The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: Strategic Problems, Puzzles, and Paradoxes

War, in its essence, is simple. It is political communication, bending an adversary to your will through violence, not an act of destruction for its own sake.¹ John Stone puts it well when he states: “Stripped down to its chassis, so to speak, almost any war emerges as an exercise in coercion. The application of force is combined with a conditional intention to stop once a desired set of political objectives is achieved.”² The question is, How is this conditional intention to continue or cease hostilities communicated? Again, the answer is simple: through escalation or de-escalation.

The notion of escalation is also straightforward. It is, as Herman Kahn explained in 1965, “an increase in the level of conflict.”3 The point of escalation is that it is undertaken for a conscious, politically coercive purpose and not for something that happens through an involuntarily momentum of events. For Kahn, escalation is “a competition in risk taking or at least resolve.”⁴ It conveys intent to prosecute war until political objectives are met. But it also implies restraint—namely, the “conditional intention to stop” once those objectives are achieved. As a consequence, the simple essence of war becomes a complex calculation of escalations as its political objectives are redefined in response to events. As Stone suggests, “Even when military action is formally conducted with a view to rendering an enemy defenceless, it ceases before that state of affairs is completely achieved. Under these circumstances, the loser capitulates not because he is deprived of all means of resistance, but because the costs associated with further resistance are unlikely to produce any discernible benefits. At this stage, too, the winner stands to gain very little in relation to the costs associated with continuing hostilities.”⁵

The notion of escalation as described by Stone presents an interesting addition to understandings of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency theorists maintain that insurgency/counterinsurgency differs from orthodox force-on-force encounters. If, following this argument, insurgency/counterinsurgency exists as a distinctive form of war, we would expect it to have its own discernible escalation dynamics. As the chapters in this volume have repeatedly shown, many COIN commentators contend that insurgent conflicts stand apart from the understandings of war enunciated by Carl von Clausewitz, who argues that war is a rational, instrumental, goal-orientated enterprise. An investigation into escalation therefore compels us to ask how the process of violent political communication is actually conducted in wars that are characterized as insurgencies/counterinsurgencies. In this manner, such an investigation can clarify a number of recurring themes in this study by considering whether insurgent-based conflict can be said to constitute something that differentiates itself from “conventional” or “regular” war. Moreover, it does so by transcending the assumption, common to most of the literature, that insurgency/counterinsurgency is a self-evident form of action based on a set of distinguishing tactics and techniques.

In the first instance, such an analysis requires us to revisit puzzles and questions identified in the first chapter, beginning with: Can the notion of insurgency itself be said to hold certain distinguishing characteristics in an analytical separation between insurgency and non-insurgency understandings of war? Theoretically, one way to think about a distinctive practice is to propose that insurgency denotes a mode of political communication on the part of one or more of the key protagonists that is not based on the physical denial of space and the attrition of resources through combat in order to wear down the enemy. Instead, practices in insurgent war might be understood as inflicting costs as a means of exerting influence—namely, the art of coercive persuasion, premised not on the actual destructiveness of the violent act, but on the latent threat of additional violence.6 In other words, such a method of political communication uses violence to indicate to an adversary that the costs of not acquiescing to an opponent’s political demands will outweigh the costs of concession.⁷ In that manner, a process of political bargaining characterizes strategies that are terroristic in nature or practiced by rebellious nonstate political actors.⁸

These characterizations may represent a commonsense approach to the conception of the process of escalation in insurgencies and thus delineate a mode of political communication typical of this kind of war. However, given that all war—even the most physically destructive of conflicts—can be seen as political communication, it is necessary to address further first-order questions about the nature of war and escalation before evaluating whether there is anything meaningful to be said about insurgency/counterinsurgency tactics.

Because these first principles underpin the bulk of the subsequent analysis in this chapter, it will be helpful here to remind readers of the crucial premises outlined at the beginning of this book. The first essential premise is that armed force possesses an instrumental relationship with politics. In Clausewitz’s classic formulation, war is an act of policy carried on with other means.9 In its most elemental form, war is, to use Christopher Bassford’s phrase, a “clash of independent wills,”¹⁰ each seeking to prevail over the other. Each combatant’s will, moreover, is determined by the combatant’s social nature and the intensity and skill of effort to fulfill its political goals through violent means. These factors in turn are governed by the variables of passion, chance, and reason. For this reason, wars will always vary in “the nature of their motives” according to the unique social conditions that gave rise to them.¹¹ Each instance of war is thereby exclusive to its time and place, which in turn will affect its direction and duration. As Clausewitz observes, war always progresses toward its conclusion at “varying speed.”¹² In other words, no two wars are ever the same and do not follow any predictable pattern.

If all war is unique, then can there in fact be any such notion as an insurgent-based war distinguishable from all other wars? According to Clausewitz, the particularity of war as just outlined is also subject to a universal dynamic, a lasting essence—to achieve goals of policy through violence. Can one, then, identify a special lasting essence of insurgent-based conflict? This question returns us to the fault line in much writing about war and strategy, initially traversed in chapter 1, which assumes, often erroneously, that in the practice of war separations can be made between the “conventional” and the “unconventional,” the “regular” and the “irregular.”

