Between ‘Qoretta’ and trenches: the 2020–2022 Tigray war, the Tigrayan Defense Forces, and 21st century mobile warfare

This paper presents a case study of the tactical and operational practices of the Tigrayan Defense Forces (TDF), in their conflict with the Ethiopian National Defense Forces and its allies throughout 2020–2022. The Tigray war has mostly been overlooked as an example of contemporary warfare, despite suggestions that this was the deadliest war of 2021–2022, pitting huge forces with great diversity in equipment and organization against each other. This paper combines a theoretical overview of paradigmatic approaches to warfare – conventional maneuver warfare, conventional mobile warfare, and classical guerilla warfare – with novel primary data on the warfare practices of the TDF. I propose that TDF showcase a highly contextualized type of warfare, akin to Mao’s ideas about conventional mobile warfare. Throughout major parts of the war, TDF fielded a highly organized force, capable of performing large-scale operations for territorial control, despite primarily drawing on unexperienced recruits and suffering from significant logistical constraints. TDF furthermore mixed operational and tactical concepts from all three approaches to warfare, with a penchant for mobile warfare. Compared to the much-researched approaches of maneuver warfare and guerilla warfare, TDF’s take on mobile warfare should be recognized as an important and overlooked facet of contemporary warfare.