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CHAPTER 2

Origins and Proliferation of Sequencing

All guerrilla units start from nothing and grow.

—Mao Zedong¹

Evolutionary Origins of Sequencing Theory

As this book’s title suggests, the intellectual roots of sequencing theory lie in the application of evolutionary thought to the field of international security. Sequencing theory draws from the combination of two propositions in the field—Darwinian adaptation by natural selection and Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics—that are often considered to be intellectual opposites. First, Darwinian selection operates on the logic of competition in which species, in this case insurgent groups, cope with a hostile environment by making a series of adjustments to survive. Competition and adjustment are no strangers to scholars of international relations; Waltz discusses the need of the state to adapt to the structure of international politics by developing capability and balancing power, or face the fate to “fall by the wayside.”² In terrorism studies, Bruce Hoffman writes that “an almost Darwinian principle of natural selection … seems to affect terrorist organizations, whereby every new terrorist generation learns from its predecessors. Terrorists often analyze the mistakes made by former comrades who have been killed or apprehended.”³

Darwinism is an appropriate tool with which to explore extrasystemic war because it shows how insurgent groups fight powerful adversaries through three mechanisms—variation, selection, and replication—all of which will be seen as key operational assumptions in the empirical chapters that follow. Variation means that insurgents consist of a diversity of combatants seeking to master mutation and innovation for the sake of survival. In selection, states impose pressure on insurgents because the former is stronger than the latter, resulting in faster adaptation by the insurgents who survive. In replication, insurgents are exposed to combat for a long time because they fight on the home territory for years at a time, which helps promote their experience, learning, and innovation, while state forces rotate soldiers on short combat tours to different regions. These conditions are the key to the success of insurgents. Dominic Johnson writes that after all, “selection effects favor weaker sides, such as insurgents and terrorists, because they are more varied, are under stronger selection pressure, and replicate successful strategies faster than the larger forces trying to defeat them, such as the US army in Iraq. To put it simply, large ‘predatory’ forces cause their ‘prey’ to adapt faster than they do themselves.”⁴ In extrasystemic war, therefore, insurgents have the natural advantage over states, although that does not mean that they will always win when they fight. Instead, they are more likely to win when they adapt and evolve. Only successful insurgents survive selection pressure and end up generating models of strategic behavior that can be replicated elsewhere. Darwinism alone, however, is not sufficient to explain variation in extrasystemic war because if it were, the logic would show that insurgents would always be the winner. We need Lamarckism to account for why some insurgents succeed and most fail.

Lamarckism posits that individual efforts are the main driver of species adaptation. Today considered an obsolete theory, especially in comparison to Darwinism, it nevertheless provides a key impetus to sequencing theory. While Darwinism posits that external environment imposes the rule of competition that shapes the chance of species to survive, Lamarckism argues that species acquire the skills of survival and pass the traits to their off-spring in the process of evolution. In other words, only a handful of insurgent groups acquire traits and pass them on over time. In this book, I treat the inheritance of acquired characteristics as part of the temporal framework; that is, insurgent groups acquire and develop traits that are then passed from time A to time B in ways that shape their performance in war. Evolution is an inherently progressive process.⁵ The literature of evolutionary biology treats Darwinism and Lamarckism as being mutually competitive, but treating them in isolation from each other overlooks essential characteristics of war. Investigating three decades of neurobiological research, Peter Hatemi and Rose McDermott write that neither alone holds the key to understanding human behavior like war. Rather, it is necessary to understand the underlying characteristics of both.⁶ Therefore, I see Darwinism and Lamarckism to be complementary with respect of extrasystemic war.

Sequencing theory operates on the combination of Lamarckism and Darwinian selection in a theory called neo-Lamarckism, which maintains that genetic changes are influenced by environmental factors and exogenous forces. In so-called gene-environment interplay, genes provide the platform for the synthesis of proteins, which triggers a series of chemical processes and informs actor behavior in interaction with environmental stimuli, which generate various neurological, cognitive, and emotive implications. The behavior of individual insurgents, the environments they are exposed to, and interaction with others end up shaping the gene expression.⁷ Therefore, Darwinism and Lamarckism play crucial roles at every step of the development of sequence. Insurgent efforts at adaptation and innovation are constantly tested by selection, which occurs in an environment where the actors fight in ways that shape the environment itself and generate opportunities for them to win the war. In this competitive environment, successful insurgents are those that adjust well to changing demands of war and generate a self-sustaining capacity for a later period, while unsuccessful insurgents are those that fail to do so. As Rafael Sagarin writes, “A fundamental tenet of evolutionary biology is that organisms must constantly adapt just to stay in the same strategic position relative to their enemies—who are constantly changing as well.”⁸