The case for an analytical separation of insurgent conflicts can be stated thus: each side’s relative power will influence how the combatant chooses to conduct itself. For example, to maximize its advantage at any given time, a combatant may decide to avoid or delay open battle and instead prosecute operations through less-direct confrontation, using guerrilla or hit-and-run tactics or sabotage. It is this attempt to evade direct battle that forms, albeit in often unstated ways, the belief that an analytical distinction can be made between conflicts in which outright force-on-force clashes take place on battlefronts and conflicts that do not. The former are often characterized as conventional war, whereas the latter are seen as unconventional—or irregular—war. Thus, irregular warfare becomes a synonym for other terms that are felt to denote warfare without battles and battlefronts—namely, insurgencies, although, as the first chapter outlined, the lexicon of insurgency is replete with many substitutes signifying the same sort of practice: low-intensity war, small war, and guerrilla war, to mention only a few. A number of suppositions usually follow this assumption about the nature of particular combatants and the geopolitical circumstances in which they choose to fight. For example, much writing about irregular warfare presumes that it represents a weaker side confronting a more powerful adversary, the weaker side resorting to the irregular methods of hit-and-run tactics in order to prosecute its campaign.13 Other assumptions follow: for example, that insurgent war signifies the involvement of nonstate groups fighting against the state and therefore is usually a characteristic of intrastate war.¹⁴

As the first chapter pointed out, few of these assumptions are conceptually robust. The belief that irregular war is about a weaker power confronting a superior opponent fails when one considers that in no war is there exact parity between protagonists. There exists a universal power differential where one side will always be in a theoretically weaker position than the other. Nor is it the case that irregular war connotes the presence of nonstate groups fighting the authority of an existing state.¹⁵ Irregular tactics, if one can call them such, involving hit-and-run guerrilla actions and sabotage are a form of fighting that can be employed by any belligerent in any type of war, as the numerous tales of daring raids behind enemy lines conducted by the principal interstate combatants in major theaters of conflict, such as World War II, readily attest.¹⁶ Neither is it possible to associate irregular/insurgent tactics with conditions of civil war. Historical examples from the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, the American Civil War in the nineteenth century, and the Chinese Civil War in the twentieth century refute any such association given that the majority of combat operations in these intrastate conflicts involved force-on-force concentrations in major battles.

If few of these characterizations of what might constitute irregular/insurgent war are intellectually credible, might it be the case that insurgencies denote a form of conflict—civil war, intrastate war—that is less prevalent than other wars and can therefore be deemed to constitute a deviation from regular, normal war? This is certainly the implication, where the terms regular and conventional denote a standard pattern or order. When applied to war, the notions of “regular” and “conventional” are taken simply to mean warfare between states. But is this really the case? Chapter 1 suggested that empirical evidence points in the other direction, statistical assessments indicating that less than one-fifth of all conflicts since the end of World War II can conceivably be classified as interstate.¹⁷ The vast majority of wars take place within states. It is also clear that so-called irregular/insurgent wars constitute the predominant form of warfare in both the post- and pre–World War II eras¹⁸ and as a matter of routine involve the profusion of substate political and military actors.¹⁹ Thus, unconventional warfare represents the convention; irregular war is the regularity.²⁰

What this somewhat paradoxical situation reveals is that distinctions between forms of war are inherently arbitrary classifications. Designations, or labels, in fact reflect less the statistical predominance of certain types of conflict than political concerns that dominated Western military planning from World War II to the postwar era of Cold War confrontation. The legacy of twentieth-century total war that culminated in a titanic fight to the death between mutually exclusive ideological systems in World War II tended to fix debate in much orthodox strategic thought, implying that warfare centered around state actors, involved open battles, and could ultimately jeopardize national survival. Such wars were labeled “conventional” not because they were the convention, but because they were perceived to be more important than other “low-level,” “unconventional,” “irregular” wars.²¹ The study and understanding of wars that might be characterized as insurgencies were consequently relegated to a low position in the pecking order of Western nations’ military priorities.

This brings us to the key question: What is irregular about irregular war? The accurate response is: nothing. War is war. Whether it is described as “irregular war,” “unconventional war,” “small war,” “low-intensity war,” “insurgent,” or “counterinsurgent,” it follows the universal dynamic enunciated by Clausewitz: to achieve goals of policy through violence.22 Theoretically and logically, irregular war does not exist.²³ A theatrical statement perhaps, but it compels us to address the first-order question of whether the term irregular war has any innate meaning: we cannot simply assume that irregular/insurgent war exists as a discrete form of war that diverges from some sort of norm. To do so is to commit the logical fallacy of petitio principii—assuming the principle you have to prove.

As suggested, when one probes into terms such as irregular war, they usually reveal themselves as euphemisms for unspoken denotations that imply the presence of nonstate actors involved in intrastate insurgent challenges. It has further been suggested that the manner in which the term irregular war has been employed in much strategic writing is not so much because it designates “irregular” phenomena, but because certain kinds of conflicts are deemed to be of lesser importance.²⁴ The term thus intimates a value judgment seeking to ascribe relative significance to instances of war. Hence, we observe that much strategic analysis is less to do with investigating war as a whole and more to do focusing on particular kinds of confrontation seen as more threatening to major global players. The result, as noted in chapters 4 and 5, is that, for most Western powers, insurgencies are wars that occur somewhere else and not inside their domestic jurisdictions. War involving clashes between well-armed and organized states is considered more threatening and therefore more important, hence the convention that other wars are of less significance. Irregular war is thus a dismissive label, or at least it functioned as such during the years of the Cold War, the implication being that “small,” “minor,” “less important” conflicts need not be studied with the same degree of rigor.²⁵ The danger, then, is that sloppy theorizing by aficionados of insurgency/counterinsurgency results in the attempt to discern the “lessons” of “irregular” war. These lessons lurk in spurious theorization, lying in wait to be “rediscovered” as timeless verities.

Is there anything of substance to be said about the notion of irregular/insurgent war? Can it be endowed with any meaningful suppositions conferring analytical utility as a category of war that can be isolated and dissected? It is possible to suggest that in its most basic inference the phrase irregular war is used to denote war between grossly unequal combatants. The term asymmetric war is also used—yet another ambiguous label because no confrontation ever takes place between exactly matched protagonists. Nevertheless, despite conceptual difficulties, it is perhaps possible to force a rough distinction between combatants where the power differential is substantial. Exactly how this differential might be quantified is beyond the scope of this volume, but the assumption that irregular war connotes a large adversarial power differential returns us to the stereotypical image of a presumably powerful state contending with an armed challenge from a materially inferior nonstate actor: an insurgent. From this assumption, we might begin to determine how the contours of escalation in such conditions might be conceived.

