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TACTICAL THOUGHT
2014 September 29 th
He defines “Insurgency” as; “to cover the use of armed force by a selection of the
people against the government for the purposes mentioned above”, here referring to the
explanation of subversion. 339
The area of Peacekeeping, understood as “how to prevent by non-warlike methods, one
group of people from fighting another group of people” is also covered by Kitson, thus
already in 1971, covering the whole spectrum of emergencies that might have to be
handled by, or supported by military forces. 340 This perspective is uncommon to be
found in most analyses of Irregular Warfare during the Cold War. Still today, with the
expanding writing on the subject, Peacekeeping is seldom included. Kitson argues for
some main differences between Irregular and Regular Warfare. The first he claims are
the areas of subversion and Insurgency; both are forms of civil conflicts. The second is
the claim that the use of “persuasion is the main method of gaining support” (of the
people), sometimes backed up by uses of force and this in contrast to regular war where
the opposite is the rule, that is mainly force, sometimes backed up by persuasion. 341
With the terms subversion and insurgency, Kitson covers all influence and violence
activities directed by people (often needing support from the outside) up to the conduct
of Regular War with these two terms. He also includes civil war as a result of an
insurgency in some ways. 342 He refers to Roger Trinquier’s term “Modern Warfare” as
a lumping together of subversion and insurgency, as being an interlocking system of
actions, political, economic, psychological and military that aim at the overthrowing of
established authority in a country. 343 Regarding attitudes for this kind of operation by
the army and military organizations in the western countries, Kitson discusses this in his
last chapter of the book. 344 Attitude problems will in turn be the subject for fighting
morale and thus a question regarding fighting power for military units countering
subversion and insurgencies.
Result and conclusions
The descriptions are of both an explanatory and umbrella character. The potential of
explaining content covers aspects of strategy but focus on operational art and tactics.
Fighting power factors are covered such as physical factors but the focus is on
conceptual factors. Moral factors are implicitly dealt with. The descriptions cover
characteristics of subversion and insurgencies and also regarding the need for personal
characteristics, dealing with “Low Intensity Operations”. Attitude aspects are included
and participating actors are described both from the attacker and defender position. The
description leans primarily on a military focus of the phenomena, such as handling such
operations. The description does not demand an understanding of sub-terms as Kitson
explains them as they occur. The descriptions are clear and have good potentiality of
being easily understood.
339 Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, Subversion, Insurgency, and Peacekeeping (1971), p. 3.
340 Ibid. p. 4.
341 Ibid. pp. 4-5.
342 Ibid. p. 4.
343 Ibid. p. 5. Kitson refers to Roger Trinquir, Modern Warfare: A French View on Counterinsurgency
(Westport, CT: Preager, 1964, reprinted 2006), p. 6.
344 Ibid. pp. 198-201.
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