Before reversing its policy in 1987, the government of India supplied LTTE insurgents with weapons and munitions in their fight against the Sri Lankan government.82 Belgrade bolstered the Bosnian Serbs during the Balkans wars while Russia offered heavy weapons and armor to insurgents in Moldova, Abkhazia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. States are not the only source of external weapons. In West Africa, the Caucasus, and South Asia, arms trafficker Viktor Bout supplied small arms and light weapons to insurgents fighting protracted conflicts throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. Finally, diaspora communities can be an external supplier of weapons and other military-related resources through long established foreign networks.
Direct military support to insurgents can range from minimal to extensive. As Byman observes, “direct assistance is rare, but when it occurs it usually has a tremendous impact on the fighting.”83 Direct military support can consist of a state (or in the case of NATO, a collection of states) using its own army to assist insurgents in battle. In 1999, NATO’s bombardment of the Serbs was the tipping point in the Kosovo conflict. Airstrikes lasted for 78 days and pulverized Slobodan Milosevic’s Serb fighters, which paved the way for a KLA victory and independence for the Republic of Kosovo 10 years later. More recently, NATO airstrikes ousted longtime Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi from power after nearly four decades in power. As of May 2015, the situation in Libya was bordering on anarchy.
Intelligence
Intelligence, as it is defined in this research, is the information that insurgents need to identify a target, develop a plan to attack that target, and understand the ramifications that the attack will have for a range of actors, to include the host nation government and COIN force, the insurgents’ supporters and wider constituency, and finally any powerful regional or international actors that may be involved in one way or another.84 In Iraq and Afghanistan, insurgents frequently attack American soldiers with improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Ideally, the insurgents try to find out when an American patrol will be passing through the area, what kind of vehicle it will be (armored Humvee, unarmored Humvee, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected tank, etc.) and approximately how many soldiers each vehicle can hold.
FARC developed a robust intelligence capability over time and uses money acquired through the drug trade to bankroll a network of informants, including some in the Colombian security forces.85 In recent years, the Taliban and the Haqqani network have relied on timely and accurate intelligence from insurgents who have infiltrated the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) to conduct an assassination campaign against government and military officials in the Karzai-led government. These “spies in the castle,” as J. Bowyer Bell has referred to them, play a critical role in hampering the COIN forces’ ability to operate effectively against insurgents. External state sponsors are another source of intelligence for insurgents. In West Africa, Liberian Warlord Charles Taylor and the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) supplied the RUF with intelligence during Sierra Leone’s 10 year long insurgency.
Insurgent organizations can follow either a minimalist model or a maximalist model of intelligence. The PIRA was an example of the former, with a nonexistent formal intelligence structure, emphasis on planning the next attack, and reliance on the Catholic community for snippets of important information. On the contrary, Hezbollah adheres to the maximalist model of intelligence, retaining the full spectrum of capabilities, including robust signals intelligence (SIGINT) and human intelligence (HUMINT) capabilities.86
Differentiated from command and control or operational space by the necessity to prevent COIN forces from sabotaging a potential attack, operational security requires significant resources to maintain the integrity of a planned operation.87 Insurgent groups overly concerned with operational security are typically fighting a COIN force with highly trained and capable intelligence operatives. Groups like the PIRA, Hezbollah, and Hamas build in overlapping redundancies while planning operations to mitigate COIN force penetration of an active plot. The more resources insurgents are forced to devote to operational security, the less time and energy they will have to maintain the cohesion of the group. In Northern Ireland, British COIN forces waged a high stakes game of spy versus spy against the PIRA in what many have referred to as “the Dirty War,” meaning the war fought between British elements like MI5 and the Force Research Unit (FRU) and the PIRA’s intelligence wing.88
Sanctuary
During the Vietnam War, Vietcong insurgents enjoyed sanctuary in several states adjacent to South Vietnam, including Cambodia and Laos. Vietcong bases over the border were used for training, arms stockpiling, operational planning and, a sanctuary for insurgents on the run and other seeking rest and recuperation.89 In Afghanistan, the Taliban and the Haqqani network manipulate the border with Pakistan as a strategic advantage against both NATO and Afghan forces. As the United States well remembers, cross-border safe haven in Pakistan was a boon to the CIA-supported mujahedin in their fight against Soviet COIN forces.
