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CHAPTER 3

How Sequencing Theory Works

What Makes Sequencing Theory?

Recent proliferation of sequential strategies, both in practice and through academia, attests to the growing recognition of the importance of using sequences in conflict. The existing ideas and works, however, need an overarching framework, which requires us to explore precisely how sequencing theory works. To answer this question I disaggregate its components in the context of extrasystemic war. In so doing, I reveal the presence of three phases—guerrilla war, conventional war, and state building—that compose the theory. I also show that sequencing strategies are likely to emerge when insurgent leaders put together a set of these phases in order to evolve during the war, creating a host of sequential patterns distinct from other strategies designed to fight stronger enemies. Indeed, a number of factors encourage insurgent leaders to choose a sequencing strategy over others, including external support, internal popular support, leadership attributes, and internal weaknesses of the states they fight. At the center of insurgent leaders’ decision to adopt sequencing strategies is the general acceptance of these strategies as a means of overthrowing powerful rivals. At the same time, however, there are different requirements for each of the six sequencing strategies. In this section, I clarify a set of different requirements for those phases to constitute a sequence.

Guerrilla War

The first of the three phases of sequencing theory is guerrilla warfare, where we see both sides engage in hit-and-run operations for a sustained period. In this phase states and insurgents exchange low-intensity violence while mobilizing the population as human buffers and sources of supplies and striving to build informal networks as support bases. Guerrilla war is, according to Samuel Huntington, “a form of warfare by which the strategically weaker side assumes the tactical offensive in selected forms, times, and places.”¹ The core of guerrilla warfare rests with the competition for popular support because it is the population that provides the sine qua non of guerrilla war—food, lodging, sanctuary, intelligence, recruitment sources, and legitimacy. Thus Chalmers Johnson states that “guerrilla warfare is civilian warfare …, conflict between a professional army … and an irregular force, less well trained, less well equipped, but actively supported by the population of the area occupied by the army.”² Of course, in practice the distinction between combatants and the population is difficult to draw because the former effectively integrates the latter in combat, and one can hardly distinguish the innocent from civilian-clothed militias. Thus the separation between guerrillas and the population is analytical. Needless to say, the primacy of popular support has been widely acknowledged in the literature.³ For Mao, “weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale.”⁴ David Galula notes that “military action is secondary to the political one, its primary purpose being to afford the political power enough freedom to work safely with the population.”⁵ In “colonial struggles against imperial powers,” writes Huntington, the war “begins with the mobilization of new groups into politics and the creation of new political institutions.”⁶ In short, the key to success in the phase of guerrilla warfare is popular support. The side that seizes popular support and builds strong bases is likely to dominate the guerrilla war phase.

There are many factors that shape a successful guerrilla insurgency, but one of the key factors is external support. State support is critical for insurgents to be successful because outside resources increase their internal sustainability.⁷ Insurgents also benefit from other groups that might coalesce to generate a united front. Some groups ally with weak states in the neighborhood. Otherwise unable to challenge enemies on their own, insurgents exploit these states that are too weak to prevent their access, states that seek to foster instability in their rivals, and large refugee diasporas that allow the groups to establish bases. States that host them tend to intervene in negotiations between governments and these groups and block progress toward peace when they pursue their own agendas and because these sanctuaries complicate intelligence gathering, COIN operations, and peacemaking.⁸ External aid comes in both wartime and peacetime, but it is critical for insurgents to receive aid during wartime when material shortages are prevalent.

Yet state sponsorship may not always be helpful. Having a sponsor that provides safe haven actually increases the risk of being eliminated by the target because sponsors may be tempted to provide information to the target to avoid potential costs from military operations within their territory.⁹ External support can backfire, furthermore, under moral hazards when an expectation of such support encourages groups to fight recklessly in the hope of getting it. Material aid gives them the expectation that a war will be easier to win, so they may become unnecessarily aggressive in the assumption of false insurance.¹⁰ Finally, getting such support is not easy. Winning outside support is highly competitive and uncertain. Even when provided, such support is not a philanthropic gesture but an exchange based on the relative power of each party to the transaction, and its effect is more ambiguous than is often acknowledged. Competition for foreign intervention occurs in a context of economic, political, and organizational inequality that systematically advantages some challengers over others.¹¹ External support is not always the decisive factor in extrasystemic war.

