Similarly, Christopher Clapham has argued that other insurgency movements are essentially "reform insurgencies" in which the theoretical intention is to seek radical reform of the state, as in the NRA's campaign in Uganda. There are also what Metz has characterized as "commercial insurgencies" and W G. Thom has called "economic insurgencies," in which mineral resources or drugs have been the real prize of a cynical quest for power, as in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Colombia. Indeed, although weapons have become widely available, the absence of Cold War sponsors has forced insurgents to purchase arms themselves, raising the economic cost of insurgency and reinforcing the significance of drugs or mineral commodities in sustaining an insurgent challenge. Thus, insurgency today amounts to little more than warlordism or organized crime. Commercial rewards have also seen private security firms supplying "corporate armies" to some insurgencies or counter-insurgencies; both the South African-based Executive Outcomes and the British-based Sandline have been involved in Sierra Leone.

Of course, more traditional causes have also contributed to contemporary insurgencies, not least ethnicity and separatism. Indeed, Metz argues that spiritual insurgencies are more likely to occur in states with a heterogeneous identity of ethnicity, race, tribe, or religion, such as in many states in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East where Islam confronts Western-style liberalism. Commercial insurgency, he argues, emerges in areas with mineral deposits, as in some African states, or with suitable soils for the cultivation of opiates, as in parts of Asia and Latin America.

The insurgent challenges have forced governments such as the FLN (National Liberation Front) in Algeria and the FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique), which were themselves created as a result of successful insurgency against colonial powers, to become counter-insurgent states. Clearly, not all insurgencies have succeeded, and much has still depended upon the skills of individual insurgent leaders. Moreover, Eric Young has suggested that, in the contemporary world, the key to insurgent success is no longer the ability to wage protracted warfare but rather the ability to rapidly establish a base and move on the capital city, the focus of power in so many states in the developing world.

Compared to earlier periods, when protracted rural insurgency was difficult to contain but urban insurgency was generally easily contained, the sheer growth of population has diminished the former advantages of urban security forces. Without the monopoly of firepower they once enjoyed, the security forces of developing states have become increasingly vulnerable to a combination of rural and urban action.

Implications of Technology

Amid these continuing insurgencies around the world, it is clear that insurgents not only have access to ever more sophisticated weapons but also to commercially available information technology. In Mexico, the otherwise obscure EZLN (Zapatista Army for National Liberation), or Zapatistas, successfully hacked into the Mexican government's website in the mid-1990s to use the Internet to spread their own message, claiming to represent the rights of indigenous Mayan natives in the southern state of Chiapas.

Similarly, during its occupation of the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, in December 1996, a standoff that continued until April 1997, the "Solidarity Website" of the MRTA (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) had over 88,000 hits and continued to generate considerable interest, with some 172,000 hits having been recorded by May 1998. MRTA thus used online technology to explain and justify its violence to an international audience. In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah relayed pictures of its ambushes of Israeli Defense Force (IDF) units on the Internet prior to the Israeli withdrawal from its "security zone" in May 2000. Again, rival websites have promoted the Russian and Chechen versions of events during the Second Chechen War since December 1999. Chechen sites have tended to be more dynamic and accessible to Western users and have included downloadable videos of attacks on the Russians, photographs of Chechens in action, and interviews with Chechen leaders.

Army and Tradition

While technology has changed, in other respects, much remains the same. Nor has much changed in terms of how professional soldiers view the prospect of insurgency. Armed forces perceive themselves as existing primarily to wage conventional warfare, whatever their actual experience. To use the example of the United States, between 1866 and 1890, US soldiers fought over 1,000 separate engagements with Native Americans, but there was a tendency to regard the army's only fixed mission of policing the moving frontier as ancillary to real warfare. Each campaign was a tiresome distraction from the study of"real war" in European terms. In fact, US soldiers largely fought Native Americans as if they were conventional opponents and despite, or rather because of, the frustrating experience of countering insurgency in the Philippines between 1900 and 1902, the army was evidently relieved to be able to turn to the more professionally rewarding fields of St. Mihiel and the Argonne during World War I. Similarly, the US Marine Corps, which had considerable experience in low-intensity conflict in the interwar period, resulting in the production of the Small Wars Manual of 1935, became so immersed in its amphibious role during and after World War II that the manual had been almost totally forgotten by 1960.

Indeed, the thrust of the new US counter-insurgency doctrine in the 1960s came from civilian sources, and the Kennedy administration's identification of communist-inspired insurgency as the predominant threat to US interests was not shared by an army that was, as Larry Cable puts it, "configured, equipped, and trained according to a doctrine suitable for conventional warfare, or for warfare on the nuclear battlefield of Europe." Institutional resistance to counter-insurgency was pronounced and one need only mention the celebrated remark of a general officer in Vietnam, "I'll be damned if I permit the United States Army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions, to be destroyed just to win this lousy war." Cable has since suggested that the US army's basic ground combat doctrine "has remained unchanged over the past 50 years."

Lest it be thought that only US soldiers have been singled out for criticism, such considerations apply equally to other nations as well. As long ago as 1896, one adherent of what has been characterized as the "British Imperial" school of military thought, T Miller Maguire, criticized what he regarded as the obsession of the rival "continentalist" school: "While looking at the stars, we may tumble in a ditch, and while lost in wonder at how to move effectively from Strasbourg, Mayence, and Metz toward Paris with many divisions of cavalry and armies consisting each of from three to eight corps, we may forget how to handle a few battalions in the passes of the Suleiman Range or in the deserts of Upper Egypt."