Guerrilla and Conventional Warfare (1978–90)

Abstract

International and regional intervention in the Angolan civil war added layers of complexity to the military strategy Luanda and its opponents employed. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola’s (UNITA’s) renewed conduct of a Maoist-inspired guerrilla war challenged Luanda and its patrons to devise a counterinsurgency strategy. Neither Moscow nor Havana responded successfully, in part because they also faced a South African military challenge that combined conventional military operations with support for UNITA’s guerrillas. The intensification of hostilities, and the extension of combat to Angola’s 18 provinces, made the next phase of the war much more destructive than the 14-year anticolonial struggle. The war to end Portuguese colonialism had been limited to remote and sparsely populated regions and casualties, by the early 1970s, numbered in the thousands. The postindependence war devastated a much larger portion of Angola’s infrastructure and inflicted many more military and civilian casualties, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths by the late 1980s.