I am uniquely qualified to answer this question because for 6 years, (well, 4 years after 2 years of training) between college and grad school, I served on an ODA in the US Army's 10th Special Forces Group. In the jargon of the profession, I was a "badged operator," and thus an expert in "unconventional warfare."

First, I need to broadly define two terms as they are typically used in modern military doctrine.

Irregular warfare is an asymmetric struggle by a group or collection of groups who are not recognized as a legitimate entity by the governing power they have designated as their enemy. Such groups fight foremost to have their legitimacy acknowledged as the initial step toward reaching their larger sociopolitical goals.

Groups that engage in irregular warfare do so because they are hopelessly outmatched in resources, manpower, and matériel, and are generally not trained to effectively maneuver on the enemy in combat, putting them at a huge disadvantage when fighting professional infantry. Because of these disadvantages, these groups utilize tactics designed to mitigate the advantages of conventional enemies.

Some of these tactics include ambushes, sabotage (often achieved by recruiting or planting friendly conventional forces), targeted assassinations, kidnappings, IED's, terror bombings and attacks, and attacks on communications infrastructure by hacking or physical destruction.

Unconventional warfare, the main job of US Army Special Forces operational detachments, is the support or instigation of irregular warfare in foreign states. This is done by training, material support, military guidance, and sometimes directly leading irregular forces.

And that brings us to the history of the conflict in Columbia, which I will examine primarily through the strategy and tactics pf.the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

FARC is a Leninist guerrilla group that emerged in the early 1960s - though the name FARC came later- in a rural communist community started by Manuel Marulanda, on the pretext that the central government was criminally ignoring and exploiting the rural population.

FARC's leadership encouraged members to create their own communities in rural areas, populated by those friendly to the cause (i.e., "fellow travelers," in Marxist-Leninist parlance), as Marulanda had done. In 1964, with around 50 fighters. Marulanda's community declared independence and a company from the Colombian Army was ordered to engage in direct action to assert the authority of Colombia's government.

In the ensuing engagement, several guerrillas were injured and killed, prompting the remaining fighters to flee into surrounding communities. These escaped fighters used this "unprovoked" attack to exacerbate grievances among much of the rural population, and soon they had recruited several hundred fighters to the cause.

These fighters created a "guerrilla organization" to both defend and provide health and wellness services to friendly communities. After a couple of years and additional attacks by government forces, the guerrilla group had recruited several hundred fighters, and the decision was made to open training camps and engage in offensive operations

Still, lacking training and resources, from their first retaliatory attempts to destabilize the Colombian government, FARC engaged in irregular tactics. Instead of assaulting enemy forces, they perpetrated attacks on civilian individual Kidnapped political opposition, robbed government-affiliated institutions, disrupted mining and logging operations.

These attacks grew bolder as the group gained thousands of embers and experienced a financial windfall by trafficking cocaine.

So, there you have it; irregular force, irregular tactics, irregular conflict