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      Origins and Proliferation of Sequencing

      All guerrilla units start from nothing and grow.

      —Mao Zedong¹

       Evolutionary Origins of Sequencing Theory

      As this book’s title suggests, the intellectual roots of sequencing theory lie in the application of evolutionary thought to the field of international security. Sequencing theory draws from the combination of two propositions in the field—Darwinian adaptation by natural selection and Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics—that are often considered to be intellectual opposites. First, Darwinian selection operates on the logic of competition in which species, in this case insurgent groups, cope with a hostile environment by making a series of adjustments to survive. Competition and adjustment are no strangers to scholars of international relations; Waltz discusses the need of the state to adapt to the structure of international politics by developing capability and balancing power, or face the fate to “fall by the wayside.”² In terrorism studies, Bruce Hoffman writes that “an almost Darwinian principle of natural selection … seems to affect terrorist organizations, whereby every new terrorist generation learns from its predecessors. Terrorists often analyze the mistakes made by former comrades who have been killed or apprehended.”³

      Darwinism is an appropriate tool with which to explore extrasystemic war because it shows how insurgent groups fight powerful adversaries through three mechanisms—variation, selection, and replication—all of which will be seen as key operational assumptions in the empirical chapters that follow. Variation means that insurgents consist of a diversity of combatants seeking to master mutation and innovation for the sake of survival. In selection, states impose pressure on insurgents because the former is stronger than the latter, resulting in faster adaptation by the insurgents who survive. In replication, insurgents are exposed to combat for a long time because they fight on the home territory for years at a time, which helps promote their experience, learning, and innovation, while state forces rotate soldiers on short combat tours to different regions. These conditions are the key to the success of insurgents. Dominic Johnson writes that after all, “selection effects favor weaker sides, such as insurgents and terrorists, because they are more varied, are under stronger selection pressure, and replicate successful strategies faster than the larger forces trying to defeat them, such as the US army in Iraq. To put it simply, large ‘predatory’ forces cause their ‘prey’ to adapt faster than they do themselves.”⁴ In extrasystemic war, therefore, insurgents have the natural advantage over states, although that does not mean that they will always win when they fight. Instead, they are more likely to win when they adapt and evolve. Only successful insurgents survive selection pressure and end up generating models of strategic behavior that can be replicated elsewhere. Darwinism alone, however, is not sufficient to explain variation in extrasystemic war because if it were, the logic would show that insurgents would always be the winner. We need Lamarckism to account for why some insurgents succeed and most fail.

      Lamarckism posits that individual efforts are the main driver of species adaptation. Today considered an obsolete theory, especially in comparison to Darwinism, it nevertheless provides a key impetus to sequencing theory. While Darwinism posits that external environment imposes the rule of competition that shapes the chance of species to survive, Lamarckism argues that species acquire the skills of survival and pass the traits to their off-spring in the process of evolution. In other words, only a handful of insurgent groups acquire traits and pass them on over time. In this book, I treat the inheritance of acquired characteristics as part of the temporal framework; that is, insurgent groups acquire and develop traits that are then passed from time A to time B in ways that shape their performance in war. Evolution is an inherently progressive process.⁵ The literature of evolutionary biology treats Darwinism and Lamarckism as being mutually competitive, but treating them in isolation from each other overlooks essential characteristics of war. Investigating three decades of neurobiological research, Peter Hatemi and Rose McDermott write that neither alone holds the key to understanding human behavior like war. Rather, it is necessary to understand the underlying characteristics of both.⁶ Therefore, I see Darwinism and Lamarckism to be complementary with respect of extrasystemic war.

      Sequencing theory operates on the combination of Lamarckism and Darwinian selection in a theory called neo-Lamarckism, which maintains that genetic changes are influenced by environmental factors and exogenous forces. In so-called gene-environment interplay, genes provide the platform for the synthesis of proteins, which triggers a series of chemical processes and informs actor behavior in interaction with environmental stimuli, which generate various neurological, cognitive, and emotive implications. The behavior of individual insurgents, the environments they are exposed to, and interaction with others end up shaping the gene expression.⁷ Therefore, Darwinism and Lamarckism play crucial roles at every step of the development of sequence. Insurgent efforts at adaptation and innovation are constantly tested by selection, which occurs in an environment where the actors fight in ways that shape the environment itself and generate opportunities for them to win the war. In this competitive environment, successful insurgents are those that adjust well to changing demands of war and generate a self-sustaining capacity for a later period, while unsuccessful insurgents are those that fail to do so. As Rafael Sagarin writes, “A fundamental tenet of evolutionary biology is that organisms must constantly adapt just to stay in the same strategic position relative to their enemies—who are constantly changing as well.”⁸

      Of course, sequencing theory does not capture the full developmental paths of all species. Efforts to theorize war come at the cost of sacrificing a large amount of information. The theory ameliorates this, however, by treating conflict as a sequence. Doing so will allow us to focus on a set of key factors in the order of phases as the determinant of war outcomes. At the same time, the theory does not claim that all insurgents evolve like biological mechanisms. What it does is use the growth of insurgent forces relative to states as a causal explanation for how they fight and defeat states in war. The way insurgents evolve through a series of interactions with state foes shapes the war outcome. Rather than modeling war as a single-shot lottery, I assume that a series of changes occurs in the duration of conflict that strongly shapes the outcome. This view is consistent with that of Scott Gartner, who argues that actors conduct wartime strategic assessment and form beliefs about their likelihood of success from what they observe during war. This assessment, based on what he calls the “dominant indicator approach” because decision makers use numeric indicators of success and failure to make such an assessment,

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