its major assets. Their refuges and depots would end located. The present impunity conviction of the rebels would disappear. With the advantage of being a native army, its initial weapons must be the discretion, the silence, using more the knives and hand grenades than its assault guns, the relative mobility with the enemy, with the night as collaborator and shelter in its operations.

The necessary ideal supply system.

The difficulties of supply in a great extension area, «empty» of enemies and without «hard» targets, can be overcome with: an anticipating logistics (a good calculation of the foreseen necessary supplies, with the commitment of the commands users); endowed with smaller and nearby pre located depots; using heavy fire pre located bases for support covering the operations zone; using all the possible common parts in equipment, food (caring of religions influence), etc.; and using small mobile armored units (minimum the reinforced interarm platoon provided with light vehicles, which could rapidly reinforce the normal military patrols). The utilization of gun and transport helicopters centralized directed, allows to rapidly create, once clarified the situation, a gravity center of the counterinsurgency effort and to supply rapidly and provisionally the most committed small units.

Lightness, mobility and relative speed in operations.
The necessary mobility of the regular forces in the fighting against the hostile irregulars of all kind prefers light combat vehicles. The Abrams tanks and the VCI Bradley need re supply every 8 hours in constant actions and are not silent, but very evident in their operations. They are designed to act massively by the fire, maneuver and shock in a gravity center of the effort against enemy regular modern forces. Also they can serve to crush a civil enemy population, as the Israelis did in Gaza, during the operation of rescue of their captured soldier.
But here we are trying to eliminate diverse guerrillas, intermingled with the Iraqi people. The armored light vehicles type Mowag 25 Piranha (14 Tm.) of Swiss design and with several manufacturing plants and the new American armored Humvee (4 Tm.) might mark the superior and low limits for the military armored vehicles to be employed in this counterinsurgency struggle.

To surround, to disperse the enemy rejection, to disturb its command and its plans and to destroy them.

Also they (the net) can react to the rebel detected activity, establishing rapidly way controls, and sufficiently sealing a more or less extensive zone. While the hermetic ring is closed next with other nearby troops or with heliborne forces. This simultaneity of initial actions has a synergetic effect that protects the small isolated military units, with exposed vulnerable flanks, in their initiative.
The surprise, besides, is a fundamental principle of this war. The relative rapidity neutralizes the alert notices that their civil Iraqi friends can pass to the bands. In Cyprus, the scanty British helicopters (it were the 50s in last century) were turning irrelevant the communication efforts of the collaborators’ net of  the E.O.K.A. about the movements of the British troops.
The best effect on the detected boxed band is achieved here by the concentric and inconsiderate attack (maximum impulse or quantity of used movement) with limited aims, by some advance spears with enough combat capacity (minimum, the reinforced platoon with heavy infantry weapons) over the interior of the siege. Since the sweep of the siege area from one or two directions is more laborious and gives the enemy, specially individual or by teams, a slip away chance. The static military forces can then be contracting by successive jumps the internal or both perimeters, according to the cases, established of the siege.

To gain the struggle through the time.
The patience must be a characteristic of all the implied ones in this war. Also it is necessary for to be effective, to reach a minimum of trade and seniority. In the zones most favorable to the bands, it is very easy that the operations of search and siege are initially closed in emptiness. It is necessary to go gaining and selecting their zone population, as we have said before, in order that the military trade and the people loyalty combined should produce its military and social incomes. The successive victories of the Iraqi army will be gaining to it the favor of the people, because all they want to be emotionally with the winning side. And because the interests of the Iraqis are volatile, unlike and yet contradictory, based on the loyalty to the family, to the clan and to the tribe.
In this type of war the armed forces cannot defend from the enemy all its possible targets. Besides, never there would be enough remaining troops to keep the initiative and to carry out a multiple, flexible and mobile offensive action against the armed rebels. Here there are no fronts to establishing and cozy, protective and supplying operative rears. What exists are armed enemies groups, their logistic support and information groups and many groups of sympathizers with them. That are integrated all according to the different personal courage of their different members. And all of them widespread and established through a big territory without limits or classic rears.
To liberate sufficient forces, the Iraqi army has to defend only its strategic objectives and its operative communications. The defense of towns and minor objectives, specially out of the Sunni zone (in the center and south center of the country), must fall in local units of police and of loyal civil self defense. These supported by military mobile units of its sector. With help of the heavy fire and the airborne mobility of the North Americans, even with the support of some of its elite units (rangers, marines, armored), the Iraqis can be trying to carry out major actions of siege and annihilation of bands and groups of them. To increasing the confidence and the respect of the own population and its experience in the resolution of its challenge of pacification of the country.

HEZBOLLAH.

In the active vanguard of the new «Supranational Undemocratic Revolutionary Totalitarianism» of the 21st century: the Islamic Radical Intransigent Fundamentalism (the IRIF). Brilliant, characteristic and terrible origins, stimulated and trained by the Jomeini’s Revolutionary Guards.

