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states. Moreover, it is fair to say that extrasystemic war is a form of asymmetric war in which there are differences in the power of two sides. Of course, no war is fought between purely equal powers, so every war is asymmetric by definition. But because states generally have more resources at their disposal, reflected in the form of advanced military hardware and troops properly uniformed and professionally trained to fight capital-intensive wars, extrasystemic war distinctively favors them. One of the consequences of this gap is the power projection capability of nation-states, which often allows them to intervene in rebel territories and put insurgents on the defensive. This is why all extrasystemic wars have taken place on insurgents’ territory.

      Extrasystemic war takes both conventional and unconventional forms of violence.¹³ Conventional extrasystemic war begins with both sides using standing armies in open terrain. The armies typically share the characteristics of massed lines, heavy fortifications, dependence on hardware, and physical force directed against combatants. In other words, force is used “directly” against the opponent.¹⁴ The concept of conventional war derives broadly from a Western tradition that values weapons procurement, military education, and doctrinal development, based on what Rupert Smith calls the “paradigm of interstate industrial war: concepts founded on conflict between states, the maneuver of forces en masse, and the total support of the state’s manpower and industrial base.”¹⁵ This tradition has more recently been passed on to U.S. forces and enshrined in the so-called American way of war.¹⁶ Fred Weyand and Harry Summers argue that “we believe in using ‘things’—artillery, bombs, massive firepower—in order to conserve our soldiers’ lives. The enemy, on the other hand, made up for his lack of ‘things’ by expending men instead of machines, and he suffered enormous casualties.”¹⁷ Conventional forces generally include ground, naval, air, and marine components, but here they mean ground forces most of the time because insurgent groups tend not to have enough resources to field naval and air forces and because the army plays a decisive role in crushing the enemy’s capacity to resist in decisive engagement. States typically prefer to fight conventional war because they train their forces to win it. The shift of American strategic focus from conventional force planning and nuclear exchange of the Cold War to less traditional missions like counterinsurgency (COIN) and counterterrorism is a relatively recent phenomenon. Seen from the long span of military history, most nation-states have consistently displayed a preference for conventional power. What is surprising, however, is that many insurgents have used conventional war. In fact, a number of extrasystemic wars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were conventional.

      The other form of extrasystemic war is unconventional, which is essentially guerrilla war. Samuel Huntington defined guerrilla war as “a form of warfare by which the strategically weaker side assumes the tactical offensive in selected forms, times, and places.”¹⁸ Guerrilla war has three forms of activity, according to Lawrence Keeley. The most common form is raids and ambushes in which a small number of men sneak into enemy territory to kill people, followed by large-scale battles and massacres and surprise attacks.¹⁹ But generally, guerrilla strategy focuses on maneuver, speed, and stealth over formation and firepower. Rather than concentrating force, guerrillas disperse it to spread the enemy thin and target where the enemy is most vulnerable. Guerrilla strategy involves the use of soldiers as well as civilian populations, which provide supplies, information, sanctuary, training ground, manpower, and human buffers—all assets that can be used to neutralize the negative balance of power.²⁰ Of course, telling civilians from guerrillas in war is not easy, since all wars contain elements of both, which challenges the dichotomy between conventional and guerrilla wars, but for the sake of analytical parsimony I consider them to be alternatives.

      What does it mean to win these wars? Scholars disagree over what defines victory and defeat, especially in insurgency environments. As William Martel argues, the term “victory” is used quite casually to express a generally successful outcome of a military contest. The literature does not have a language to describe victory in precise terms, so he examines victory in terms of achieving a set of political, military, territorial, and economic objectives on the tactical, operational, strategic, and grand strategic levels.²¹ Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney define victory based on the achievement of political ends and material gains and losses made in the course of war, which are adjusted by the importance and difficulty of the missions. To measure progress in war, they use two methods: a “scorekeeping method” that focuses on actual material gains and losses and “match-fixing,” in which evaluations become skewed by mind-sets, symbolic events, and media and elite spin.²² Furthermore, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s famous dictum that “the enemy wins if he does not lose” reflects the inherent advantage given to the insurgents in our judgment about victory in asymmetric contexts. These considerations sound reasonable, but the problem is that they do not provide useful metrics to measure war outcomes in extrasystemic war. However, all extrasystemic wars turned out to have clear winners, so it is enough to argue here that insurgent groups win extrasystemic war when they attain their utmost ends set at the beginning of the war while state sides fail to do so. Insurgents lose, in contrast, when they fail to achieve the objectives while states succeed. Of course, it is often the case that actors seek to achieve more than one objective in a single war and these objectives change before the war ends, which makes it difficult for us to assess mission accomplishment. But in most cases, territorial and political integrity is the main cause of extrasystemic war and actors regard sovereignty as the most important determinant of victory.

       The Puzzle

      Through the early twentieth century, governments defeated foreign insurgents lopsidedly in most encounters. A majority of these wars were acts of colonial conquest in which imperial Western powers traveled across the world and used brute force to subdue local subjects on a massive scale. At different times, Britain, France, Portugal, and other European countries waged wars of empire building almost nonstop in their scrambles for colonial possession. Once they settled the lands, they did everything they could to suppress revolts and exploit resources. The control was so systematic that whenever discontented elements rebelled against the settlers, they found themselves to be almost always on the losing side. Scholars stress the logic of power in explaining this pattern of insurgent defeat; insurgent groups lose because they are poor and powerless. Indeed, the international distribution of power favors nation-states at the expense of insurgents. Scholars have noted the general tendency for these disorganized forces to be weak on the battlefield. Mueller holds that a group of criminal thugs confronting a competent army is doomed to fail because they simply do not have the training, leadership, logistic support, weaponry, and morale.²³ To others, nonstate violence is not relevant anymore. According to Janice Thomson, nonstate violence, once highly marketized around the world, was even “delegitimized” and “eliminated” in early modern Europe when the sovereignty of nation-states became an established institution of the time.²⁴ Nonstate violence in its various forms, ranging from insurgency to terrorism, has long failed to serve the ultimate interest of those who execute it. More recently, Max Abrahms found that since 2001, terrorist groups have rarely achieved their political objectives; they accomplished their policy objectives only 7 percent of the time.²⁵ Today, as great powers continue to build arms, train for new types of conflict, and become more powerful, this record of state victory appears embedded, in both theory and empirical evidence. Between 1816 and 1945, the victory rate for insurgents was only 15 percent, as they won only 20 of 130 wars.

Figure 1. Extrasystemic war outcomes.

      Figure 1 indicates that since 1945, this trend has changed. For the past seventy years we have seen more insurgent groups overcome military inferiority to defeat external powers. Winning eleven of eighteen wars through 2010, the insurgents’ victory rate has jumped from 15 percent to 61 percent. From Algeria and Indonesia to Guinea-Bissau, dedicated members of nationalist groups in colonial entities have engineered a dramatic shift in the strategic landscape by unseating leading colonial powers and taking charge of their newfound statehood. In a span of just a few years, European powers lost possessions in Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and

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