S2 Book Club January: Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
4 months agoThe votes are in and by an overwhelming margin Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla will be our next book! This one can easily be found on the used market, and ebook versions can also be found easily. The hardcover and reprint versions are all the same, as far as I can tell.
For Audible subscribers it's also available for free listening.
But whichever format you chose, take along a notebook because this one is going to generate a lot of notes 👍
I picked up a pdf copy. Looks like an interesting read.
The problem the talking heads that have come out of the war on terror era is that their strategy didn't win the war on terror.
So I'm not sure what there is to learn of value, other then looking at what doesn't work.
When I read Roger Trinquier and David Galula I realized that they developed a theory based not about the French experience in Algeria but what they wanted it to be, and you can't learn from imagined history only actual history.
Although I did learn that what didn't work for the French never works because it doesn't work.
I'm 68 pages into the book. I hope it gets better. His theory of the city as an organism, and the coastal mega city, slum, hooked to the internet as the new conflict zone doesn't really ring true to me.
He does a case study on the terror attack in Mumbai as an emergent property of coastal, mega cities with a slum, and the internet. But in all reality the Mumbai attack is an emergent quality of organizations that use terrorism to achieve strategic objectives. In this case I think the group uses terrorism as a form of political theatre.