Extrasystemic war shares some commonalities with interstate and civil wars, but as seen most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, it poses a unique set of challenges that many have failed to appreciate. It is generally long in duration, involves conventional, guerrilla, and “hybrid” battles, and is highly political. Fairly common during the European imperialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, extrasystemic war continues to be a key security topic for many governments in the West. This is because most wars in the Third World involve Western governments with violent insurgencies, often pitted against local governments that are supported by powerful states intervening from outside. Furthermore, extrasystemic war is becoming more lethal, with the proliferation of small weapons among violent rebels and arms trade among insurgents, particularly for those who live in highly contested areas. In fact, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq are where we have seen extrasystemic wars recently, and these top the list of nations where minority groups are most exposed to dangers of genocide, mass killings, and violent repression.7 Moreover, the United States left Iraq in 2011 and is scheduled to leave Afghanistan in 2014. Because violence continues to pervade these two states, foreign military intervention there is likely to stay on the table for major powers in the near future.
The central puzzle of this book is this: How do insurgent groups fight and defeat foreign states in war? What allows some nonstate insurgent groups to beat powerful states and others lose? The literature provides some insights into war between unequal powers, but none specifically for this type of conflict. In Adapting to Win, I answer these questions by exploring 148 cases of extrasystemic war and generating a set of distinctive patterns of how insurgent groups fight this kind of war. My answer is that successful insurgents tend to fight state adversaries in a sequence of actions that allows them to achieve their ends, whereas most unsuccessful groups end up adopting a sequence that does not. In other words, victory requires insurgents to evolve and do so in “right” sequences. I call this explanation the “sequencing theory,” which posits that insurgent groups are likely to win extrasystemic war when their interactions with the states allow them to evolve into a powerful modern army capable of defending an emerging statehood. Growing powerful through iteration when confronting strong enemies is a challenging matter for any insurgent group. Because insurgents are generally weaker, most actually fail to evolve. However, quite a few have nevertheless succeeded through a set of sequencing patterns, and this book demonstrates how that happens.
In answering the main puzzle, Adapting to Win makes two contributions to the study of international security. First, it presents an alternative research project to the mainstream body of security studies that has until recently been fixated on great power interstate conflict and civil wars. Given the centrality of nation-states in the international system and given the growing relevance of internal war since the end of the Cold War, this fixation is natural. But it comes at the expense of analysis on extrasystemic war. To be certain, extrasystemic war does not make many headlines or affect the military balance of major countries. Held mostly in less attended areas of the globe, it is also closely associated with imperial and colonial conflict of the past. We must remember, however, that resources that states devote to small wars shape their balance of power with other states and affect the international system. The recent surge in the world’s attention to violent insurgencies, in various parts of the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, means that we must dispel the notion that it is peripheral to the interests of major powers. Indeed, as Lawrence Keeley argues, so-called primitive warfare has been “extremely frequent” in the history of mankind. Insurgents are highly aggressive: according to his analysis of fifty societies, 66 percent were at war every year and over 70 percent went to war at least once in every five years.8 More broadly, because rebellions have a long history, extrasystemic war has been a recurring state of affairs since the birth of nation-states. Therefore, John Mueller is right that while great power war may be becoming obsolescent, civil war persists and so does “policing war,” defined as militarized efforts by developed countries to bring order to civil conflicts in other parts of the world, which has a great deal of commonality with extrasystemic war.9 More recently, extrasystemic war has been acknowledged for its relevance to other important strategic issues. Michael Horowitz, for example, shows that nonstate actors have actively evolved through organizational change, learning, and the building of linkages among themselves, as a way of adopting and carrying out new strategic innovations like suicide terrorism.10
The other contribution of this book is to enrich the policy-making community through the study of what lessons powerful states can learn to fight foreign insurgencies. The sequencing framework will inform statesmen and government officials about how to win through phases. I show what it takes for states to prevent policy disaster when they engage in asymmetric war. Therefore, although Adapting to Win largely takes on the perspective of the insurgent groups confronting states, it generates ideas for states in terms of how to execute extrasystemic war. Naturally, the book also considers implications about the kinds of government policy that are likely to prove effective and ineffective. For this reason, in the concluding chapter I examine the implications of America’s conduct of the war in Afghanistan. Although it is too early to call a winner there, I argue that extremist insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban have largely failed in their attempt to generate effective sequences, while the United States/International Security Assistance Forces have arguably made some progress in making Afghanistan increasingly capable of self-governance and keeping the Afghan-Pakistani relations reasonably stable. Outside Afghanistan, however, insurgent groups have learned to fight through phases to inflict severe damage on those who intervene in their territory. From Somalia and Algeria to Pakistan, these groups have learned to become more persistent, adaptive, and innovative. This reality, along with tough economic problems at home and long-term security challenges from rising powers like China, means that the United States must find a way to fight small wars effectively. Adapting to Win proposes a sequential analysis as a new theoretical framework to generate key insights for U.S. security policy in the twenty-first century.
Conceptual Clarifications
Extrasystemic war is different from other types of war, such as interstate and civil. It differs from interstate war in that the latter is fought between nationstates while the former war involves states and insurgents. On the other hand, civil war is between government and nonstate groups in the same country. Civil war and extrasystemic war are interrelated, however, because they become inseparable when a foreign government intervenes in a civil war on either side. As Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Idean Salehyan, and Kenneth Schultz argue, states experiencing a civil war are substantially likely to become involved in militarized disputes with other states, making war look extrasystemic. International disputes that coincide with civil wars are tied to the issues surrounding the civil war. Civil wars are likely to be internationalized when states seek to affect the outcome of the war through strategies of intervention and externalization.11 In contrast, extrasystemic war has much to do with small wars and “hybrid” war. Small war is a “campaign other than those where both sides consist of regular troops,” such as “operations of regular armies against … irregular forces,” while hybrid war is a combination of traditional war with terrorism and insurgency.12 Like small wars and hybrid wars, extrasystemic war involves