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Abstract
For generations, most analysts treated state and nonstate war making as a dichotomy, with states employing high-intensity ‘conventional’ methods centered on seizing and holding ground, but with nonstate actors using low-intensity ‘irregular’ methods such as roadside bombings, ambushes, and assassinations. This article, by contrast, argues that many nonstate actors have adopted substantially conventional warfighting styles, and that more are likely to do so over time. Increasingly, the best predictor of a combatant’s military methods is not its status as a state as opposed to a nonstate actor, but its internal politics – and especially its institutional maturity and war aims.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Stephen Biddle is Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on U.S. defense policy, international security, the conduct of war, military technology, and the analysis of recent combat operations. He has served on the Defense Policy Board, and as a member of theater assessment teams under Generals David Petraeus and Lloyd Austin in Iraq and General Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan. He has held teaching and research positions at the Council on Foreign Relations, George Washington University, the U.S. Army War College, the University of North Carolina, and the Institute for Defense Analyses.
Notes
1 Note that to establish this claim will require a detailed discussion of both internal politics and military methods below; the details are needed to substantiate the theory.
2 Biddle (Citation2004), pp. 92, 119 assuming, conservatively, 15,000 soldiers per British division in 1918.
3 Elsewhere these techniques, inter alia, have been described as the modern system of continental warfare: Biddle (Citation2004), which argues that actors’ relative degree of adoption of the modern system canon accounts for much of the observed variation in twentieth and early twenty-first century military outcomes.
4 The complexity of fire-and-movement and combined arms is thus a major element of the new theory’s causal mechanism for connecting the dependent variable of nonstate military methods to the independent variables of institutions and stakes; to explain the new theory’s deductive causal logic completely thus requires a sustained discussion of these techniques and why they require complex interdependence among specialists in ways that guerilla warfare does not.
5 As in the techniques for tank-infantry intercommunication improvised in World War II: Doubler (Citation1994).
6 Institutions’ ability to overcome collective action problems is thus another major element of the new theory’s causal mechanism for connecting the dependent variable of nonstate military methods to the independent variables of institutions and stakes; to explain the new theory’s deductive causal logic completely thus requires a sustained discussion of how viable institutions can enable some nonstate actors to produce the complex interdependence required by conventional, but not guerilla, warfare.
7 Foundational works include Ostrom (Citation1990), Ostrom (Citation2005), Oye (Citation1986), and Axelrod and Keohane (Citation1985).
8 This variation is critical to the new theory. Many assume that nonstate actors, unlike states, are weakly institutionalized. If this weakness were uniform and institutions thus did not vary to any meaningful degree across nonstate actors, then one of the theory’s two central independent variables would actually be a constant and the theory would be mis-specified. To explain the new theory’s structure, it is thus necessary to establish that real nonstate actors vary widely in their institutional maturity.
9 North, Wallis, and Weingast (Citation2009) specify four categories of political development among states: fragile natural order, basic natural order, mature natural order, and ‘open access’. Below I describe nonstate analogs to the first three, but the features of ‘open access’ status restrict its application to modern industrial democratic states such as the United States and Great Britain. As such, this category excludes essentially all nonstate military actors, and I thus drop it from the taxonomy used below.
10 This category thus corresponds directly to a nonstate version of North, Wallis, and Weingast’s (2009) characterization of ‘fragile natural order states’; the categories of basic and mature natural order below do likewise.
11 This also requires existential stakes – see below. Mature natural order institutions and existential stakes are thus mutually necessary but insufficient for proficient mid-concealment military operations in the theory presented here.
12 Institutions eventually adapt when stakes are high; this is a central claim of much political development theory: Tilly (Citation1992). The process, however, can take a century or more to unfold. As a simplifying assumption appropriate to the theory’s mid-term time horizon (i.e. decades rather than centuries), the theory thus treats institutions as exogenous – in all but the very long run, institutions are not merely epiphenomenal consequences of actors’ stakes.
13 Not all possible variations in military behavior are theorized here, of course. The puzzle motivating the analysis is the ability of some nonstate actors to adopt surprisingly state-like conventional military methods. Hence the theory focuses on the demands of conventional warfare as a means of shedding light on the ability of some non-state actors to fight conventionally while others cannot. There are other variations in nonstate military methods that warrant research – such as the use of suicide bombings or sexual violence, for example, by some nonstate actors but not others. These topics have, in fact, attracted considerable attention in the literature: see, e.g. Pape (Citation2005), Bloom (Citation2007), Berman & Laitin (Citation2005), Piazza (Citation2008), Cohen (Citation2013), and Wood (Citation2008). To date, the requirements of conventional warfighting by nonstate actors have been less studied by political scientists and I thus focus on this aspect here, but that does not mean other variations are unimportant or unworthy of study. Nor does the discussion above treat competing hypotheses in any detail; the larger book project does, but in the interest of brevity my goal here is merely to present the new theory rather than to test it exhaustively against competing claims (such as the potential causal roles of culture, religious ideology, or fanaticism).