Contemporary Asymmetric Conflict Theory in Historical Perspective

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.
net/publication/254269047
Contemporary Asymmetric Conﬂict Theory in Historical

Perspective
Article in Terrorism and Political Violence · September 2012

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2012.700624
CITATIONS READS
11 1,033
1 author:
Ivan Arreguín-Toft
Harvard University
14 PUBLICATIONS 449 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
All content following this page was uploaded by Ivan Arreguín-Toft on 21 September 2015.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

This article was downloaded by: [Harvard College]
On: 31 July 2012, At: 07:44
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Terrorism and Political Violence

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ftpv20
Contemporary Asymmetric Conflict

Theory in Historical Perspective
a
Ivan Arreguín-Toft
a
Department of International Relations, Boston University, Boston,
Massachusetts, USA
Version of record first published: 31 Jul 2012
To cite this article: Ivan Arreguín-Toft (2012): Contemporary Asymmetric Conflict Theory in Historical
Perspective, Terrorism and Political Violence, 24:4, 635-657
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2012.700624
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation
that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any
instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary
sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,
demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Terrorism and Political Violence, 24:635–657, 2012
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0954-6553 print=1556-1836 online
DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2012.700624
Contemporary Asymmetric Conflict Theory

in Historical Perspective
IVAN ARREGUÍN-TOFT
Department of International Relations, Boston University, Boston,
Massachusetts, USA
This article offers an intellectual history of theoretical work devoted to explaining

asymmetric conflict outcomes since World War II. Three factors are critical to
understanding how the literature has evolved. First, the concept of ‘‘asymmetric
Downloaded by [Harvard College] at 07:44 31 July 2012
conflict’’ encompasses a number of overlapping literatures, including insurgency, ter-

rorism, counterinsurgency, and most recently, civil wars. Second, and interrelated,
the field of inquiry has been unproductively divided between military and academic
thinkers, with insufficient engagement between the two communities. Third, the
popularity of the field of inquiry following the events of September 11, 2001, and
the subsequent American-led military operations in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq
(2003) have resulted in analyses that are empirically rich, but have provided little
in the way of theoretical advances. The conclusion offers an overall assessment of
the field of inquiry into asymmetric conflict outcomes, suggested directions for
future research, and a table of major contributors to the literature, their key ques-
tions, case universes, intended contributions, and theoretical limitations.
Keywords asymmetric conflict, counterinsurgency, hearts and minds,

insurgency, interaction, review, small wars, strategic, theory
This article surveys the segment of asymmetric conflict literature concerned with
explaining outcomes, and focuses on the period following World War II (WWII).
The very term ‘‘asymmetric conflict’’ represents a scholarly judgment that much of
what had been written about strategies as old and familiar as terrorism, guerrilla
warfare, and counterinsurgency can be encompassed by a single term. And support
for this generalization may be found in the tracts and treatises themselves. These
range from accounts of battles, campaigns, and wars in Greek and Roman times,
to more contemporary efforts to understand the dynamics of fighting in Afghanistan
(2001–present), and Iraq (2003–present). The most common form of such evidence is
Ivan Arreguı́n-Toft is an assistant professor in Boston University’s Department of Inter-

national Relations. A veteran of the U.S. Army, he is the author of How the Weak Win Wars:
A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and a number of articles
on the strategy and relationship between legitimacy and the use of force in war. His current
work, and the focus of his second book manuscript, explore the impact of the deliberate or
systematic harm of noncombatants as a strategy in war.
Address correspondence to Ivan Arreguı́n-Toft, Department of International Relations,
Boston University, 156 Bay State Road, #305, Boston, MA 02215, USA. E-mail: imat@
bu.edu
635
636 I. Arreguı́n-Toft
reference to certain strategies (in particular terrorism and guerrilla warfare) as being
‘‘strategies of the weak’’; where it is understood that ‘‘weakness’’ refers to a specific
conflict dyad, rather than any absolute measure, and where the relevant measures of
strength and weakness are reduced—perhaps imprudently—to the power to win a
political objective by force of arms.
In surveying the literature, two caveats are in order. First, efforts to offer a gen-
eral explanation of how the weak win against the strong have advanced under two
separate banners. Namely, military and academic approaches have largely ignored
each other, at least in print. Soldiers and ex-soldiers who write at times brilliant
monographs on the subject rarely acknowledge, incorporate, or engage previous aca-
demic contributions to similar questions and, until recently, the reverse has held true
as well. This has led, along with another trend on the academic side, to an unfortu-
nate duplication of effort. On the academic side, an additional problem has slowed
progress in the development of general asymmetric conflict theory, and this has been
the tendency to mistake advances in methodology for advances in theory.
Second, although the literature itself is divided into scholarship that focuses on
the motivations of actors (and the strategies and tactics they choose), on why and
how such conflicts start in the first place, on the many ways they are conducted,
and on attempts to explain asymmetric conflict outcomes, discussion here will focus
mainly on outcomes. The reason is twofold. The first reason is simple space limi-
tation. Any review attempting to encompass the entire spectrum of asymmetric con-
flict from origins to outcomes would simply exceed the limitations imposed on a
journal article. The asymmetric conflict literature has expanded tremendously in
the last decade, such that a review of all the different phases would result in a not
very comprehensive or helpful treatment of the subject. Second, among the questions
addressed in the literature, the scholarly analysis of outcomes is the most advanced
both in terms of theory and, more recently, in advances in data collection and
empirical analysis that test the claims derived from extant theory.
It should come as no surprise that the questions international relations (IR) the-
orists ask, today as in antiquity, are deeply affected by the times in which they live.
After a brief discussion of key concepts, I show how much of the literature of the
post-WWII era focuses on the difficult issues attending the concomitant rise of
nationalism or anti-colonialism, and the advent of a strategy designed to both
exploit nationalist resentment, and to do so in a way difficult for colonial powers
(or other interested advanced-industrial states) to counteract. This section is fol-
lowed with a look at the analogous impact of the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, and renewed interest in the events that followed sparked in the explanation
of asymmetric conflict outcomes. Finally, the conclusion offers a summary of the
chief theoretical contributions of the literature, and a look at the puzzle of why some
of the best advice offered by practitioners and scholars appears unlikely to gain
much policy traction any time soon.
Key Terms
In its original sense ‘‘asymmetric conflict’’ is a descriptive term that simply marks off
one subset of conflicts from another. In this first meaning, it simply refers to the rela-
tive power of two or more actors in a conflict, with one actor possessing a much lar-
ger relative share of power. Conflicts in which individual actors or groups of actors
have close to the same relative power would then make up the remainder of conflicts
Contemporary Asymmetric Conflict Theory in Historical Perspective 637
(what might be described as ‘‘symmetrical’’ conflicts). Most academic and

practitioner interest in asymmetric conflict starts from this point of view, which
understands power as the ability to win a political objective by force of arms.
Two points follow. First, conflicts need not be violent. It is likely that many of
the principles and implications that emerge from the study of violent asymmetric
conflicts apply to the non-violent ones. Second, to date most arguments employing
the term have nevertheless tended to focus on asymmetric conflicts that are violent,
and take place within rather than between states, such as terrorism or guerrilla
warfare.
However, every asymmetric conflict in this broad sense of relative power will
contain other asymmetries, such as asymmetry in a willingness to suffer costs, or
asymmetry in objectives. But two other asymmetries mark off important advances
in our understanding of both why and how weak actors engage in violent contests
with much stronger actors. The first of these is asymmetries in actor resolve. The
second of these is asymmetries of strategy or strategic approach; and here there is
an analogous division between strategy broadly conceived, and strategy broken

down into component parts such as equipment, tactical deployment, war aims,
and so on.
In addition to asymmetries subsidiary to the larger power asymmetry, the field
of inquiry into asymmetric conflicts may be roughly divided into variations on two
sets of questions: a) ‘‘why or under what circumstances do weak actors (groups) or
individuals attempt to resist or challenge others they know to be more powerful than
they by force of arms?’’; and b) ‘‘how do weak actors win violent contests when
opposing much stronger actors?’’
As to the first question set, assuming such actors are rational, why would they
do so when the expected response of the strong actor is the weak actor’s imprison-
ment, torture, or death? A related set of inquiries attempts to answer the important
question of why actors choose to resist some ways, but not others. Why do actors
choose the strategies or tactics they do? Key contributions here include Jeffrey
Race’s War Comes to Long An (1972), Andrew J. R. Mack’s ‘‘Why Big Nations Lose
Small Wars’’ (1975), Samuel Popkin’s The Rational Peasant (1979), James Scott’s
Weapons of the Weak (1987), T. V. Paul’s War Initiation by Weaker Powers
(1994), Roger Petersen’s Understanding Ethnic Violence (2002), Stathis Kalyvas’s
The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (2006), and Jeremy Weinstein’s Inside Rebellion
(2006).1
The second question set (‘‘how do the weak win?’’) aims to offer a general expla-
nation of asymmetric conflict outcomes, assuming (rather than explaining) actor
motivations and strategic and tactical choices. Key contributions here include Roger
Trinquier’s Modern Warfare (1964), Robert Thompson’s Defeating Communist
Insurgents (1966), David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare (1964), Robert Taber’s
The War of the Flea (1965), again, Mack’s ‘‘Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars,’’ D.
Michael Shafer’s Deadly Paradigms (1989), Thomas Hammes’s The Sling and the
Stone (2004), my own How the Weak Win Wars (2005), and Jeffrey Record’s Beating
Goliath (2007).2
It is this second set of questions—those surrounding the question of how weak
actors win (or why strong actors lose)—that will be the focus of the rest of this sur-
vey. I begin by introducing a subset of key contributions in historical context. I then
focus on key issues in asymmetric conflict theory, and in particular on the nature of
contemporary work and its contributions to theory building and policy.
Asymmetric Conflict Theory in Historical Perspective