It is not possible to talk about war and escalation of any kind without turning once again to Clausewitz’s conceptual rigor and his baseline understanding of their essential features.26 Assuming the rough definition that insurgent war denotes a conflict where there is a substantially disproportionate asymmetry in material means, is it now possible to say something novel or interesting about the escalation process? In his classic strategic formulations, Clausewitz argues that “if the enemy is to be coerced you must place him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make. The hardships of that situation must not of course be merely transient—at least not in appearance.”²⁷ Thomas Schelling echoes this point in his writings about nuclear deterrence, describing conflicts characterized by what he called “coercive bargaining,” where the “ability of one participant to gain his ends is dependent to an important degree on the choices or decisions that the other participant will make.”²⁸

This insight underlines the reactive environment of war. Clausewitz explains: “War is not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass but always a collision of two living forces.”²⁹ In analytical terms, this reactivity demands that we not only focus on what may seem logical, consistent, and efficacious from one point of view but take into account the fact that all sides have agency in war and that, as Schelling suggests, the decision-making process in war is an inherently interdependent dynamic.

Clausewitz again gives us the theoretical premise on which to develop an understanding of the philosophical essence of the decision-making process in war, which involves choices to escalate or de-escalate. “War is an act of force,” he maintains, “and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.”30 Clausewitz illustrates this inherent escalation dynamic by employing the analogy of two wrestlers locked in a mutual grip: as one wrestler exerts more pressure to overthrow his opponent, he compels the other to match or exceed that force, leading to a reciprocal action that sees each wrestler—or combatant—reaching a point of maximum effort.³¹

War theoretically contains an irresistible tendency to escalate toward a notional extreme. One side’s ability to outescalate the other or, via Schelling’s understanding of coercive bargaining, to convince the other side of one’s will to escalate beyond the other’s willingness or capabilities is necessary to bring war to an end. Having outlined this dynamic of escalation toward a point of utmost exertion, Clausewitz goes on to explain why of course in reality this never happens. All wars, in practice, are limited by any number of variables both tangible and intangible—time, geography, resources, organizational ability, military skill (or lack of it). However, Clausewitz reduces the basic ideas that act as a barrier to escalation to two main principles.

The first is the notion of “friction”: constraints that are forever present, physical and logistical impediments that always prevent the application of maximum effort and resources at any one time.32 For example, it may take time to mobilize forces, to transport them to where they are needed. Armed forces may suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune: they will get lost, their personnel will fall ill from disease, the enemy will assault suddenly when least expected. Indeed, all the elements of chance and luck will be at play. Second, politics constrains escalation. The goals that a social actor sets for itself and the degree of effort it is prepared to make will be subject to a means–ends calculation: the attempt to ensure that war is proportionate to the objectives sought.³³ War is thereby kept within the domains of rationality. Thus, a political actor is unlikely to escalate its activities in war toward the maximum if the cause does not necessarily threaten vital national interests—a minor territorial dispute, for example. But it may well commit everything to the fight if its very survival is threatened.

Apart from Clausewitz, most other theoretical discussions of escalation in war arose from the Cold War era, when the writings of analysts such as Kahn and Schelling predominated with an emphasis on controlling intensification of conflict as a means of stopping a slide toward all-out nuclear confrontation between the superpowers. Otherwise, as analysts such as Isabelle Duyvesteyn have noted, understandings of escalation in war below superpower conflict, especially in the realms of civil war, remain remarkably underdeveloped.³⁴ Cold War theorists, however, did provide a useful postulation that future superpower conflict would progress through a series of discernible boundaries—thresholds. From the outbreak of hostilities, conflict would systematically increase in intensity through an ever-expanding range of targets, geographical locations, and categories of weapons. Kahn notably visualized the spiralling conflict from peace to outright intercontinental ballistic nuclear strikes on the homelands of the United States and the Soviet Union as an escalation ladder.³⁵

The point about Kahn’s ladder of escalation is that it stipulated individual steps he assumed each superpower would tacitly recognize. These steps could function as putative, mutually observed limitations. As war progressed up the escalation ladder, each superpower was understood to be ever more reluctant for fear of further escalatory consequences. In this way, thresholds were perceived as the basis for implicit cooperation to restrain superpower confrontation, preventing a slide toward nuclear catastrophe.³⁶ Theorists such as Schelling meanwhile hypothesized that these implicit boundaries were susceptible to manipulation for political advantage. An indicated willingness to up the ante by crossing one of these targets, weapons, or geographical boundaries could demonstrate resolve. In other words, manipulating fear of thresholds would signal the intention to impose future costs on an adversary and the escalator’s readiness to assume risk, with the inducement that those costs, both real and implied, will be withdrawn once an adversary has conceded.

A further elaboration of escalation thresholds is now required to understand how political communication might be said to operate in insurgent conflicts. What is a threshold? It is a prominent or salient boundary: a line in the sand. For Richard Smoke, an act of escalation is one “that crosses a saliency which defines the current limits of a war, and that occurs in a context where the actor cannot know the full consequences of his action, including particularly how his action and the opponent’s potential reaction(s) may interact to generate a situation likely to induce new actions that will cross more saliences.”37 This observation introduces us to two important elements of escalation: uncertainty and risk. War is a reciprocal process of potential escalation over which you have no control. Cross a saliency, and you do not know where it all may end up.

