Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

402 • LOYALIST VOLUNTEER FORCEgroups below general war and above routine peaceful competition.It frequently involves protracted struggles of competing principlesand ideologies. Low-intensity conflict ranges from subversion tothe use of the armed forces. It is waged by a combination of means,employing political, economic, informational, and military instruments.Low-intensity conflicts are often localized, generally in theThird World, but contain regional and global security implications.”In this context, terrorism has often been an accompanying feature ofthese conflicts since it has allowed both state and nonstate actors ameans of striking at nations with powerful conventional militaries,with plausible denial for the responsible group.A study of 43 internal conflicts involving Western powers in theperiod 1945–1983 by Max G. Manwaring (“Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency: Toward a New Analytical Approach,” Small Wars andInsurgencies 3, Winter 1992: 272–310) revealed that much of thesuccess or failure of counterinsurgency actions rested not merely onmaterial resources of the contending sides but also on the qualitiesof discipline of the defending forces, legitimacy of the targeted government,unity of effort by the various civilian, police, military, andgovernmental components of the targeted nation, and also the qualityof intelligence gathered. The center of gravity of the low-intensityconflict is not merely physical tactical advantages, such as control ofkey points on the terrain, but rather the more intangible and fragilequality of regime legitimacy. Whereas the outcome of general conventionalwarfare depends largely on the military and economic componentsof national power, in low-intensity conflict the political andinformational components are more crucial. Terrorist actions haveoften sought to undermine the legitimacy of targeted governments byprovoking security forces to commit acts of indiscriminate retaliationagainst civilians in the territories in which insurgents operate. Seealso ASYMMETRIC WARFARE; INSURGENCY.LOYALIST VOLUNTEER FORCE (LVF). The LVF emerged in1996 from a few dozen disaffected members of the Ulster VolunteerForce (UVF) who were opposed to the cease-fire to which the UVFand other Ulster Protestant paramilitaries agreed in 1994 and whowere armed with only some rifles, machine guns, and handguns, plusa small quantity of Powergel (a commercial plastic explosive). TheLVF is believed to have been responsible for the murder of Michael