Sustained interest in asymmetric conflict outcomes dates from the end of WWII in
Europe and in particular in the Pacific. In the decade following the war the colonial
powers of Europe found themselves challenged by violent resistance and, against
most experience and expectation, most of these challenges proved successful. As
Mack puts it in his analysis:
The French successfully subjugated the peoples of Indochina for more

than sixty years with a locally based army only fifteen thousand strong.
The situation changed dramatically after 1946, when the Vietnamese took
up arms in guerrilla struggle. By 1954 the nationalist forces of the Viet
Minh had forced the French—who by this time had deployed an
expeditionary force of nearly two hundred-thousand men—to concede
defeat and withdraw their forces in ignominy. Within twenty years, a vast
U.S. Military machine with an expeditionary force of five hundred-

thousand strong had also been forced to withdraw.3
What might explain this ‘‘situation’’ shift from relatively inexpensive mainte-
nance of colonial authority to massive yet failed intervention? Two logical responses
seemed to follow. First, perhaps though ‘‘victors’’ in WWII, Britain, France, the
Dutch, Portuguese, and others had been so weakened by their struggles against
Germany and Japan that this created a window of opportunity through which those
seeking independence jumped? Second, perhaps in some hard-to-measure way col-
onial subjects had become more powerful or more motivated? With hindsight, the
combination of factors that led to the shift are relatively simple to describe, and they
neatly bracket the set of proposed explanations of the puzzling outcomes to which
Mack refers.
True, the colonial powers had been weakened by WWII, but it is difficult to
argue that it was their own weakness that primarily explains the dramatic shift. It
is also the case that in terms of both capability and motivation, colonial subjects
enjoyed increased power over that which they had possessed prior to WWII. As
adversaries of Germany and Japan, the colonial powers had armed and trained
many of their soon-to-be-former subjects to resist occupation, and both the weapons
and understanding of their effective employment persisted after the war. In addition,
political and social elites in far flung colonies, having been educated in Europe and
the United States during the interwar, returned after WWII filled with a passionate
conviction of the need for their respective nations to take control of their own
destinies regardless of the considerable losses that might ensue as a result of indepen-
dence (to say nothing of the risks of rebellion itself). Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh each
personify this trend. Finally, overlaying nationalism was the simple fact that the
most effective and best organized resistance to German and Japanese occupation
had been communist. After the war, in many places communists emerged as genuine
local and national heroes. But postwar colonial power weakness, training in and pos-
session of reliable small arms, and nationalist zeal harnessed in communist organiza-
tions, while necessary, are not sufficient to explain the dramatic shift.
For that we may turn to analyses of Mao Tse-Tung’s defeat of the Kuomintang
in 1949; French efforts to hang on to Indochina and Algeria; and to the British
efforts to hang on to India and Malaysia. Mao believed he had, through a process
of study, reflection, and application in the crucible of Japanese occupation of China,

refined a set of principles which he referred to most often as ‘‘revolutionary guerrilla
warfare.’’ As noted in Katzenbach and Hanrahan (1955), and Johnson (1968), Mao’s
principles centered on four key components: time, social support and organization,
self-reliance, and a three-phase periodization of protracted war.4 Mao’s system relied
on a combination of well-developed social support that preceded operations, afford-
ing him near-perfect intelligence, enabling his forces to choose when and where to
strike, discipline, and above all patience (the time element was crucial). Properly
implemented, the intelligence advantages gained would tend to make small victories
easy, and make adversaries look clumsy, cruel, or both. War would be won after a
considerable delay, and after what began as terrorism and guerrilla warfare had
evolved into a conventional military confrontation.
Whatever one thought of Mao’s claims to having discovered ‘‘immutable laws’’
of conflict, his Red Army’s victory meant that the principles he espoused and
employed would be both widely analyzed and copied.5 If, as Mao asserted, social
support was the foundation of victory for the ‘‘weak,’’ then one logical counter-
measure was to target that social support. What soon emerged was a split in counter-
insurgency theory over how social support might be disrupted.
Counterinsurgency Theory: ‘‘Hearts and Minds’’ Versus Terror

Two different thinkers—each with considerable direct experience with insurgency
and counterinsurgency—came to opposite conclusions about how to reduce an
insurgent’s social support and thereby isolate the minority of fighters and leaders
from that broad base of support which made them so effective and durable. In
Malaysia, after two years of failed jungle sweeps against Malaysian Communist
Party insurgents (‘‘CTs’’ or Communist Terrorists as they were then called), British
strategist Lieutenant General Sir Harold Briggs won approval for a plan to shift
from seeking out and destroying CTs (a military-centric strategy) to seeking to
win over popular support for the government through a ‘‘hearts and minds’’ strategy
(a law-enforcement-centric strategy). Under the leadership of Sir Gerald Templer,
this strategy appeared to quickly turn the tide: popular support for the MCP at first
wavered, and then began to collapse. The core of the ‘‘hearts and minds’’ strategy
was to engage social support by means of three key principles: a) maintain the rule
of law, even under duress; b) find out what the opposition’s grievances are and
address any that are feasible and legitimate; and c) build an intelligence network cap-
able of aiding specially trained armed forces in the discriminate discovery and con-
version of—or, if not possible, capture or destruction of—insurgents. The result
would be a protected population and a steady shift of popular support toward the
government. Isolated from social support, insurgents would find it progressively dif-
ficult to mount operations and eventually, even to avoid capture. The evolution of
this plan and the story of its implementation are well covered in Thompson’s Defeat-
ing Communist Insurgency, which he clearly hoped would provide guidance to the
United States in its escalating counterinsurgency war in Vietnam.6
Thompson’s service to posterity was to mark out what worked and what did not
in the British government’s counterinsurgency efforts in Malaysia. The real difficulty
then, as now, is the extent to which the conditions under which the Templer-
implemented Briggs Plan could be generalized beyond the ‘‘Emergency.’’ It is a
crucial point, one that is covered more fully below.
Keeping in mind that British strategy in Malaysia made use of tools and ideas
common to the British colonial lexicon (viz., much can be accomplished with
well-targeted bribes that cannot be accomplished with well-targeted ordnance), an
alternative to hearts and minds was explored by another giant of counterinsurgency
theory, Roger Trinquier. Trinquier, a French veteran of colonial conflicts in both
Asia and Africa, argued that the end of WWII marked off a new period of warfare
he called modern warfare. In Trinquier’s view, ‘‘modern warfare’’ meant a war of
ideology in which the will of insurgents remained fundamentally beyond reach. As
a result, Trinquier argued that the key to effective counterinsurgency was the use
of terror to shatter social support for insurgents. Methods off limits against conven-
tional adversaries—in particular torture—were to be the centerpiece of an effective
counterinsurgency strategy. And because Trinquier came to view modern warfare
as an existential threat (a view no doubt intensified because the French, much more
than the British, tended to view their colonial holdings as France rather than as
French ‘‘possessions’’), much of his writing hints that in order for the state to sur-
vive, it must accommodate itself to the new reality of the necessity of the use of
barbarism in war. It must, in addition, become more authoritarian.
In sum, for asymmetric conflict theory the legacy of Mao’s victory, French
defeats in Indochina and Algeria, and British success in Malaysia was an unresolved
divide between those who imagined that grievance redress could demobilize support
for insurgents (leading to peace or, if not pure peace, then a reduction in violence to
manageable levels); and those who insisted that terror and cruelty—either targeted
or indiscriminate—was the most effective way.
The United States in Vietnam: Supply- Versus Demand-Side Strategy