In summary, according to Clausewitzian understandings, the restrictions on escalation are: (1) you cannot commit all of your resources, and (2) you choose not to commit all your resources. Dissecting the reasons why a political actor may or may not apply its maximum effort and resources in war is a complex amalgam of contingent factors that are impossible to systematize in any coherent manner but in one sense are likely to boil down to the unwillingness to cross certain saliences for fear of the unknown—that is, uncertain consequences on the part of the opponent and a reluctance to accept unnecessary costs or avoidable threats. Given this understanding, is it possible to posit any generalizations about the decision-making factors likely to influence whether a political actor chooses to escalate or not in any conflict involving grossly unequal combatants (our definition of irregular war)? To do this we need to consider the theoretical position confronting the decision processes of the manifestly weaker (insurgent) side and the manifestly stronger (counterinsurgent) side in turn. Once the theory has been enunciated, the assessment will illustrate the theory through a set of practical case examples drawn from the experiences of insurgent challenges in Argentina and in Northern Ireland.

Is it possible, however, to induce moral capitulation or to foster a belief that the conflict is not worth the cost of carrying on or to reach a position of power equilibrium with a more powerful adversary without stimulating the other side to escalate its military campaign to a point where the weaker protagonist’s survival is jeopardized? Although inevitably complex and speculative, any answer to this question must be premised upon the weaker side’s appreciation of the contingent political environment in which it functions. In particular, the insurgent is required to possess a comprehension of the ways in which a particular target group, actor, or audience might respond to a campaign of violence. The psychological effects of small-scale attacks to produce a climate of moral collapse or a feeling of war weariness might, for example, diminish over time, and repeated attacks on similar targets will increase predictability, enabling better protection. What is to be done?

The traditional conception of escalation is to commit more resources to combat: more troops, more material, bigger formations, ever more destructive techniques. For the weaker side to apply sufficient coercive pressure, there must theoretically be more than one way to escalate, returning us to the relevance of ideas of saliency as escalation thresholds. As we have suggested, the likely intention of strategies adopted by materially inferior combatants is to exploit the wider psychological effects of violence rather than try to degrade the enemy’s physical resources. This might entail a willingness, therefore, to cross a particular salient psychological boundary. A combatant might attempt to endanger the fabric of a society that attaches value to being prosperous and peaceful—for example, through a campaign of violent disturbance—but always with the prospect of diminishing returns, which increases the pressure for escalation.38

Widening the franchise of violence to reestablish unpredictability of threat and regenerate the psychologically disproportionate effect of a military campaign is a next step. The inferior combatant may, for instance, choose to cross a salient threshold by expanding attacks beyond the once predictable. What does this mean in practice? It entails moving the campaign toward greater levels of indiscrimination and may include people who are seen to be innocent or unconnected with any quarrel.³⁹ Although such an escalation may be enough to maintain the coercive impact on an opponent, it is a path that contains inherent risks, especially if the weaker side is attempting to win popular sympathy. In other words, a materially weaker actor in conditions of irregular war may seek to escalate not by committing more resources or by seeking greater physical destructiveness (through new weaponry and technological innovation), but by transcending ethical barriers.⁴⁰

What we can deduce, then, is that widening the franchise of violence by introducing greater levels of indiscrimination is a method of escalation in irregular war. Furthermore, such an impulse conforms to the Clausewitzian notion that a reciprocal action in war will propel the combatant to intensify the level of violence, to maximize military pressure, in an attempt to coerce an opponent to accede to its will.

In summary, we have so far discussed the impetus to escalate on the part of the weaker side in terms of an attempt to sustain the coercive effect of violence, which might be eroded over time, though, as violent acts become internalized by a target population and accepted as part of the everyday risks. Once a strategic actor discerns that its military campaign is losing its capacity to influence an enemy, the potential for escalation presents itself. Such an escalation is then seen to occur as reduced discrimination regarding targets and a transcending of ethical boundaries carry a further risk of alienation for the insurgent.

Another rationale for the materially inferior side to seek escalation is that an enemy may be deemed vulnerable and that a further raising of the intensity of violence might convince that enemy once and for all to concede to its opponent’s demands. Perhaps the stronger side has already made concessions, suggesting a crumbling of resolve in the face of the inferior side’s attacks. Alternatively, the weaker side might perceive its stronger opponent as responding incompetently or repressively.41 This could be a sign that the enemy is losing control of events, which the insurgent interprets as an opportunity to test its resolve with another, final push.

The common theme throughout, however, is the attempt by the weaker combatant to either forestall the more powerful side from escalating altogether or to ensure that any escalation that does occur is sufficiently inept or ineffective that it undermines the powerful side’s own authority rather than dealing a blow to its opponent. Anxiety about endangering its own legitimacy, (for example, by being seen to overreact) additionally complicates the more powerful actor’s response. Democratic systems of governance often face such dilemmas in relation to domestic violence—whether, for instance, they should implement tough security measures or introduce more restrictive legislation that might curb civil liberties.⁴²

Although there is never going to be a universal template for understanding why political actors choose not to bring their full power to bear upon any enemy, we can use historical illustrations to demonstrate contingent understandings around the stronger side’s escalation decisions. Let us take two instructive case studies. First, in the case of Argentina, which was subject to violent instability, as indeed were many other Latin American states in the 1970s, we can ask, Why did the Argentine military government apply the full panoply of state power in the so-called Dirty War between 1976 and 1982, effectively declaring war against one section of its population and involving massive and systematic repression in order to destroy what it perceived to be a subversive threat? Conversely, why did the British government, in its attempts to combat the threat of Irish Republican violence from the early 1970s through to the 1990s, take a different approach, sometimes even retreating from harsh measures that might be construed as “escalations”? Any understanding of these two very different cases demands both a rigorous comprehension of the historical antecedents and an appreciation, if only basic, of the worldviews of both the Argentinean and British governments at the time.

