How the weak win wars
Ivan Arreguin-Toft
This is a book about asymmetric warfare, in other wars between a powerful and a weak actor. Normally, the more powerful actor wins these wars, but increasingly, since 1800, the force that would conventionally thought to be weaker wins disproportionately. Over this period, the weak actor has won about 28% of the time, despite being no more than 20% the strength of the more powerful actor. But the success of weak actors has been increasing as shown by the following chart.
This summary will describe the basic tenets of the theory explaining the improving fortunes of underdogs.
A number of factors have been advanced to explain the success of weaker actors. (1) One explanation is that the two actors have very different degrees of commitment. For example, the war may be a nuisance for the powerful actor, but life-or-death for the weaker actor. This difference in commitment allows the more committed weaker actor to sacrifice more than the stronger actor and eventually make the cost of continuing greater than the benefit for the stronger party. (2) Some governing structures might influence the commitment level of the population more than others. Authoritarian regimes can restrict information going to citizens and thus disguise the costs of their war efforts. At the same time, they may be able to cast their own efforts as defending their country’s vital interests and suppress discussion of alternate perspectives. In contrast, more democratic regimes have greater information flow and the costs are harder to hide. Alternative narratives easily develop that pressure politicians to resist war. Within this argument is an assertion that democratic nations may be more squeamish about the means used to dominate the opponent. For example, citizens are more likely to object to civilian casualties out of a sense of moral obligation. (3) Strong actors may start with an advantage in arms technologies, but the weaker party may acquire better weapons and essentially eliminate the technological advantage. (4) The interaction between strategies executed by the weaker and stronger actor may determine the outcome. Without dismissing the first three explanations, the author proposes that strategic interaction is the most important foundation for victories by the weak.
By strategic interaction, the author means the combination of strategies of the two parties. For simplicity, strategies can be thought of as direct or indirect. A direct strategy involves something like sending an army to invade another country. An indirect strategy might include conducting a guerilla war involving raids on the opponent’s soft targets, disrupting communications and hiding from the opponent’s forces. Both strong and weak actors can use either strategy. For example, the bombing campaigns against London and Tokyo in World War II represented indirect strategies intended to coerce the opposing civilian populations to give up. This example also suggests that an actor can mix direct and indirect strategies, but for the purposes of this summary, I’ll assume that a side will use one strategy at a time.
The book provides 6 cases studies from wars in this 150-year time period, and I will not summarize that content. Suffice to say that in almost every case, one or both sides switched between direct and indirect strategies at least once. Some wars involved each side changing strategy more than once
The combinations of actor strength and strategy type establish 4 types of interactions. The chart below shows these four combination and indicates which combinations favor the weak actor’s victory. The key contention of the author is that strategic mismatches favor the weak actor, while matching strategies favor the strong actor.
Start with the most obvious case. Usually, when two forces approach the war with the same strategy, the stronger one will win. If each chooses conventional warfare, and assuming equal competence, then the stronger side should win. Similarly, if both sides choose a war based on informal forces – the stronger side should win. Simply put, a direct-direct strategies pit the armies against each other, while indirect-indirect pit the popular will of each nation against the other. The other two cases, involve a match of an army against a populace. For example, the bombing of North Vietnam was an indirect attack on the North Vietnamese government’s will, while the guerilla attacks on US forces was actually an indirect attack on the popular will of the US population. It is this mismatch that multiplies the power of the weaker actor.
One consequence of this story of strategy is recognition that strategy can multiply or divide power. When a more powerful actor gets involved in a strategy mismatch (direct vs. indirect), their power is divided at the same time that the weaker actor’s power is multiplied. One benefit of being the stronger actor is that changing strategies is within their capabilities. The weaker actor may be more stuck. In this sense, strong actors lose wars based on their own choices, while weak actors must respond to their opponent’s choices.
But strong actors can also be limited by the factors that make them strong. Strong actors have strong adversaries – and then tend to organize primarily to cope with those strong actors. This may limit their capabilities to react to weak actors. The structures, skills and well-practiced tactics are based on competition with the strong, and the better integrated these elements of strategy are – the less capable they are of acting in a very different way. For example, the British Army sent to put down the American Revolution was well equipped to defeat a professional army in direct battle, but poorly structured and lead to deal with irregular forces using guerilla tactics.
