Regular Warfare is Increasingly Irregular
From our good friends at Kings of War – Regular Warfare is Increasingly Irregular by Dr. David Betz (Note to self – you have not been visiting Kings of War of late as much as you should).
Fascinating article in the Straits Times from a couple of days ago ‘North Korea Rethinks War-fighting Strategy‘. The upshot of it is that North Korea is increasingly reliant on irregular measures. Personally, I see this as yet another reinforcement of Frank Hoffman’s hybrid wars concept (the link goes to the KCL events page–scroll two thirds of the way down and you will find a podcast of Frank’s lecture here from 21 January)…
The North Koreans are learning lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. Chief among those would seem to be: when fighting Western armies you can tie them in knots with irregular techniques whereas confronting them in a conventional order of battle is a good way to get slaughtered. What lessons are we learning? According to some it’s that we should stop messing around with this irregular warfare stuff because, hey, North Korea might want to do some high-intensity manoeuvre warfighting with all those heavy divisions it’s got!
More at Kings of War.