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      How Do Insurgents Fight and Defeat Foreign States in War?

      How do insurgent forces fight and defeat foreign states in war? What can powerful states do to prevent policy disaster when they confront nonstate rebels in foreign lands? Recent conflicts in Iraq, Libya, and Syria—and Western experiences with them—have all underscored the importance of understanding how nonstate insurgent and guerrilla forces have dealt with enormous disadvantages in power to achieve their ends and what foreign governments and their powerful militaries can do to attain their own purposes.

      These are not just policy questions. Until recently, few in academia believed in the power of rebel insurgents challenging powerful states in violent conflict. In 1967, Kenneth Waltz wrote that the “revolutionary guerrilla wins civil wars, not international ones” and that “the potency of irregular warfare (had) been grossly exaggerated.”¹ At that time insurgency as a whole was such a small force in global politics that, even if some communist forces swept through parts of the Third World by guerrilla tactics, that would not pose a serious threat to American power. After all, guerrilla movements had little systemic effect on the bipolar stability between the United States and Soviet Union, at least until the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989.

      Waltz’s statement rings true to this day, except that it made a lot more sense for conflict through the early twentieth century. Since the mid-twentieth century, however, violent insurgent groups have done significantly better; they have made what were supposed to be “small wars” lengthy endeavors, raised the cost of war drastically, and won many of them quite impressively. Most recently, insurgent groups in Afghanistan and Iraq have managed to force the United States, arguably the champion of the post–Cold War international system, to suffer embarrassing if temporary setbacks. Forty years after Waltz made his argument, the Washington Post quoted Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson, close observers of this kind of war, as saying “although great powers are vastly more powerful today than in the 19th century … they have become far less likely to win asymmetrical wars. More surprising … the odds of a powerful nation winning an asymmetrical war decrease as that nation becomes more powerful.”² In other words, things have changed dramatically in favor of insurgent underdogs in the international system. What explains this change? What does it mean to the future of great power politics?

      In recent years, international relations scholars have made considerable progress in the understanding of many types of conflict: interstate, civil, and asymmetric. In a major study of asymmetric war, T. V. Paul explains how underdogs decide to go to war based on the perceived achievability of their political and military goals. More specifically, he argues that weak actors’ choice for asymmetric war rests with their perceptions about the availability of external and internal support, short-term offensive capabilities, and their advantage in making the first strike.³ Other scholars have followed, making arguments about weak resolve, strategic interaction, vulnerability of democracies to small wars, and mechanization of armed forces as major causes of upsets in asymmetric war.⁴ These contributions, however, do not directly address

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