A second set of theoretical issues emerged from attempts to understand the U.S.
defeat in Vietnam. The United States tried out a combination of strategies, begin-
ning, as the British had in Malaysia from 1948 to 1950, with those which sought
to engage Viet Cong fighters directly (‘‘find them, fix them, finish them’’7). The
U.S. military understood that the French and British had experienced setbacks with
this approach, but they chose to frame those setbacks in terms of insufficient
resources or technology (an American commitment would suffer from neither),
rather than those which marked off such supply-side strategies (‘‘search and
destroy’’) as counterproductive regardless of resources.
These strategies failed, and for the same reasons they had failed for the French
and the British. Viewing the conflict through the myopic filter of anti-communism, it
was all but impossible for the counterinsurgents to perceive that opposition to their
presence was not a plot controlled by Moscow, and that insurgents did enjoy local
social support (or, as time went on, social apathy). Insurgents were not simply brain-
washed, sacrificing themselves in hideous numbers for an abstract cause, but rather a
mix of nationalist-inspired freedom fighters and Marxist-inspired organizers,
attempting to represent a social base which preferred above all to simply be left
alone. But this was difficult to appreciate at the time.
Demand-side strategies were also attempted. ‘‘Demand-side’’ strategies are those
which we now think of as ‘‘hearts and minds’’ strategies, insofar as they attempt to
counter an insurgency by addressing the legitimate demands of insurgents (operatio-
nalized as legitimate grievances) rather than simply ignoring these and attempting to
kill them into compliance. And here we come again to the root of the problem, which
still takes two distinct but related forms: a) do insurgents have 1) legitimate and 2)
actionable grievances?; and b) are insurgents rational?8
The two forms are related because how the second question gets answered will
often determine the strategic response. For example, if an insurgent is irrational,
and seeks to harm us, there is no option short of physical annihilation capable of
eliminating the threat. Where this is true of our adversaries, attempting to identify
‘‘grievances’’ is pointless, because our behavior is not what motivates their assaults.
Rather it is our very existence that they seek to extinguish, regardless of our actions
or inactions. Our only logical response is to attempt to kill them in self-defense.
There is an additional yet unspoken benefit to imagining one’s opponent as an
irrational and existential threat. For even well-indoctrinated and highly motivated
soldiers, killing is psychologically wounding.9 This is especially so when those who
are killed or maimed are themselves defenseless. It helps a great deal if one can
imagine one’s adversaries as a veritable (and lethal) force of nature, rather than as
fellow human beings with fears and families of their own. The combination of a cor-
rupt South Vietnamese government, and lack of legitimacy of U.S. forces meant that
from 1965 until the Tet Offensive (1968), the Viet Cong in the South would enjoy a
considerable intelligence advantage over U.S. and South Vietnamese armed forces.10
This in turn implied that often the wrong human beings would be blown up, maimed,
or incinerated, in particular by fires from artillery and aerial assaults. Second, U.S.
forces engaged in the war were attempting to adapt a conventional metric of progress
to a situation in which that metric simply did not apply. In conventional war, enemy
casualties—identifiable by uniform—are one measure of progress, but the key
measure is territory captured on the way to an adversary’s capital (where, presum-
ably, its leaders reside and direct affairs of state). Because the United States had fore-
sworn an assault on North Vietnam in 1964, territorial gains were neither sought nor
could they stand as a measure of progress in the war. Instead, ‘‘enemy casualties’’
became the default measure of success (and a basis for promotion within combat
units).
The effects of this misapplied ‘‘body count’’ metric have been well canvassed
elsewhere.11 The key point is that in a choice between a demand-side strategy
(‘‘hearts and minds’’) and a supply-side strategy (‘‘find them, fix them, finish them’’),
the tendency to demonize one’s opponents is fatal to the possibility of even attempt-
ing a demand-side strategy. To the military mind, demand-side strategies seem alien
as they amount to the equivalent of being shot at, and retaliating with a candy bar
rather than a mortar strike. This is the primary reason Thompson, in his writings
about what worked for Britain in Malaysia, cautions against militarizing counterin-
surgency and recommends a law-enforcement approach, undertaken by personnel
with a law-enforcement mindset.
After 1950, the British switched rather dramatically from a supply-side to a
demand-side strategy in Malaysia. The Briggs plan forced counterinsurgents to view
the problem as primarily political rather than military—a law enforcement prob-
lem—in spite of the fact that the MCP considered themselves soldiers at war, and
in spite of the fact that these ‘‘soldiers’’ used violence, even against noncombatants.
It is difficult to overstate how complicated and difficult this was. But in attempting
to use British strategy in Malaysia as a general and idealized model of counterinsur-
gency, we must be careful because the most effective mobilization grievance of the
MCP was ‘‘colonial oppression’’ and the chief remedy sought as a result was
Malaysia’s independence from Britain. This Britain granted.
So the first problem with demand-side strategies is that they force counterinsur-
gents to ask and answer tough questions about insurgent grievances: e.g., which
would we too consider legitimate by our own standards of justice? Of those, which
are in our power to effect? Usually, the psychology of counterinsurgency runs in the
opposite direction: the fact that the adversary has used violence renders the quality
of their demands irrelevant (illegitimate), and the fact that the adversary is so
‘‘weak’’ as compared to incumbents suggests it is irrational as well. Both calculations
tend to rely on self-deception, insofar as the state-sanctioned violence that so often
inspires insurgency is still violence, and the ability of nominally ‘‘weak’’ insurgents to
launch successful attacks and escape demands social support which itself implies
some insurgent legitimacy.
In the case of Britain, granting Malaysian independence severely undercut the
MCP’s appeal, but did not destroy it. This left Britain with a set of real counter-
insurgency problems to solve, and in attempting to do so it appears to have been
strongly favored by geography (the MCP could not expect external support due to
the added challenges the Malaysian peninsula’s geography presents, relatively easy
for the British to isolate by air and sea), an unexpected economic boon (the Korean
War dramatically increased demand for tin and rubber, both of which were exports
Malaysia could provide), and a patient (or perhaps apathetic) public in Britain.
The end of the U.S. effort to secure South Vietnam from ‘‘communist
aggression’’ came rather suddenly in the spring of 1975. In that same year, Andrew
J. R. Mack published the first major pre-theoretical treatment (as he calls it) of what
we now think of as asymmetric conflict theory.12
Asymmetric Conflict Theory

In Mack’s analysis, which focused most on the French defeat in Algeria and the U.S.
defeat in Vietnam, asymmetry of the power to win war was systematically and inver-
sely related to the political vulnerability—the will—of each respective actor. Mack’s
argument begins with power asymmetry, and shows how power asymmetry leads to
interest asymmetry (weak actors perfectly interested because their very survival is at
stake; strong actors marginally interested because their survival was in no way at
stake). Interest asymmetry in turn leads to inverse political vulnerability (because
weak actors are resolute, they do not suffer politically from military setbacks;
whereas strong actors become increasingly vulnerable to even minor setbacks as a
war drags on). Mack’s analysis therefore considers primarily the motivations of
states or quasi-states as actors, and how the structural relationship implies other
asymmetries which aggregate to explain outcomes. On balance, weak actors will
win whenever an asymmetric conflict lasts longer than anticipated. Thus, the U.S
lost the Vietnam War because the North Vietnamese were fanatically committed
to victory and the United States was not; and the conflict endured far beyond what
the United States expected.
Mack’s pre-theory of asymmetric conflict is a powerful piece of analysis with one
omission that leads to an unresolved puzzle: why don’t strong actors lose asymmetric
conflicts more often than they do? Mack’s logic leads us to expect strong actors will
generally lose small wars, yet sometimes they win.
Two pieces of scholarship tackle this question. The first was authored by Eliot
Cohen at a time (1984) when most IR and security studies scholars were returning to
the study of conventional forces in Europe and Asia.13 In ‘‘Constraints on America’s
Conduct of Small Wars,’’ Cohen presciently laid out a number of issues facing the
United States as the Reagan administration contemplated a more aggressive use
of armed forces in support of U.S. foreign policy. Key among these issues were that
the U.S. military needed to build a capacity to engage in small wars, but that it
lacked the institutional will to do so. Small wars, Cohen argued, were likely to be
long wars, and they demanded not simply lighter, more mobile troops but an entirely
different sort of military. Cohen argues that the experience of Vietnam moved the
U.S. military’s leadership to work at all levels to ensure that it did not get stuck
in a similar kind of war in the future.14 It did so by avoiding the temptation to
acquire anything that might look like a capability to engage effectively in small wars,
such as special operations forces, and by re-structuring the ratios between active
duty, reserve, and national guard components so as to force future U.S. presidents
to go to Congress and the American people for permission before getting the United
States stuck in another quagmire. Activating the reserves and especially the Guard
was expected to act as a brake on such engagements—a sobering effect only slightly
less severe than the return of compulsory military conscription. Finally,

