The Long War - Insurgency, Counterinsurgency and Collapsing States by Mark T. Berger Douglas A. Borer

Author:Mark T. Berger, Douglas A. Borer [Mark T. Berger, Douglas A. Borer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, International, International Security, History, Military
ISBN: 9781317990925
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

Things fall apart

All this has implications for the speed and ‘tactical’ picture of the endgame and each side’s ability to save itself once it has begun to go into decline. For one thing, it turns out that, while the trajectory of decline in the case of the insurgency and the state follow the characteristic concave and convex paths discussed above, a higher-resolution picture of these collapse paths show that they do not fail smoothly but in ‘chunks’. If the insurgency and the state were defined as random networks of largely undifferentiated vertices, this would not be true; their path of decline would be smooth and predictable. The loss of any group of vertices in a given time period, in this case, would be no more significant than the loss of any other; the only question of interest would be the rate at which they were being reduced. Because the vertices that comprise insurgent and state networks, however, do not equally contribute to the whole, this is not the case. The loss of a large number of low-level vertices within a system may not be as significant as the loss of a single ‘hub’ or authority centre. This not only makes each of these systems subject to periodic shocks, it also introduces an interesting stochastic dimension to the struggle as the end draws near. The conflict may appear to be on a predictable glide path in one period, only to take a significant turn for the worse (or the better) in the next.

The players’ ability to effectively discriminate between high-value and low-value targets will tend to change, we have said, as a function of their changing force ratio. The stronger they are, all other things being equal, the better they will be at eliminating key (hardened or hidden) vertices in their opponent’s network. For reasons we have discussed however, this will not influence the battlefield prospects of each side in the same way.

While the state’s ability to look for and destroy high-value targets within the insurgent system will increase as its force advantage grows, the insurgents will also become more difficult to find as their numbers decline and they fade back into the woodwork. These two effects are offsetting. The first, if nothing else were to change, would allow the state to take the insurgency apart at a faster rate by hitting targets of greater value. The second, as we discussed earlier, works in the opposite direction, making the insurgents harder to locate and, therefore, harder to attack as their numbers begin to decline. Historically the second effect dominates the first, which is why insurgent networks characteristically decline at a decelerating rate as they approach their breakpoint.

The state, as a general rule, is not so lucky. The effects of decline, in this case, are reinforcing. The rate at which the insurgents are able to engage the regime, as we have said, depends on the number of attackers; it does not depend on the number of defenders. As the balance of power

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