Of course, sequencing theory does not capture the full developmental paths of all species. Efforts to theorize war come at the cost of sacrificing a large amount of information. The theory ameliorates this, however, by treating conflict as a sequence. Doing so will allow us to focus on a set of key factors in the order of phases as the determinant of war outcomes. At the same time, the theory does not claim that all insurgents evolve like biological mechanisms. What it does is use the growth of insurgent forces relative to states as a causal explanation for how they fight and defeat states in war. The way insurgents evolve through a series of interactions with state foes shapes the war outcome. Rather than modeling war as a single-shot lottery, I assume that a series of changes occurs in the duration of conflict that strongly shapes the outcome. This view is consistent with that of Scott Gartner, who argues that actors conduct wartime strategic assessment and form beliefs about their likelihood of success from what they observe during war. This assessment, based on what he calls the “dominant indicator approach” because decision makers use numeric indicators of success and failure to make such an assessment, enables decision makers to assess if strategy is 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

Yet because the influence of norms and institutions was hardly uniform across various colonial societies, it was not a decisive factor for insurgent movements to succeed in extrasystemic conflicts. There was remarkable variation in the normative power of decolonization between, for instance, Latin America and Africa. Although in Latin America, the Dominican Republic aligned with the interest of colonialist nations, Guatemala, Mexico, and Haiti proved to be strong anticolonialists at the UN. African countries were even more emotional and vocal than those in Latin America because they embraced more ethnic and cultural ties with the dependents of the territories.²⁰ As a result, wars did not always break out because colonial control in many places ended rather peacefully. After World War II, more countries became independent peacefully, including French colonies like Guinea and the former Soviet republics, while just sixteen anticolonial movements turned violent before they became independent. Therefore, the postwar spread of norms and institutions for independence notwithstanding, most insurgencies seeking decolonization ended up opting against violent recourse. This may have had to do with the recognition that civil resistance would be more effective than violence in achieving decolonization aims and because civil resistance presented fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement, information and education, and participator commitment. Indeed, political participation contributed to enhanced resilience, tactical innovation, and opportunity for civic disruption, and provided less incentive for the regime to maintain the status quo.²¹ Even where movements did achieve independence, there was a limit to the strategic effect of these norms and institutions. Table 1 shows that since 1945, insurgencies have won eleven of eighteen extrasystemic wars, but they have also lost seven: in Madagascar, Malaya, Hyderabad, Kenya, Cameroon, East Timor, and Iraq. Furthermore, norms and institutions of independence were not always the same thing as insurgent victory. While victory in extrasystemic war did lead to independence most of the time, insurgents’ defeat, too, sometimes gave them freedom, as seen in places like Cameroon in the 1960s. The norms and institutions did not empower the anticolonial insurgency in Angola and Mozambique, either, because the outcome hinged more strongly on the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, which was caused primarily by a few select junior officers in the Portuguese military dissatisfied with the way they were fighting in Guinea Bissau. For these reasons, while the normative and institutional explanation may be relevant to wars of independence, it is not sufficient to explain variation in extrasystemic war outcomes.

Sequencing theory presents itself as an extension of academic discourse about analyzing conflict through stages. In recent years, there has been an increasing number of such works that use phases as a means of analysis. In addition to Gartner, Marc Sageman investigates a three-phase evolution of terrorist groups in order to follow the development of al-Qaeda.²² Not surprisingly, the need to confront these untraditional security challenges has spawned a sequence-based response from military analysts. David Kilcullen discusses al-Qaeda’s four-phase evolution in terms of what he calls the “accidental guerrilla syndrome.”²³ Military practitioners and policy makers have similarly highlighted the importance of strategic adaptation in more contemporary experiences. John Nagl’s work has called for the U.S. army to change and adapt, arguing that organizational culture is key to the ability to learn from events, which is why the British army successfully conducted COIN operations in Malaya and why the American army failed to do so in Vietnam. The British army, because of its role as a colonial police force and the organizational characteristics created by its history and culture, was better able to quickly learn and apply the lessons of COIN.²⁴ Evidence shows that the U.S. military has relearned lessons from recent COIN experiences, improved its ability to conduct stability operations, changed the institutional bias against counterinsurgency, and figured out how to account for successes gained from the learning process.²⁵ The U.S. military has also successfully adapted to untraditional security missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Learning from two centuries of small wars and nation building, the United States increasingly has emerged successful from insurgency wars, carrying out the surge in Iraq most recently.²⁶ These research findings buttress the importance of organizational adaptation in COIN settings, especially the U.S. military’s adaptation to the changing environment of the Iraq War, in which “successive and sequential historical decisions shaped how the army would and could function in Iraq, particularly as its missions changed during the course of the war.”²⁷