Cohen anticipated but did not expand on the core theme of Andrew Krepinevich’s
The Army and Vietnam (1986): the U.S. military had the wrong sort of army
and the wrong sort of strategy in Vietnam, and that is why the United States lost
the war.
While Mack focused on asymmetry of resolve and will, and Cohen explored
institutional obstacles to acquiring the military capability to win asymmetric con-
flicts, Krepinevich systematically highlighted the military requirements of effective
intervention in sub-state violence, and showed how the U.S. military neither had,
nor wished to acquire, such capabilities. Krepinevich is clearly angered over what
he credibly counts as U.S. military wooden-headedness when faced with a
demand—both on the ground and from the White House—to evolve to effectively
engage insurgents and terrorists.
From our own perspective today we can afford to be more charitable. True, the
military serves the civilian authority, and we may justifiably be angry and annoyed
when it conspires to undermine the President’s authority—as it did when President
John F. Kennedy shifted the mission of U.S. Special Forces from support of con-
ventional operations against the USSR (in the event of war) to counterinsurgency
in Vietnam (including new doctrine and training). But then as now we should recall
that the identity of the United States and its military as a global superpower is not
invested in fighting and winning major large-scale conventional conflicts by acci-
dent. Unless one wants to argue that terrorism, distant civil wars, narco-trafficking,
and other organized crime directly threaten the survival of the United States or its
allies (they do not), or that major interstate war is absolutely a thing of the past (it
is not), the U.S. military’s insistence on maintaining and advancing what at times
seem counterproductive values and capabilities is prudent. And perhaps ironically,
if Cohen and Krepinevich are right that the different threats demand different sorts
of military, then the U.S. military is vindicated in its efforts to maintain a first-tier
major conventional war capability, even when there are no peer competitors on the
horizon. What the U.S. military might not be forgiven for is maintaining only an
interstate war capability, or in undertaking only half-hearted reforms.
At this point, although Mack had presented a pre-theory of asymmetric out-
comes and Cohen and Krepinevich explored the institutional and bureaucratic
obstacles to winning the war in Vietnam, it was not until nearly a quarter century
later that a general theory was introduced to explain variation in asymmetric conflict
outcomes both in conflicts between sovereign states and within them.
How the Weak Win Wars

In How the Weak Win Wars (2001, 2005), I explicitly expanded on the logic of
Mack’s thesis by showing that the interaction of the strategies actors choose explains
how long a conflict is likely to last. Long wars favor the operation of what Mack
identified as ‘‘political vulnerability,’’ whereas short wars (e.g., a fait accompli) make
political vulnerability irrelevant. This leads to the important question of what causes
some asymmetric conflicts to be over quickly (which, given the disparity in material
power, we expect), while others drag on (which we do not expect).
The answer depends on the interaction of actor strategies. Reduced to their
essences, I argued that strategies have two main forms—direct and indirect—and
a universe of potential combinations can therefore be reduced to four pairs, yielding
two patterns. In direct-direct or indirect-indirect patterns (‘‘same-approach’’), I

maintain that simple understandings of ‘‘power’’ (material power) are sufficient to
predict outcomes: wars will be over quickly and the strong actor will win. When
the pattern is ‘‘opposite approach’’—direct-indirect or indirect-direct—the conflict
will take longer, and this leaves strong actors vulnerable to pressure to withdraw
before winning. Thus, they lose more often than we expect. Since in my view, stra-
tegies are bound up with doctrine, equipment, training, and even cultural values
(e.g., what counts as victory and defeat, or what forms of warfare and what targets
of violence are acceptable and what are not), his work represents an important theor-
etical advance in our understanding of asymmetric conflict outcomes. The theory is
general in that it is not limited to explaining outcomes at the sub-state level (such as
civil wars and terrorism), but can also explain interstate outcomes (say, why Ethiopia
lost its war with Italy in 1935, or why the Afghan Taliban were so quickly defeated in
2001, but have since rebounded).
Asymmetric Conflict Theory After 9/11