Conventional War

In guerrilla warfare, it is the population that plays a central role while the army provides a supportive function. In conventional war, it is the opposite. The army takes the main role in crushing enemy capacity in decisive engagement and gaining control of the population, territory, or vital industrial and communications centers while protecting the population behind the front lines. But conventional war does not serve states and insurgents equally. Military history makes it clear that it is states, rather than insurgents, that enjoy the benefit of using regular armies in war because they have the inherent advantage in resources and organization.¹² Western powers taxed their citizens and monopolized the production and dissemination of advanced weapons. In contrast, nonstate insurgents did not have any other means but to pick up arms after battle, use aid from allies, and secretly purchase weapons from foreign agents. Naturally, the quality and quantity of weapons imports and advisers did not match those of states.

Conventional war has evolved to become what it is today. Risking over-simplification, we know from history that by the fourteenth century, not just European powers but also colonized peoples in non-European territory had developed armies of heavy cavalry and infantry, but Europe led the way to add the power of the siege cannon in the mid-fifteenth century. Later in that century came the creation of standing armies that dramatically increased the size of force structure along with the expansion of government expenditures on military affairs.¹³ The evolution of land and sea transport after 1815 had a strong association with the development of the steam engine, which affected the balance of power between European powers and their colonial subjects. The railway in Europe then eliminated prolonged marches and allowed huge armies to be moved quickly.¹⁴ Growth in military technology and European imperial motives worked hand in hand to produce an overwhelming firepower advantage that brought down a host of political entities in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Middle East in the following centuries. At the center of this European expansionism was the conventional military power that drew on the dramatic innovation of weapons.¹⁵ Weapons evolved through stages of gunpowder, cannons, crossbows, and atomic weapons, which reflected the notion that development in military technologies changes the nature of military organizations and modern war.¹⁶ Until World War I armies consisted mostly of infantry and were organized around the principle of “foraging,” in which the bulk of their supplies was obtained from local populations. Foraging involved the use of monetary payments, forced requisition, and simple looting to acquire provisions from populations near the conflict zone.¹⁷ The end of World War I saw the replacement of manpower with motorized vehicles like tanks, which increased the mobility and survivability of military forces on industrial-age battlefields.

State Building

Military power is a determinant of victory, but it is not the only one. As Lenin’s party-state concept attests, we must add state-building efforts to the equation. Both sides engage in building government structures and seek to monopolize the means of violence over a given territory. Central to the process of building a state is the control of institutions and the growth of organizational capacity to govern the territory. Generally understood as a set of formal and informal rules that constrain and reward human behavior,¹⁸ institutions here are a generic group of formal organizations such as political parties and civil service, police, financial, legal, and educational systems that facilitate government functions. Institutions are quite visible in major centers of activity, such as the capital. Yet the process of state building is more than just the establishment of institutions. Insurgent groups must build national unity with popular consensus, win international recognition, yield economic productivity, collect revenue, and pay for the war. State building may take place simultaneously with the phases of conventional and guerrilla war because they are not mutually exclusive.

The role of state building has been overlooked in the study of irregular war because it does not center on the destruction of enemy forces. Yet state building is a quite distinctive phase, as it belongs to a separate analytical category from fighting war.¹⁹ Michael Doyle singles out this category as a key to the success of independence movements in their endeavor against empires as they manage to institutionalize the participation of their newly mobilized citizenry.²⁰ Organization is the key to rebellion in terms of control, finance, recruitment, violence, and resources.²¹ While state building is a more subtle phase than guerrilla war and conventional war, we see the phase of state building when these institutions perform a central role during the war.²²

States have resources to build a government in colonial territories, but they face challenges in the process. Governments face two types of “dilemmas” when they deploy forces overseas and intervene in foreign nations, a common scenario in extrasystemic wars. The “duration dilemma” means that states that occupy foreign territories provide security for the locals, but the welcome is likely to decrease over time as populations seek to reassert their control and press the state to leave. The “footprint dilemma” shows that while foreign states’ presence is needed for security in local societies, it may increase the danger of stimulating nationalist resistance, as we saw vividly in the 2003 Iraq War, for instance.²³ These dilemmas challenge foreign governments’ efforts to be adept at building a state in conflict zones. Thus occasionally insurgents outperform foreign governments in building institutions, resulting in a more equal balance of political power and a growing ability to fight war better. This scenario may be likely when states have not built a counterbalancing structure. In what Tilly calls “multiple sovereignty,” insurgents obtain recognition and receive support from the population. The war becomes a polarized venue for the contention of political control between states and insurgents who compete for the public mandate and negotiate autonomy.²⁴

How Do Insurgents “Adapt to Win”?

