Adapting to Win: How Insurgents Fight and Defeat Foreign States

Adapting to Win: How Insurgents Fight and Defeat Foreign States By Noriyuki Katagiri Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014 320 pages $69.65 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Adapting to Win is written by Dr. Noriyuki Katagiri, a political scientist, who presently teaches at the Air War College. It is derived from his 2010 dissertation "Evolving to Win: Sequencing Theory of Extra-systemic Warfare" at the University of Pennsylvania. The book represents over five years of research and study on this topical area and benefits from a great deal of support, including fellowships--in both the United States and Japan. As a result, the work is extensively researched, tightly designed, and is both well written and innovative. It represents a very polished product drawing upon the Correlates of War (COW) data spanning the years 1816 to 2010. The intent of the book is to present "...an alternative research project to the mainstream body of security studies that until recently been fixated on great power interstate conflict and civil wars" and "...to enrich the policy-making community through the study of what lessons' powerful states can learn to fight foreign insurgencies (4). " It focuses on the concept of "extrasystemic" wars, which are a blending of civil wars in which "... a foreign government intervenes in a civil war on either side (5)." The work proposes insurgents use conflict phase-sequencing (conceptually derived from evolutionary biology and evident in revolutionary warfare) as they attempt to prevail in taking over a state. Six models of extrasystemic war based on sequencing are evident. Each model witnesses from one to three phases derived from conventional war, guerilla war, and state-building as the starting point. The first four models (Conventional, Primitive, Degenerative, and Premature) are quite common, only possess one or two stages, and typically fail. The last two models (Maoist and Progressive--a Maoist variant) are rare, possess all three stages, and typically see their insurgencies succeed. Table 3: Six Models of Extrasystemic War (49) helps to highlight the various models and phases. Not surprisingly, "The central argument of this book is that insurgent groups are likely to defeat foreign states in war when they achieve an orderly combination of three phases: state building, guerrilla war, and conventional war" (169) which is very Maoist-insurgency oriented. The work is divided into nine chapters: how insurgents fight and defeat foreign states in war, origins and proliferation of sequencing, how sequencing theory works, presentations of the six sequencing models and case studies (the Conventional model--Dahomean war, 18901914, Primitive model--Malayan Emergency, 1948-1960, Degenerative model--Iraq War, 2003-2011, Premature model--Anglo-Somali War, 1900-1920, Maoist model--Guinean War of Independence, 1963-1974, and Progressive model--Indochina War, 1946-1954), and a conclusion. Criticism of this work focuses solely on the COW data. …