Adapting to Win. Noriyuki Katagiri
Historians and ethnographers provide a set of reasons for the poor performance of insurgents. Among them are Quincy Wright and Harry Turney-High, who list nine reasons for their failure: (1) poor mobilization of manpower and reliance on voluntary force, (2) inadequate supply and logistics, (3) inability to conduct protracted campaigns and lack of strategic planning beyond the first battle, (4) no organized training of units, (5) poor command and control, (6) lack of discipline and low morale, (7) shortage in weapons and neglect of fortification, (8) lack of professional warriors and specialization, and (9) ineffective tactics.33 Turney-High, an anthropologist and a principal architect of the concept of “primitive war” and “submilitary combat,” further accuses insurgents of viewing war as a social institution and a diversion for a variety of nonmilitary functions.34 His view is familiar in extrasystemic wars. Insurgents generally lack unit discipline, which means they are short on training, structure, and physical compulsion, whereas states spend enormous resources on these assets. Insurgents are unable to plan for long wars. Weakness in command and control mean that they have doubtful grasp of individual soldiers, who are prone to acting badly toward civilian populations and generating a great deal of anxieties among the civilians. Soldier misbehavior leads to the decline of popular support, which in turn undermines nonstate operations by reducing manpower and supplies. Although this model has been observed most frequently in the history of extrasystemic war, it is largely a model of nineteenth-century warfare.
Primitive Model
The second model is the primitive model, represented by the execution of guerrilla war from the beginning to the end. It takes place when the guerrilla strategy is the dominant strategy of both states and insurgents. On the one hand, insurgents fight guerrilla war when they seek to take advantage of their access to people, support bases, and topographic features like mountains and urban areas. They may favor the guerrilla strategy even if their support base is not strong because the alternative—conventional war—would only weaken such bases and because there is still a chance to regain people’s trust if they fight well. After all, the conventional model rarely works for insurgents, so many of them may prefer guerrilla war. On the other hand, state forces employ this strategy as well if they have enough support or think they can gain it over time, or if the terrain favors guerrilla operations. They make this choice in response to the insurgents’ adopting of guerrilla strategy and based on the realization that conventional military strategy would not be effective against guerrillas. Therefore, even when insurgents consider using guerrilla strategy, if states adopt a conventional strategy, the war tends to be primitive. Similarly, even if states use a guerrilla strategy and insurgents adopt a conventional strategy, the war may become primitive because insurgents would make a switch in hopes of improved chances. In this model, neither side will change its strategy in the middle of war because, on the one hand, insurgents are comfortable with it or do not have enough resources to do so and, on the other hand, state forces believe that they are approaching victory with it. Under these conditions, guerrilla war becomes the dominant strategy of both sides.
In addition, the primitive model takes place under several conditions. Guerrilla war is likely when geographical conditions in the battlefield support operations in jungle areas, mountains, villages, and urban areas. Guerrilla operations in extrasystemic war became prominent also once Mao began to spread the idea of fighting in asymmetric conditions and in small wars against big powers. Thus, the primitive model assumes that insurgent leaders choose the option of fighting in more clandestine and asymmetric conditions over the option of facing the enemy face-to-face in open-terrain conflict. Furthermore, insurgent leaders are likely to adopt the primitive model when they do not have enough military resources to build conventional armies they can feel comfortable with, to train soldiers in satisfactory manner, and when they have developed mistrust in using the conventional method in fighting more powerful adversaries.
The primitive model does not work for insurgents most of the time. Of course, through guerrilla activities insurgents can prolong the war, undermine enemy willpower, and sometimes win outright. Yet guerrilla war is a challenge for insurgents for three reasons. First, unlike in conventional war where warriors can capture portions of territory to defend, insurgents must trade territory for performance in order to maintain the strategic parity. This repositioning may prove to be highly unpopular and cost the insurgents their support bases. Keeping the masses on one’s side requires a large amount of energy and resources. J. Boyer Bell cautions that the masses in guerrilla war are “mere mouths to feed, not assets but responsibilities” as they “have a reluctance to sacrifice for a distant grail, a distaste for a duty seldom properly understood, and they rarely live a life so intolerable that death is preferable.”35 Second, people may rescind support for insurgents when they fear government retaliation or appreciate government actions for them. On the one hand, because revenge is a powerful deterrent, most people naturally prefer to carry on their daily lives without threats on them. On the other hand, states may offer civilians a better alternative in the form of increased spending, infrastructure building, and job security to undermine sources of grievance. Popular support declines in long campaigns where people become tired and demand a quick end to war. Even if guerrilla war becomes longer, it does not always make them more likely to win. For these reasons, strategists have warned against the careless use of guerrilla war. As far back as in 1906, Lenin argued that “the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of struggle; it means that this method must be subordinated to other methods, that this method must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare.”36 Mao found guerrillas in general to be so vulnerable that he did not endorse reliance on the guerrilla strategy alone and instead insisted on combining it with the use of base areas and regular armies.
Degenerative Model
The degenerative model is a sequence of actions that combine the conventional and primitive models. In the first phase, both sides engage in conventional war where they use regular armies to fight pitched battle. Most states have the advantage in this environment, so insurgents are likely to collapse at this point, as in the conventional model. The degenerative model departs from the conventional model, however, when either side determines that it can no longer sustain its operations but has just enough resources to shift to guerrilla war. Therefore, when nearing defeat in the conventional phase, insurgents use their remaining resources to disperse their forces into the jungle, mountains, and urban areas. State forces respond similarly if they expect to have sufficient popular support for COIN operations. As stated above, the choice of guerrilla strategy is conditional on the fact that insurgents have advantage in deciding the nature of combat and that states in turn believe that the conventional strategy will not be effective for guerrillas. Even though they survive the first phase, however, they are considerably weakened by the time they reach the second phase. After all, this model is referred to as degenerative not only because the war moves “backward,” but also because conventional war in the first phase has the effect of undermining support bases and destroying resources that could be used in the second phase.
There are several conditions that must be met for insurgent groups to fight in the degenerative model, which include the knowledge of group leaders to fight using both conventional and unconventional methods, availability of weapons to fight in capital-intensive combat and willingness to fight protracted war, and the leaders’ realization that there is a limit to fighting conventionally. Geographic features must also allow them to fight both in open terrain at one time and in jungles, urban areas, high mountains, and villages at another. The other key condition is that insurgent leaders believe in the superiority of conventional war in order to choose it as the initial method of fighting, only to change their mind later that they need to replace it with an inferior military strategy. Thus, the degenerative model operates on the assumption that the insurgent and state leaders have a degree of strategic and operational flexibility in the course of war.
The degenerative model has never worked for insurgents, for three reasons. First, neither the conventional war nor the guerrilla war phase is self-sustainable. Most insurgents are highly likely to be decimated in the conventional phase for the above-mentioned reasons. Even if they somehow reach the second phase, they are likely to lose, as in the primitive model. Second, the two phases are not mutually supportive when they are put into this sequence. The initial phase generates high-intensity combat that puts innocent civilians at risk, destroys villages,