The one published by Marco Mostarda on "Inter Populum" with the title "Before Small Wars: Early Thoughts On The Strategy Of Colonial Warfare And Their Relevance" is probably the most focused recent study on the theoretical-strategic evolution of "small wars" in the colonial era. In addition to this, however, Mostarda's essay offers food for thought that is particularly useful in a phase in which Western armies, after twenty years of counter-guerrilla operations, must reevaluate their doctrine and capacity in conducting a conventional war.
The Victorian theorists of "small wars" - above all Callwell e From Costa Porter - have made a reluctance to embrace the inherent asymmetrical nature of colonial wars their trademark. A tendency described as the idea that the "irregular warfare should be kept as 'regular' as possible". This did not mean rejecting the objective reality of the colonial conflict, but overcoming it, managing to bring the war back to the "regular" field, where technological superiority would prevail, inflicting a decisive blow to the enemy.
The need to bring "small wars" back to the art of conventional warfare, which in milieu British military found admirers mainly in the hard core of the nascent continentalist school of the "Roberts Ring", anticipated the contemporary theories of the Israeli-Dutch military historian Martin Levi van Creveld on low intensity warfare and the British professor Mary H. Kaldor on the "New Wars" (the introduction by Andrea Baccaro to the Italian edition of Callwell's work is illuminating in this regard). Although he strongly criticizes the contemporary "classic" Clausewitzian interpretations - within which van Creveld also brings back the Jominian line of thought - of asymmetric wars, defining them as something "different" compared to the conflicts of the past, therefore impossible to bring back within the analytical schemes of the Prussian general, he recognized the importance of approaching individual conflicts by analyzing their details, without accepting "universal systems" of conduct (as in the case of COIN)
The approach of violence and bottom-up "regularization" to colonial-era counterinsurgency was determined by the "external nature" of imperial wars, while in modern interpretations of counterinsurgency, a selective use of violence is privileged, connected to the acceptance of the asymmetry of conflict. This fundamental difference has been highlighted by Thomas R. Mockaitis, tracing the theoretical boundaries between the British "small wars" and French COIN schools.
The idea expressed by the lieutenant of the Royal Engineers and Anglo-Zulu War veteran Reginald da Costa Porter's attempt to recover from the principles of regular warfare those that could be applied to irregular warfare anticipates the recovery that is being made today - conversely - of the tactics of asymmetric conflicts to combat conventional ones, which, at times, mirror their characteristics (empty battlefield, dispersion, deep advances of columns, extension and heaviness of logistic lines, difficulty in building rational operational strategies and tendencies); in this criticizing the neo-Jominian "methodism" that animated certain military tests in Ukraine.
