What Can We Learn About the Future of Proxy Warfare from the 2008 Mumbai Attacks?
John Spencer and Liam Collins | June 3, 2020
Last summer, we traveled to India with a team of West Point faculty and cadets to study the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. Those attacks revealed lessons about the challenges of urban warfare. They also highlighted—as we learned during our two weeks there conducting dozens of interviews, site visits and detailed research—a number of lessons about the use of proxies in the twenty-first century. Combined with lessons we also learned during a similar cadet and faculty research trip to Ukraine the year before, our research yielded important conclusions that should inform the way the US Army conceptualizes the role of proxies in modern war.
When ten Pakistan-based terrorists infiltrated Mumbai and laid siege to targets across the city in November 2008, they brought the city of eighteen million to a standstill for nearly four days. The world watched, shocked by the duration and impact of the attack from so few terrorists with limited training.
https://mwi.usma.edu/can-learn-future-proxy-warfare-2008-mumbai-attacks/
