Howard, you are very well-spoken and, I think, accurate about guerrillas and their place in war. I've always thought of war as fought along a continuum of violence, with one end of the spectrum taken up by large-scale warfare and the other, now, by terrorism. It seems to me that countries and peoples respond to their antagonists in different ways depending on their strength. When peoples and countries possess state-of-the-art militaries, they reach the battlefields with battalions, regiments, armies, corps, and sometimes army groups to wage warfare. But when a people is weaker, they resist in different ways. When they have no army but are compelled to resist, they take up arms but operate in the guerrilla mode, the only way they can resist. In such a mode, being vastly outnumbered, they must choose their point of attack or be annihilated entirely. So guerrillas seldom fight unless they outnumber their foe. So they pick their fights, choose the enemy when he is outnumbered on a specific piece of ground, and attack him where he is most vulnerable. And they hit and run, before the enemy can assemble its more powerful forces.

Terrorism, on the other hand, is a more modern form of fighting, although John Brown used it in the nineteenth century. In this sort of fighting, where the terrorist forces are even too weak to fight guerrilla warfare, the idea is to terrorize the enemy populace, not its armies. Because the terrorists are small in number, their enemy's military establishment has no fear of it, or very little. The terrorists cannot challege the enemy armies, so the terrorists attack the enemy's nerves, especially that of the common people, who have little idea what warfare ia all about and the sacrifices necessary to wage war and resist an enemy. So the terrorists intimidate normal people, especially if they are weak of will. Terrorism, in my view, is the most despicable form of war imaginable and is hellish, damnable, and cowardly and attacks innocent people. That's how I view warfare, guerrilla warfare, and terrorism, for what it's worth.

Don G.