War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History [Hardcover]

Robert B. Asprey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1994

An updated edition of the classic study of guerrilla warfare includes detailed analyses of everything from Alexander the Great's battles with Asiatic Scythians, through the events of the Vietnam War, to the current status of guerrilla warfare.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Originally published in two volumes in 1975, this updated, abridged version of Asprey's monumental survey of guerrilla warfare begins with the struggle between Persian king Darius and Scythian irregulars and concludes with the mujahedin resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He discusses how great commanders such as Hannibal and Napoleon dealt with irregulars and how counterinsurgency experts such as Sir Gerald Templar during the Malayan Emergency in the early 1950s found ways to defeat the guerrilla. Roughly a fifth of the text treats the United States's involvement in Vietnam and our failure to adapt organizationally or tactically to the guerrilla challenge of the Viet Cong. Asprey's angry remarks about our "criminal military-political strategy" in Southeast Asia is even more scathing than in the original edition. This is the definitive history of guerrilla warfare over the past two millenia, illustrating its evolution into "an ideal instrument for the realization of social-political-economic aspirations of underprivileged peoples."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

When this title debuted as a two-volume set in 1975, it was praised for its scholarship, with LJ's reviewer contending that "no other single work can match the breadth and grasp of Asprey's history of war." This edition has been updated and expanded to include guerrilla activity since the original publication. This "masterly display of erudition and commentary" (LJ 5/15/75) remains a benchmark title.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1279 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co; Rev Upd Su edition (May 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688128157
• ISBN-13: 978-0688128159
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 2.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,058,852 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Shadows Wars: Why Americans Can't Learn from the Past, August 31, 2002

By 

David Bradford (Merritt Island, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: War In The Shadows: The Guerrilla In History (Paperback)

Update: Robert Asprey died January 26, 2009. He left a major portion of his estate to New College of Florida. I knew him, wrote for and with him, and called him my mentor for over 35 years.

When War in the Shadows (WITS) was first published in 1975, it infuriated members of the US military. Asprey's denunciation of high-ranking officers' conduct of the war in Vietnam came under intense criticism. Asprey claimed the US military lost that war due to its total ignorance of unconventional guerrilla warfare. Though blackballed by military scholars for almost a decade, he refused to retract his accusations. Instead, he continued to cite 2000 years of guerrilla/terrorist warfare tactics, operations, and strategy as proof the US military violated most, if not all, principles of unconventional warfare. Nineteen years later, he revised WITS, and along with that revision came a newfound respect for his insights. WITS is still the most definitive study of guerrilla/terrorist warfare available and it continues to remind the military of the requirement to fully understand this type of warfare's capabilities and limitations.
Overall, Asprey's work is very edifying. His 30 year research effort brillantly imparts lessons needed today. His reminders to the military about going off to an unconventional theater of war "half-cocked" contain some of the most valuable military thinking of our time. WITS is more than a historical appraisal. It is a usable text of events that, while historically embedded, continue to speak to the contemporary experience of unconventional warfare.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic & Convincing, December 20, 2007

By 

Kyle Stegerwald (SLC, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: War In The Shadows: The Guerrilla in History (Paperback)

This is a very broad, very shallow survey of the entire history of guerilla warfare from the days of Alexander the Great and his successors in the Roman Empire all the way to the (contemporary, at least in 1976 when the book was first published) War in Vietnam, with the explicit purpose of explaining the Vietnam war by placing it in its proper historical context (and thereby revealing the mistakes made). The narrative (and it is a narrative, with themes that recur with sickening frequency) spends the most time detailing the abject failure of the United States in Vietnam, and devotes smaller chunks of the book to the rest of guerilla history. This focus and the aforementioned shallowness of the historical analysis in some parts are in no way out of place or even remotely harmful to the author's thesis. He is not attempting to exhaustively chronicle the "wars in the shadows" but to build up a tremendous tidal wave of evidence to support the claims he makes during the chapters on Vietnam.

Those chapters on Vietnam are worth reading the entire unabridged 2-volume set from start to finish. Throughout the narrative the author meticulously extracts common themes from the guerilla wars of the past and builds up a vocabulary of incompetence, ignorance, supidity and brutality that is then unleashed on the planners and generals of Vietnam with all of the mad rancor of an attack dog. The author lambasts short-sighted policymakers, incompetent or fatally uncreative generals, and a hideously flawed understanding of the nature of "Communist" power, and after two thousand plus pages of his compelling argument it is very difficult to disagree with virtually anything he says. The triumph is total and complete. The conclusion, in the end, seems to be that we shouldn't get outselves involved in these kinds of wars, and if we do we should engage in them not as military conflicts but social upheavals. The author's suggested changes to the State Department (presented as a coda) seem to suggest this.

The bottom line is that this is a marvelously researched and skillfully argued thesis which sadly remains as relevant and incisive as it was thirty years ago.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars War In The Shadows: Fascinating!, September 30, 2003

By 

Ralph C. (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: War In The Shadows: The Guerrilla in History (Paperback)

A must for any Military and History buff. This book has bought me endless hours of reading enjoyment. As a Latino, of most interest to me were the chapters on the Mexican revolution, Spanish-American war and Che Guevara. Asprey writes in great detail and in chronological order, he also provides the reader with the political and social climate of the time and events that lead to any engagements against opposing forces. Keeping any opinions to himself, he just gives the fact as if we all are spectators viewing a movie. Asprey describes the guerrilla units, their political indoctrination, strength and weakness and field attire and equipment. The maps help illustrated the subject area and regions, any troop movements and battles fought that help paint the complete picture. He presents any leading figure with importance and when able too delves into their personal histories and background. I'd fancied myself a authority on History and warfare till I read Asprey "War In The Shadows" and found out just how much I wasn't aware of. So put this on your list of reading materials and tell your friends.