Adapting to Win. Noriyuki Katagiri
working, use various metrics to evaluate the effectiveness and the pace of acceleration, and, if necessary, make changes in strategy to influence war.9 Insurgents conduct wartime strategic assessment in order to move to the next phase, a collection of which will allow us to see war as a sequence. As a theory of social science, sequencing theory helps us simplify the complex reality by focusing on a host of events in a given period.
Sequencing in Revolution and War
The courage and recklessness of the weak fighting the strong are well documented in a number of historical texts, ranging from the story of David and Goliath in the Bible’s book of First Samuel to the late nineteenth-century revolutionary works of Marx to the modern literature on decolonization. Yet pioneer works on the use of sequence did not emerge until the turn of the twentieth century when Vladimir Lenin showed how members of the suppressed class would revolt.10 Of course, the revolutionary leader made little reference to evolutionary thought at the time, although the fundamental ideas had a great deal to do with basic evolutionary concepts. Even then, the use of sequence was not the central thesis of Lenin, who was keener on social revolution and the impact of international capitalism on weak economies. Nor did he intend to help boost backward societies’ chances in war in the first place. As a result, through the twentieth century there was little literature on how to win a war that revolutionary leaders had access to. Insurgents of all sorts had no intellectual text to resort to when devising a strategy for the weak, which is partly why, combined with material weakness, many of them lost extrasystemic wars throughout the nineteenth century.11
Lenin’s notion of carrying out revolution through phases derived from what he called the “revolutionary situation.” By this concept he defined revolution in terms of significant changes in mass mobilization and group struggle. These changes resulted from strategic innovations that produced cycles of development from primitive insurrectionary movements into professional rebellions. In what looked like an orderly progression of events, Lenin formulated a strategy for the suppressed class of social discontent to launch a series of revolutionary movements in the colonial periphery of imperialism through the creation of the revolutionary situation, which was made of the endangered ruling class, dissatisfied people, and politically active workers.12 By then revolutionary movements had concentrated among a small number of underground circles based more on personal relationships than rule-based structures. These movements gradually became specialized into the “vanguard,” who took up challenging roles in the planning and execution of revolutions. One of the most notable innovations of the time was the concept of party-state. Insurgents began to realize that the development of a state was key to winning a revolution, although they still considered the state to be an objective rather than a means to victory. As it turned out, state building became one of the most critical factors for underdogs facing powerful foes. In this way, revolutionary groups evolved into a set of increasingly competitive uprisings of mass violence and became the basis of political and military organizations ready to fight modern war.13
Slowly, Lenin’s thesis spread across the world to shape the way successive leaders devised strategies. One such leader was Mao Zedong, who developed revolutionary ideas into a strategy of people’s war, guerrilla war, and protracted war through his experience with Japan and the Guomindang in the 1930s. Mao’s works covered many other issues than just fighting against imperial forces. His teachings over the following decades spanned issues like leadership, organizations, culture, and political change.14 Yet on guerrilla war, Mao argued that programs of national liberation and anti-imperialism set the stage for the creation of communist parties before they adopted a semidictatorial form of internal domination justified in the name of progress toward socialism.15 In a people’s war, the vanguard party would mobilize the masses and prompt them to plant the seeds of resistance. They would do so in order to overthrow the urban centers of capitalism by encircling these centers with strategic footholds in the periphery. In short, Mao put forth a framework that can be considered a classic sequencing approach; in addition to his statement that opened this chapter, he argued that there “must be a gradual change from guerrilla formations to orthodox regimental organization.”16
Naturally, sequencing theory draws from Mao’s concept of “stages” in people’s war, which proceeded in three stages. The first stage was characterized by what Mao called the “strategic defensive,” in which guerrilla forces would withdraw from the front lines to secure strategic locations, establish bases, and carry out operations on exterior lines behind the enemy. It was followed by the “strategic equilibrium” phase, in which the guerrillas would bring the war to parity by extending the combat area into a stalemate of attrition before they would begin to match the enemy in battles. This phase would leave the enemy frustrated with endless maneuvers of evasion and make it difficult for the enemy to operate effectively, a stage best characterized by efforts to protract the war and gradually reverse the balance of power between the two sides. The last stage was “strategic counteroffensive,” in which guerrillas would form a regular army to overrun enemy forces in conventional battle. At this stage, guerrilla warfare would be rendered a part of people’s war with a reduced role and would be followed by conventional war. Thus the essence of people’s war was to develop a chronologically ordered, symbiotic relationship between the three phases.
Sequencing Theory in the Postwar Era
The end of World War II unleashed a wave of decolonization movements in the 1950s and 1960s, which prompted scholarly research about how these movements evolved and generated a number of approaches in the Western scholarship to deal with the movements. One of the most prominent works of the time that used sequences in insurgency environments was that of Roger Trinquier, a French army officer who witnessed debacles in Indochina and Algeria and saw insurgency movements develop in three phases. First, insurgent groups would conduct isolated raids to attract attention from the population. Second, they would carry out terrorism selectively against enemy personnel. Finally, they would install a small armed band through guerrilla warfare.17 Another major figure was David Galula, whose Counterinsurgency Warfare has been read widely; he saw communist insurgents in China develop through five phases: (1) creation of a communist party, (2) buildup of a united front, (3) execution of guerrilla warfare, (4) movement warfare, and (5) annihilation campaign. For counterinsurgents, he provided a strategy in as many as eight steps: (1) concentrate enough armed forces to destroy or expel the main body of insurgents, (2) detach for the area sufficient troops to oppose an insurgent’s comeback in strength and install these troops in the hamlets, villages, and towns where the population lives, (3) build contact with the population and control its movements in order to cut off its links with the guerrillas, (4) destroy the local insurgent political organizations, (5) set up new provisional local authorities through elections, (6) test these authorities by assigning them various concrete tasks, replace the incompetents, support active leaders, and organize self-defense forces, (7) group and educate the leaders in a national political movement, and (8) win over or suppress the last insurgent remnants.18 Other experts used different sequences than these, adding alternative paths to the growing body of scholarly research. Multiple methods of insurgency generated a set of resultant diverse responses by the government, which in turn allowed insurgents to evade uniform government counterattack.
Sequential strategies worked in tandem with changes in postwar international politics. Calling for independence, nationalist leaders in respective colonies around the world seized the emerging consensus about the immorality of colonialism, Wilsonian self-determination, human rights, and justice. European powers faced the destruction of colonial justification and the emergence of institutions like the United Nations that demanded the secession of power to the suppressed colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Independence movements in the colonies now had strong support from the combination of decolonization processes, norms of self-determination, and international organizations encouraging the transfer of power. During the 1950s and 1960s, norms of sovereignty and institutions emboldened these forces and shaped the international atmosphere for mass decolonization from Kenya to Indonesia to India. One of the key elements in this movement was the power of narrative and argument. Ethical arguments regarding slavery and colonialism fostered changes in long-standing practices, arguably the greatest changes in world politics to occur over the past five hundred years.19