Adapting to Win. Noriyuki Katagiri
Second, now that the insurgents have greater chances of winning, the population realizes that their chances of victory are greater, so they support the insurgents more. After all, more insurgent victories mean that states have to do more to win, while it becomes harder for them to do so, discouraging them from continuing the war. Thus, as the war moves from one phase to another, insurgents gain a greater likelihood to achieve their ends. As they evolve, they grow stronger than they were in the first phase, and more capable and willing to take advantage of the gains they made and more likely to move on to the third phase.25 Leaders of successful insurgencies, from Indochina’s Ho Chi Min to Amilcar Cabral of Portuguese Guinea, have recognized these dynamics and instituted them. Cabral, for one, stated that “the successes won during the past year and the objective factors we have already established and consolidated enable us to look to the future with confidence.”26
Models of Sequencing Theory
Sequencing theory consists of six models so as to reflect the number of ways that insurgents evolve. Not all extrasystemic wars proceed in linear fashion, but there are six major paths that they can take as they progress. However, not all models are evenly used. Over the period of 1816 to 2010, the relative weight of the models shifted. In much of the nineteenth century, most extrasystemic wars could be described in terms of army-to-army combat that I call the conventional model. During this period, as seen in Figure 3, a majority of insurgent groups built regular armies and used them against foreign states in open terrain. The population was protected behind the front lines and played a marginal role in combat. Most colonial European states were better armed, organized, and stronger, but many insurgents were bold enough to challenge them.
Figure 3. How extrasystemic wars change over time.
Table 3. Six Models of Extrasystemic War
From the middle of the nineteenth century, however, we see a slowly increasing number of guerrilla wars, as denoted in the primitive model, which challenged the primacy of the conventional model in the early twentieth century. This made the conventional and primitive models the two most dominant types of extrasystemic war in much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In other words, having no more than just a single phase, these models depicted where insurgent groups did not evolve. In recent years, however, extrasystemic wars have become complex. A small number of what I call the degenerative and premature cases emerged in the late nineteenth century to add a layer of complexity to the overall picture of extrasystemic war. By the middle of the twentieth century, furthermore, wars became even more complex. The primitive model had become stable, but a small number of so-called Maoist and progressive wars emerged to replace the degenerative and premature wars. Table 3 summarizes the six models. In the following sections I describe how each of the models works.
Conventional Model
In the conventional model, states and insurgents use armies to fight in open terrain from the beginning to the end. The key to victory in this classic battle of position is the destruction of enemy forces; war ends when one side’s army annihilates another. Yet conventional war is hardly a product of one side’s military prowess. This model reflects the commitment of both sides to fight in similar fashion and assumes that they end up taking similar actions to make a conventional war. When, for example, insurgent groups consider adopting a guerrilla strategy while state forces adopt a conventional strategy, the model posits that both sides become inclined to fight in an orthodox fashion. This is because they have enough resources to build an army and history of using armies in past wars. The Dahomean War, which I examine in the next chapter, is a good example. Conversely, even when states consider adopting a guerrilla strategy and insurgents adopt a conventional strategy, the war is likely to be conventional because states have inherent advantage in resources and organization and know that they will fight better in a conventional war. In this model, neither side changes the conventional military strategy in the middle of the war because neither is sure if changing the strategy will improve their situation. Under these conditions, conventional military strategy becomes the dominant strategy for both sides.
Insurgent groups all around the world have adopted a conventional strategy even though the guerrilla strategy has always been available. Globalization of conventional war dates as far back as when nonstate groups began to embrace military technologies. The attraction of orthodox war was so strong that some of these groups were even quicker than states to appreciate new weapons once they seized them.27 Insurgent preference for conventional war is by no means accidental.28 Insurgent groups of different sizes have displayed a remarkable similarity in the structure of military organizations across the globe, following the patterns of capital-intensive militarization and proliferation of standing armies.29 Insurgents’ propensity toward conventional war is based on the inherent inclination of “the poor and weak and peripheral copy[ing] the rich and strong and central.”30 The converging power of conventional strategy also represents the fact that military technologies and organizational features of developed and developing states have been similar. This similarity may in part be due, among other things, to the attraction of conventional weapons; as Michael Adas argues, “No invention elicited as much astonishment and respect from Africans as European firearms.”31
Used in 63 percent of the entire samples of extrasystemic war, the conventional model is the most popular model of extrasystemic war for several reasons. For one, it brings stability to the military organization. Because it requires a high degree of training and discipline, it forces leaders to seek firm control of their army when the war becomes difficult. It is favored also because, as organization theory posits, militaries have an institutional interest in the autonomy, survival, and expansion of their organization by way of conventional strategy. Successful execution of conventional war rests with fast battlefield decisions, so the organization must have adequate decision-making autonomy. It requires investments in advanced military equipment, which justifies the need for an increased size and budget for the organization. This concept is also consistent with important elements of most military cultures, as they seek effective ways to minimize casualties, facilitate the seizure of initiative, and deliver quick and decisive victory. Indeed, some insurgents are found to be equal or superior to their civilized counterparts in four respects: (1) devotion to offensive strategy, (2) use of surprise, scouting, and intelligence, (3) use of terrain, and (4) tactical mobility.32 Finally, conventional war is popular because it raises a symbolic value as a civilized nation. Only an army organized, trained, and uniformed along European lines firmly under the command of the standing officer corps is considered to be able to mount a challenge against a Western power. A concentrated field army implies refinement and attracts the world’s attention. From this standpoint, conventional war is seen as an extension of military modernization. It is also a signal to external audiences that the rebel group can fight a stronger foe on the same level.
Many insurgent groups resorted to the conventional model in the nineteenth century as part of a global trend in favor of using traditional military resources to fight wars. The conventional model takes place under the condition of sufficient military resources, past experiences with conventional war, and the assumption that the insurgent groups have little knowledge about the utility of different war strategies including guerrilla strategy. The groups must have access to enough resources to build up an army of soldiers, train and arm them with weapons, and organize and discipline the forces to fight modern enemies. Insurgent forces also use the conventional model when they have a history of having used it to win a war. Most extrasystemic wars took the form of the conventional model until Mao introduced and proliferated guerrilla war as a popular military strategy. Conventional extrasystemic wars therefore were fought repeatedly by many insurgent groups during the nineteenth century even though they found themselves almost always on the losing side.
While many insurgents prefer conventional war, they are generally not successful at it. While they have fought conventionally in 63 percent of their wars,