In the Argentine case, the military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1976 and 1982 conceived the violent subversion carried out by left-wing groups such as the Montoneros and Ejèrcito Revolucionario del Pueblo in terms of a Manichean struggle between the forces of Christian civilization and the forces of barbarous Marxism. This profundity is in line with the Clausewitzian stipulation that the intensity of war will vary with the passions with which the combatants fight for their respective cause. In practical terms, the regime determined the threat posed by leftist guerrilla groups to be a “social disease” that needed to be eradicated.44 In its view, these groups were alien to the Argentine nation, prompting a senior army commander, General Roberto Viola, to declare: “Argentine citizens are not victims of the repression. The repression is against a minority that we do not consider Argentine.”⁴⁵ Against this ideological backdrop, the authorities could utilize any escalatory measures they wanted, in this case state power, to obliterate all forms of dissent, including the imposition of media controls, the curtailment of civil liberties, and rule by law as opposed to the rule of law.⁴⁶ It was a process that was to lead to widespread surveillance, the secret detention of suspects, secret prisons, the systematic use of physical torture as a means of both extracting information and inflicting terror throughout society, mass executions, and the secret disposal of victims.⁴⁷

What we can observe in the case of the Argentine government’s reaction to the crisis of the 1970s is that the escalation dynamic in irregular war does under certain conditions have a propensity to widen the franchise of violence. In this case, the definition of subversion was systematically extended to embrace an ever-larger section of the population—not simply insurgent activists but also their supporters and perceived supporters. As a consequence, the regime’s persecution included, in Patricia Marchak’s words, “students, left-leaning intellectuals and artists, trade union leaders, journalists, liberal lawyers, and various others deemed to be enemies of the state.”⁴⁸ The Argentine general Ibérico Saint-Jean explained: “First we kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then … their sympathizers; then … those who remain indifferent; and finally we will kill the timid.”⁴⁹

Continuous redefinition of the target group thus represents a form of escalation toward the extreme in irregular war as it functions as an enabling device by which a political authority—the counterinsurgent and in this case the Argentine armed forces—can legitimize the elimination of all threats it defines as subversive.⁵⁰ In Argentina, broad categorizations of threat meant that the military government could entrap more or less any group or person it wished and justify any methods of repression, applying, in the words of the leader of the military regime, General Jorge Videla, the government’s “inalienable right to exercise its legitimate defence.”⁵¹

The Argentine military authorities were brutally effective in eliminating the perceived threat by left-wing groups. Irrespective of the damage caused to the fabric of Argentine society by the actions of the armed forces, there is no question that victory went to the stronger side, which followed an escalatory path that destroyed its opponents. Moreover, the Argentine example is merely one historical illustration among many of this approach’s potency. The crucial factor here is the preparedness to cross implicit ethical barriers to prescribe discriminate targeting, a strategy used across Latin America in the same period and discernible in many other recent spheres of insurgent-based war—for example, the Algerian civil war against Islamist forces in the 1990s and the Sri Lankan regime’s actions against Tamil separatists in the late 2000s.52

Why, therefore, do other actors not apply this same method? The British government, for all its initial policy mistakes in Northern Ireland, never went down the road of an Argentine-style dirty war. British policy makers chose not to crush the IRA through brute force, even though they had the theoretical capability to do so. In the words of one Irish Republican supporter, the IRA could “of course be beaten. If the British Army put the boot in they could be flattened. But will they do it?”⁵³

The IRA itself in the early 1970s felt that British reluctance to “flatten” their opponents was a sign of weakness and lack of resolve that was itself to encourage the IRA down the road of escalation in mid-1972. In this case, however, critical values, resting on political calculations about how best to calm the Northern Ireland crisis without provoking more violence, underpinned the official approach to conflict. The authorities had already tried a form of escalation in August 1971 with the introduction of internment without trial, drawn—it may be noted—from Britain’s supposedly classical counterinsurgency experience, but this approach had proved disastrous and merely stoked the resentment felt by Northern Ireland’s Catholic nationalist population and swelled the ranks of the IRA. Realizing that such moves were in fact counterproductive, the British government repeatedly retreated from measures that were felt to alienate Northern Ireland’s nationalists and prevent them from being drawn into an internal power-sharing accommodation, which the British felt, provided the best hope for ending the violence.⁵⁴

Political calculations aside, the wider value system of the British polity also explain these restraints. Steeped in the state’s liberal traditions, this system broadly adhered to the notion that the rule of law, not rule by law, should prevail. This outlook sustained a belief that any challenge to established authority should be, insofar as possible, prosecuted within the existing criminal justice system.55 The British state’s liberal-democratic outlook did not preclude the enactment of measures that might be construed as escalatory, such as the introduction of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1974, which increased pressure on Northern Ireland’s paramilitary groupings and restricted their room for operational and political maneuver. However, the emphasis on conduct within the law meant that those escalation measures that did occur were invariably employed primarily in reaction to a perceived increasing of the military pressure by the IRA (rather than proactively introduced to crush the threat) and applied only insofar as the measures would be able to recontain the conflict at what became known as “an acceptable level of violence.”⁵⁶ The perception that certain degrees of violence should be tolerated within a society is interesting in its own right, underscoring as it does a liberal perception that the attempt to eradicate all forms of antistate activity may in certain circumstances simply not be worth the cost, in either material or political terms. The notion of reducing violence arising from the Northern Ireland conflict to a level that was “acceptable” was openly articulated by the British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling in December 1971 and has been widely interpreted as framing the overarching security objective in which British governments sought to deal with the Troubles thereafter.⁵⁷

Such a political and judicial framework thus constrained the impulse to escalate toward the theoretical extreme and was in itself an expression of commitment to a set of ideological values. In other words, a governing value system acted as a brake on escalation by ensuring that the institution of measures to deal with the violence, be they of a legal or an operational nature, were seen as commensurate with the threat. Such an approach tends to emphasize that the law be applied fairly, that basic civil rights be preserved, that due process be observed, and that humanitarian treatment is extended to those detained under the law. The operation of these values is likely, therefore, to limit any escalation toward a dirty-war solution because arbitrary detentions, the use of torture, ill treatment of those in custody, and the maintenance of the right to a fair trial and appeal are prohibited. Crucially, such a value system also implies that those who participate on the manifestly stronger side in any conflict are themselves subject to the rule of law, bound by its procedures and restraints, and liable to be punished under law for any transgressions that may overstep the boundaries of legality and proportionality.58