Table 1. Extrasystemic Wars After 1945

Learning and Proliferation of Sequencing Practice

What explains variation in the outcomes of extrasystemic war is the way both sides of war fight in sequence. But how do insurgent forces know about sequencing? The answer rests with their ability and willingness to learn to put the war in sequence. Insurgent forces need to learn from wars of the past and adapt to their specific environment and spread a demonstration effect from one battlefield to another, from one country to another, in order to generate a cascade of insurgency victory across the world. But because there are constraints in the process of learning, receiving and accepting new ideas, and ultimately spreading them, few can consciously adopt effective models. These constraints include the availability of communications technology and the possibility that actors interpret things differently. Actors also learn selectively; research shows that humans learn much more from their own experiences than from those of others.²⁸ Furthermore, learning is not the same thing as adopting a new policy; one can learn something but decide not to use it. Of course, these problems do not hamper only insurgents; states, too, have had trouble figuring out how to innovate. That is why, again in Algeria, French generals did not necessarily apply the lessons they learned from their experiences in Indochina. Yet one of the major reasons why many insurgent groups have lost wars over the years had to do with the fact that they never learned from their mistakes. Indeed, evidence shows that many of them have repeatedly used the wrong strategy against the same enemies, even though they had been losing such wars for decades. Therefore, many groups actually fail to evolve across generations, which explains why some groups “fight the last war” again and keep losing. Table 2 indicates that throughout the history of extrasystemic war before 1945, thirteen of sixteen groups that lost once went back to fight the same foe using the same strategy.

There are at least two reasons why these groups used the same strategy repeatedly. The first is the availability of military technologies that favored a conventional strategy and force structure. As noted earlier, global attraction to modern military technology in part explains why many insurgent forces fought extrasystemic wars in mostly conventional fashion in the nineteenth century. The other reason is the limited access the insurgent forces had to information about foreign wars. Shortages of communications devices, networks, and printing presses through which to learn from other groups gave insurgents little choice but to fight wars the way they knew how. As information technology, overseas travel, and printing presses became available over time, some insurgent leaders shared ideas through publications, meetings, interviews, and speeches. These leaders received an early education in Europe, where they exposed themselves to a diverse set of ideas including Marxism, learned Western languages and customs, and embraced nationalist thought before they returned to their motherlands. While many of them embraced class struggle and the philosophy of Marx and Lenin, the proliferation of learning devices coincided with the time of Maoist people’s war. While Mao’s ideas have influenced many revolutionary leaders generation after generation, they were made available only in the early twentieth century and came too late for many insurgent leaders who had little access to technology and information. Furthermore, these ideas proved to be so hard to replicate outside China that they impacted other revolutionaries only variably. Variation in insurgents’ access to technology, press, and information naturally had dissimilar effects on insurgent movements around the world. Among a diverse set of anticolonial forces in Southeast Asia to Latin America to Africa, Mao proved to be a key shaper of decolonization movements, but only in limited ways. As a result, revolutionaries across the globe embraced the sequential ideas with local characteristics to fit the latter, creating variation in areas like Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

In Southeast Asia, major extrasystemic wars of recent decades have included the Malayan Emergency of 1948 to 1960 and the Indochina War of 1946 to 1954, both of which demonstrated that learning and adaptation of sequencing, or lack thereof, was a critical determinant of war outcomes. In Malaya, Chin Peng led a communist rebellion against British colonial forces under the banner of the Malaya Communist Party (MCP). For much of the emergency period, Chin maintained limited contact with Mao, received little support, and ignored the need to “win hearts and minds” of the population. A few years into the war, the MCP realized that its guerrilla strategy was not working, so it issued a policy directive in 1951 to urge its members to refrain from coercive measures on the population. The MCP also received advice from China and Russia to modify the struggle in line with the growing emphasis on “peaceful coexistence” with the population, but the MCP minimally adopted these measures. By the late 1950s the independence movement was practically over. In Indochina, Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap learned a great deal from Mao, copied some ideas but generated their own versions, and successfully led a phased war against the French in their quest for independence. One of Ho’s first official statements after the outbreak of war was that Vietminh leaders would follow the people’s war. Another Vietminh leader, Truong Chinh, authored a pamphlet called The Resistance Will Win, which drew extensively from Mao’s writings on guerrilla war. In contrast to the MCP, the Indochina Communist Party (ICP) worked closely with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Vietnam had assisted Mao during the Chinese civil war, and China reciprocated during the Indochina War. In fact, the CCP’s victory in 1949 became a catalyst for the Vietminh to resurrect the ICP in 1951. The Vietminh closely studied the CCP’s wars against Japan and Chiang Kai-shek while translating documents and training materials into Vietnamese and distributing among troops.

