The Wild Edge

Photo by  Sohaib Ghyasi  on  Unsplash An excerpt from " Mountains, Deserts and Irregular Warfare: How the Soviet Union Lost their War in Afghanistan"  Unconventional Warfare: Mountains and Deserts Hostile, difficult terrain—like the high mountains and windswept deserts of Afghanistan—does not allow for the mechanized support, large numbers and sweeping, coordinated attacks of modern conventional warfare. An army trying to fight a conventional war in such areas will soon find themselves at a disadvantage, the tactics that they have been trained in largely ineffective and the enormous machinery they are accustomed to and trained for all but useless. If the local population—who know the terrain best—are as hostile as the land itself to the invading force, these problems are compounded.  These types of terrain, particularly the mountains, are well-suited for insurgency, favoring small, light units over the large armored convoys of conventional warfare.  An ar...

Photo by  Chirag Saini  on  Unsplash An excerpt from " 'My Boys are Dying': The Impacts of High-Altitude Combat on Unprepared Soldiers in the Opening Weeks of the Kargil War" Tactics               Mountain warfare, especially in peaks as jagged and harsh as the high Himalaya, requires highly unconventional tactics carried out by small units trained for both the terrain and the tactics required. Troops must be acclimated and well-armed, with supplies staged all up the ridgelines that will be used as assault paths; detailed and accurate maps of both enemy positions and terrain are vital. In the early days of the 1999 Kargil War the Indian soldiers sent up the mountains had none of these things.               In the narrow valleys and knife-edged ridges of a high-altitude battlefield, modern mechanized warfare is less than useless—it is imposs...

  Photo by  Patrick Robert Doyle  on  Unsplash Reading academic journal articles and books is a hobby that most of the population considers questionable, if not actively insane, but I readily admit that I really do enjoy it. I mean, I'm the kind of nerdy that wrote and published a research paper around a full-time job; for a few months most of my free time was spent doing nothing but reading sources. But there is a line separating enjoyable academic writing from aggravating, a necessary amount of jargon from multisyllabic self-aggrandizement, and many writers seem to rush across it with abandon. Case in point: I'm currently reading a book on irregular warfare by nonstate actors. The premise is fascinating, the thesis sound, and the case studies both interesting and supportive of the author's premise. Yet in two months I've barely picked it up, and I'm still only in chapter one. Why? Because the author has gone out of their way to make the text as dense, difficult, a...