In a highly contested series of violence against government opponents, insurgents boost the chances of achieving their goals by evolving into an organized army with serious work for statehood. The process appears as war moves from one phase to another in the temporal sense. The decision to move is mutual, because it rests with the insurgents’ ability and willingness to do so, coupled with the ability and willingness of the states to block the evolution. In other words, evolution is not complete unless the state side follows the insurgent’s move to a next phase, and vice versa. The state side often uses its enormous resources to dictate the term of violence in order to veto the insurgent move. Otherwise, the war develops through combinations of the following three phases—guerrilla war, conventional war, and state building. Insurgent forces grow more organized and militarily capable, and consequently more likely to make a transition from one phase to another and achieve their ends. There are, however, different sets of requirements to meet, depending on between which phases the transition takes place.

First, a transition from guerrilla war to conventional war occurs under two conditions. First, insurgent forces must gain a significant advantage in the level of popular support over their opponents. Popular support is the key ingredient here for the transition to take place because the population generates manpower for the army, raises money for the insurgency, and provides legitimacy for the military operations it conducts in the conventional war phase. Without it, the army would have to fight the war as its social foundations decay quickly. The other condition is that, once the war moves beyond the conventional phase, the insurgents’ armed branch must have sufficient resources to continue to protect the population and territory. In other words, insurgent forces need both popular support and military power to evolve from a guerrilla group to a modern army. We see a good example of this transition in segments of many extrasystemic wars; for example, the Somali-British War of the early twentieth century demonstrates how difficult it is to complete the transition if the insurgents do not have adequate resources even if they initially managed to win local support. The Somali insurgency lasted nearly two decades but eventually collapsed because they became vulnerable to growing British firepower and airpower despite the fact that the transition from the guerrilla war phase to conventional war was successful.

Similarly, a transition from the guerrilla war phase to state building takes place under two conditions. On the one hand, insurgents must win a popular mandate to build a state so that the population will support their emerging institutions. Popular support is the key ingredient here because, without it, government institutions would lack legitimacy and resources to become an independent state, a necessary ingredient to win extrasystemic war. The other condition is that the institutions they create in the second phase have enough resources to reinforce the support base. Stable institutions are the key here because, without them, the insurgents would soon lose a key popular support base to continue their state-building efforts. In other words, insurgent forces need to outperform their state foes in terms of popular support and institutions in order to evolve. A good example of this transition is the Indochina War, in which the insurgent Vietminh forces initially succeeded in winning hearts and minds of the people. This victory at the local level allowed them to launch a nationwide political effort to reestablish the political party to drive the war effort. The party leadership generated a powerful effect to centralize the war effort because the population supported efforts to build an independent state.

A shift from state building to conventional war has two requirements. On the one hand, the political institutions built in the first phase must generate resources, policy, strategic direction, and administrative support for military operations to empower the insurgency. Institutional stability and resourcefulness are critical ingredients here because, without them, armed forces will likely collapse. On the other hand, insurgent forces must develop the capability to protect these institutions as they fight for independence. Short in military power, insurgent groups would lose policy direction and fall into aimless mass killing. In other words, for the transition from state building to conventional war to work, insurgents need both military power and institutions.

Fourth, a transition from conventional war to guerrilla war occurs when insurgents already have a fairly developed and organized army that can protect the population and maintain order and territorial integrity against state aggression in a volatile environment. Military power is the key factor that enables insurgents to consolidate gains made in the conventional war phase into the guerrilla war phase because insurgents would otherwise be too powerless to protect noncombatants and leave themselves vulnerable to enemy attack. At the same time, the army must have a significant level of popular support because the population generates manpower for the army, raises money for the war, and increases legitimacy for military operations it conducts in the conventional war phase.