Hezbollah arises after the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon in June, 1982. Hezbollah takes advantage of the great reigning confusion for it, between the established Lebanese different factions (among them, Amal, the Shiite political religious organization which was receiving then the loyalties of the great majority of the Lebanese Shiites), the neighboring states and the great powers. Hezbollah is going to prosper in the emptiness of power and action created by the frustration of some ones and the weariness and the skepticism of others. Hezbollah’s catalyst is going to be the Islamic republic of Iran. Which is going to infiltrate through the Antilibano mountain chain up to the Bekaa altiplane, her revolutionary, selected, capable and motivated «volunteers», throughout the first months following the invasion. They were not too many. But the sufficient ones to indoctrinate, train armed militias and support and stimulate the creation of local active Shiite groups. This was Hezbollah’s original core.

The Islam is, in its simpler meaning, a simple faith, with external and social well definite, easy to follow and observe rites. In the Islam there exist five great rites, which are symbolized in its iconography by an opened hand: The profession of faith, short declaration that opens anyone the entry to the Islam; the 5 daily invocations (the Salat) to Allah; the fasting in the Ramadan month (the Roza); the charity (the Zakat) with helpless, disabled and poor persons of the Umma (Muslim universal community) and the peregrination to Mecca or Hajj at least once in the life, if resources are possessed, which is realized in community, between the seventh and the tenth day of last month of the lunar calendar, Dhul i Hijja. The administration of the Zakat corresponds to the ulemas or to the ministers, according to the sects. This gives them a power and an independence that no civil lay power of the Muslim countries has even dared to question.

There exists a great ideological and practical difference between the Sunnism and the Shiism. This one feels pursued, in reason of the dynastic and ideological orthodoxy that proclaims and defends. The schism in the Islam start from the fourth caliph, Alí, cousin, son-in-law and companion of the Prophet. The death of his grandson Hussein in Kerbala’s battle, Iraq, in the year 680, will mark the real beginning of the schism between the Shiites and those whom it will be called later Sunnis. Anchored in the original past, the Shiism does not evolve, as part of its identity signs, and admits fewer revelation sources. This way, it historically assumes a fatalistic, passive attitude, even of physical suffering for it, waiting for the return of the last missing imam (caliph), the seventh one since Hussein. Imam is the name that the great politician religious guides take in the Shiism. That one, which is hidden, not died, will return as Mahdi (the guided by Allah), at any one moment of the History, to make triumph the orthodox Umma (the Shiites). But also in the Shiism cases of insurgent action have existed, even with certain success and popular active implantation, as in Jomeini’s Iran or in the Lebanon with Hezbollah or Allah’s party. The Shiites constitute today about 12 % of all the Muslims.

Unlike what some pseudo trendies deduce, Hezbollah’s hostile vision towards the West derives more from the religious dogmas of the islamist totalitarian organization, that from the foreign policies of the democratic powers. During the short war of 2006, Hezbollah led its operative campaign with a high strategic and tactical knowledge and great profusion of conventional armament. Its ideologists understand and value its «blood struggle» as part of the Islam’s war against the unfaithful persons. A general war without political conventional borders. And which goal is, first, to re-define the map of Middle East according to those interests, and, finally, to manage to establish a world Islamic orthodox order.

The Hezbollah’s thinkers do not consider the Lebanon as a possible reality right now. Only when the western influence is eliminated in the zone and Israel destroyed, the Muslim Lebanon will be able to have a proper entity. For Hezbollah, the Western world is one in its hatred and hostility towards its vision of world Islamic unity. In this delirious puzzle, the United States (the Great Satan) are the command of this conspiracy and its aggressive campaign. In them Israel is only one more weapon against the Muslims. Only that is very active, nearby and, till now, very effective. We are not forgotten other modern democratic countries in this attributed and sealed role, despite of us. France, Germany, Great Britain, etc., and even Russia and, lately, China are associates, co-religionists, collaborators, friends of Satan. This about «Satan and company» gives unit of intention and coherence to Hezbollah. Only the «Union of the Islam» can defeat to this unfaithful persons’ tremendous federation. And from this, for example, Hezbollah’s recognition to the Islamic politically active and provocative Iran, as part of that one. In Hezbollah’s lexicon, the Islamic republic of Iran is «Iran el-Islam», which indicates that Iran is only a province of the great «dar el-Islam», the world future caliphate, the Umma in action, in the Shiite version.

There is in Hezbollah a strong integration phenomenon of fanaticism: the promised Paradise already is here or, at least, within reach of the simple faithful believer. It consists in joining the Umma and fulfilling a few clear and simple rules: the so called «5 rites of the Islam». Then Hezbollah preaches them that the Koran says that if they fight in the «blood struggle» of Allah, God «will reinforce them in their resolution and will give them the victory» (caution, to the Umma). And to those who die in this roses path, the immediate and sure prize is the «Houris garden» during an indefinite time (caution, not necessarily eternal). Where all their sensory and sensual appetites will be satisfied, to their personal mundane and wished range. And those who do not fall, specially belonging of the families or the most ancient clans of the «community», will see their material wealth increased with good part of the booty of war taken to the unfaithful persons. It is all a complete, simple, coherent and satisfactory program, specially for the oppressed, those without option, the overwhelmed, the prosecuted and the resentful from this difficult world in which they live.