A long small war: Italian counterrevolutionary warfare in Libya, 1911 to 1932

The paper argues that the success of the Italian pacification campaign of Libya in 1932 can be traced to the implementation of a military-centric strategy used in counterrevolutionary warfare, a type of Small War made popular in the early twentieth century and an older form of counterinsurgency. Rather than focus on achieving an acceptable level of security common to modern counterinsurgency doctrine, COIN, the Italians used kinetic military operations to defeat and subdue rebel groups in the two Libyan colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. The roots of third rebellion, and the military strategy used to pacify the colonies, were developed during the guerrilla war by Ottoman and indigenous groups used to oppose the Italian invasion of Libya during the Italo-Libyan War, 1911–1912. The lessons of Italy's success should make the application of a military-centric rather than a security-centric strategy useful for current counterinsurgencies.