This afternoon, a reader of mine asked me if I had read Edward Luttwak. I had. I particularly liked his, “Coup D'Etat A Practical Handbook.”
Without revisiting it, I can pull one lesson from the book that is
relevant to global guerrillas. He points out in the book that colonial
administrations and the states they spawned were extremely mechanistic.
They were built from the top down. This made them vulnerable to coups,
since the state's apparatus was not decentralized or complex enough to
reject seizure by determined cabal. I surmise this extreme
centralization would also make them extremely vulnerable to a
decentralized insurgency. [John Robb's Weblog]