Table 2. Repeated Extrasystemic Wars with the Same Strategies

In Latin America, Mao’s ideas influenced the thoughts of revolutionaries such as Che Guevara and Regis Debray about how to carry out guerrilla wars through stages. Guevara made clear the origin of his ideas on guerrilla war when he said that “we have always looked up to Comrade Mao Tse-tung. When we were engaged in guerrilla warfare we studied Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s theory on guerrilla warfare. Mimeographed copies published at the front lines circulated widely among our cadres; they were called ‘food from China.’ We studied this little book carefully and learned many things.”²⁹ A number of chapters in his selected works resonated closely with the ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, including the concept of vanguard, people’s war, and people’s army. Guevara praised Giap in his prologue to Giap’s book when it was brought into Cuba and published in La Guerra del Pueblo: Ejercito del Pueblo.³⁰ Regis Debray, too, displayed a considerably detailed knowledge of the associated readings, citing authors like Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao, as well as Cuban national hero Jose Marti.³¹ In fact, Mao’s ideas became so popular that local leaders applied them in many instances against their own governments. Gilberto Vieira, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Colombia, outlined five phases of civil war: (1) preparation and organization, (2) large-scale program of psychological action against the government, (3) isolation of armed forces, (4) division of armed forces, and (5) economic, political, and social reconstruction of the zones of operations, using American aid.³² These leaders communicated closely with their revolutionary counterparts elsewhere as they commanded their wars of liberation.

In Latin America, however, local characteristics and geography intervened to generate a diverse effect. In particular, Guevara’s famed “foco theory,” which argued that revolutions would begin with a small core of discontented elements and blossom over time into an organized group, stood out as a clear deviation from people’s war. Accordingly, Guevara anticipated that a revolution in Cuba along with Fidel Castro would proceed through three stages, with the first phase including small-sized guerrilla units that would mix with the physical and human conditions of the battlefield. Unlike the Maoist concept of “base areas,” the guerrilla units would carry out limited attacks at this phase. In another important contrast to Mao’s theory, revolutionaries would not wait until all conditions were met but instead would allow a small guerrilla nucleus—foco—to operate liberally. In the process of guerrilla growth, the battle would reach a point where commanders would move around to spread violence. This spread of violence would establish a rough parity of power where a compact group would emerge and seek to dominate the war. The final phase would consist of the rebels successfully capturing large cities and overrunning the army. In the other contrast to Mao’s theory, mobile operations introduced in this phase would not replace guerrilla fighting; instead, regular forces would be a supplement to guerrilla forces.³³ It was clear that Guevara’s theory had a sequential element, but it apparently developed on a different path.

In Africa, there were numerous extrasystemic wars in recent history, including the Ashantis, Zulus, Boers, and Senegalese. Here again, we see the impact of learning and proliferation of sequencing ideas on the way local insurgent forces fought extrasystemic wars. Many of these tribal groups had little luck throughout the European colonial period and until the 1960s when decolonization movements became widespread. Among the prominent leaders were Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, and Frantz Fanon. Leading an insurgency in Guinea-Bissau against Portugal, Cabral read Mao’s writings when he was in China in 1960 and studied them further before he opened his war in 1963.³⁴ Fighting a long but increasingly successful struggle for independence, he praised Mao, Guevara, and Nkrumah as champions of Third World revolution.³⁵ In Ghana, Nkrumah shared the idea of fighting over multiple phases as the key to liberate the territory when he followed Lenin’s masterpiece—Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism—to criticize the residual colonialism in his aptly titled book Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism.³⁶ In Algeria, Fanon developed what was essentially a sequencing strategy, a little-known fact for a psychiatrist best known for the treatment of peasant rage and emotions in suppressed societies. During the Algerian war for independence, Fanon was a key ideological leader behind the operations of the FLN and National Liberation Army (ALN), which also advocated a multiphase approach that differed from Mao’s. He anticipated that in the first phase, a small group of frustrated individuals would make a spontaneous attack on colonial forces in their local areas. This period would be characterized by small-scale movement; “the aim and the program of each locally constituted group was local liberation.” In the second phase, colonial forces would respond with a series of large-scale offensives. Through these offensives the forces would turn into guerrilla operatives, similar to those seen in a peasant revolt. In the final phase, the revolt would transform itself into a revolutionary war. The insurrectionists would evolve into warriors of liberation strong enough to decimate the colonial leaders and regain sovereignty. Through three phases, according to Fanon, a war of liberation would be complete.³⁷ Of course the Algerian war per se did not proceed like he anticipated; it was mostly a series of insurgent operations using local cells and individual networks in hit-and-run operations in avoidance of frontal attacks on French troops. Although in later phases Algerians made efforts to modernize forces, the center of gravity lay in the underground terrorist cells. Therefore, the war was highly divergent from the people’s war concept, although it had apparent links with sequencing ideas. These revolutionary leaders inherited the intellectual impetus from Lenin and Mao and localized the practice in ways that fit their strategic environments. Sequencing strategies gradually disseminated in small pieces from the mainstream approach while retaining distinctive revolutionary characteristics.