Jason Lyall is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. "I am also a faculty associate of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. My research focuses on the dynamics of violence in both conventional and guerrilla warfare, with special emphasis on Afghanistan and Russia’s Northern Caucasus (particularly Chechnya)" (more bio here). 

A couple of weeks ago Lyall published a paper (you can read it here) entitled “Do Democracies Make Inferior Counterinsurgents? Reassessing Democracy’s Impact on War Outcomes and Duration.” I thought it was very interesting, so I sent him a couple of questions: 

1. Your final conclusion is that there's no data proving that democracies lose insurgency wars more than countries with other systems of government. So why is it that so many people believed democracies can't fight such wars effectively?

Yes, the study concludes that democracies and authoritarian states have roughly comparable rates of defeat when fighting counterinsurgency wars. This finding challenges the conventional wisdom that democracies, with their casualty-averse publics, accountable leaders, and free media, are uniquely prone to losing these wars. The persistence of this belief that democracies are flawed by design stems from several sources. First, the cases of Algeria and Vietnam loom large over the field of counterinsurgency studies, and many of our early attempts at theorizing why states win wars were heavily influenced by these two cases, arguably to the exclusion of drawing on other, perhaps more relevant, experiences. Second, most of the research on this topic has been produced by scholars based in democracies who, naturally enough, wish to examine how democracies fare in these wars. Finally, there appears to be an implicit belief that policymakers in autocratic states can simply ignore the wishes of their people by crushing dissent and limiting media freedoms, two measures not available to democratic leaders. As a result, authoritarian states are viewed as capable of fighting prolonged wars since they are shielded from their publics, whereas democratic efforts are undercut by impatient voters who buckle under the burden of supporting a protracted conflict. Since we typically cannot observe dissent in closed societies, this argument about "soft" democracies appears plausible, at least on the surface.

2. What exactly did you do in this study, and how did you measure failure and success of democracies and autocracies in counter-insurgency wars?

The study begins from the simple premise that the question of war outcomes is a comparative one. That is, we must compare democracies and autocracies that share similar characteristics (other than regime type, of course) if we are to determine whether democracies truly do fare worse in counterinsurgency wars. I therefore gathered data on 286 insurgencies fought between 1800-2005 and recorded data about the characteristics of the combatants as well as war duration and outcomes.

Here, victory and defeat are cast in political, not military, terms, since it is clear from history that the ability to defeat insurgents in battle tracks poorly with eventual outcomes. A victory for the state occurs when the insurgency is militarily defeated and its organization destroyed or the war ends without any political concessions granted to insurgent forces. A "loss" is said to occur when the state unilaterally concedes to all, or nearly all, insurgent demands, including the granting of independence. A "draw" occurs when an incumbent is forced to concede to some, but not all, insurgent demands, and neither side obtains its maximal aims. Examples of concessions include the voluntary disarmament of insurgents in exchange for greater participation in the state’s political affairs or the granting of greater regional autonomy.

3. You write that "nearly all existing studies share the same two flaws that restrict their ability to assess the relationship between democracy and outcomes" of insurgency wars. What are the flaws, and why do we keep making mistakes when we explore this subject?

Briefly put, there are two basic problems at the heart of existing studies. First, nearly all studies adopt a democracy-only focus. This may seem an odd criticism at first --- why shouldn't we study democracies, if that's what we care about? --- but by focusing only on democracies, we restrict our ability to determine whether democracies are indeed unique since we have no idea whether autocracies possess similar odds of victory. In other words, we must adopt explicitly comparative research designs if we are to test this argument properly.

Unfortunately, it isn't enough to simply compare all democracies and authoritarian states at war. On average, democracies are wealthier, more powerful, and more apt to be fighting wars of choice through external intervention than typical authoritarian states. To correct for this imbalance, I matched each democratic combatant with an autocratic one that had similar characteristics except for regime type. In doing so, we can isolate the effects of regime type since all other factors that might explain war outcomes are similar, if not identical, across the pairs of states. Once we do so, we find that regime type has little bearing on war outcomes.

