By Omar Ashour for Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI)
26 January 2016
Since the 1970s, the number of victories by insurgents over stronger incumbents has risen significantly while the ability of incumbents to defeat much weaker insurgents has decreased. Today, Omar Ashour cites seven possible reasons for this phenomenon, two of which particularly apply to Syria and Iraq.
The following extract is part of a larger report ("Why does the Islamic State [IS] Endure and Expand?") which the Instituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) published in December 2015. If you are interested in the broader text, which explores IS’ military capabilities, the strategy it’s pursuing against the West, and the current and long-term counter-strategies being employed against the group, go here.
Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, there has been a steady rise in insurgents’ capacities. Some scholars have shown a significant rise in the victories of insurgents over stronger incumbents or in the inability of incumbents to defeat much weaker insurgents. [1] This is a change in historical patterns. Lyall and Wilson showed that in 286 insurgencies between 1800 and 2005, the incumbents were only victorious in 25 percent of them between 1976 and 2005.[2] This is compared to 90 percent incumbent victories between 1826 and 1850. Connable and Libicki produced a similar finding while studying 89 insurgencies. In 28 cases (31 percent), the incumbent forces won and in 26 cases (29 percent), the insurgent forces won. The outcome was mixed in 19 cases (21 percent). [3]
The literature provides a wide range of explanations as to why weaker insurgents beat or survived stronger state forces. These explanations focus on geography, population, external support, military tactics and military strategy. Mao highlighted the centrality of population loyalty for a successful insurgent by stating that an insurgent “must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”[4] The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual concludes that insurgencies represent a “contest for the loyalty” of a mostly uncommitted general public that could side with either the status quo or non-status quo, and that success requires persuading this uncommitted public to side with the status quo by “winning their hearts and minds.”[5] Some scholars show that the brutality of incumbents against local populations affects their loyalty, and therefore helps the insurgents in terms of recruitment, resources and legitimacy. [6] General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, refers to this effect as the “insurgent math:” for every innocent local the incumbents’ forces kill, they create ten new insurgents.[7] Kilcullen earlier coined the term “accidental guerrilla,” [8] a reference to the consequences of indiscriminate repression that lead elements of the local population to be drawn into fighting the incumbents, without being a priori enemies of them.
Geography-centric explanations have also been proffered by the literature. Fearon and Laitin stressed that rough terrain is one of four critical variables supportive of an insurgency.[9] Mao argued that guerrilla warfare is most feasible when employed in large countries where the incumbents’ forces tend to overstretch their lines of supply.[10] Macaulay and Guevara explained how tiny numbers of armed revolutionaries in Cuba manipulated the topography to outmanoeuvre much stronger forces and gradually move from the easternmost province of the island towards the capital in the west.[11] Galula was more deterministic when it came to geographical explanations. In his seminal work Counterinsurgency Warfare, he stresses that “the role of geography […] may be overriding in a revolutionary war. If the insurgent, with his initial weakness, cannot get any help from geography, he may well be condemned to failure before he starts.”[12] Boulding introduced the concept of the “loss of strength gradient” (LSG) to geographical explanations.[13] Briefly, it means that the further the fight is from the centre, and the deeper it is into the periphery, the more likely it is that the incumbent’s forces will lose strength. Schutte builds on and modifies the concept to argue that it is accuracy, not necessarily strength, which gets lost as a function of distance. He introduces the “loss of accuracy gradient” (LAG): incumbents’ long-range attacks are more indiscriminate and less accurate (in killing insurgents) than short-range ones. Hence, civilian alienation becomes a function of distance, as a result of inaccuracy and indiscriminate killings.[14]
Other scholars highlighted the importance of foreign support. In their study of eighty-nine insurgencies, Connable and Libicki argued that insurgencies that “benefitted from state sponsorship statistically won at a 2:1 ratio out of decided cases [victory is clear for one side].” Once foreign assistance stopped, the success ratio for the insurgent side fell to 1:4.[15] This is relevant only to clear-cut victories, not to mixed cases or enduring insurgencies.
Finally, scholars explained that insurgent victory was based on either their military tactics and/or their military strategy. In terms of tactics, Lyall and Wilson argue that modern combat machinery has undermined incumbents’ ability to win over civilian population, form ties with the locals and gather valuable human intelligence.[16] Other scholars argue that insurgent access to new technologies in arms, communications, intelligence information, transportation, infrastructure and organisational/administrative capacities has allowed them to enhance their military tactics to levels historically reserved for state-affiliated armed actors.[17] This significantly offset the likelihood of being defeated by incumbents’ forces. Strategically, Arreguín-Toft offers a complex model of strategic interactions between militarily weaker actors and their stronger opponents. His study concludes that weaker forces can overcome resource paucity by employing opposing strategies (direct versus indirect) against stronger ones. A guerrilla warfare strategy (an indirect strategy) is the most suitable to employ against direct attack strategies by stronger actors, including “blitzkriegs.”[18]
Several elements of these explanations apply closely to the case of IS in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere at different stages and points in time, most notably the LSG, the LAG, military tactics and strategy arguments. But the story of its endurance and expansion also deviates from the above review. Certainly the political environment in the Arab-majority Middle East has its own particularities. A combination of arms and religion/sect or arms and chauvinistic nationalism in most of the Arab-majority world has proved to be the most effective means by which to gain and remain in political power. Votes, constitutions, good governance and socioeconomic achievements are secondary means, and in many Arab-majority countries are relegated to cosmetic matters. IS can certainly endure and expand in a regional context where bullets keep proving that they are much more effective than ballots, where extreme forms of political violence are committed by state and non-state actors and then legitimated by religious institutions, and where the eradication of the “other” is perceived as a more legitimate political strategy than compromise and reconciliation. This is not to suggest, in any way, that the region is inherently violent. However, its dominant sociopolitical elites, with few exceptions, consistently choose to conduct politics via violent methods, ranging from systematically torturing individuals to genocidal policies.