Finally, insurgent groups may take the war from the state-building phase to guerrilla war when the institutions are capable of governing the people and winning popular support for the insurgency. Stable institutions are the key here because without them the insurgents would soon lose a key support base to continue their state-building efforts. In other words, they need both popular support and institutions in order to evolve. On the other hand, the insurgents must win popular support to build a state and make the institutions legitimate. Popular support is the key ingredient here because without it institutions lack legitimacy and resources to function as an independent state. Thus the insurgents must generate sufficient social support for the state-building process.

Adaptation and evolution are key causal factors of insurgent victory because the transition from one phase to another empowers the insurgents in two critical ways. First, groups elicit greater expectations of success from the population, who in turn invest more in their efforts. The stakes become higher, and the insurgents become more determined to win and more aggressive on the battlefield. This has negative consequences for states. Because insurgents fight harder now, they are harder to defeat and ready to fight longer. They begin to win more battles, making it difficult for states to score victories. As a result, the probability of state victory diminishes, increasing the length of time necessary for states’ potential victory. 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, they have won only 15 percent of them. 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, and kills the livestock. The burden of destruction in the first phase falls on the people who are forced to pay for war. Thus local support declines and guerrilla operations decrease. Even if the war moves to the second phase, insurgents suffer from the drainage of popular support, followed by the reduction of military capability. Finally, the second phase is unlikely to go well because the population draws negative impressions from the process. Collapse of conventional strategy in the first phase sends them a signal that the war is not going well. They learn that an initial military effort has failed despite their effort and sacrifice, so now they are less likely to support guerrilla causes. States welcome this change of popular sentiment, which enhances their resolve to win and, naturally, their chances to dominate this phase. Therefore, the degenerative model does not work.

Premature Model

The premature model is made of a sequence of actions that expand the primitive model into the conventional model. It reflects a form of strategic evolution in the direction opposite to the degenerative model. In this model, both sides start a guerrilla war, but insurgents realize that the war is not decisive enough, so they crawl out of the jungle and mountains and use their remaining resources to organize and arm soldiers. By the time they reach the second phase, however, any army they organize is likely to be overwhelmed because the preceding guerrilla activities had drained insurgents’ resources and resolve, boosted public frustration, and diminished popular support. The state side responds to the shift because it knows that, having the advantage in resources, training, and organization on the battlefield, doing so will increase their chance of victory. The war will remain irregular, however, if the state sees no value in deploying regular armies and is able to destroy the insurgents at that point. In short, the model characterizes the insurgent prematurity in the level of preparation for conventional war.

The premature model takes place when the transition occurs “prematurely.” That is, insurgent groups end up fighting like this when they do not have resources or willingness to build a state even if they do have capability and willingness to fight both like an army and guerrilla forces in different time periods. Alternately, the premature model may occur when the state side succeeds in sabotaging insurgents’ early efforts to carry out a counterrevolution, stopping their evolution short of becoming a mature political organization. Because of these potential dangers associated with the model, the insurgent groups need to be flexible and resourceful enough to fight in both conventional and unconventional manners. They also need to initially act in the belief that the guerrilla strategy suits the particular terrain they fight on and is militarily more effective than the other options, only to realize later that switching to a conventional war strategy makes more sense and only if the state side reciprocates in creating such a transition.

There are two extrasystemic cases where insurgents fought along this model, but none has been successful. By the time a war reaches its second phase, most insurgents normally have used up their resources to build a powerful army after protracted guerrilla combat, while the state side keeps its material advantage. There are few resources left in the insurgents’ governing organizations to collect taxes and sustain the activities. Another reason is that the two component phases of the premature model are not compatible with each other when they are put into this sequence. The initial phase depicts the execution of low-intensity combat for a sustained period of time when the population gets involved in cross fire and makes sacrifices in the food and shelter. Even if insurgents survive the first phase, the war takes heavy tolls on them and destroys resources needed for the second phase. Thus insurgent bases become precipitously underresourced and weakened along with the reduction of operational ability and popular support.