The terrorist attacks against New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon cat-
apulted interest in terrorism specifically, and asymmetric conflict more generally,
into public and academic consciousness. Whereas prior to 9=11 the study of all
but Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) terrorism had been essentially ghettoized
within the IR subfield, following 9=11 and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003,
interest grew rapidly. The George W. Bush administration’s reaction to 9=11
instantly militarized counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.15 What had before
been largely seen as a law-enforcement problem, became the responsibility of the
U.S. Department of Defense: a vital national interest. This point is not controversial.
One of the tragedies of 9=11 must stand as the odd timing of a major shift in
civil-military relations. The U.S. military, having largely learned the lessons of past
counterinsurgency wars (not how to fight them, but how to avoid them), was sud-
denly thrust into just the sort of conflict about which Caspar Weinberger (and later
Colin Powell16) had warned. Now the U.S. military, struggling to find its way follow-
ing the collapse of the USSR a decade earlier, had a real mission, but in terms of its
own institutional preferences, that mission was far from ideal.
Still, the U.S. officer corps in 2001 was (and a decade later remains) the smartest
and best-educated in U.S. history. Many in uniform had devoted considerable
thought to the problem of counterinsurgency and had struggled to find a way to pre-
serve two distinct operational capabilities—alternately characterized as the ability to
fight ‘‘low’’ and ‘‘high’’ intensity wars, or ‘‘conventional’’ and ‘‘unconventional’’
wars—within a single, hi-tech, mechanized military. The two most well-known of
which were John Nagl and David Petraeus, but Roger Barnett’s thinking on ‘‘asym-
metrical warfare’’ deserves an important mention as well. Two additional important
contributors within the asymmetric conflict literature—not themselves officers but
closely associated with the U.S. military—are Steven Metz and Stephen Biddle.
In 2002, Nagl, then a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, published Learning to
Eat Soup with a Knife. The book offered a detailed review of state-of-the-art of coun-
terinsurgency wisdom as represented by Thompson’s account of the British experi-
ence in Malaysia, and reduced it to principles that could be applied (with some
effort) by the U.S. Army now that it was tasked with defending the United States
and its allies from insurgents. Nagl’s book both emphasized Thompson’s warnings
about engaging an insurgency with a soldier’s mindset (and equipment set), and
shone a much-needed (but at the time widely ignored) light on the many gaps and
shortcomings in then current U.S. thinking about how to engage weak actors with
armed force.
Stephen Metz has been working at the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute
for over twenty years, and has during his tenure there produced some of the best
work on insurgency, counterinsurgency, and asymmetric conflict from the perspec-
tive of the U.S. military. Like Nagl, Metz recognized that the U.S. military faced
a type of adversary it was neither materially nor philosophically equipped to deal
with; and his work, unlike much of the academic literature, takes these limitations
into account. In January 2001, for example, Metz co-authored an early look at
the relationship of the concept ‘‘asymmetry’’ to U.S. strategy and vulnerabilities.17
Metz’s more recent work also contributes two additional themes of crucial impor-
tance for understanding insurgency and counterinsurgency. First, intelligence
requirements are different when facing insurgents, and failure to take this into
account will lead to severe operational setbacks. Second, Metz reminds us that
well-intentioned U.S. combat support to beleaguered governments will often back-
fire, converting what begins as a fight between disparate insurgents and incumbent
governments to a unified insurgency against what are seen as ‘‘foreign occupiers.’’18
Another contribution from the military side is Roger Barnett’s Asymmetrical
Warfare.19 Like many either in or formerly in the U.S. military, Barnett’s under-
standing of asymmetric conflict is colored by two biases. First, the substitution of
‘‘warfare’’ for ‘‘conflict’’ takes as given that adversaries to U.S. interests are making
war against the United States. This is a point of considerable controversy both
because it a) might entitle adversaries to protections of the laws of war to which they
might not be entitled, and b) the damage they are capable of doing, while both viol-
ent and painful, does not rise to the level normally associated with war. Second, it
underlines the tendency of U.S. military theorists to use the term ‘‘asymmetric’’ as
a proxy for older words such as ‘‘cunning,’’ ‘‘clever,’’ ‘‘sneaky,’’ and in particular,
‘‘below the belt.’’20
The difficulty from the perspective of the theorist is that taken together, both
biases tend to reduce to the same advice: ‘‘be prepared for adversaries who seek
to exploit your weaknesses while minimizing your strengths by means of sneaky
or underhanded strategies.’’ Like Gil Merom (see below), Barnett adds that cultural
constraints (in particular casualty sensitivity) on the threat to use force or on the
employment of force may act to undermine U.S. success in asymmetric engagements.
Again, if true, it is not clear what one could alter in terms of U.S. force structure,
doctrine, training, and so on that might conduce to increased effectiveness and
better—from the U.S. perspective—outcomes.
In 2004, Stephen Biddle offered an important contribution to our understanding
of what he calls ‘‘military power.’’ In his book of the same name, Biddle lays out an
argument for why the U.S. military was able to succeed so dramatically against, for
example, the Iraqi militaries of 1991 and 2003. Although Biddle restricts his study to
‘‘operations to control territory in mid- to high-intensity continental warfare,‘‘21 his
larger aim is to bracket the conditions under which military power conduces to mili-
tary victory. Biddle’s argument is analogous to my own (2001, 2005), in that like me
he generates puzzles based on an initial condition of power asymmetry (expectations
based on net assessments of military power conceived of in material or technological
terms), but persuasively argues that non-material factors matter most: ‘‘Assessments
focusing solely on material will radically overestimate well-equipped but poorly
handled armies.’’22 Both he and I make the same overall point: how forces are used
is a better way to explain and predict outcomes than how many armed forces are
deployed or how well equipped they are. If Biddle’s excellent analysis suffers from
any shortcoming, it is that his boundary conditions exclude many actors whom what
he calls ‘‘the modern system of force employment’’ can kill, but not coerce.
Beyond his accession to command of U.S. armed forces in Iraq in 2007, David
H. Petraeus is perhaps best known as the creative and institutional force behind the
U.S. military’s reformulation of counterinsurgency doctrine in the U.S. Army=
Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24 (2006).23 The re-publication of the U.S. Marine
Corps’ counterinsurgency manual renewed controversy between those who see insur-
gents as a threatening force of nature which can only be destroyed, not coerced,24
and those who see insurgents as divided between a broad supporting cast of people
who would prefer to be doing something else and a violent minority bent on assault-
ing incumbent forces.25 The manual adopts a strategy modeled on Thompson’s (and
Galula’s) approach to demobilizing public support for insurgents=terrorists by pro-
tecting populations from terror aimed at sanctioning potential defectors, addressing
public grievances (including U.S. force presence) by means of targeted reconstruc-
tion aid and, where possible, political reform (openness, shared offices). Essentially,
it is an attempt to square the circle between an ideal ‘‘hearts and minds’’ strategy run
by other-than-military forces with military support, and the reality that for the fore-
seeable future, the U.S. military will find itself tasked with counterinsurgency with
support from NGOs, the U.S. Department of State, and so on.
A final entry in contemporary asymmetric conflict theory is Gil Merom’s How
Democracies Lose Small Wars (2003). Merom argues that democracies lose asym-
metric conflicts for two reasons: they are a) incapable of escalating to the level of
brutality, and b) unwilling to accept the casualties necessary to win this type of
war. While there are problems with Merom’s logic and his research design, his book
offers an important contribution to our understanding of non-military constraints
on achieving political objectives by means of violence. For Merom, the key to
explaining the trend toward increasing strong actor failure over time is shifts in
societal definitions of what is acceptable and legitimate in terms of the use of force
before the first shots are fired. Expanding on a logic similar to Edward N. Luttwak’s
‘‘Give War a Chance’’ essay in Foreign Affairs (1999),26 Merom argues that demo-
cratic societies are generally too casualty sensitive and ‘‘squeamish’’ to permit their
militaries the degrees of freedom necessary to win against adversaries who hide
among civilians.
As a theory of outcomes—even one limited to democratic strong actors and
weak actors who employ an indirect defense strategy—Merom’s book does not suc-
ceed. Yet in its discussion of the societal factors that determine strategy and affect a
democratic state’s degrees of freedom in changing strategies, it stands as a key con-
tribution. Viewed in relation to my strategic interaction theory, Merom offers an
explanation I do not: democratic strong actors have the strategies they do (e.g., their
doctrine emphasizes firepower and maneuver in the context of overcoming another
state’s military, and de-emphasizes capabilities and training necessary to engage in
sub-state violence) because these are what their societies consider legitimate.27 It is
an open question, for example, whether Germans of the 1930s would have sup-
ported, if asked, the formation of the SS Einsatzgruppen; but Merom considers it
axiomatic that publics in contemporary Germany, the United States, and Israel
(to name but three examples) would never support the formation of para-military
units whose express purpose was the efficient murder of non-combatants. Since in
his view, brutality of that level is what is ‘‘necessary’’ to win against adversaries
who hide among civilians,28 Merom concludes that democratic strong actors can
never win this sort of fight.
Follow-Ons
Before concluding, it is worthwhile looking at some of the latest work on asymmetric
conflict outcomes on the academic side. Here I’ll focus on five representative argu-
ments: a) Dunne et al.’s ‘‘Managing Asymmetric Conflict’’; b) Record’s Beating
Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win; c) Sullivan’s ‘‘War Aims and War Outcomes: Why
Powerful States Lose Limited Wars’’; d) Lyall’s and Wilson’s ‘‘Rage Against the
Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars’’; and e) Kilcullen’s
Accidental Guerrilla.29
What one normally expects in the IR subfield—or any subfield of social scien-
tific inquiry—is that the publication of a general theory is followed by debate, test-
ing, criticism, and improvement. Mack’s and my theories, for example, would not
have been possible without the efforts of earlier scholars, including military analysts,
counterinsurgency and terrorism experts, IR theorists, and so on. Their work con-
tains both errors of commission and omission (as all work does), and so whatever
the value of their contributions we expect them to be tested, corrected, and
improved.
This is what we find in the first two of the five contributions. My strategic inter-
action thesis, for example, is tested—and supported—by means of a formal model (a
game). Dunne and his colleagues begin with a simple asymmetric dyad model, and
design a three-stage game to test that model. Essentially, they show that strong
actors tend to get locked into strategies and this makes it relatively easy for the weak
actor to guess what is coming. Weak actors then have a chance to alter their own
defense plans in response, thus diminishing the impact of the expected attack, and
leading to the possibility of an unexpected outcome. In the third stage of the game,
both sides get to reconsider their next move based on the outcome of the previous
interaction.
In Beating Goliath, Jeffrey Record supplies an important qualification and

criticism of theories such as my own. He argues that I excessively discount the
impact of external support on asymmetric conflict outcomes. Record argues that
the weak win wars when they are supplied and supported by outside powers,
and that my claim that outside support may under some circumstances be counter-
productive is ‘‘preposterous.’’30 Record adds to our understanding of asymmetric
conflict outcomes by highlighting a subset of cases no previous thesis handles well:
cases of mixed resistance. In a mixed resistance, ‘‘insurgents’’ oppose counterinsur-
gents with two distinct types of military: a) a shadowy terrorist or guerrilla force
ideal at fighting the sort of protracted wars that have been the bane of
advanced-industrial counterinsurgents since WWII; and b) a conventional military
with standard uniforms, ranks, organization, and hardware. In these cases, outside
support (to the conventional component) is certainly necessary, and may be suf-
ficient, to explain outcomes.31 Record’s criticism might be best characterized as
a problem of lumping these mixed cases in with cases in which either a conven-
tional or unconventional resistance is offered. But on balance, there are no other

