Paths to victory: Christopher Paul discusses what history tells us about how to defeat insurgencies.

• Author: Paul, Christopher

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An age-old form of warfare, insurgency is still a problem for many governments today and merits careful study. Regional governments, global coalitions and international security policy-makers--all have an interest in finding the ways and means of countering such challenges. Historical analysis provides a good foundation for understanding the problem and seeking solutions to it. The Rand Corporation has undertaken an extensive and detailed comparative examination of insurgencies begun and completed worldwide since the Second World War, focusing on the 71 most recently resolved conflicts in particular. The findings of this important study provide useful guidelines for implementing an effective counter-insurgency strategy.

Insurgency has been one of the most prevalent forms of armed conflict throughout the course of human history and shows no sign of disappearing in the future. Indeed, at the time of this writing, insurgencies were on-going in (at least) the following countries: Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire, India, Israel/Palestine, Mali, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Uganda and Yemen. Countering insurgencies is a major concern for regional governments, global coalitions and international security policy-makers alike. (1) New Zealand has participated in coalition efforts to defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan, and it remains committed (now and in the future) to supporting the internal security efforts of numerous partner nations in the South Pacific.

When a country is threatened by an insurgency, what strategies and approaches give the government the best chance of prevailing? Contemporary discourse on the subject is voluminous and often contentious. A variety of concepts and areas of emphasis have been advocated, but such advocacy is usually based on relatively limited evidence. A 2013 RAND report, Paths to Victory: Lessons from Modern Insurgencies, seeks to improve this situation with thorough analyses based on a firm foundation of historical data. It offers an extensive and detailed comparative examination of insurgencies begun and completed worldwide since the Second World War. (2) This short article summarises the methods and key results of that larger study.

Findings and analyses are based on detailed insurgency case studies. Each case is supported by a detailed case narrative and by quantitative data on nearly 300 individual factors. These analyses benefited considerably from both quantitative and qualitative data, as well as from the ability to move back and forth between the two. The qualitative narratives frequently suggested new factors or hypotheses, which were then tested comparatively across cases using the quantitative data. Patterns that did not make sense in the quantitative analyses were explored in the detailed narratives, with the nuance from the narratives subjected to quantitative analyses in the form of still more new hypotheses or factors.

The selected cases are the 71 most recent resolved insurgencies, spanning the period from the Second World War through 2010. In addition to being perfectly representative of the modern history of insurgency, these cases represent geographic variation (mountains, jungles, deserts, cities), regional and cultural variation (Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, the Balkans, the Pacific), and variation in the military capabilities and tactics of counter-insurgency forces and insurgent forces alike. The 71 cases do contain a subset of cases that are unlike the others, however, and are therefore not appropriate comparisons for the larger set of cases. Specifically, their outcomes were not driven by the effectiveness of the counter-insurgency force but by exogenous factors related to broader historical currents: the end of colonialism and the end of apartheid. We removed the cases that were fought 'against the tide of history' from those used for the quantitative analyses, leaving an analytic core of 59 cases (see Figure 1).

Key findings

The research quantitatively tested the performance of 24 counter-insurgency concepts against the historical record. These concepts were identified through a survey of the existing literature and based on previous research in this area. Some of the concepts were drawn from classical perspectives on counter-insurgency from the previous century, such as pacification and resettlement; others are contemporary concepts suggested for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as 'boots on the ground'. (3) Table 1 lists the concepts. Each was represented by a set of quantitative factors in the data and was evaluated based on the strength of the relationship of those factors with case outcomes. We considered concepts to have strong support if the relationship between the implementation of the concept (as represented by the factors) and the case outcome was very strong (that is, implementation of the concept is a very strong indicator of outcome). We considered concepts to have minimal support if there was limited correlation between the implementation of the concept and the outcome. Finally, we considered there to be strong evidence against a concept if it was implemented in a greater proportion of losses than wins.

Seventeen of the 24 concepts had strong empirical support. (4) There was strong evidence against one concept...