Adapting to Win. Noriyuki Katagiri
because the influence of norms and institutions was hardly uniform across various colonial societies, it was not a decisive factor for insurgent movements to succeed in extrasystemic conflicts. There was remarkable variation in the normative power of decolonization between, for instance, Latin America and Africa. Although in Latin America, the Dominican Republic aligned with the interest of colonialist nations, Guatemala, Mexico, and Haiti proved to be strong anticolonialists at the UN. African countries were even more emotional and vocal than those in Latin America because they embraced more ethnic and cultural ties with the dependents of the territories.20 As a result, wars did not always break out because colonial control in many places ended rather peacefully. After World War II, more countries became independent peacefully, including French colonies like Guinea and the former Soviet republics, while just sixteen anticolonial movements turned violent before they became independent. Therefore, the postwar spread of norms and institutions for independence notwithstanding, most insurgencies seeking decolonization ended up opting against violent recourse. This may have had to do with the recognition that civil resistance would be more effective than violence in achieving decolonization aims and because civil resistance presented fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement, information and education, and participator commitment. Indeed, political participation contributed to enhanced resilience, tactical innovation, and opportunity for civic disruption, and provided less incentive for the regime to maintain the status quo.21 Even where movements did achieve independence, there was a limit to the strategic effect of these norms and institutions. Table 1 shows that since 1945, insurgencies have won eleven of eighteen extrasystemic wars, but they have also lost seven: in Madagascar, Malaya, Hyderabad, Kenya, Cameroon, East Timor, and Iraq. Furthermore, norms and institutions of independence were not always the same thing as insurgent victory. While victory in extrasystemic war did lead to independence most of the time, insurgents’ defeat, too, sometimes gave them freedom, as seen in places like Cameroon in the 1960s. The norms and institutions did not empower the anticolonial insurgency in Angola and Mozambique, either, because the outcome hinged more strongly on the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, which was caused primarily by a few select junior officers in the Portuguese military dissatisfied with the way they were fighting in Guinea Bissau. For these reasons, while the normative and institutional explanation may be relevant to wars of independence, it is not sufficient to explain variation in extrasystemic war outcomes.
Sequencing theory presents itself as an extension of academic discourse about analyzing conflict through stages. In recent years, there has been an increasing number of such works that use phases as a means of analysis. In addition to Gartner, Marc Sageman investigates a three-phase evolution of terrorist groups in order to follow the development of al-Qaeda.22 Not surprisingly, the need to confront these untraditional security challenges has spawned a sequence-based response from military analysts. David Kilcullen discusses al-Qaeda’s four-phase evolution in terms of what he calls the “accidental guerrilla syndrome.”23 Military practitioners and policy makers have similarly highlighted the importance of strategic adaptation in more contemporary experiences. John Nagl’s work has called for the U.S. army to change and adapt, arguing that organizational culture is key to the ability to learn from events, which is why the British army successfully conducted COIN operations in Malaya and why the American army failed to do so in Vietnam. The British army, because of its role as a colonial police force and the organizational characteristics created by its history and culture, was better able to quickly learn and apply the lessons of COIN.24 Evidence shows that the U.S. military has relearned lessons from recent COIN experiences, improved its ability to conduct stability operations, changed the institutional bias against counterinsurgency, and figured out how to account for successes gained from the learning process.25 The U.S. military has also successfully adapted to untraditional security missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Learning from two centuries of small wars and nation building, the United States increasingly has emerged successful from insurgency wars, carrying out the surge in Iraq most recently.26 These research findings buttress the importance of organizational adaptation in COIN settings, especially the U.S. military’s adaptation to the changing environment of the Iraq War, in which “successive and sequential historical decisions shaped how the army would and could function in Iraq, particularly as its missions changed during the course of the war.”27
Table 1. Extrasystemic Wars After 1945
Learning and Proliferation of Sequencing Practice
What explains variation in the outcomes of extrasystemic war is the way both sides of war fight in sequence. But how do insurgent forces know about sequencing? The answer rests with their ability and willingness to learn to put the war in sequence. Insurgent forces need to learn from wars of the past and adapt to their specific environment and spread a demonstration effect from one battlefield to another, from one country to another, in order to generate a cascade of insurgency victory across the world. But because there are constraints in the process of learning, receiving and accepting new ideas, and ultimately spreading them, few can consciously adopt effective models. These constraints include the availability of communications technology and the possibility that actors interpret things differently. Actors also learn selectively; research shows that humans learn much more from their own experiences than from those of others.28 Furthermore, learning is not the same thing as adopting a new policy; one can learn something but decide not to use it. Of course, these problems do not hamper only insurgents; states, too, have had trouble figuring out how to innovate. That is why, again in Algeria, French generals did not necessarily apply the lessons they learned from their experiences in Indochina. Yet one of the major reasons why many insurgent groups have lost wars over the years had to do with the fact that they never learned from their mistakes. Indeed, evidence shows that many of them have repeatedly used the wrong strategy against the same enemies, even though they had been losing such wars for decades. Therefore, many groups actually fail to evolve across generations, which explains why some groups “fight the last war” again and keep losing. Table 2 indicates that throughout the history of extrasystemic war before 1945, thirteen of sixteen groups that lost once went back to fight the same foe using the same strategy.
There are at least two reasons why these groups used the same strategy repeatedly. The first is the availability of military technologies that favored a conventional strategy and force structure. As noted earlier, global attraction to modern military technology in part explains why many insurgent forces fought extrasystemic wars in mostly conventional fashion in the nineteenth century. The other reason is the limited access the insurgent forces had to information about foreign wars. Shortages of communications devices, networks, and printing presses through which to learn from other groups gave insurgents little choice but to fight wars the way they knew how. As information technology, overseas travel, and printing presses became available over time, some insurgent leaders shared ideas through publications, meetings, interviews, and speeches. These leaders received an early education in Europe, where they exposed themselves to a diverse set of ideas including Marxism, learned Western languages and customs, and embraced nationalist thought before they returned to their motherlands. While many of them embraced class struggle and the philosophy of Marx and Lenin, the proliferation of learning devices coincided with the time of Maoist people’s war. While Mao’s ideas have influenced many revolutionary leaders generation after generation, they were made available only in the early twentieth century and came too late for many insurgent leaders who had little access to technology and information. Furthermore, these ideas proved to be so hard to replicate outside China that they impacted other revolutionaries only variably. Variation in insurgents’ access to technology, press, and information naturally had dissimilar effects on insurgent movements around the world. Among a diverse set of anticolonial forces in Southeast Asia to Latin America to Africa, Mao proved to be a key shaper of decolonization movements, but only in limited ways. As a result, revolutionaries across the globe embraced the sequential ideas with local characteristics to fit the latter, creating variation in areas like Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
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