In the 1970s and 1980s, PLO guerillas used Lebanon and Jordan as sanctuaries. Prior to the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Al-Qaida used Sudan and Afghanistan as home base at different points. “Sanctuary substantially increased al-Qaida’s financial requirements, but that safe haven lowered overall needs of covertness, eased command and control, enabled extensive training and planning, and generally allowed terrorist groups to operate at a far lower marginal cost per attack,” according to Rabasa et al.90
In their study on how insurgencies end, Connable and Libicki discuss the subject of sanctuary at length. One of their key findings is that sanctuary is vital to insurgencies.91 Their detailed analysis of Al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), Communist insurgents in Greece, and the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan reinforce the importance of a space where insurgents can train, rest, and organize unmolested by counterinsurgents. Sanctuary has also been a major factor in insurgencies in Malaya, Thailand, Mozambique, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, among others. Securing national borders to blunt an insurgency is a COIN force imperative, but the reality is that borders are difficult to seal. Still, it is not impossible. COIN forces in Turkey, Israel, India, Morocco, and France have all quelled insurgencies by closing down the border and eliminating external sanctuaries.92
Operational space is critical to insurgencies. This is the space used by insurgents to plan, train, rest, recuperate, resupply, and hide those members being actively sought by the security forces. An ideal type of operational space is an “ungoverned territory,” which is more often an alternatively governed territory ruled by unsavory actors like warlords, criminal gangs, or militias. The dimensions of ungovernability include: the level of state penetration into the society, which entity holds a monopoly on the use of force, the degree of control over the borders, and the potential for external interference in the area.93
How conducive these areas are to insurgents depend on several variables such as the adequacy of infrastructure and operational access, sources of income, demographic and social characteristics, and invisibility, or the extent to which insurgents can blend in with the local population.94
Training
As it would be for any soldier or fighter, training is a highly valued component of an insurgent’s repertoire. Training requires both individuals with the technical knowledge or knowhow to train others, as well as an area where insurgents can train far from the watchful eye of the government. Deserts, jungles, and mountainous terrain all serve as ideal training areas for insurgents. But even more important than carving out the space to train, to truly hone their skills handling weapons, constructing bombs, and conducting surveillance and reconnaissance, insurgents need the technical expertise of individuals with practical experience. The Internet or a beat up old version of The Anarchist’s Cookbook can only take one so far.
Technical expertise is an advanced form of training. It extends beyond explicit knowledge and into the realm of tacit knowledge. As Dennis Gormley explains, tacit knowledge “can’t be writte
n down.”95 On the contrary, tacit knowledge can only be acquired “through an often lengthy process of apprenticeship” as it is “the product of a unique social and intellectual environment composed of highly skilled senior and junior colleagues, who pass this specialized knowledge around from one individual to another.”96 In his work on Islamist militancy, Michael Kenney resurrects the work of ancient Greek philosophers to elucidate the difference between explicit knowledge and technical expertise. Kenney’s analysis of techne and metis is an important contribution to the literature on organizational learning in terrorist and insurgent groups. While techne is abstract technical knowledge codified in documents, metis is “intuitive, practical knowledge” that can only be institutionalized by “engaging in the activity itself, rather than by formal study.”97 Whether it is called technical expertise, tacit knowledge, or techne, a strong case has been made for the six fingered bomb maker.
WHAT ARE ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITIES?
In their theoretical analysis of leadership, Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack conclude that “international relations cannot be understood if the role of the individual is ignored.”98 The organizational capacity of an insurgent group is comprised of those activities that sustain the group’s existence as a cohesive entity.99 Leadership is the most important component of a group’s organizational capacity. The leadership of an insurgency provides strategic direction to the movement, issuing directives and making the major decisions that affect every aspect of the organization. It requires leadership to provide vision, direction, guidance, coordination, and organizational coherence to other aspects of the insurgency, including the combatants (“foot soldiers”), political cadre, auxiliaries, and mass base.100 Leadership touches upon all facets of the insurgency and is closely connected with command and control, ideology, recruitment, and public relations. Command and control will also include an analysis of the group’s organizational structure and any organizational aid that was important to the group. In cases where outside actors provided political support or propaganda to an insurgent group, this factor will be considered under the category of public relations.
Leadership
Command and control is the mechanism by which insurgent groups plan, coordinate, and execute attacks.101 A command and control network functions according to how the group is organized, or its organizational structure. To ensure that an attack will be carried out, insurgent leaders will often attempt to build a degree of redundancy into their network. However, the more people that are made aware of an operation, the greater chance there will be for the attack to be compromised as a result of a leak or penetration.102 Technology and communications are impacting the command and control networks of insurgent groups by allowing individuals to stay in contact even when they are physically located in disparate places.
Like other organizations, how an insurgency is structured will have implications for how it conducts operations and how it is countered. Moreover, organizational structure and design can impact a group’s ability to both impart and import knowledge, the latter of which is critical to group survival. An insurgency can be vertical, or top-down, issuing orders from the top to be executed by those below. Vertical leadership has both advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, in a vertically structured organization, once a decision is made it is passed down and carried out with little friction. Subordinates understand their role and are keen to follow directions with a minimum amount of pushback. A major disadvantage, however, is that in a vertical organization, if a leader is lost (or in the case of an insurgency, eliminated through kill or capture), the organization will lack direction and guidance for a definite period of time. Even if a capable understudy steps in to fill the void, a period of transition will ensue, and some degree of resulting confusion is inevitable. Still, this is not always the case, as FARC has exhibited relatively smooth succession.
