Adapting to Win. Noriyuki Katagiri
logic of sequencing theory rests not with a tautological argument that insurgents’ victory occurs when they evolve, but with whether the evolution they engineer goes through a successful sequence.
The Literature
Sequencing theory is a new theoretical framework of international security that fills a void in the existing theories of asymmetric war and counterinsurgency. The field of international security has generated a number of ideas about these issues, but sequencing theory presents an alternative means of analysis on irregular conflict and extrasystemic war. Hilde Ralvo, Nils Gleditsch, and Han Dorussen explore the relationship between democracy and colonial, imperial, and postcolonial wars, which concerns us here because many of these wars are extrasystemic at the same time, but they focus on the propensity of democratic countries to fight these wars rather than dealing with war termination.32 Dan Reiter and Curtis Meek examine how factors like regime type, steel production, and national borders shape military strategies of states, but they do not investigate insurgencies.33 Todd Sechser and Elizabeth Saunders examine conditions under which states seek to mechanize their militaries, but they do not discuss how nonstate actors do so.34 To be sure, the literature on asymmetric war offers a set of ideas about how weak actors defeat strong ones, although it assumes no analytical boundary between interstate, civil, and extrasystemic types. Some of the major works in the literature address the cause of underdog victory in terms of (1) balance of resolve, (2) strategic interaction, (3) democratic weakness, (4) external support, (5) mechanization of armed forces, and (6) political objectives.
First, Andrew Mack writes that weak actors are likely to win when they are more resolved to withstand the cost of war than are powerful actors. The idea is that asymmetric war is a contest of will that favors the less powerful because they make greater efforts. Material power is considered indecisive because weak actors face the danger of annihilation and thus are determined to outlast the states that do not. This imbalance of resolve leads to a gap in the degree of vulnerability to domestic opposition. While weak actors maintain a high level of determination, stronger ones often see their resolve decline before they are forced out of war by their constituents.35 In extrasystemic war, this means that insurgents win when their resolve is greater than that of nation-states. The theory does a good job of explaining a number of wars of decolonization where insurgent sides were presumably more determined to fight on to grab independence. The theory also works with sequencing theory in that it describes the fundamental asymmetry in power and resolve that drives some insurgents to seek military power and popular support as key ingredients in extrasystemic war.
Second, Arreguin-Toft posits that particular configurations of strategic interaction affect the likelihood of insurgent success. The idea is that weak actors are likely to win when they adopt a different military strategy than that of stronger actors. Specifically, they are likely to win when they adopt guerrilla strategy and the stronger actors adopt conventional strategy because they can out-will the stronger side. They are also likely to win when they adopt a conventional strategy and stronger actors adopt what he calls barbarism: targeting civilian supporters of the enemy. In contrast, they are likely to lose if both sides adopt similar military strategies because the stronger actors can simply outpower the weaker ones.36 In short, strategic matching empowers the weak, whether states or nonstates, while strategic mismatch is likely to lead to the victory by the powerful. A key difference between this theory and sequencing theory is that while the former stresses the matching of different strategies as the determinant of war outcomes, the latter emphasizes the role of evolution as a key variable for insurgent victory against states. As I show in the case studies, the theory of strategic interactions does not account for the fact that actors change strategies in the middle of war, as many states and nonstate actors do in extrasystemic wars. The theory of strategic interaction is salient here, however, because many extrasystemic wars involve the use of both conventional and guerrilla strategies. As the wars have become more complex in recent decades, Arreguin-Toft’s explanation does a good job of showing how different strategies between the two sides leave different implications for war outcomes.
Third, Gil Merom argues that weaker actors are likely to win when their opponents are democratic and susceptible to pressure from antiwar forces at home. Their chance of victory increases when middle-class constituents, who reject the high costs of lengthy war because the costs fall directly on them and because they oppose war on moral grounds, become strong antiwar forces to block the democratic government from raising the level of violence necessary to win. Soon enough, they begin to threaten to punish the government electorally. Merom’s argument centers on an important dynamic surrounding the process of how democratic governments become weak through the mismanagement of war on the domestic front.37 The theory speaks to a host of insurgencies in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America where many Western democracies have underperformed because they succumbed to powerful pressure to withdraw from those wars. From a broader perspective, Merom’s work advances an important research project on why democracies may fight poorly, especially in small wars and in comparison with nondemocracies. Research has shown that some democracies are prone to lose wars because they are more susceptible to electoral punishment than are nondemocracies. Voters and the mass media are sensitive to spectacular attacks that can shift voting patterns and constrain the ability of democratic leaders to wage war.38 By looking specifically into democracies in small wars, Merom’s work adds pessimism to the sense of vulnerability felt by many democracies constrained by the domestic effects of antiwar norms and institutions.
Fourth, Jeffrey Record argues that external aid is the key to underdog victory. Reviewing eleven insurgent wars from 1775 to 2007, he argues that external assistance correlates more consistently with insurgent success than any other explanation. Acknowledging some roles played by the resolve to fight, strategy, and regime type, he argues not that external aid is sufficient for insurgent victory but that it plays a crucial role in war outcomes between the strong and weak.39 Similarly, Paul Staniland argues that resources and the structure of the preexisting social networks of insurgent groups are crucial parts of their mobilization and operation.40 Material support may be especially significant if it comes from states that can offer firepower, funding, training, and intelligence far beyond the ability of these actors. Some states have incentives to support terrorist groups primarily for strategic reasons, such as to influence neighbors, topple regimes, counter U.S. hegemony, or advance ideologies.41 But state sponsorship is not always helpful to terrorist groups when they risk being the next target. Sponsors that provide safe haven can have incentives to provide information about the groups to the opponent in order to avoid getting into trouble with it.42 After all, as I show in the empirical chapters, the support-based theory functions as part of sequencing theory because they both show how resources enable insurgents to fight both guerrilla and conventional wars.
Fifth, Lyall and Wilson argue that states are likely to fail in COIN missions when they are obsessed with military mechanization. High levels of mechanization, along with external support for insurgents and government occupation of foreign territories, are associated with an increased probability of state defeat because they undermine the state’s ability to collect intelligence from local populations and tell combatants from noncombatants, which increase the difficulty of selectively applying rewards and punishments to the populations. In other words, the modernization of armed forces, seen here in terms of the replacement of manpower with motorized vehicles, such as tanks, trucks, and aircraft, impairs the way state actors fight wars.43 The theory can work in tandem with sequencing theory when the latter offers a chronological lens to deal with how extrasystemic wars have changed over time. Indeed, sequencing theory works where Lyall and Wilson’s theory does not in terms of explaining why prior to the early twentieth century, military modernization did not always lead to state defeat. Rather than assuming that only in the post-twentieth-century period did major powers mechanize their forces, the sequencing perspective factors in the force structure of both sides as a key variable on the outcome of extrasystemic conditions. Mechanization not only has been a major part of extrasystemic war but also has always benefited states more than insurgents. Because the technological gap has remained largely constant for the examined period, if Lyall and Wilson are correct, states should have lost wars roughly at the same rate as today.
Last, Patricia Sullivan