Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea: The Sixteenth Century Origins of Modern Maritime Strategy

The concept of the command of the sea has its roots in medieval notions of the sovereignty of coastal waters, as claimed by several monarchs and polities of Europe. In the sixteenth century, a surge of intellectual creativity, especially in Elizabethan England, fused this notion with the Thucydidean term ‘thalassocracy’ – the rule of the sea. In the light of the explorations of the oceans, this led to a new conceptualisation of naval warfare, developed in theory and then put into practice. This falsifies the mistaken but widespread assumption that there was no significant writing on naval strategy before the nineteenth century.     

The Cultural Revolution in Counter-Insurgency

Michael C. Fowler, Amateur Soldiers, Global Wars: Insurgency and Modern Conflict.Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. Pp.183. $49.95/£28.99, HB. ISBN 0-275-98136-3.

Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View on Counterinsurgency, first published in France as La Guerre Moderne (1961), trans. by Daniel Lee, foreword by Bernard Fall, introduction by Eliot Cohen. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Pp.95. $74.95/£41.95, HB. ISBN 0-275-99267-5. US$29.95/£16.95, PB. ISBN 0-275-99268-3.

David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice first published 1964, foreword by John A. Nagl. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Pp.107. $74.95/£41.95, HB. ISBN 0-275-99269-1. $0.00/£0.00, PB ISBN 0-275-99303-5.

Richard H. Shultz, Jr. and Andrea J. Dew, Insurgents, Terrorists and Militias – The Warriors of Contemporary Combat. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Pp.316. $29.50/£19, HB. ISBN 0-231-12982-3.

Robert M. Cassidy, Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Pp.211. US$49.95/£28.99, HB. ISBN 0-275-98990-9.

US Army and US Marine Corps, Counterinsurgency FM 3-24, MCWP 3-33.5 of 15 December 2006. Pp.282 <http://usacac.army.mil/CAC/Repository/Materials/COIN-FM3-24.pdf>.     

Lessons learnt? Cultural transfer and revolutionary wars, 1775–1831

Did participants in small wars in the period 1775–1831 learn from previous or contemporary examples? While this is difficult to prove for participants who left no written records, there is considerable evidence in existing publications by practitioners that they did indeed draw out lessons from recent insurgencies, either from their own experience or from events elsewhere which they studied from afar, especially the Spanish Guerrilla, which had already become legendary. Most authors showed an interest in how to stage insurgencies rather than in how to quell them. Even then, transfer did not come in a package of tactics-cum-values, but in each case in different configurations.     

Introduction: Exploring the jungle of terminology

When twentieth-century authors wrote about ‘partisan warfare’, they usually meant an insurgency or asymmetric military operations conducted against a superior force by small bands of ideologically driven irregular fighters. By contrast, originally (i.e. before the French Revolution) ‘partisan’ in French, English, and German referred only to the leader of a detachment of special forces (party, partie, Parthey, détachement) which the major European powers used to conduct special operations alongside their regular forces. Such special operations were the classic definition of ‘small war’ (petite guerre) in the late seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries. The Spanish word ‘la guerrilla’, meaning nothing other than ‘small war’, only acquired an association with rebellion with the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleon. Even after this, however, armies throughout the world have continued to employ special forces. In the late nineteenth century, their operations have still been referred to as prosecuting ‘la guerrilla’ or ‘small war’, which existed side by side with, and was often mixed with, ‘people's war’ or popular uprisings against hated regimes.