Maoist Model

Unlike the previous four models, the Maoist model proceeds in three phases. In the first phase of state building, insurgents retreat into a safe area and build a united front. This phase entails efforts on both sides of war to “build the state” by establishing and strengthening political parties and puppet regimes, bureaucracy, education, and constitutional systems and unify the movement across these institutions. Successful countermeasures by the state side, such as securing the occupied areas and boosting puppet regimes, may make the insurgents too weakened at this stage to proceed to the next. In other words, insurgents attempt to build the institutions in order to establish a state entity with sovereign recognition in mind. In extrasystemic war, the base area functions as an important foundation for mobilization, empowerment, and deployment. In Guinea-Bissau, for instance, rebels built up the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde as well as various political systems as the organizing body to lead the insurgency against the Portuguese.

The institutions give insurgent groups adequate resources to engage in low-intensity conflict. These resources also allow them to move their battles from rural areas to towns, give access to the urban population, gain publicity, and enhance political appeal. Johnson writes, “The establishment of rural revolutionary base areas and the encirclement of the cities from the countryside is of outstanding and universal practical importance for the present revolutionary struggles of all the oppressed nations and peoples.”³⁷ This phase has an important function of reinforcing the state-building effort. Success in building a state structure in turn allows insurgents to make a transition to the third phase of conventional war where they have gained a great deal of manpower and firepower. Military modernization allows them to carry out counteroffensive campaigns involving both mobile and positional forms of combat. Battle areas expand in size. As such, this sequence of actions has a semblance to people’s war, in which insurgents “promote the mobilization and organization of peasants in lands subject to imperialist interference, leading to guerrilla warfare and finally to regular warfare against the forces of imperialism and their local allies.”³⁸ It starts with the institutions playing a key role, followed by guerrilla war and conventional war to complete a sequence.

A rare sequence, the Maoist model works through the mechanism of mutual reinforcement between phases. The first phase of state building is sustained by the second phase of guerrilla war in that the institutions allow insurgents to wage guerrilla resistance. We see the consolidation of political power in insurgency, as institutions provide resources to help the population so as to elicit their support. In turn, popular support strengthens back the institutions as the institutions become embedded in the society through public discourse. This mutual reinforcement mechanism works between the second and third phases, too, in that insurgents are more likely to win conventional war if they gain advantage in military power over states. In turn, armed forces supplement the insurgency by offering firepower and protecting the vulnerable. This socialization allows the armed forces to become the principal instrument of destruction. As Mao said, “Without a people’s army, the people have nothing.”³⁹

Specifically, the Maoist model generally occurs when both states and insurgent groups have access to adequate resources and willingness to fight in all three phases. There must be sufficient realization on the part of both state and insurgent leaders that they must focus their resources on building a state in the first phase of nation building. The political effort must correspond with insurgents’ efforts to fight the war on the military front, starting with guerrilla war. Geographic conditions should support guerrilla movements, but simultaneously there must be geographic conditions that support armies to transform heavy weapons, organize, and fight in conventional manner in the final phase. To make it even more difficult, the insurgent leaders at least must have the recognition that they have to proceed in sequence and must put their war efforts into proper sequence.

Progressive Model

The progressive model proceeds in three phases. The first phase of guerrilla war sees both sides fighting primarily in search for popular support. Achievement of adequate support propels them into a second phase, where they strive to consolidate their political party, build bureaucracies, generate resources, distribute wealth across the society, and appeal for foreign recognition. The combination of guerrilla war and state building is the cornerstone of many independence movements in the postwar era. The two phases alone, however, are not sufficient for insurgencies to win; they must be reinforced by military power. Thus at this stage, they will gain control of arms, which will be a key determinant of battles as well as a key consolidator of the political process. By way of using foreign aid and material resources, insurgents become better armed, trained, and organized, while popular consensus emerges across the territory in the direction of independence. Furthermore, their army develops more efficient units, with chain of command and control improving between the field and central authority. State attempts to arrest this development by the use of brute force often fail as most of them find their forces stretched thin in enemy territory. The third phase characterizes the shift of military balance from the state to insurgents.

