Nonstate Warfare

The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords, and Militias

De: Stephen Biddle

Narrado por: Danny Campbell

Since September 11, 2001, armed nonstate actors have received increased attention and discussion from scholars, policymakers, and the military. Underlying debates about nonstate warfare and how it should be countered is one crucial assumption: that state and nonstate actors fight very differently. In Nonstate Warfare, Stephen Biddle upturns this distinction, arguing that there is actually nothing intrinsic separating state or nonstate military behavior. Through an in-depth look at nonstate military conduct, Biddle shows that many nonstate armies now fight more "conventionally" than many state armies.

Biddle frames nonstate and state methods along a continuum, spanning Fabian-style irregular warfare to Napoleonic-style warfare involving massed armies, and he presents a systematic theory to explain any given nonstate actor's position on this spectrum. Showing that most warfare for at least a century has kept to the blended middle of the spectrum, Biddle argues that material and tribal culture explanations for nonstate warfare methods do not adequately explain observed patterns of warmaking. Investigating a range of historical examples from Lebanon and Iraq to Somalia, Croatia, and the Vietcong, Biddle demonstrates that viewing state and nonstate warfighting as mutually exclusive can lead to errors in policy and scholarship.

©2021 Princeton University Press (P)2021 Tantor

Very Interesting

The reader spoke kinda slowly, I ended up increasing the speed which I haven’t done before this book and once I did it suddenly sounded like any other ordinary audible book like I couldn’t even tell like I can when increasing the speed, no loss in audio quality from speed increase. Very good.

Great content. Pedantic, thorough, but a bit repetitive.

The performer did read the wrong word a couple of times (excluding the presumably intentionally replacement of “above” with audiobook-suited alternatives).

Content was great; I learned a lot! It was a fun read, but more tasking and time-consuming than it had to be due to the formality and style.

An astonishingly brilliant analysis of conflict

In this masterpiece, Professor Biddle has produced a work I believe is destined to be a classic in military and security literature. While not for the layman, requiring some familiarity with warfare and policy, the book is well-written and readable, and its density of information is due to the complexity of war and conflict, not any lack of skill of the writer. In introducing the bimodal concepts of "Napoleonic and Fabian" as polar ends of a sliding spectrum for classifying the manner of conducting warfare, Professor Biddle has cut through decades or more of popular equivocation of terms such as guerrilla or unconventional warfare. He explains lucidly that conflicts we often view as conventional or unconventional almost always are in fact a mixed hybrid of the two extremes of warfare. I cannot recommend this book more highly to the serious student, practitioner, or observer of conflict and statecraft.