Underlying a value system of this nature is the assumption that state authority gains its legitimacy from upholding basic standards of moral and humanitarian behavior. Adherence to such standards differentiates the state from those who seek to challenge its authority by methods that violate these standards, notably through violence.⁵⁹ Should the state itself escalate toward actions that endanger these standards, then a crucial moral difference between established authority and the weaker challenger may be broken down, leading to the authority’s loss of legitimacy and the right to rule. Speaking in the context of a counterterrorist campaign, Paul Wilkinson notes that the “primary objective” of any strategy “must be the protection and maintenance of a liberal democracy. It cannot be sufficiently stressed that this aim overrides in importance even the objective of eliminating terrorism and political violence.”⁶⁰ With respect to British government policy in Northern Ireland, it is this understanding that facilitated the reversal of escalatory methods deemed by the courts to be unlawful or disproportionate, such as hard-interrogation techniques or the conviction of paramilitary suspects on the uncorroborated testimony of informers.⁶¹

At the same time, if the weaker adversary is to stand any chance of attaining some, let alone all, of its goals, it has to demonstrate political dexterity. In particular, it has to assess the impact of any escalation on its adversary to gauge whether it will succeed in maintaining coercive pressure without provoking an act of counterescalation that may impede its progress. A number of twentieth-century historical illustrations suggest that instances of nonstate groups challenging the superior power of the state often demonstrate a poor grasp of this point and are prone to overhasty acts of escalation. Such groups invariably take an initial lack of action by the state, a stumbling response or a willingness to compromise, as an indication of inward weakness and therefore as a signal to escalate a campaign of violence, heedless of the consequences. At its extreme, as in the case of Argentina, this escalation can lead to an authoritarian solution, engendering an escalatory response that, in Walter Laqueur’s words, ends up meeting “indiscriminate murder with indiscriminate repression.”62

Just as pertinently, even liberal-democratic societies are liable to take tough measures and escalate conflict if provoked beyond a certain point of tolerance, returning us to conceptions of the salient ethical boundary. On close examination, we may discern that cases such as Argentina and Northern Ireland reveal differences in degree rather than in kind. Although British conduct in Northern Ireland did not escalate through indiscriminate repression as in Argentina, it did countenance orthodox escalation solutions, including discriminate legal, policing, and intelligence measures along with the application of precision force in a new context.

In July 1972, the IRA consciously chose to escalate its campaign. The invitation to an IRA delegation to participate in talks with government had lulled the organization into a belief that violence was weakening British resolve, and, mistaking this invitation as a sign that the IRA was close to outright victory, the IRA leadership decided to “impose a sudden and severe load on the British and Unionist system.”63 In a coordinated multiple bombing, the IRA killed nine people in the center of Belfast on July 21, 1972. The attack, known as Bloody Friday, merely provoked the British government in its own act of escalation, Operation Motorman, on July 31, 1972. This was a huge demonstration of exemplary military power as more than thirty thousand troops moved in and took over the IRA-controlled districts in the cities of Belfast and Londonderry.⁶⁴ The IRA had used these “no-go” areas as bases to build up its military campaign, and the British had until that point observed restraint, being reluctant to move in for fear of inflaming sectarian tensions. Yet, as if to demonstrate the uncertain consequences of escalation, the IRA’s ill-conceived attempt to raise coercive pressure brought down upon itself an overwhelming exercise in hard power.⁶⁵ Its rate of violence declined sharply (a comparison of three-week periods before and after the operation shows that recorded bomb attacks declined from 180 to 73 and shooting incidents from 2,595 to 385).⁶⁶ In a single stroke, Operation Motorman had altered the principal basis upon which the IRA’s coercive bargaining position once rested.⁶⁷

In effect, Motorman was a classic example of “surge” tactics that were to become a notable feature of military operations by U.S. forces in Iraq in 2007. The principle of escalating by “going in hard” not only runs counter to the usual canards about hearts and minds and minimum force in counterinsurgency but also establishes the point that recontaining threats and establishing the conditions for greater security are often the precursors for other forms of escalatory activity in tandem with and not instead of social and economic amelioration and the search for political reconciliation.⁶⁸ The Bloody Friday bombings demonstrate the validity of Richard Smoke’s contention that escalation is a risk because the actor “cannot know the full consequences of his action.”

The consequence of this escalation was that the IRA not only blew its best bargaining position but set the scene for the next twenty years, during which it withered toward a slow military defeat as British security policy moved from overt exemplary power into a more covert extension, reorientation, and escalation, leading into the shadows of intelligence-led Special Forces operations and the remorseless penetration of the IRA’s ranks by security force agents and informers. Indeed, in the late 1970s, the British government rejected any further exemplary military escalations in favor of an intelligence-led campaign,69 and by the early 1980s the intelligence war was the primary theater of British efforts to grind down the IRA.⁷⁰ Escalation occurred in the growth of counterambush operations by the Special Air Service, in which dozens of IRA members, including many of their most experienced operatives, were killed in “Find, Fix, and Finish” actions.⁷¹ Furthermore, the British were prepared to escalate this “secret war”—via the penetration of the IRA by security forces in an extensive networks of informers and agents, comprising sometimes controversial incidents of collusion between state forces and anti-IRA loyalist paramilitary gangs⁷²—to a point where the IRA almost certainly lost control over large parts its organization,⁷³ resulting in the collapse of its will to prosecute the armed struggle in the early 1990s.⁷⁴

Thus, British escalation policy in regard to the IRA was not so much minimum force, on the one hand, or search and destroy, detain and torture, as in Argentina, on the other, but to spy, infiltrate, control, and kill. In this regard, there are more commonalities with the Argentinian case than a liberal-democratic polity might find comfortable, demonstrating a readiness for exemplary force and a willingness to escalate into the secret shadows. Crucially, this is not “hearts and minds” COIN as we have been led to understand it. These actions are assertive, forceful counteractions. They can be enacted brutally and indiscriminately, as in Argentina’s Dirty War, or with more discrimination, as Britain’s decisions in Northern Ireland, which saw the selective but no less fierce application of escalation into the realms of Special Forces and intelligence operations.

