Latest posts
Case Study: Colombia
The Colombian conflict has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the longest-running civil wars in the modern world. Its conventional starting date is 1964, when government forces moved against a small communist self-defense enclave at Marquetalia in the Tolima mountains and the survivors regrouped under Manuel Marulanda, adopting the name Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de…
The Forest Brothers: The Baltic War After the War
The Forest Brothers waged the longest armed resistance to Soviet power in the postwar USSR. How the Baltic guerrilla war formed, why Soviet counterinsurgency broke it, and why Baltic total defense still runs through it.
Case Study: Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka’s civil war is the rare modern case where a separatist insurgency was brought to a definitive military end. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, known internationally as the Tamil Tigers, ran one of the most capable insurgent organizations of the late twentieth century. They fielded a conventional army, a navy, an air wing,…
Beyond Cuba
Contributor MOE GYO Moe Gyo is a writer and consultant working with ethnic organizations in Myanmar. Writing from the Thai–Myanmar borderlands, he draws on years of direct engagement with communities shaped by conflict and disrupted health systems. His work captures firsthand how resilience and informal support networks develop under prolonged irregular warfare. His writing has…
Case Study: The Revolutionary War
In July 1776 the Continental Congress declared the independence of thirteen British colonies. The anniversary invites commemoration, but for students of irregular warfare the Revolutionary War insurgency invites something more useful: analysis. The ARIS case study The Patriot Insurgency (1763 to 1789), written by Robert R. Leonhard and a Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory team…
Revolutionary Warfare in Three Visions
Contributor MOE GYO Moe Gyo is a writer and consultant working with ethnic organizations in Myanmar. Writing from the Thai–Myanmar borderlands, he draws on years of direct engagement with communities shaped by conflict and informal governance under prolonged irregular warfare. His writing has appeared in the Small Wars Journal and the Journal of Special Operations…
Africa’s Expanding Gray Zone
// Updated October 2026 Through 2026 JNIM intensified its campaign in Mali, including a fuel blockade that squeezed Bamako and a wave of attacks in April 2026, per Chatham House and the Institute for the Study of War, escalating the threat described below. In January 2026, fighters affiliated with the Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP)…
Karen National Union (KNU) Case Study
This case study applies the War Marketplace Framework (WMF) across three analytical levels — competition, structure, and strategy — to one of the world’s longest-running insurgencies: the conflict between the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Myanmar state. Rather than treating the Karen war as an ethnic rebellion, a counterinsurgency campaign, or a peripheral civil…