Armies tend to be hierarchal and led by the most experienced soldiers. They learned their methods based on previous wars, but they are rarely involved in actual battles. During Vietnam, generals dismissed the idea of “unconventional” war as a cover for bad organization. In that war, the people learning about the enemy’s tactics were not generals, but low level officers. The US Army did change strategy eventually, but years were lost in the process.
Comment and Interpretation:
- The book was written explicitly about military history with an appreciation that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan involved aspects of direct-indirect interaction that might cause problems for the United States – clearly the stronger actor. Though the author mentions in the idea only in passing, similar dynamics may apply in competition between actors in a commercial setting. A company is in constant competition with a range of parties including other companies offering the same goods/services, raw material suppliers, customers, new entrants and other parties. In some cases, parties have similar power and presumably the more powerful party prevails. However, there are often significant mismatches between competitors. Interest groups advocating changes in practices tend to have much less power than the organizations they are attacking. They rarely implement direct attacks. More commonly they attack indirectly, for example through creating media interest, advocating regulatory change or conducting “educational” events.
- Many authors suggest that a successful strategy requires differentiation from competitors. It is interesting to consider that innovators are usually weak actors taking on an established strong actor. In general, strong companies in good positions build strategies based on the status quo while start-up companies build strategies based on being different from established actors. Similarly, companies that fall into trouble can modify strategy to “renew” their core competency or can change to a new approach. This book would seem to suggest that a return to core would struggle if the competitor was strong in the same “core”, but the company would have better prospects if they changed to a different strategy that is dissimilar to the prime competitor. This is naturally complicated in markets with multiple competitors.
- One of the books that most influenced me is “The discipline of market leaders”. This book suggests that in any market there are three ways to dominate. The least successful approach is to compete on the same basis as one of your competitors. Said in a different way – direct competition does not benefit any of the competitors, but indirect competition might allow all parties to succeed by offering different customers different values that match the customers’ preferences. The success of Apple in multiple markets can be seen as a model of how the weak win wars because before the iPod, Apple was considered a weak ineffectual company. But in each of their big successes they both innovated and created ways to satisfy customers with minimal direct competition. Aspects of the offer, like iTunes, meant that Apple was using an ecosystem to compete with an isolated product. While Apple is strong today, they began from a position of weakness. Now they have the dilemma of how to resist upstarts, who will try to come at them indirectly.
- I recently participated in a meeting that discussed trend analysis. The relevant point was that big companies have a hard time taking many trends seriously until it is too late. Developing trends tend to arise in the fringes of the market and look unimportant to companies in the center of the market. The people who first adopt the trend are atypical and the ways that the first adopter learn about the option are atypical. For companies that practice standard brand management, the rise of trends involves a period of indirect attack on the mainstream “position” that is easy to ignore or dismiss. Guerilla wars often start the same way. For companies in many industries, the markets have been overturned by these indirect attacks. In fact, one way to read Clayton Christianson’s theory of disruptive innovation is in terms of an indirect attack by the innovators on a market incumbent which the market leader tries to fend off by using direct means. Japanese auto companies attacked using low-cost and reliability. Steel mini-mills attacked using low-value commodity production. Apple attacked using a product ecosystem. In every case, the new entrant was dismissed, in part, because they used an unconventional approach to the market which the incumbents found irrelevant.
- Many large companies are used to competing by using their size to their advantage. This book suggests that they have more to fear from a smaller company that will use their lack of size to their advantage. According to the thesis of this book, the right way for the more powerful company to respond to the challenge is to switch to a strategy of the same type as the upstart and use the superior power in the same strategy to outcompete them. This is a challenge for any company that must simultaneously compete with similarly sized incumbents and differently sized challengers. Expanded further within the framework of Porter’s 5 forces thinking, there may be strategy type matches and mismatches in each of the strategy dimensions. This may call for ways to switch between elements of direct and indirect strategy to compete with different actors. It makes wars look simple.
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