Adapting to Win - Noriyuki Katagiri

Скачать книгу

the key to understanding victory lies in the nature of the political objectives states pursue through the use of military force. The effects of the factors above, such as strategic interaction and democratic weakness, are dependent on the nature of the states’ political objectives. The way the states’ political objectives align with the quality of their military strategy and resources determines war outcomes. Underdogs are likely to win when their political objectives are more closely aligned with military objectives and the balance of military capabilities between belligerents. In contrast, they are less likely to win when the objective relies on compliance from the target.44

      These works have made important contributions to the expansion of our knowledge about asymmetric war. What these theories lack is an evolutionary perspective that insurgent growth has a strong bearing on insurgents’ chances to achieve their purpose. In other words, none of the existing works takes into account the role of wartime evolution that often shapes the outcome of extrasystemic war. In this context, sequencing theory offers a theoretical challenge to the existing thoughts about asymmetric war by presenting a sequence as a means of analysis. By highlighting the way wars evolve through phases, this book shows how insurgents can increase the probability of victory in the exchange of violence.

       Methodology

      I take three steps to explain how insurgent forces fight and defeat foreign states in war. First, I examine 148 cases of extrasystemic war in the period between 1816 and 2010 and classify each of them into one of the six models. As a baseline I use existing datasets on extrasystemic war because, while they do not directly deal with insurgencies per se, they provide a list of non-state actors fighting states in the closest way possible to extrasystemic wars.45 However, they contain a number of inaccuracies about outcomes, duration, and categorization, so whenever necessary I have recoded and updated the datasets.46 The result is Appendix A, which lists all 148 wars and presents information on duration, winners, and models used.47 Second, I supplement the raw data with a set of descriptions of each war, drawn from primary and secondary sources in historical literature and compiled in Appendix B. The descriptive analysis is followed, third, by comparative historical case analysis designed to provide an extra layer of robustness and substantiate the six models of sequencing theory.48 I investigate the six models, respectively, in the (1) Dahomean War, (2) Malayan Emergency, (3) Iraq War, (4) Anglo-Somali War, (5) Portuguese-Guinean War, and (6) Indochina War.

      The rationale for choosing these 6 out of the 148 cases is as follows. Each is best suited to provide empirical support for the six models. The cases also clarify conditions for success and failure of insurgencies in extrasystemic war. Furthermore, they highlight the stark difference between the colonial and imperial era and the decolonization period. Specifically, the case studies contrast the key tendency of insurgent forces before the 1940s to fight mainly using the conventional model and the tendency of state forces to lose extrasystemic wars against those insurgencies in the decolonization era. In other words, the six cases help achieve my aim to maximize the temporal and geographic distribution of the survey while reflecting the number of models of sequencing theory. In data collection, I carried out archival research, examining sources including memoranda, meeting notes, transcripts of conversations, war and diplomatic communiqués, as well as memoirs and secondary historical literature. Taking these three steps has proven to be an effective way of exploring questions central to this book. How exactly do insurgent forces fight foreign states when they do? If and when they defeat their opponents, what strategy have they used? When they lost the war, what did they do wrong? And ultimately, what causes the variation in the sequences that insurgent forces end up adopting in extrasystemic war?

      There are three caveats in regard to the data collection and analysis. First, the existing dataset does not fully capture differences between cases. For example, while some insurgencies turn out to be relatively short-term rebellions in South Asia, others are modern extensions of ancient African kingdoms defending what little autonomy they have left, such as the Dahomey, Ashantis, and Mahdists, and these do not appear to be insurgencies. Furthermore, there is more than one type of rebellion and insurgency; in postcolonial Africa alone, William Reno argues a variety of rebel groups can be categorized into anticolonial, majority rule, reform, warlord, and parochial types.49 In this book I do not use Reno’s typologies, but they reinforce my point that these differences make cross-case comparisons difficult. What I do to deal with this issue is to first eliminate cases that do not conform to the category of extrasystemic war and then ascertain that all the other cases share common features of extrasystemic wars, with insurgent groups being illegitimate members of the international system at the time of war and nation-states being such members. In other words, to carry out comparative case studies effectively, I treat these cases in a uniform manner under the category of extrasystemic war and by exploring the central questions consistently across the empirical chapters.50 This method allows us to draw theoretically informed and substantially meaningful implications for the recent and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

      The second issue concerns the conditions under which wars take place. In some cases insurgent groups opt not to go to war when conditions for it exist. Given the enormous challenge of extrasystemic war, there are incentives for them not to fight in general. Nonviolent resistance may in fact be preferred over violence because it presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement, information and education, and participator commitment. High levels of participation in nonviolent protests also enhance group resilience, tactical innovation, and opportunities for civic disruption and reduce incentives for the regime to fight.51 This issue raises the question of what constitutes necessary and sufficient conditions for war, which needs to be solved in order to avoid generating a no-variance research design. I solve this question by counting conditions for war when it takes place and by considering why some insurgents choose not to fight at all when conditions for war exist and why other insurgent groups do fight when conditions do exist. At the same time, because my data do not speak for all cases under which war should have taken place but did not, I do not make claims about whether they are sufficient conditions for war. But I assume that they demonstrate a set of conditions that enable us to create a series of distinct patterns of war. Doing so allows me to make a contextually restricted yet substantial contention about conditions for war.

      The last issue is with counting “models” of sequencing theory. A single war may account for more than one model while the model overlaps with another. For instance, a war that I code as a conventional war model may actually count as a degenerative model if insurgent groups might have tried to go degenerative but failed in the conventional war before they could reach a second phase. Similarly, a war may account for both primitive and Maoist models if the insurgent group fights like guerrillas first and then fails to move on to a next phase. The overlapping issue may potentially complicate my counting rule for the models. I solve this problem first by ensuring that each case is completely different from the others and second by counting models in which we see hard evidence that insurgent groups made an effort to reach the next phase. Therefore, if evidence proves that the groups tried but failed to reach a phase, then the case counts toward a more complicated model, while if the groups did not try to attain another phase, then it counts as a single-phase model.

       Plan of the Book

      This book has ten chapters. In the second chapter, I trace the intellectual origins of sequencing theory in the application of evolutionary biology to political science, coupled with analysis of the works of Lenin and Mao, who made use of phases and sequences in revolutionary situations. I also examine how early ideas of sequence in war became consolidated and spread into limited parts of the postwar globe, which enabled a few insurgent leaders of Third World independence movements to achieve decolonization. The idea of fighting through sequences, however, has hardly been uniform; the sequencing method has generated variation in the way that these groups evolved. In fact, the very multiplicity of sequences explains the variation in war outcomes, with each “model” having different frequency levels and war outcomes. I also discuss factors that shape the probability of insurgent victory and show that although insurgent victory is

Скачать книгу