Northern Ireland demonstrates that in the end the reciprocal act of escalation in irregular wars is likely to benefit the more powerful actor, even if that actor is theoretically restrained by a liberal ethical value system. Sufficiently determined, it has the capacity to recontain any conflict with a lesser actor to a level of its choosing. In October 1970, the Canadian government did exactly this when it invoked the War Measures Act in Québec, sending out the Canadian armed forces onto the streets (a “surge,” in other words) following an escalation in violence by the Front de Liberation du Québec that culminated in the kidnap and murder of hostages.75 Similarly, in 1977 the West German government instituted severe measures against left-wing revolutionary groups such as the Red Army Faction, which escalated its campaign in the summer of 1977 by killing a well-known banker and political adviser, then kidnapping and murdering the head of the West German Employers Federation. Events reached a climax in October 1977 when members of the Red Army Faction hijacked a Lufthansa jet, killed the captain, and forced the plane to fly to Mogadishu in Somalia, where it was successfully stormed by West German commandos, resulting in the freeing of all the hostages and the death of three of the four hijackers.⁷⁶ In both the Canadian and the West German cases, liberal-democratic governments were provoked into robust acts of counterescalation that ultimately were to reduce and undermine the movements that challenged them.

Beyond recontaining an insurgent challenge through hard security measures, which include the use of surge tactics and Special Forces, covert intelligence activity rather than overt military power is thus likely to determine the more powerful actor’s subsequent escalatory path. We see this pattern in events after 9/11. Stone observes that the weaker side’s capacity to mount an effective challenge against its disproportionately more powerful opponent resides in its capacity to remain elusive. Remaining elusive while striking from a position of asymmetry relies on a mix of careful planning to preserve secrecy and reliance on the shelter and degree of political support among people who are prepared to help conceal the insurgents in the wider civilian populace.77 Insurgent escalation across salient geographical and targeting thresholds, such as the al-Qaeda attacks on 9/11, thus presents the more powerful actor—the United States in the case of the 9/11 attacks—with an escalation dilemma: How can it break down the barrier of insurgent elusiveness? The stronger side has to be mindful because, as Stone explains, “too much enthusiasm for the likes of ‘search and destroy’ operations can inconvenience and endanger the wider population among whom they are conducted,” which carries the “risk of pushing previous uncommitted individuals into the enemy camp, thereby strengthening the very thing that such operations were intended to weaken.”⁷⁸

Following the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, U.S. escalation took a two-tier approach according to patterns we can discern in both the Argentine and Northern Ireland cases. Escalating with overt military might to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan constituted one form of political communication to demonstrate U.S. intent and resolve. How to break al-Qaeda’s more elusive terror networks around the world presented a far more difficult escalatory challenge. Speaking on September 16, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney stated that the United States would have to work on “the dark side.” “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world,” he said, “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful.”⁷⁹ Top Central Intelligence Agency official Buzzy Krongard echoed this sentiment, proclaiming that the campaign against al-Qaeda would be “won in large measure by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see and in ways you may not want to know about.”⁸⁰

Both patterns of escalatory activity were in evidence in U.S.-led Coalition operations against al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) between 2003 and 2010. Although attention continues to focus on the Surge of U.S. forces into Iraq in 2007 as the crucial act of escalation that helped stabilize the country following its descent into civil disorder and insurgency,81 the upscaling of activity by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is increasingly recognized as the crucial determinant in breaking AQI.⁸² Overt military escalations, such as U.S. forces’ attempt to dislodge insurgents from Fallujah in November–December 2004, were widely seen as costly in terms of troop losses and politically self-defeating given the extensive collateral damage inflicted and negative media coverage. The vision of the JSOC commander between 2003 and 2008, General Stanley McChrystal, however, was to wage a much more surreptitious but still relentlessly aggressive campaign of “industrial counterterrorism” that aimed to degrade AQI faster than it could regenerate itself. Utilizing the extensive intelligence resources and technologies at their disposal to keep an “unblinking eye” upon AQI insurgents, American and British Special Forces kept up a massive pace of raids against AQI operatives from 2006, particularly in and around the capital, Baghdad. JSOC’s activities and the relentless grinding down of AQI operatives were eventually to crush the movement, as McChrystal had anticipated.⁸³

Although intelligence-led Special Forces operations were only one facet in the decline of violence in Iraq after 2007, the contention is that they were indicative of a discernible pattern of conscious, systematic escalation on the part of the stronger side into the shadows of secret war. Reflecting patterns witnessed in Argentina, Northern Ireland, and the broader so-called global war on terror, these operations can be seen as an escalatory “blueprint” and disturbingly transcend or at least challenge many ethical barriers for liberal societies. U.S. actions against al-Qaeda after 9/11 were to include the implementation of secret renditions, black sites, enhanced interrogation, torture, and targeted killings.⁸⁴ These measures were far from the “hearts and minds,” “softly softly” COIN stereotypes: they were clearly forms of hard-nosed escalation intended to bring an end to hostilities.