areas in which he and I disagree; and beyond the important addition of a condition
under which external support is apt to be decisive, our arguments have similar
implications. In addition, Record’s book is particularly valuable for its summary
and application of the larger body of asymmetric conflict theory to the contempor-
ary conflict in Iraq. It should be read by anyone interested in explaining asymmet-
ric conflict outcomes.
The final three contributions do not advance asymmetric conflict theory, but
provide sophisticated statistical and empirical tests of factors identified in earlier
studies of asymmetric conflict outcomes.
In the first test, Sullivan focuses on what she calls a new causal variable, ‘‘war
aims.’’ Following Thomas Schelling’s work (1966), she argues that we may imagine
two ideal-type war aims: a) brute force and b) coercion. She associates ‘‘brute force’’
as a war aim with conquest (including postwar occupation), and ‘‘coercion’’ with
‘‘target compliance.’’ Beyond some confusion about Schelling’s concepts and what
they actually mean, what we end up with is less two discrete variables and more a
continuous variable, where the key measure is ‘‘degree of coercion necessary to
achieve an objective.’’ On the low end, there are goals which can be accomplished
without a target’s compliance, such as mass murder, regime change, or territorial
conquest; whereas on the high end, there are goals which can only be accomplished
with the target’s compliance, such as peacemaking or a change of policy. Sullivan
then posits that strong actors may lose asymmetric conflicts in proportion to how
ambitious their political objectives are in terms of this brute-force-to-coercion spec-
trum. The more ambitious the objectives, the more likely the strong actor is to fail, as
compared to other plausible causes of success and failure. Sullivan then proceeds to
outline out an impressive large-n test of this thesis, and concludes that her theory is
superior to previous theories of asymmetric conflict outcomes.
Sullivan’s analysis is an important and plausible start, but there are two prob-
lems with it. First, although she cites previous work that includes the puzzle of a
trend toward increasing strong actor failures over time, her own analysis does not
engage the question. Assuming for the sake of argument that ‘‘war aims,’’ as she
defines them, are doing the causal heavy lifting, what we expect to see in her analysis
(but don’t) is an explanation for a shift in the distribution of strong actor war aims
from brute force to coercion.
Second, and more importantly, while Sullivan is correct to point out that war
aims are a key determinant of the costs of obtaining a political objective independent
of relative material resources, she errs by misreading, for example, previous defini-
tions of strategy, which often incorporate war aims.32 Because strategic interaction
theory, to cite but one example, clearly associates ‘‘direct’’ strategies with what
Sullivan calls ‘‘brute force,’’ and ‘‘indirect strategies’’ with what Sullivan calls
‘‘coercion’’ or ‘‘target compliance,’’ on at least one level Sullivan’s argument reduces
to a test of the strategic interaction thesis (and her analysis supports that thesis).
Yet on another level, Sullivan breaks new ground by further unpacking—and in
a way neglected by me—the causal foundations of the ‘‘direct-indirect’’ quadrant in
How the Weak Win Wars. Sullivan shows that the reason strong actors lose in such
strategic=war aims dyads is because they think the fight is about brute force (supply
side), when it is really about coercion (demand side).
The fourth contribution, ‘‘Rage Against the Machine,’’ suffers from a similar set
of issues. Although it offers a rigorous test of the predictions of strategic interaction
theory at the sub-state level (an important and welcome contribution), one could
argue that the authors have mistaken an important empirical test of previous theory
for a novel theoretical advance. Because this problem is not unique to Lyall’s and
Wilson’s effort, it is worth explaining in some detail why this is the case.
Lyall and Wilson argue that the United States is losing asymmetric conflicts—
especially fights against insurgents—more often over time because its military is
too modern and high-tech. These modern militaries tend to be poor at gathering
local intelligence (true) and as such tend to harm a good number of non-combatants
(true, but also because advanced-industrial militaries often have firepower-centric
doctrines and as a result struggle in their efforts to employ firepower discriminately).
When non-combatants are harmed or killed, the insurgency is strengthened (right),
making it less likely that the modern military will prevail. In essence, modern mili-
taries are unsuited to fighting counterinsurgencies and small wars because they are
self-contained and fire-power-centric.
Such an argument has a long history in the literature. As noted above, both
Cohen and Krepinevich provide outstanding analyses of why it is that high-tech,
firepower intensive militaries do not fare well in counterinsurgency settings.33 On
the military side, this is equally well established.34 For example, Lyall and Wilson
consider it axiomatic that high-tech militaries such as the United States cannot adapt
their current intelligence capabilities to fight counterinsurgency campaigns better.
But the work of authors such as John Nagl and Thomas Hammes—both former offi-
cers in the U.S. military—suggests that organizational reforms, such as moving intel-
ligence analysis resources closer to operational units, could dramatically improve
actionable intelligence.35
This leads to a second problem, however. ‘‘Industrialized’’ actors (states) do
have choices in how they use their forces.36 Great Britain was the first state to indus-
trialize, and yet mistakes aside, since WWII it has consistently fared better in coun-
terinsurgency operations than other industrial states such as France, the United
States, and the USSR. Most previous analyses of the relation of modernization to
counterinsurgency failure have focused—as Cohen and Krepinevich did—on
bureaucratic or institutional obstacles to reforms aimed at giving high-tech militaries
an improved sub-state violence capability. In my own theoretical work I add that
there may also be threat assessment reasons why the U.S. military (for example)
resists reforms aimed at making it better at counterinsurgency: namely, (a) its
identity remains invested in defending the United States from a threat capable
of destroying the United States, and (b) the forces required to engage interstate
and sub-state threats are qualitatively different.37 I counter that the United States
needs to create and maintain two sets of military competences (both conventional
and unconventional) because sub-state violence is costly, and left unchecked may
set in motion processes that ultimately constitute a direct threat to U.S. national
security.
Finally, the logic of the ‘‘information starvation’’ component of ‘‘Rage,’’ though
entirely original, relies on an ahistorical reading of the relationship between foraging
militaries and local populations. In ‘‘Rage,’’ Lyall and Wilson argue that the close-
ness of foragers to local populations gives foragers ‘‘excellent awareness of
local-level power relations, cleavages, and languages,‘‘38 which conduced to better
intelligence: ‘‘foraging armies possessed sufficient information about local popula-
tions to ensure that their application of rewards and punishment was selective.’’39
Good intelligence is important because it enables discrimination between comba-
tants and noncombatants, and harming the innocent is apt to make insurgencies
more rather than less dangerous: ‘‘If incumbent forces cannot wield their power
selectively, then they will ease insurgent recruitment by collapsing the distinction
between combatants and noncombatants.’’40 The difficulty here is that no reputable
military historian—including Martin van Creveld, the historian upon whose work
Lyall and Wilson say they rely for their understanding of the implications of
foraging41—would imagine that the brutality of foraging in practice would provide
counterinsurgents with actionable intelligence. Most historians consider it axiomatic
that occupying-force foraging provides insurgents with crucial intelligence about
occupying forces, as it did Spanish guerrillas during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Penin-
sular War (1807–1814), and Soviet Partisans in Nazi-occupied Western Russia
during WWII. The Third Reich, one might add, fielded a mechanized military that
was nevertheless forced to forage from 1942 onward; and its ‘‘foraging’’ has been
widely credited with increasing, not decreasing, its insurgency woes.42
Where Lyall and Wilson are the strongest then is not making theoretical
advances, or supporting novel policy recommendations, but in the empirical testing
of previous hypotheses and general theories. Their analysis provides an excellent test,
for example, of Cohen’s and Krepinevich’s claims that a misfit between military
type (mechanized) and mission (counterinsurgency) led to U.S. defeat in Vietnam
(Krepinevich) and would likely complicate U.S. efforts to win victories in future
small wars (Cohen). It also tests—and provides additional empirical support for—
strategic interaction theory.
Finally, I should add a brief mention of David Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerrilla.
Kilcullen argues that contemporary counterinsurgency is what social scientists would
recognize more formally as a ‘‘two-level game.’’43 Making headway in local counter-
insurgency demands local knowledge; but this local knowledge—and its implications
for war and peace—are powerfully shaped by transnational ideology and resources.
The book’s only weakness is that most of its ideas are already well-established in
both the military and academic literatures on asymmetric warfare, asymmetric con-
flict, and counterinsurgency. But as with Nagl’s book, the major purpose of the book
is to provide the theoretical and philosophical foundation for a shift in attitude (and
strategy) within advanced-industrial militaries. Both books, in other words, are
intended more to support reform of doctrine and strategy than to offer a general
explanation of an empirical puzzle.
Table 1. Main theoretical works surveyed (contributors in alphabetical order)
Contributor Key puzzle Case universe Intended contribution Theoretical limitations
Arreguı́n-Toft How the weak win Asymmetric conflicts General theory of Limited explanation of
wars; why the (inter-state, sub- asymmetric conflict actors’ strategic choices;
strong have been state, mixed) outcomes stronger as theory of
losing more often costs than of outcomes
over time
FM 3-24 How to defeat Advanced industrial Provide support for No consideration of
(2006) insurgencies state v. an institutional reform cultural and domestic
insurgency conducive to warfare political constraints on
against violent nonstate strategic choice
actors (population
protection over attrition)
651
Galula How to defeat Advanced-industrial Template for success Search and destroy efforts
communist state v. nonstate against revolutionary tend to increase social
insurgencies actors with external guerrilla warfare; support for insurgents,
support emphasis on supply-side making subsequent stages
(search and destroy) unreachable
strategy
Mack How the strong lose Asymmetric conflicts Pre-theory of asymmetric Relative power not
asymmetric conflict outcomes sufficient to explain
conflicts relative interests;
variation in duration of
asymmetric conflicts
under-explained
(Continued )
Table 1. Continued
Contributor Key puzzle Case universe Intended contribution Theoretical limitations
Mao Tse-Tung How to defeat more Capitalist-imperialist Template for success in war Conditions under which
numerous and much v. Marxist-socialist against Capitalist- social support can be
better-equipped Imperialist foes gained and maintained
adversary may not lie within control
of insurgents
Thompson How to defeat Advanced-industrial Template for success in war Conditions which led to
communist state v. non-state against communist success in Malaysia are a)
652
insurgencies actors with external insurgency via difficult to implement; b)
support legitimacy-centric take time; and c) may be
(‘‘hearts and minds’’) unique to Malaysia
strategy
Trinquier How to win modern Advanced-industrial Template for success in Terror against civilians may
war state v. irrational modern war; including backfire, is costly to
non-state actors license for use of violence democratic actors, may
with external against noncombatants as be corrosive of
support war winning strategy democracy in response to
security threats
The strong points of Kilcullen’s book come from his ability to cogently reprise
traditional wisdom on the etiology, dynamics, and outcomes of asymmetric conflicts
in the context of his own considerable experience; and his strong suggestion that
military power to affect outcomes cannot succeed by itself in most of the conflicts
the United States and its allies face. His is an illustration of why local knowledge
matters so much, and that, to recall Clifford Geertz’s famous framing,44 knowing
the difference between a twitch and a wink is necessary, though never sufficient,
to defeat the violent insurgencies that seek to harm us around the world.
Conclusion
What began following WWII as a set of guides to counterinsurgency (most often
with a focus on countering communist insurgency), and preliminary explanations
on the etiology of asymmetric conflict, evolved after the U.S. withdrawal from
Vietnam into a nascent body of theoretical work on how the weak win wars in asym-
metric conflicts—on the limits, in other words, of killing power.