Specifically, the progressive model is likely to become the strategy of choice over other options when state and insurgent leaders possess both capability and willingness to fight in all three phases. Ideally, the terrain they fight on supports guerrilla operations as well as large movements, eventually allowing insurgent groups to develop capability, transport heavy weapons, organize, and fight in conventional manner. Yet there must also be sustained efforts by at least the insurgent side to build a range of political and economic institutions to support their war effort in such a way as to transform guerrilla operations into more conventional military missions. To make it even more difficult, the insurgent leaders at least must have the recognition that they have to proceed in sequence and must put the war efforts into proper sequences.

There are several challenges associated with insurgent efforts to adopt this sequence. To start with, it is difficult to mobilize the population because people have often been socialized into colonial control and tend not to have the courage to rise. That makes the population pool too small to draw on for mobilization and recruitment. On the other hand, state forces seek to arrest the growth of insurgency at this early stage, but it may be the hardest stage to detect it because the latter may deliberately take a low profile or simply fail to garner much attention. Even if they do get noticed, it is difficult to know which insurgents will develop into a significant threat that will justify a quick and definitive reaction by states. At the same time, however, states find it relatively easy to attack the insurgency because the group is small, inexperienced, geographically dispersed, and therefore vulnerable. Along the same lines, insurgents must undergo a dangerous path of extinction unless they have a growing population. This makes it ideal for the states to strike fast, hard, and early.⁴⁰ Again, failing that, states will find that the longer the war gets, the more difficult it becomes.

In the two-hundred-year history of extrasystemic war, there have been three instances of insurgents fighting along this model, and they have all completed the transition to win them. The progressive model works through the mechanism of mutual reinforcement. The insurgents must do well in the first phase to do as well in the second. For this transition to succeed, insurgents need an organization strong enough to help the population. On the other hand, strong popular support will help the insurgents to consolidate the political process, as the use of violence against enemies often has a unifying effect.⁴¹ Thus, primary emphasis is placed on the government’s collaboration with the population. Similarly, in the third phase of conventional war, the insurgents must use government and party resources to support the war-fighting apparatus. History is replete with botched efforts toward independence because the leaders were powerless.

Figure 4. The likelihood of insurgent success.

Strategic Evolution and the Likelihood of Victory

The main argument of this book is that the likelihood of insurgent victory is a function of insurgent ability and willingness to adapt and fight state adversaries in an evolutionary method. The relationship between the way insurgents evolve (or do not evolve) and victory is causal because the choice of sequencing models has a powerful impact on the insurgents’ chances of achieving their political ends. The relationship between evolution and war outcomes is also empirical because the popularity of the models is closely associated with the likelihood of insurgent victory. Figure 4 and Table 4 indicate that while the conventional model is most popular, at 63 percent, followed by the primitive model at 22 percent, their probabilities of success are 19 percent and 16 percent, respectively, essentially closely associated with failure. The degenerative and premature models are less common, but they have not been successful even once. In contrast, the Maoist and progressive models are rare, with only 3 percent and 2 percent of all the samples, but they bolster insurgent performance the most. In other words, the conventional model is the most frequent but unlikely to work for insurgents, while the primitive and degenerative models are moderately frequent but unlikely to lead to success. It is also clear that the premature model is rare but unlikely to work, whereas the Maoist and progressive models are rare but very likely to work. Thus the relationship between frequency and success is inverse, which suggests that these last two models are associated with the recent increase in the probability of insurgent victory. In wars through the 1940s, insurgent groups tended to fight wars quite simplistically. When wars were simple, the insurgents were the losers. Since the 1940s, however, insurgent groups have evolved by adopting successful models.

Table 4. Chance of Insurgent Victory

These findings generate a set of key insights into our understanding of guerrilla war, conventional war, and state building. In most extrasystemic wars, guerrilla war alone does not work for insurgents. Insurgents have learned this only in recent decades. Instead, a guerrilla strategy works well as a supplement to conventional war and state-building phases. On the other hand, state building has become a necessary factor for insurgent victory. A successful state-building program will boost insurgents’ ability to fight guerrilla war and conventional war, but it needs to be augmented by good performance in the phases as well. The dynamic relationship among popular support, military power, state building, and the likelihood of victory indicates that the more support insurgents have, the more institutions they build, and the more power they have, the more successful they are.⁴² As insurgents evolve from a group of guerrilla insurgents into a modern state with an army, they have a greater chance to win.