September
24
Ep. 0078: History of Irregular Warfare with Bill Buppert (Part 2)
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Join CJ & Bill as they discuss:
- The 1807-1814 Peninsular War in Spain during the Napoleonic era (with a few remarks about the potential effectiveness of fighters with no prior military background, and some examples of this from the American Revolutionary War)
- Confederate partisans, ‘rangers’ and some of their precursors in the Kansas & Missouri violence of the 1850s
- The Anglo-Boer Wars in South Africa in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century
- The little-known but astonishing campaign of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa during World War I
Internal Links
External Links
- ZeroGov, Bill’s website
- “The Other Fight: Understanding Conventional Warfare” by Bill Buppert
- “Come Out You Black & Tans” as performed by Paddy Reilly (the intro music for this episode)
(Featured image for this episode is of the guns Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck scavenged from the ship Konigsberg & then used on land in his African campaign; Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 105-DOA3100 / Walther Dobbertin / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons)
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You’re most welcome, Nathan, I’m glad you’re enjoying it. It’s great to talk to a real expert in all this stuff who’s nonetheless anti-state. Bill’s a rare gem in that regard.
To paraphrase Morpheus, “Take the red pill, and we’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” (<=Cliched at this point I know, but couldn't resist. 😉
That’s very interesting. Like most Americans, I had no idea about that episode in Scandinavian history, but the overall pattern seems to have occurred in many times and places — ie, that unconventional warfare proves extremely effective, and yet is often abandoned or forgotten or not employed on enough of a scale to win an entire war. It seems like many cultures, not just antebellum Southern aristocratic culture in this episode, have rather rigid socially constructed notions of what war is “supposed” to be, and many leaders would rather lose a war fighting the “right” way than win it fighting the “wrong” way. Those who are willing to give unconventional war the respect it deserves are usually the eccentrics and mavericks who are willing to go against their own culture’s taboos about how war is and is not supposed to be conducted.