Overwhelmed with images of terrorism, many often forget that guerrillas are fighters first. They shoulder arms, execute battle plans, engage the enemy, and take prisoners. Their military goals and tactics vary as a function of their relative size and power. While some guerrilla groups such as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) fight and win set piece battles, most insurgents set very limited objectives for their military forces. While the EPLF could defeat Ethiopian forces in open warfare, inflict staggering losses, and, most conventionally, capture the Eritrean capital and set up a provisional government (Iyob 1995:108–135; Pateman 1990:88–93), most other guerrillas hope to harry their opponents and make the cost of continued warfare or occupation unbearable. To that end, most employ traditional hit-and-run guerrilla tactics to undermine their enemy’s military morale and undercut popular support for continued warfare.

The military tactics of guerrilla warfare, that is, operations aimed specifically at unambiguous military targets – troops, convoys, army bases, or any object whose destruction “offers a definite military advantage” (API 1977 Article 52(2); ICRC nd. a) – are not without controversy or moral hazard. This chapter and the following one consider four dimensions of traditional guerrilla warfare: armed attacks utilizing small arms and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), missile strikes, assassination, and prisoner exchange. In many respects, the moral dilemmas accompanying each of these tactics are not so different from those bedeviling state armies. Like any kinetic weapon, IEDs and missiles immediately raise the danger of disproportionate harm when noncombatants are caught in the fighting. Assassination or targeted killings, whether initiated by state or non-state armies, elicit charges of extrajudicial execution, while prisoners of war demand reasonable conditions of incarceration that guerrilla armies, no less than state armies, often struggle to meet.