Notes
[1] Andrew Mack, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict”, in World Politics, Vol. 27, No. 2 (January 1975), p. 175-200; Ivan Arreguín-Toft, “How the Weak Win Wars. A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict”, in International Security, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Summer 2001), p. 93-128; Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III, “Rage against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars”, in International Organization, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Winter 2009), p. 67- 106, http://www.jasonlyall.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Rage_Final.pdf; Ben Connable and Martin C. Libicki, How Insurgencies End, Santa Monica, Rand Corporation, 2010, http://www. rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG965.html; Seth G. Jones and Patrick B. Johnston, “The Future of Insurgency”, in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2013), p. 1-25; Sebastian Schutte, “Geography, Outcome, and Casualties. A Unified Model of Insurgency”, in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 59, No. 6 (September 2015), p. 1101-1128.
[2] Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III, “Rage against the Machines”, cit.
[3] The armed conflict is still ongoing in the remaining 16 cases. Ben Connable and Martin C. Libicki, How Insurgencies End, cit., p. 5.
[4] Mao Tse-tung, “On Protracted War”, in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. II, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, (1938) 1967, p. 113-194.
[5] See David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos and John A. Nagl, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 79-136.
[6] Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency. The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam, New York, Praeger, 1966; T. David Mason and Dale A. Krane, “The Political Economy of Death Squads: Toward a Theory of the Impact of State-sanctioned Terror”, inInternational Studies Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 2 (June 1989), p. 175-198; Elisabeth Jean Wood,Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006; Stathis N. Kalyvas and Matthew Adam Kocher, “Ethnic Cleavages and Irregular War: Iraq and Vietnam”, in Politics and Society, Vol. 35, No. 2 (June 2007), p. 183-223, http://stathis.research.yale.edu/documents/ KK.PS.pdf; Luke N. Condra and Jacob N. Shapiro, “Who Takes the Blame? The Strategic Effects of Collateral Damage”, in American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 56, No. 1 (January 2012), p. 167-187; Alex Braithwaite and Shane D. Johnson, “Space-Time Modeling of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq”, in Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 28, No. 1 (March 2012), p. 31-48.
[7] Bob Dreyfuss, “How the War in Afghanistan Fuelled the Taliban”, in The Nation, 23 September 2013, http://www.thenation.com/article/how-us-war-afghanistan-fueled-taliban-insurgency.
[8] David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla. Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.
[9] The other three variables are political instability, large population, and poverty. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War”, in American Political Science Review, Vol. 57, No. 1 (February 2003), p. 75-90.
[10] Mao Tse-tung, “On Protracted War”, cit., p. 7.
[11] Neill Macaulay, “The Cuban Rebel Army: A Numerical Survey”, in The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 58, No. 2 (May 1978), p. 284-295; Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1961.
[12] David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare. Theory and Practice, Westport, Praeger, 1964, p. 26.
[13] Kenneth E. Boulding, Conflict and Defense. A General Theory, New York, Harper, 1962.
[14] Sebastian Schutte, “Geography, Outcome, and Casualties”, cit. One of the most publicized LAG examples in Egypt is the killing of the Mexican tourists by the incumbent’s Apache helicopters in September 2015. The killings of Egyptian civilians due to LAG are common Sinai, but much less publicised.
[15] Ben Connable and Martin C. Libicki, How Insurgencies End, cit., p. xiii.
[16] Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III, “Rage against the Machines”, cit.
[17] Seth G. Jones and Patrick B. Johnston, “The Future of Insurgency”, cit.; David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains. The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2013; Hans Martin Sieg, “How the Transformation of Military Power Leads to Increasing Asymmetries in Warfare? From the Battle of Omdurman to the Iraq Insurgency”, in Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 40, No. 2 (April 2014), p. 332-356.
[18] Ivan Arreguín-Toft, “How the Weak Win Wars”, cit., p. 100 and 122. According to Arreguín-Toft, strong actors won 76 percent of all same-approach strategic interactions, while weak actors won 63 percent of all opposite-approach interactions. See ibid., p. 111.
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Omar Ashour is a Senior Lecturer in Security Studies at the University of Exeter, a TÜBİTAK Scholar in Marmara University, and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House
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