Horizontal organizations, sometimes known as “flat,” “networked,” or “matrix” organizations are becoming increasingly common in the contemporary environment of information flows and technological innovation. In a horizontal organization, leadership is seen as a total system rather than the domain of a single people or small cadre of individuals. Like vertical organizations, horizontal organizations have both advantages and disadvantages. In a horizontal organization, more people have access and authority to decisions, which makes the vetting process more thorough, but can also prolong both reaching and implementing a decision. In an insurgency, horizontal networks are less prone to decapitation strikes, where the elimination of a charismatic leader of a group can be a crushing blow.103 But what effect does the structure of an insurgency have on the group’s decision to negotiate or continue fighting? Are vertically structured groups more likely than horizontally structured groups to make one decision or another? Once a decision is reached, which structure will be more amenable to implementing this decision? Is splintering a likely second order consequence?
Ideology
Ideology has been, and will continue to be, a way for insurgencies to gain recruits and amass popular support. Ideologies are crucial for insurgent groups because they explain the struggle to its followers and articulate a platform to resolve grievances, both perceived and real. As the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Field Manual 3–24 (FM 3-24) notes, “The most powerful ideologies tap latent, emotional concerns of the populace,” and can be based on religion, nationalist, ethnic, tribal, or cultural aspirations, a desire for justice or vengeance, or liberation from occupation.104
Writing over 50 years ago, Eric Hobsbawm alluded to the absence of a “common movement” as one of the major shortcomings of rebel groups.105 What he meant was that these groups lacked an innovative, shared, explicit ideology to motivate and mobilize the group’s followers.106 Thomas Marks sees a close linkage between leadership and ideology, which then connect to goals, noting, “If the ideological approach of the leadership is able to hold sway, insurgency will result. The movement will go on to pursue political goals, normally the effort to remake the system, either defensively (e.g., separatism) or offensively (e.g., revolutionary war, the purposive effort ‘to make a revolution’).”107 One way of conceptualizing ideology is analyzing whether the group is ideologically flexible, rigidly dogmatic, or somewhere in between.
Popular support for an insurgency has been the focus of scholars and practitioners of both insurgency and counterinsurgency alike. Indeed, Mao realized the importance of maintaining the goodwill of the population, not from an altruistic perspective but from a pragmatic standpoint. Sir Gerald Templer of the British military is credited with coining the term hearts and minds, during his tenure in command of the Malayan Emergency. Even today, the American military in Afghanistan is keen to avoid civilian casualties for fear of alienating the population and pushing Afghan civilians closer to the Taliban and Al-Qaida.
Once an insurgency is under way, the host nation government and COIN force can choose to respond to threats in any number of ways. Often times, the first reaction is a move to crush the insurgency before it grows into a more formidable threat. However, the use of overwhelming force can sometimes backfire, leading the insurgency to metastasize. Scholars have noted that repression, especially the disproportionate use of force in response to an insurgency, can have the unintended effect of increasing support for an insurgency.108 Argo contends that violence has a polarizing effect on the population and reprisals can easily elevate a low-level conflict into a more aggressive insurgency.109 Moreover, when the COIN force is perceived as an occupying power, insurgent resistance is fierce and increases the likelihood of suicide attacks.110
Accompanying components of repression include humiliation, intolerable frustration, alienation, and hatred.111 Daily reminders of an individual’s status as a second-class citizen in his or her own homeland can push one to support or join an insurgent organization.112 A dearth of economic opportunities, a repressive political culture, and a nonexistent civil society also qualify as elements related to fertile ground for i
nsurgency.113 In some cases, as we have seen in Western Europe, prison becomes an incubator for radicalism and extremism, transforming common criminals into committed ideologues intent on perpetrating acts of violence not for profit, but because of politics. Finally, a growing body of research suggests that insurgents can generate and maintain support as the desire for resistance within a community gains acceptance as the support of a public good. Fair and Shepherd argue that insurgents provide resistance and that, by extension, anyone who also wants resistance benefits from that provision and seeks to continue some level of support, whether active or passive.114
Human Resources and Recruitment
Popular support is also critical to consider when considering the translation of passive support into more active forms, including recruitment into an organization. No insurgent organization can sustain itself without replenishing the ranks of its captured or killed. While scores of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters are killed each day, an untold number of new recruits regularly travel to the Middle East from around the world to join the group. Like social movements, insurgent groups must attract members outside of their hardcore.115 Pinpointing precisely why an individual decides to join an insurgent group can be difficult, but a host of factors have been identified in the literature that suggest reasons why certain people choose to rebel against the state. Furthermore, it is clear that insurgent organizations seek to actively recruit new members into their ranks and have several platforms for achieving this objective. As Todd Helmus notes, “group socialization processes are inherently active in organizational recruitment and indoctrination efforts.”116
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