The table below summarizes the main works surveyed and their key questions or
puzzles, case universe, intended contribution, and theoretical limitations.
As the ‘‘key puzzle’’ column reveals, asymmetric conflict theory is ripe for
additional theoretical development and testing of its core propositions. For this to
happen, the faults of previous efforts (including my own) must be isolated, and then
compared systematically against a new set of propositions using a design that high-
lights the differences in explanatory power as against a puzzle or empirical fact. To
date, most of the research published tends instead to invent a new term for an old
concept, or simply disparage a previous effort without providing supporting or dis-
confirming evidence. This ‘‘criticism’’ is then followed by analysis of a new data set
(very often systematically related to one analyzed in previous work), employing logic
identical to a previous effort, which is then claimed—erroneously—to amount to a
new theory or theoretical advance.
In other words, the field of inquiry is expanding, but many students of asymmet-
ric conflict or insurgency are not reading books or articles written before 2000.
Rather than asking better questions, the field seems to favor a process of ever more
sophisticated statistical analyses of previous questions, followed by an unjustified
claim to a novel theoretical advance: we don’t know anything new, but we know
what we thought we already knew to a greater degree of certainty. This has led to
a great deal of unproductive ‘‘wheel reinvention’’ that could be avoided by moving
beyond criticism and [inadvertent] testing to comparative evaluation of predictions.
But rather than end on a depressing note, allow me to close with an assessment
of three directions the field could most productively go from here. First, empirical
testing of previous theories (identified as such) should continue. The construction
of new and more sophisticated data sets, followed by robust statistical analyses,
should not only serve to test, discipline, and refine existing theory, but can also be
expected to generate new puzzles and insights. Second, as suggested by Merom’s
2003 effort, more work needs to be done on the social and other determinants of
strategic choice (including ethnic discounting,45 path dependency, and so on), as well
as on other cultural constraints states may face in choosing an ideal intervention or
counterinsurgency strategy.46 Third, and as suggested by Sullivan’s 2007 analysis,
more work needs to be done on the social construction of the political objectives
sought in interventions (military and non-military). If ‘‘a return to peace’’ is sought
as an objective of intervention, how much postwar non-violence, for example, is suf-

ficient to count as ‘‘peace’’ (victory) in the context of a counterinsurgency effort?
Building on asymmetric conflict theory—including but not limited to general
explanations of conflict outcomes—is very much needed as we move forward into
the next decade of the 21st century. Advances in theory—more certain if academic
and military theorists engage each other’s work more conscientiously—can help
direct policy and strategy in ways that make interventions both more rare and more
effective. Doubtless, those are goals on which we all can agree.
Notes
1. Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006); Andrew J. R. Mack, ‘‘Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics
of Asymmetric Conflict,’’ World Politics 27, no. 2 (January 1975): 175–200; T. V. Paul, Asym-
metric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994); Roger D. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in
Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Samuel
Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1979); Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary
Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972); James
Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1987); and Jeremy Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent
Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
2. Ivan Arreguı́n-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare:
Theory and Practice [1964] (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006); Thomas Hammes, The Sling and
the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (New York: Zenith Press, 2004); Jeffrey Record, Beating
Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007); D. Michael Shafer,
Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1989); Robert Taber, The War of the Flea: A Study of Guerrilla Warfare
Theory and Practise (New York: L. Stuart, 1965); Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist
Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966);
and Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency [1964], Daniel
Lee, Trans. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006);.
3. Mack (see note 1 above), 175.
4. Edward L. Katzenbach and Gene Z. Hanrahan, ‘‘The Revolutionary Strategy of Mao
Tse-Tung,’’ Political Science Quarterly 70, no. 3 (1955): 321–340; and Chalmers Johnson,
‘‘The Third Generation of Guerrilla Warfare,’’ Asian Survey 12 (1968): 435–447.
5. Che Guevara, perhaps the leading guerrilla thinker and practitioner in Latin America,
for instance, admitted to being heavily influence by Communist ideas of revolution and Mao’s
concept of a people’s war.
6. Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency (see note 2 above). See also Geoffrey
D. T. Shaw, ‘‘Policemen vs. Soldiers: The Debate Leading to MAAG Objections and
Washington’s Rejection of the Core of the British Counter-Insurgency Advice,’’ Small Wars
and Insurgencies 12, no. 2 (2001): 51–78.
7. The first use of this now common exhortation is attributed to Edward Lansdale, a
former advertising executive who served as a counterinsurgency advisor in both the
Hukbalahap Emergency in the Philippines (1950–53) and in Vietnam. As cited by Stanley
Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1983), 221.
8. Irrational actors are those who a) are either unable or unwilling to assess net benefits;
or b) take actions they expect to result in net losses.
9. See especially, Lieutenant Colonel David A. Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological
Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009).
10. Beyond the writings of Mao Tse-Tung, the effects of intelligence asymmetries in
insurgencies have been well-canvassed in the literature of the post-Vietnam era, including
especially Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency (see note 2 above). Later entries
include Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: Johns-Hopkins Press,
1986); Arreguı́n-Toft, Arts of Darkness: Guerrilla Warfare and Barbarism in Asymmetric
Conflict (Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Chicago, 1998); Arreguı́n-Toft, ‘‘How the
Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict,’’ International Security 26, no. 1
(2001): 93–128; Arreguı́n-Toft, ‘‘Tunnel at the End of the Light: A Critique of U.S.
Counter-Terrorist Grand Strategy,’’ Cambridge Review of International Affairs 15, no. 3
(2002): 549–563; Arreguı́n-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars (see note 2 above); Kalyvas, The
Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (see note 1 above); and Hammes, The Sling and the Stone
(see note 2 above).
11. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States in Vietnam,
1950–1975, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), 153–156, 183; and Krepinevich, The
Army and Vietnam (see note 10 above), 198–199, 203.
12. This is only a slight exaggeration, because in The War of the Flea, Robert Taber
engaged a number of the same themes as Mack in a more journalistic treatment published
ten years previously (1965). Taber’s prescient analysis, however, focused more on explaining
the dynamics of guerrilla warfare across cases; whereas Mack’s aim was a general theory of
asymmetric conflict outcomes. This distinction is difficult to appreciate until you read both
works. See Taber, The War of the Flea (note 2 above).
13. See, e.g., John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1983).
14. The principles for avoiding ‘‘another Vietnam’’ were spelled out in a speech to the
National Press Club by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in 1984. See ‘‘Remarks
Prepared for Delivery by the Honorable Caspar W. Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, to
the National Press Club, Washington, DC (28 November 1984).
15. For an early analysis and critique of the George W. Bush administration’s response to
9=11, see Arreguı́n-Toft, ‘‘Tunnel at the End of the Light’’ (see note 10 above).
16. See Colin L. Powell, ‘‘U.S. Forces: Challenges Ahead,’’ Foreign Affairs 71, no. 5
(1992=3): 32–51.
17. Steven Metz and Douglas V. Johnson III, Asymmetry and U.S. Military Strategy: Defi-
nition, Background, and Strategic Concepts (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Strategic Studies Institute, 2001).
18. See, e.g., Steven Metz, Learning from Iraq: Counterinsurgency in American Strategy
(Carlisle, PA: U.S. Strategic Studies Institute, 2007); and Steven Metz, Rethinking Insurgency
(Carlisle, PA: U.S. Strategic Studies Institute, 2007).
19. Roger W. Barnett, Asymmetrical Warfare: Today’s Challenge to U.S. Military Power
(Washington DC: Brassey’s, 2003).
20. On this second point, see Montgomery C. Meigs, ‘‘Unorthodox Thoughts on
Asymmetric Warfare,’’ Parameters 33, no. 2 (2003): 4–18.
21. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 6.
22. Ibid., 3.
23. The U.S. Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2007).
24. See especially Ralph Peters, ‘‘In Praise of Attrition,’’ Parameters 34, no. 2 (2004):
24–32.
25. What is striking about these arguments is that their basis has shifted even as they
serve the same function. In the 1940s and early 1950s the core basis of the calculation that
adversaries couldn’t be coerced, but only destroyed, was ideology (Communism) or race
(‘‘Japs’’ in WWII, ‘‘Asian hordes’’ in Korea). Today it tends to be religion (radical Islamists).
Regardless of the basis, the same function is served: these ‘‘Communists’’=‘‘Japs’’=‘‘Asian
Communists’’=‘‘Fundamentalists’’=‘‘Islamic terrorists’’ can’t be bargained with, the argument
goes, only destroyed (therefore the only available counter strategy is supply-side).
26. Edward N. Luttwak, ‘‘Give War a Chance,’’ Foreign Affairs 78, no. 4 (1999): 36–44.
27. On this same question, see Jonathan D. Caverley, ‘‘The Myth of Military Myopia:
Democracy, Small Wars, and Vietnam,’’ International Security 34, no. 3 (2009=10):
119–157. Caverley argues that the U.S. tends to adopt ineffective counterinsurgency strategies
(i.e., mechanized, fire-power-centric strategies) because median voters prefer capital-intensive
war strategies, which simultaneously promise reduced U.S. combat casualties and jobs in the
defense sector.
28. In this Merom and Luttwak could be counted as intellectual descendants of

