Quote:
Originally posted by sgtclub
I am going off what I've read from military experts. Apparently there is a specific military meaning to the term insurgency. It is based on things like the number of members, goals, ability to supplant the current government with a substitute government, and other factors. I'm not sure what the precise number is, but surely we can agree that 10 members of a group in Iraq does not an insurgency make. The percentage of the population you cited earlier seems to be more along the lines of that magnitude.
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I think you'll find different approaches in the military to defining insurgency, and that it is often a catch-all with a variety of sub categories, including terrorism (which can be done by that cell of 10) and revolution (requiring a very broad basis of support). I've also seen military reports focusing on less than the entire country in deterimining whether their defined term (civil war, insurgency, revolution, uprising, etc.) has been met, so someone might argue that ifyou have 20% of the population of Kosovo tacitly allied with a guerilla force you've got a civil war even if that translates to 2% of the population of the Serbian/Yugoslav state ostensibly ruling Kosovo.
I'd bet all these numbers are very tough to pin down, and any number is inaccurate. But if there is a force under arms that is able to replenish itself from the population, you have a very different problem than if there is an isolated and discrete element within the population that has taken up arms. It's the difference between Ho Chi Minh and the Black Panthers. Given the fact that the insurgents have held entire cities against conventional forces, and that there are individual leaders who seem to have significant followings in established institutions like the Mosques, I'd say you have a force under arms replenishing itself.
