Adapting to Win. Noriyuki Katagiri
build national unity with popular consensus, win international recognition, yield economic productivity, collect revenue, and pay for the war. State building may take place simultaneously with the phases of conventional and guerrilla war because they are not mutually exclusive.
The role of state building has been overlooked in the study of irregular war because it does not center on the destruction of enemy forces. Yet state building is a quite distinctive phase, as it belongs to a separate analytical category from fighting war.19 Michael Doyle singles out this category as a key to the success of independence movements in their endeavor against empires as they manage to institutionalize the participation of their newly mobilized citizenry.20 Organization is the key to rebellion in terms of control, finance, recruitment, violence, and resources.21 While state building is a more subtle phase than guerrilla war and conventional war, we see the phase of state building when these institutions perform a central role during the war.22
States have resources to build a government in colonial territories, but they face challenges in the process. Governments face two types of “dilemmas” when they deploy forces overseas and intervene in foreign nations, a common scenario in extrasystemic wars. The “duration dilemma” means that states that occupy foreign territories provide security for the locals, but the welcome is likely to decrease over time as populations seek to reassert their control and press the state to leave. The “footprint dilemma” shows that while foreign states’ presence is needed for security in local societies, it may increase the danger of stimulating nationalist resistance, as we saw vividly in the 2003 Iraq War, for instance.23 These dilemmas challenge foreign governments’ efforts to be adept at building a state in conflict zones. Thus occasionally insurgents outperform foreign governments in building institutions, resulting in a more equal balance of political power and a growing ability to fight war better. This scenario may be likely when states have not built a counterbalancing structure. In what Tilly calls “multiple sovereignty,” insurgents obtain recognition and receive support from the population. The war becomes a polarized venue for the contention of political control between states and insurgents who compete for the public mandate and negotiate autonomy.24
How Do Insurgents “Adapt to Win”?
In a highly contested series of violence against government opponents, insurgents boost the chances of achieving their goals by evolving into an organized army with serious work for statehood. The process appears as war moves from one phase to another in the temporal sense. The decision to move is mutual, because it rests with the insurgents’ ability and willingness to do so, coupled with the ability and willingness of the states to block the evolution. In other words, evolution is not complete unless the state side follows the insurgent’s move to a next phase, and vice versa. The state side often uses its enormous resources to dictate the term of violence in order to veto the insurgent move. Otherwise, the war develops through combinations of the following three phases—guerrilla war, conventional war, and state building. Insurgent forces grow more organized and militarily capable, and consequently more likely to make a transition from one phase to another and achieve their ends. There are, however, different sets of requirements to meet, depending on between which phases the transition takes place.
First, a transition from guerrilla war to conventional war occurs under two conditions. First, insurgent forces must gain a significant advantage in the level of popular support over their opponents. Popular support is the key ingredient here for the transition to take place because the population generates manpower for the army, raises money for the insurgency, and provides legitimacy for the military operations it conducts in the conventional war phase. Without it, the army would have to fight the war as its social foundations decay quickly. The other condition is that, once the war moves beyond the conventional phase, the insurgents’ armed branch must have sufficient resources to continue to protect the population and territory. In other words, insurgent forces need both popular support and military power to evolve from a guerrilla group to a modern army. We see a good example of this transition in segments of many extrasystemic wars; for example, the Somali-British War of the early twentieth century demonstrates how difficult it is to complete the transition if the insurgents do not have adequate resources even if they initially managed to win local support. The Somali insurgency lasted nearly two decades but eventually collapsed because they became vulnerable to growing British firepower and airpower despite the fact that the transition from the guerrilla war phase to conventional war was successful.
Similarly, a transition from the guerrilla war phase to state building takes place under two conditions. On the one hand, insurgents must win a popular mandate to build a state so that the population will support their emerging institutions. Popular support is the key ingredient here because, without it, government institutions would lack legitimacy and resources to become an independent state, a necessary ingredient to win extrasystemic war. The other condition is that the institutions they create in the second phase have enough resources to reinforce the support base. Stable institutions are the key here because, without them, the insurgents would soon lose a key popular support base to continue their state-building efforts. In other words, insurgent forces need to outperform their state foes in terms of popular support and institutions in order to evolve. A good example of this transition is the Indochina War, in which the insurgent Vietminh forces initially succeeded in winning hearts and minds of the people. This victory at the local level allowed them to launch a nationwide political effort to reestablish the political party to drive the war effort. The party leadership generated a powerful effect to centralize the war effort because the population supported efforts to build an independent state.
A shift from state building to conventional war has two requirements. On the one hand, the political institutions built in the first phase must generate resources, policy, strategic direction, and administrative support for military operations to empower the insurgency. Institutional stability and resourcefulness are critical ingredients here because, without them, armed forces will likely collapse. On the other hand, insurgent forces must develop the capability to protect these institutions as they fight for independence. Short in military power, insurgent groups would lose policy direction and fall into aimless mass killing. In other words, for the transition from state building to conventional war to work, insurgents need both military power and institutions.
Fourth, a transition from conventional war to guerrilla war occurs when insurgents already have a fairly developed and organized army that can protect the population and maintain order and territorial integrity against state aggression in a volatile environment. Military power is the key factor that enables insurgents to consolidate gains made in the conventional war phase into the guerrilla war phase because insurgents would otherwise be too powerless to protect noncombatants and leave themselves vulnerable to enemy attack. At the same time, the army must have a significant level of popular support because the population generates manpower for the army, raises money for the war, and increases legitimacy for military operations it conducts in the conventional war phase.
Finally, insurgent groups may take the war from the state-building phase to guerrilla war when the institutions are capable of governing the people and winning popular support for the insurgency. Stable institutions are the key here because without them the insurgents would soon lose a key support base to continue their state-building efforts. In other words, they need both popular support and institutions in order to evolve. On the other hand, the insurgents must win popular support to build a state and make the institutions legitimate. Popular support is the key ingredient here because without it institutions lack legitimacy and resources to function as an independent state. Thus the insurgents must generate sufficient social support for the state-building process.
Adaptation and evolution are key causal factors of insurgent victory because the transition from one phase to another empowers the insurgents in two critical ways. First, groups elicit greater expectations of success from the population, who in turn invest more in their efforts. The stakes become higher, and the insurgents become more determined to win and more aggressive on the battlefield. This has negative consequences for states. Because insurgents fight harder now, they are harder to defeat and ready to fight longer. They begin to win more battles, making it difficult for states to score victories. As a result, the probability of state victory diminishes, increasing the length of time necessary for states’