Quote:
Originally Posted by Checkman
I wish I could provide a bibliography for the following information , but I can't. Anyhow years ago I came across a piece of information about the IRA. Now that is not an organization I support, but it would have to be considered a guerilla organization in it's methods regardless of what one thinks of their political objectives. One man's Terrorist is another man's Freedom fighter. Anyway the source stated that the British estimated the actual number of active (full-time) IRA operatives to number no more than thirty or forty. Thirty or forty! Think about that. The Irish "Troubles" (the most recent one) started in 1969/70 lasted for approximately thirty years (give or take a few years) and killed a bunch of people and the IRA had less than a 100 active operatives.
Oh sure there were a bunch of auxilaries who showed up for the occassional event and many more supporters who provided support (food, shelter, money, weapons etc.) but somewhere between 30 - 40 people actually doing the majority of bombings, shootings, ambushes, raids, kidnappings, and other assorted acts. I think this little figure supports your theory in full. I don't know how many troops England had in Northern Ireland at the peak and of course that isn't counting all the cops and intelligence operatives, but I bet it was a lot more then 30 or 40. That's guerilla warfare.
Of course I would imagine there was a pretty high turn-over among those 30/40 IRA "soldiers". High mortality rate, bad benefits and no pension.
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I actually have written about this particular conflict, plus I was in Belfast in 2007. I can tell you quite a bit on this:
(1.) The PIRA "hardcore" was definitely
not just 30-40 people. Today's splinter factions have more members than that. In 1972, the IRA's Belfast "Brigade"
alone had almost 1,000 members, and about half of them were gunmen and bombers (the rest were support/logistics). The "Executive", the IRA leadership, has always had about 12-15 people, including the seven members who sit on the "Army Council", which makes the decisions. Then, below them, you have the six "Brigade Commanders". You can pretty much see the pattern...the leadership alone has close to 30 people.
(2.) The British had about 30,000 troops in Northern Ireland at any given time. However, the Provisional IRA was not their only opponent - there were other Republican paramilitary groups (including the INLA, the Marxist breakaway IRA faction) and a much larger number of Loyalists (including the UDA and UVF). The IRA was the most dangerous opponent that the British Army faced, but it wasn't the only one. Between the PIRA, INLA, UVF, UDA, and all of the other paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, the British were probably outnumbered by at least 2 to 1, maybe even more.
(3.) The PIRA does not qualify as a "guerrilla" organization or an insurgency; its usual classification is "paramilitary", which is not quite the same thing. In the early days of the Troubles, the PIRA did use guerrilla tactics to fight the British Army - including hit-and-run attacks, IEDs, and mortar attacks on British military bases. However, after the late-1970s, the IRA decided that these tactics weren't bringing about the desired result, so they shifted to the "Long War" strategy, which mostly abandoned guerrilla tactics in Northern Ireland in favor of terrorist attacks in London., which were expected to bring about public demand for an end to the British Army's involvement in Northern Ireland. This is why the IRA became better known in the 80s and 90s for incidents like the Harrod's department store bombing and the attempt to kill Margaret Thatcher in 1984.
There were still IRA units that continued to use guerrilla tactics - the group's South Armagh "Brigade", which operated in rural areas, continued to operate as a quasi-insurgency until the ceasefire. But the IRA by-and-large abandoned any pretense of being an insurgency after it adopted its "Long War" strategy and decided that it was more interested in going after political targets in London rather than going after soldiers in Belfast.
(4.) It's fairly tough to assess how "fluid" IRA membership was, but one thing to keep in mind is that there's a pretty thin line between Sinn Fein members (the political activists who claimed they weren't involved in terrorism) and IRA members (who were involved in terrorism). What this meant was that every Sinn Fein member was also a potential IRA member - Gerry Adams himself was at one point on the IRA Army Council at the same time that he was President of Sinn Fein.
(5.) The IRA also operated from both sides of the Irish border - typically, the gunmen and bombers were based in Northern Ireland (where the fighting was being done initially), and the support staff and leadership were based in the Republic (which is where the arms dumps and safe houses were located). Many of the people in the Republic who supported the organization did so very informally (i.e. farmers who let their barns be used to stash guns and ammunition coming in from Libya).