In the final analysis, though, even where we identify a degree of similarity in the escalation of dynamics in the waging of warfare against insurgent forces, we are still returned to vital, timeless, strategic concerns—the most pertinent being the necessity to achieve a political effect through violence. The means and preparedness to escalate are one consideration; politically acuity is another. Escalation, as has been reiterated, involves risk because the outcome is unpredictable. If escalation does not produce the required political advantage, however effective the technique, the consequences can be—and often are—lamentable. Reflecting on the mutual escalations in the era after 9/11, Stone observes: “Both sides proved rather more technically adept at applying violence than they did at generating the political effects from it.”85 Al-Qaeda raised the stakes by mounting a coordinated, highly sophisticated mass attack into the U.S. homeland. The outcome of this attack, though, was a U.S. escalation leading to the invasion and denial of al-Qaeda’s sanctuary in Afghanistan. However, U.S. unwillingness to limit the scale of retaliation led to a widening of the war on terror with the invasion of Iraq, inspiring AQI to launch its offensive against the forces of occupation. Equally, AQI’s intent to escalate its campaign into a brutal sectarian war merely alienated the Shia population and Sunni tribal leaders, creating the conditions for the subsequent repression of AQI. Repetitive cycles of escalation invariably lead not to the elimination of resistance, but to recrimination, wherein the seed of further hostilities often lie.⁸⁶ For Stone, “the general point, applicable to both sides, was an old one—that it is easier to use force to kill people and break things than it is to extract any political benefit from the process. Both sides’ technical capacity for escalation outstripped their ability to harness it to some politically tenable line of action.”⁸⁷ Hence, the eternal strategic dilemma: You may have the capacity to escalate, but is it worth the long-term cost?

This chapter has highlighted the onus on the weaker combatant, the insurgent, to calculate the potential effects of escalatory action. The success of a violent campaign is likely to be premised upon the quality of a combatant’s analysis, and it is incumbent on the weaker challenger to discern whether its campaign is based on a clear-sighted understanding of its enemy and how much violence that enemy will tolerate. Logically, this understanding should induce a further calculation of the limits of its position and whether it should “cash in” any political influence it may have secured through dialogue and compromise. Failure to do so is likely only to lead to rash escalatory decisions that may result in severe curtailment, if not annihilation, of the weaker side, as some of the examples cited earlier attest.

In one way, these insights are not novel, either in theory or practice. Clausewitz notes these dynamics at work when he observes that in situations where the “political aims are small, the motives slight and the tensions low[,] a prudent general may look for any way to avoid major crises and decisive actions, exploit any weaknesses in the opponent’s political and military strategy, and reach a political settlement.”88 In other words, there are situations where a stronger side has insufficient effort or enthusiasm, and a weaker political force might do well to exploit political, social, and psychological fault lines to achieve some or all of its goals. However, war is a reciprocal phenomenon, as we have discussed, and therefore always carries the threat of escalation. Clausewitz continues, noting that if the assumptions of the prudent general who wishes to avoid major armed clashes—our theoretically weaker side challenging the power of a stronger one—prove to be “sound and promise success[,] we are not entitled to criticize him. But he must never forget that he is moving on a devious path where the god of war may catch him unawares.”⁸⁹

This chapter has endeavored to explain the puzzle of escalation in relation to counterinsurgency. It has sought to articulate a conception of the escalation process in conditions of irregular war through an understanding of the basic precepts of strategic theory. The examination went on to explore how the term irregular war can be construed as a situation of violent conflict that exists between manifestly unequal combatants. With this understanding, the notion of escalation could then be explored and located within the Clausewitzian understanding of war as a reactive environment in which each opponent’s reciprocal actions lead to an inevitable escalation toward a theoretical extreme.

The chapter proceeded to outline how the escalatory challenges may present themselves from the perspectives of both the weaker party and the stronger party. It suggested that although the multiple and contingent factors governing behavior mean that no predictive mechanism can be formulated to forecast accurately how actors in such situations will escalate, certain broad observations may be held to be true: social values that emphasize proportionality of response, restraint of action, and the observance of the rule of law may confront more powerful actors with problems in escalation against weaker opposition, and weaker military actors invariably will have to exploit political divisions in the stronger opponent to induce a favorable reaction facilitating its objectives. Nevertheless, it has been noted that materially inferior actors are sometimes prone to escalate via increasing indiscrimination in targeting, although in most cases this approach remains unlikely to overcome a substantial power differential that will permit them to attain all their objectives. The weaker side thus has to be careful not to overestimate its capacities and provoke counterescalation that may ultimately threaten its destruction. A note of caution here, however, needs to be raised. Although we have explored the capacity to transgress ethical boundaries for tactical gain within structural parameters in the understanding that these transgressions are nevertheless also subject to fortune, the potential for insurgent ideology to become a political religion injects additional and unknowable variables—for example, martyrdom—that exceed the brief of this current work.90

Most importantly, it has been suggested that all sides, both weak and strong, have to engage in a continuous calculation about the political efficacy of violence and to consider carefully the effects they wish to achieve through any act of escalation. A sophisticated strategy is always likely to be premised on a careful understanding of the conditions pertaining in any instance of conflict as well as an acute appreciation of how one’s adversary is likely to react. This understanding requires constant dialogue over ends and means in any actor’s calculations, ensuring that the political effects sought through the actions of war are feasible and proportional to desired goals. In the final analysis, the practice of escalation in insurgent conflict corresponds to the operation of good strategic judgment in all war. Chapter 1 of this volume argued that notions such as irregular war, small wars, and insurgencies are largely artificial constructs because all conflicts take place between theoretically unequal sides. We return yet again to the wider truth of Clausewitz’s observation that war is “more than a true chameleon that adapts its characteristics to any given case.”⁹¹ Wars are exclusive to time and place, and there consequently is no process unique to the escalation dynamics of insurgency/counterinsurgency. War is war whatever its individual manifestation, and as such it will always be subject to passion, chance, and reason. This explains the process of escalation regardless of the nature of the actors involved or of the social, geographical, and political conditions in which any war arises.