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What is "paramilitary"

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paramilitary
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
paramilitary
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
force
▪ The region has been fiercely contested by guerrillas and the paramilitary forces for the past few years.
▪ He is accused of hiring Barbie to advise the country's paramilitary forces on torture techniques.
▪ Civilians and members of security and paramilitary forces are also reported to have been physically ill-treated after being captured or detained.
▪ In the southern district of Faridabad there were visible pockets of tension, in spite of a strong presence of police and paramilitary forces.
forces
▪ The region has been fiercely contested by guerrillas and the paramilitary forces for the past few years.
▪ He is accused of hiring Barbie to advise the country's paramilitary forces on torture techniques.
▪ Civilians and members of security and paramilitary forces are also reported to have been physically ill-treated after being captured or detained.
▪ In the southern district of Faridabad there were visible pockets of tension, in spite of a strong presence of police and paramilitary forces.
group
▪ It even had some influence on paramilitary groups like the Protestant Ulster Defence Association.
▪ According to sources, the report urges paramilitary groups to commit themselves to exclusively democratic means and to total disarmament.
▪ Things got progressively out of hand, and a paramilitary group took hold of the upper Maroni region.
▪ Prime Minister Major favors elections as a path to talks since paramilitary groups have refused to disarm.
▪ All paramilitary groups, including those on ceasefire, continue to raise millions of pounds.
▪ I always suspected that this guy belonged to some anti-Castro paramilitary group.
▪ The Right is better organised than the Left, and has already started forming volunteer paramilitary groups.
organisations
▪ They went to a hall where they would meet a cross-section of men from the various paramilitary organisations.
▪ The paramilitary organisations, on either side of the political divide, remain active and hard to penetrate.
▪ Gangsters and racketeers gained a hold on sections of the urban paramilitary organisations quite early.
▪ Prisoners' families often end up relying on paramilitary organisations for transport to jails.
▪ The Ulster Workers' Council joined as did the remaining paramilitary organisations.
▪ Only the two main loyalist urban paramilitary organisations were able occasionally to produce a bomb of that size.
▪ It turns neighbour against neighbour, breaking down trust in a way that the paramilitary organisations are finding easy to exploit.
police
▪ The protestors eventually surrendered to paramilitary police.
▪ Armed paramilitary police placed central Turin under a virtual state of siege for the hearing on Saturday morning.
▪ I had not previously read anything about a paramilitary police force.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ paramilitary gear
▪ paramilitary operations
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ In other countries, however, suspicions persist that the weapons and the paramilitary training were put to illegal use.
▪ More paramilitary than military, more maverick than paramilitary.
▪ Suspicions will now be increased that the regiment has been penetrated by a network of loyalist paramilitary supporters and sympathisers.
▪ The building trade alone, which is particularly vulnerable to paramilitary intimidation, loses millions of pounds a year.
▪ The Good Friday agreement was equivocal on decommissioning of paramilitary weapons.
▪ There had been no paramilitary involvement and no one had been injured, he said.
▪ They want to visit their gun shows, collect their armaments and enjoy their paramilitary games in peace.
▪ Usually it was a member of a political party; occasionally of a paramilitary organisation.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
paramilitary

1935, from para- (1) + military.

Wiktionary
paramilitary

a. relating to a paramilitary n. 1 A group of civilians trained and organized in a military fashion, but which do not represent the formal forces of a sovereign power. 2 (label en colloquial) A member of a paramilitary group.

WordNet
paramilitary

n. a group of civilians organized in a military fashion (especially to operate in place of or to assist regular army troops) [syn: paramilitary force, paramilitary unit, paramilitary organization, paramilitary organisation]

paramilitary

adj. of or relating to a group of civilians organized to function like (or in aid of) a military unit

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Paramilitary

A paramilitary is a semi-militarized force whose organizational structure, tactics, training, subculture, and (often) function are similar to those of a professional military, and which is not included as part of a state's formal armed forces.

Under the law of war, a state may incorporate a paramilitary organization or armed agency (such as a national police, a private volunteer militia) into its combatant armed forces. The other parties to a conflict have to be notified thereof.

The use of the term paramilitary can be debated, but the general consensus being of a combatant force or organization, more military-like than civilian. Organizations that have been described as paramilitary are as diverse as the Minutemen, Black Panthers, youth groups (from scouting to the Pioneer movement), and even military-themed boarding schools.

Though a paramilitary is not a military force, it is usually equivalent to a military's light infantry force in terms of intensity, firepower and organizational structure. A paramilitary may also commonly fall under the command of a military, even despite not being part of the military or play an assisting role for the military in times of war.

Usage examples of "paramilitary".

These paramilitary cadres were trained in basic small arms skills and the protection of Baath Party headquarters and other key sites, which was one of the missions that the Iraqi military failed to carry out in the uprising of 1991.

But that war had been largely fought by an Afghan-based opposition group, CIA paramilitary units, Special Forces, local warlords, and a relatively small deployment of Marines.

The Army had lost eighteen soldiers in the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia: Baghdad was a city of some six million, defended by the Special Republican Guard and paramilitary forces under the iron fist of a dictator who was deemed to possess weapons of mass destruction.

But the Iraqi paramilitary Fedayeen quickly occupied Zubayr and treated the British who followed the Marines to a hail of rocket and machine gun fire whenever they approached the town.

Two scouts had been wounded--one a platoon sergeant--by paramilitary forces.

Marines stepped up their fight against the Fedayeen and blunted the paramilitary attacks along the lengthening supply lines.

SOF and CIA paramilitary units should be able to tie up the Fedayeen, freeing conventional Army and Marine forces for the push north.

There were paramilitary forces in Samawah and Najaf and they were moving between the two towns.

Qatar, McKiernan fired off a quick message to Franks, defending Wallace and making the case once again for slowing the push to Baghdad in order to defeat the paramilitary foe in the south.

He agreed that speed was imperative, but there was a huge difference between viewing icons on a computer screen and moving large formations on the battlefield as they were fighting a paramilitary foe over extended distances.

The battery was worried that paramilitary fighters might sneak into their position.

The 3rd Infantry Division had battled a paramilitary foe that had been largely ill-defined before the war but two of the principal threats it had expected to encounter had evaporated: WMD and the much touted Republican Guard.

But after the American military was attacked by paramilitary forces in the rear, the 101st was ordered to clear the southern Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala before moving north.

But it would be the paramilitary Fedayeen that represented the principal challenge in Nasiriyah, Samawah, Najaf, Kifl, and Diwaniyah, and that fought tenaciously in Baghdad as well.

Iraqi intelligence, security, and paramilitary units attempt to set up defenses in An Nasiriyah in order to delay U.