Adapting to Win - Noriyuki Katagiri

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trend was hardly limited to European experience; before the Soviet Union retreated from Afghanistan in 1989, the United States suffered through the Vietnam War, an experience that made the American public less willing to engage with tribal violence of the Third World and subsequently shaped the structure of the U.S. military for the remainder of the Cold War. America’s victory in the Cold War did not mean that it could win small wars everywhere, as military missions in Somalia in 1993, the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq each proved extremely difficult and costly. Instead, these wars have opened a crack in U.S. forces and weakened the economy, reinforcing the general perception that even powerful countries like the United States find it hard to defeat a foreign insurgency.

      This should not be surprising, because the growing success of weak actors in international politics has been recorded in recent research. Arreguin-Toft shows that in the past two centuries, materially weak actors have won only a third of all wars, yet since 1945 they have won more than half of them. The reason they used to lose these wars was because they would fight the same way as the other side did—whether using a conventional or guerrilla strategy. This has changed dramatically because weak actors have adopted military strategies opposite to those of powerful actors.26 Lyall and Wilson find that before the First World War, strong nations used to beat irregular opponents at the rate of 80 percent, but the rate has declined to 40 percent since World War II. Non-great powers had similar experiences, defeating insurgents in 80 percent of pre–World War I cases but only 33 percent of post-1918 wars. This is mainly due to the increasing mechanization of government forces, which in turn weakened their ability to collect intelligence among local populations, differentiate combatants from noncombatants, and selectively apply rewards and punishments to the locals.27

      The rising probability of insurgent victory coincided with the extension of war duration, which suggests that the longer the war becomes, the more likely insurgent groups are to win. This may be because weak actors are so determined that they are willing to endure the pain of war longer than strong actors. It may also be because the cost of a long war may be relatively lower for underdogs who have little to lose from defeat. Or it could be that people on the weaker side gain hope as war becomes longer while those on the stronger side tend to lose that hope. As David Galula argues, “The longer the insurgent movement lasts, the better will be its chances to survive its infantile diseases and to take root.”28 The relationship between war duration and outcome is important because in most extrasystemic wars, the state side is democratic and does not like long wars. In the short run, democracies may be more likely to win than their opponents because they choose the wars they fight and because they can mobilize domestic resources more effectively, but in the long run they are subject to electoral punishment for the conduct of overseas missions. As a result, democracies are more vulnerable to pressure to withdraw from unpopular wars.29 As Scott Bennett and Allan Stam show, democracies begin to lose wartime advantage in capability and resolve roughly eighteen months into the war and at that point become far more likely to quit and more willing to settle for draws or losses.30 So when democratic states win an extrasystemic war, it is generally a short war.

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      Figure 2 confirms this relationship. The average duration of extrasystemic war is 2.7 years, but in the postwar period when insurgent groups are most likely winners, it increases to 7 years. The wars became longest in the 1960s and 1970s when decolonization movements were the most intense. Other things being equal, the longer the war, the more likely insurgent groups are to succeed. The problem, however, is that war duration alone does not tell us anything about what happens in war. Consequently, the relationship is not causal, and the duration is not a cause of insurgent victory but only an indicator of their success. Yet duration is important because longer wars allow insurgent groups to evolve in a complex manner. The question, then, is what takes place in each of the wars that leaves some insurgent groups so much stronger that at the end of the war they find themselves to be victorious.

      My answer is centered on sequencing theory. The theory operates under the assumption that extrasystemic war can unfold in multiple sequences. The very multiplicity of these trajectories assumed in the theory captures the multilinearity of extrasystemic war and explains the variation in the probability of insurgent victory.31 Each sequence consists of up to three “phases,” conventional war, guerrilla war, and state building, which represent a set of critical military, political, and economic factors shaping the strategic environment of extrasystemic conflict. The theory posits that insurgent forces may be able to boost their chance of victory when they evolve. They evolve by fighting their superior opponents in ways that transform them into a conventional army. They evolve as they use the gains they have made in an earlier phase relative to their foes and deploy them to their advantage as they fight on. Most of the time, they do not have enough capability to defeat their enemy in a single phase, so they are likely losers in most violent encounters. Through evolution, however, they can grow to be capable of moving on to a next phase where they are more likely to achieve their ends. In other words, the key variable for insurgent victory is whether the insurgents grow into an independent state with organized armed forces. Put simply, the main hypothesis of sequencing theory is that the more insurgents evolve, the more likely they are to win extrasystemic war.

      The fact that there are several ways in which a “phase” combines with another phase means that there are as many sequences to consider. In this book I show six such sequences, or models, all of which evolve in dissimilar trajectories and result in different frequencies of occurrence. They are the (1) conventional, (2) primitive, (3) degenerative, (4) premature, (5) Maoist, and (6) progressive models. The conventional model describes a war in which states and insurgents fight by using organized forces. The primitive model depicts the execution of guerrilla war between the two sides from the beginning to the end. The degenerative model is a two-phase model, which begins with a conventional war (as in the conventional model) but turns into guerrilla war (primitive model) in the middle of the conflict. The premature model reflects a midwar transformation of guerrilla conflict (primitive model) into conventional war. The Maoist model shows that insurgents evolve from a small political party through the experience of fighting in guerrilla war, before the party becomes a conventional armed force. Finally, the progressive model describes a process of insurgent evolution from the period of guerrilla war through the years of state building into the establishment of modern armed forces. Because they are materially weak, few insurgent groups have managed to generate an ideal sequence, which explains why most groups have lost extrasystemic wars. The data show, however, that in the past several decades these insurgent forces have reversed the trend by evolving through the transformation of small guerrilla forces into a modern political and military system. They have built this system with support from local populations and have fought well on their home turf.

      Sequencing theory presents but one of the several ways in which insurgent forces fight and defeat foreign states in war. I do not argue that the theory is the only way to explain extrasystemic war because existing explanations of asymmetric war may at times account for why some insurgents succeed and others fail in extrasystemic war. Sequencing theory, however, generates a useful analytical framework about how the order of sequences in conflict between states and nonstate insurgents can generate forces that empower the latter into victory. Furthermore, the theory posits that an insurgency’s evolution or failure to evolve has a strong impact on its ability to achieve its goals. In other words, through evolution insurgents increase their chances to accomplish the utmost political ends. Yet sequencing theory is hardly focused only on insurgency. It argues that the evolution comes only with the state side co-opting the insurgent. Not every insurgency failing to appropriately evolve into a conventional force wins these wars because they fail to achieve the fundamental purpose of war.

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