Trinquier’s ‘‘terror wins counterinsurgency’’ tradition (Trinquier, Modern Warfare (see note
2 above)). See also Luttwak’s harsh criticism of ‘‘hearts and minds’’ as counterinsurgency
strategy in Edward Luttwak, ‘‘Dead End: Counterinsurgency as Military Malpractice,’’
Harper’s 314, no.1881 (2007): 33–42. The implications are also somewhat grim: if insurgency
(or as it is framed nowadays, ‘‘radical fundamentalist terrorism,’’ constitutes a grave threat to
our existence (as a state, if not as individuals), then perhaps democracy must be dispensed with
in order to survive?.
29. See J. Paul Dunne, Maria D.C. Garcı́a-Alonso, Paul Levine, and Ron P. Smith,
‘‘Managing Asymmetric Conflict,’’ Oxford Economic Papers 58 (2006): 183–208; Record,
Beating Goliath (see note 2 above); Patricia Sullivan, ‘‘War Aims and War Outcomes: Why
Powerful States Lose Limited Wars,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no. 3 (2007):
496–524; James Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III, ‘‘Rage Against the Machines: Explaining Coun-
terinsurgency Outcomes,’’ International Organization 63, no. 1 (2009): 67–106; and David Kil-
cullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting a Small War in the Midst of a Big One (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
30. Record, Beating Goliath (see note 2 above), 23.
31. The problem is that the outcomes explained may not count as asymmetric outcomes,
since in previous analyses (e.g., Mack’s, and mine), asymmetry is operationalized as material
power, and at some point the external support may increase the power of the weak actor to the
point where the contest becomes effectively symmetrical.
32. Arreguı́n-Toft, ‘‘How the Weak Win Wars’’ (see note 10 above), 99.
33. On this point see also Arreguı́n-Toft, ‘‘How to Lose a War on Terror: A Comparative
Analysis of a Counterinsurgency Success and Failure,’’ in Jan Angstrom and Isabelle Duyves-
teyn, eds., Understanding Victory and Defeat in Contemporary War (London: Frank Cass,
2007), 146–147.
34. See, e.g., Meigs, ‘‘Unorthodox Thoughts on Asymmetric Warfare’’ (see note 20
above); Hammes, The Sling and the Stone (see note 2 above); and Steven Metz, Learning from
Iraq: Counterinsurgency in American Strategy (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies
Institute, 2006).
35. John Nagl, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat
Soup with a Knife (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Hammes, The Sling and the Stone (see note
2 above); Kyle Teamey and LTC Jonathan Sweet, U.S. Army, ‘‘Organizing Intelligence for
Counterinsurgency,’’ Military Review 86, no. 5 (2006): 24–29.
36. It is not true, however, that weak actors will in general have the same degrees of
freedom in strategic choice. Industrialized strong actors can use capital- or labor-intensive
strategies as they see fit, but non-industrialized countries (often assumed to be ‘‘weak’’ as a
result), are not likely to be able to employ a capital-intensive strategy unless supplied hardware
by a third party.
37. So reforms aimed at making an advanced-industrial state’s military more adept at
small wars might make it less adept at big wars. See Eliot Cohen, ‘‘Constraints on America’s
Conduct of Small Wars,’’ International Security 9, no. 1 (1984): 151–181; Krepinevich, The
Army and Vietnam (see note 10 above); and Arreguı́n-Toft, ‘‘How the Weak Win Wars’’
(see note 10 above), each of whom make this point (Cohen most strongly). For a more direct
treatment of the argument that conventional and special operations forces are fundamentally
different, see also Deborah L. Marquis, Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special
Operations Forces (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1997); and Stephen P. Rosen,
War and Human Nature (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially Chapter 4.
38. Lyall and Wilson, ‘‘Rage Against the Machines’’ (see note 29 above), 73.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 77.
41. van Creveld is clear that for many strategists during the age of foraging, campaigns
were planned so as to make use of foraging as a punishment strategy (a kind of offensive
‘‘scorched earth’’ strategy). Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallerstein
to Patton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 23–24, 39.
42. See, especially Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third
Reich (New York: Oxford, 1992); and Ben Shepherd, War in the Wild East: The German Army
and Soviet Partisans (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
43. See especially, Robert Putnam, ‘‘Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of
Two-Level Games,’’ International Organization 42, no. 3 (1988): 427–460.
44. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 6.
45. See Michael P. Fischerkeller, ‘‘David vs. Goliath: Cultural Judgments in Asymmetric
Wars,’’ Security Studies 7, no. 4 (1998): 1–43.
46. I have suggested here a marked U.S. cultural preference for supply-side solutions to
policy problems (in this case, counterinsurgency strategy); but it is clear that this preference
extends far beyond counterinsurgency to war in general, immigration, gun control, healthcare
reform, and the so-called ‘‘war on drugs.’’ A comparative analysis of variation in such cultural
constraints, if real, would be a boon to our understanding of why states choose the strategies
they do, especially when a given strategy is historically associated with failure when employed.
View publication stats

Contemporary Asymmetric Conflict Theory in Historical Perspective

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Contemporary Asymmetric Conflict Theory in Historical Perspective

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

Contemporary Asymmetric Conﬂict Theory in Historical

Article in Terrorism and Political Violence · September 2012

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Terrorism and Political Violence

Contemporary Asymmetric Conflict

Version of record first published: 31 Jul 2012

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2012.700624

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Contemporary Asymmetric Conflict Theory

This article offers an intellectual history of theoretical work devoted to explaining

conflict’’ encompasses a number of overlapping literatures, including insurgency, ter-

Keywords asymmetric conflict, counterinsurgency, hearts and minds,

Ivan Arreguı́n-Toft is an assistant professor in Boston University’s Department of Inter-

(what might be described as ‘‘symmetrical’’ conflicts). Most academic and

an analogous division between strategy broadly conceived, and strategy broken

Asymmetric Conflict Theory in Historical Perspective

The French successfully subjugated the peoples of Indochina for more

U.S. Military machine with an expeditionary force of five hundred-

of study, reflection, and application in the crucible of Japanese occupation of China,

Counterinsurgency Theory: ‘‘Hearts and Minds’’ Versus Terror

The United States in Vietnam: Supply- Versus Demand-Side Strategy

Asymmetric Conflict Theory

less severe than the return of compulsory military conscription. Finally,

How the Weak Win Wars

two patterns. In direct-direct or indirect-indirect patterns (‘‘same-approach’’), I

Asymmetric Conflict Theory After 9/11

In Beating Goliath, Jeffrey Record supplies an important qualification and

tional or unconventional resistance is offered. But on balance, there are no other

Table 1. Main theoretical works surveyed (contributors in alphabetical order)

Contributor Key puzzle Case universe Intended contribution Theoretical limitations

Contributor Key puzzle Case universe Intended contribution Theoretical limitations

metric conflicts—on the limits, in other words, of killing power.

as an objective of intervention, how much postwar non-violence, for example, is suf-

28. In this Merom and Luttwak could be counted as intellectual descendants of

View publication stats

You might also like