War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare Review

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(More customer reviews)I read the first edition of this book which was published in 1965 - so I don't know whether this edition is a revised one. Remember that, at the time the original one was published, the Vietnam War was still on - and Che Guevara was still alive & very much active. So the first edition does not make any reference to either the greatest triumph of guerrilla warfare, defeat of the vastly superior US forces to the peasant army of the Vietcong and North Vietnam; nor its dismal failure in almost all other parts of the world, symbolically represented in Che's death in Bolivia. This was the time when everyone thought that guerrilla warfare was the wave of the future; and there were a number of books on its theory and practice. There was Che's own "Guerrilla Warfare", Regis Debray's "Revolution of the Revolution", Carlos Marighella's manual on urban guerrilla warfare, etc (I remember seeing at least a couple more books which came out during this period). There were also books on counter-insurgency, mostly by ex-US Special Forces experts, most of which confidently predicted that US victory over the guerrillas in Vietnam was just a matter of few months :->
However, what sets Taber's book apart from these other books is the non-partisan approach he took in writing on the subject. He is virtually the only writer in this area who discusses Grivas, one of the rare non-leftist guerrilla fighters, in any length. Many people seem to forget that guerrilla warfare has no essential connection to leftist political movements. It is just a method of warfare available to political movements of all hues (as is evident from a perusal of the manual of insurgency for the Nicaraguan Contras prepared by the CIA). Taber discusses the method rather than the politics, and I think we should give him full marks for a very clear exposition of the theory of unconventional warfare, the necessary conditions for its success, and why it has failed so often. He uses case-studies drawn from as wide a field as Ireland, Vietnam, Greece and Indonesia. He also discusses why counter-insurgency is such an expensive proposition and can never completely succeed by itself - something that is very topical in today's age. All in all, an excellent introduction to a fascinating topic.

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'The guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog's disadvantages: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with." With these words, Robert Taber began a revolution in conventional military thought that has dramatically impacted the way armed conflicts have been fought since the book's initial publication in 1965. Whether ideological, nationalistic, or religious, all guerrilla insurgencies use similar tactics to advance their cause. War of the Flea's timeless analysis of the guerrilla fighter's means and methods provides a fundamental resource for any reader seeking to understand this distinct form of warfare and the challenge it continues to present to today's armed forces in the Philippines, Colombia, and elsewhere.

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