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.
CHAPTER 4
The Conventional Model: The Dahomean War (1890–1894)
In this chapter, I deploy the conventional model as a theoretical framework to examine the Dahomean War. The central proposition of this chapter is that war against a stronger foreign power is an impossible task if the insurgent side adopts a conventional model. According to this model, insurgent forces engage in open-terrain violence with their counterpart until one side is defeated. The conventional model is characterized by the direct use of force where military power plays a central role in the outcome. As such, rebel forces in Dahomey, located in what is now Benin in West Africa, mounted a brave challenge to the French army before they were ultimately crushed. The Dahomeans fielded an organized army that was twice as large as that of the French but still lost the war through a series of ground battles in two major campaigns. Dahomeans’ initial advantage in manpower size allowed them to prolong the war by a couple of years and bring a draw to the first campaign, but their failure to evolve throughout the duration cost them the war. In this context, the Dahomean War serves as a good case study for this book. It illustrates some of the key problems associated with the conventional model, such as insurgent failure to adopt guerrilla strategy, build a state as a means of war, and increase military capability. This case study shows that the Dahomeans, relatively understudied in the field of international security, confronted a powerful French adversary, used modern weapons and strategy in orthodox combat, and were defeated. The case study proves my argument that war without adaptation is a suicidal endeavor even though the insurgent side has a numerical advantage in manpower.
This chapter proceeds in four sections. First, I trace the war from 1890 to 1894 to present a brief background. Next, I use the conventional model to explain the war outcome. In the third section, I connect Dahomean defeat to the lack of strategic evolution on the part of the insurgents, namely the absence of state-building efforts and guerrilla war. In the final section, I examine the existing theories of asymmetric war. While this case study alone does not fully refute