Wars of National Liberation - Strategies and Tactics

Strategies and Tactics

Wars of national liberation are usually fought using guerrilla warfare. The main purpose of these tactics is to increase the cost of the anti-guerrilla forces past the point where such forces are willing to bear. Wars of national liberation generally depend a large amounts of public support, with ordinary civilians providing crucial support. Finally, wars of national liberation are often embedded in a larger context of great power politics and are often proxy wars.

These strategies explain why they are quite successful against foreign regimes and quite unsuccessful against indigenous regimes. Foreign regimes usually have a threshold beyond which they would prefer to go home rather than to fight the war. By contrast an indigenous regime has no place to go to, and will fight much harder because of the lack of alternatives. Moreover, foreign regimes usually have relatively few active supporters, who can often be easily identified, making it possible for guerrilla armies to operate. By contrast, indigenous regimes often have much more popular support, and their supporters are not as easily recognized, making it much harder to conduct guerrilla operations.