Why scholars continue to adopt these democracy-only research designs isn't entirely clear. My sense is that early scholars, drawing on formative experiences in Algeria and Vietnam, crafted their theories around the belief that democracies were uniquely vulnerable. Later generations of scholars simply built on this foundation without actually challenging its core claim, and so the democracies-as-vulnerable thesis passes into our own era as "common sense."

4. The picture you paint is rather grim: democracies usually lose battles. But you also say that "the level of mechanization within a state’s military is negatively correlated with victory: the more mechanized a state’s military, the higher the probability that it will suffer defeat". So what should democracies do: abandon sophisticated weaponry?

While it's generally true that as a state's military becomes more mechanized, its odd of victory actually diminish, this does not necessarily mean that democracies should abandon their modern systems. Instead, it suggests a rethinking of how these weapons systems are employed on the battlefield---if they are employed at all. Militaries fighting COIN wars would do well to increase the number of infantry in their armies, for example, reversing the trend toward replacing men with machines. These infantry would conduct dismounted patrols, positioning them to obtain better intelligence from, and exercise better control over, the local population than is achievable with "drive-by" patrolling. Above all, overemphasizing force protection by keeping one's soldiers "buttoned up" in armored vehicles is typically a prescription for defeat. The brutal truth is the militaries must accept a higher degree of risk for their soldiers if they are to win over local populations, a task that starts by breaking contemporary dependence on armored vehicles and other high-tech "solutions" to what is an age-old problem, namely, how to identify insurgents and then selectively remove them from within the civilian population.

5. You seem to think that democracies show little sense in "selecting" their battles - they go into battles they can hardly win more often than autocracies. But you don't really explain why this happens. Can you speculate on this question?

This remains an important puzzle in our current studies. Neither democratic nor authoritarian leaders appear especially capable of gauging the risks and costs associated with foreign intervention. Democratic leaders should be good at this: they face electoral defeat if the war goes poorly, for example, and have a free press that can provide an important corrective to bad ideas. Yet they seem to suffer the same deficiencies in planning that also characterize decision-making in autocracies. Perhaps democracies are wealthy and powerful enough that they can afford to "muddle through" since they typically possess far greater military power than their adversaries. These wars are rarely life-and-death matters for democracies, after all. It may also be that democratic leaders systematically discount how nationalism can play a pivotal role in motivating insurgents, allowing them to sustain losses and prolong wars even in the face of sharp material imbalances.

6. Can your study shed some more light on Israel's recent wars in Lebanon (2006) and Gaza - can we learn something from it that will make future Israeli battles more successful?

Israel possesses one of the most modern and mechanized militaries in the world. Yet it has struggled to translate these advantages into decisive battlefield victories or durable political settlements in Lebanon (2006) and Gaza. While making predictions for a specific conflict is difficult, we can clearly see how Hezbollah's and Hamas' hybrid nature --- part guerrillas, part conventional forces --- makes for a particularly challenging set of adversaries. If Hezbollah and Hamas adopt more conventional tactics in the future, we might expect that the IDF's performance will improve, if only because the IDF continues to structure itself along more traditional military-on-military lines. If, however, Hezbollah and Hamas conclude that they cannot meet Israeli strength openly but must instead wholly embrace guerrilla warfare, then we would expect the heavily mechanized, and casualty-sensitive, IDF to continue to struggle to impose its will and bring about a political settlement. Airpower offers only a partial, temporary and ultimately an ineffectual means of coercing an adversary since without territorial control it is unlikely that the IDF can punish Hezbollah and Hamas sufficiently to bring about a durable settlement. In the final analysis, replacing men with machines is usually a losing proposition in COIN wars for both democracies and authoritarian powers alike.

http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rosner/entry/jason_lyall_on_do_democracies

All rights reserved © The Jerusalem Post 1995 - 2010