The Insurgent’s Dilemma

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As an expert on insurgency in Latin America, my investigations of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) led me to observe an interesting dilemma: The FARC adopted methods that made it militarily strong yet undermined the popular base it was trying to mobilize. Specifically, these methods included the use of wildly inaccurate homemade mortars, unprecedented levels of kidnapping, and drug trafficking. These allowed FARC to build a formidable military machine that was hard to defeat, but it also reduced its political appeal.

Despite popular protests, FARC seemed tone deaf. Internal documents reveal that within the leadership there was considerable debate about these activities alienating the people. Nonetheless, the FARC did not stop. Why? Because the FARC thought that it would reduce its military advantage, thus superseding the negative impact on political mobilization. I struggled to find academic literature to explain this trade-off until I found David Ucko’s The Insurgent’s Dilemma: A Struggle to Prevail. Ucko is currently head of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Net Assessment, which speaks to the heart of the matter. Prior to joining NATO, Ucko was a professor of irregular warfare in the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University, and this work is the product of his years of teaching and researching this topic.

Insurgents, posits Ucko, must grapple with competing imperatives: the need to build popular support, the need to secure resources, and the need to maintain military effectiveness in the face of overwhelming state opposition. The Insurgent’s Dilemma not only treats how this is done but, most important, also how the changing global context has led to new approaches to the nature of insurgency. Traditional insurgency, built on amassing military power sufficient to vanquish the state, has now been driven by changed circumstances politically, technologically, and resource-wise to adapt. FARC, in other words, was caught during change and could not see its way through to such adaptation.

The Mexican Zapatistas provide a useful example of new approaches discussed by Ucko. The first form of adaptation Ucko identifies is ideational insurgency. The Zapatistas initially resembled FARC but during their first uprising found themselves facing obliteration by superior state power. Quick adaptation to what RAND researchers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt termed netwar caused a cyber-generated and -facilitated international network of support to bring neutralizing power to bear on the Mexican state. Violence became secondary, the Zapatistas survived, and their cause remained robust. FARC would never have thought to make this shift.

The Zapatistas also displayed what Ucko identifies as a second form of adaptation, local insurgency, in which a group contents itself with dominating a local region vice overthrowing a national government. They remained a force in Chiapas, but not all of Mexico, neutralizing government power by enmeshing themselves with the local population. The FARC, in contrast, wanted nothing less than total state power and were forced to the peace table when they proved incapable.

Significantly, the Zapatistas also displayed a third form of insurgent adaptation identified by Ucko, infiltrative insurgency, that is, the penetration of key institutions to manipulate their actions from within. Through propaganda, mass action, and political alliances, the Zapatistas sought to advance their goals against the state by converting its key actors. The contrast with FARC highlights how divorced FARC was from the emerging trends in insurgent action, seeing massed martial power as the only path to insurgent victory. Unable to achieve it, the FARC was defeated.

The central dilemma insurgencies now face is that they must not only mobilize popular support but also fight in a way that allows survival and goal attainment. To summarize Mao Zedong on this dilemma, one cannot mobilize the people enough to win if one does not fight, and one cannot fight to win if one does not mobilize.

A key aspect of any insurgency remains its use of violence, but since states usually have a significant advantage in terms of resources and firepower, insurgents must find a way to leverage asymmetry to “flip” the correlation of forces. This includes altering goals to achieve what is desired while remaining off the state radar screen for as long as necessary. This dilemma exists because of the insurgent’s need to establish legitimacy and support among local populations while simultaneously pursuing military objectives against a far more powerful state. The dilemma becomes clear when insurgents must decide between engaging in violent tactics that may alienate the population or moderating their actions to maintain support even while risking military failure. This tension between violence and legitimacy often defines the trajectory of an insurgency.

Ucko demonstrates that changing circumstances since the end of the Cold War have forced insurgencies to get creative and adapt. This is a point that has been missed by some analysts and ties in with Vietnamese Communist theorist Truong Chinh’s concept of the “combination of all forms of struggle” or “the war of interlocking,” where different forms and modes of struggle will predominate in space and time depending on the relative correlation of forces. An insurgency must continually analyze and adapt. FARC was not oblivious to the issue but could not bring itself to adapt in any way save “more of the same.”

Ucko observes that insurgencies often evolve in cycles. At first, insurgent groups may adopt a highly ideological stance, focusing on spreading their message and recruiting new members. Over time, however, as the group becomes more operationally focused, its strategy may shift toward military goals, such as weakening state infrastructure, while trying to retain its political legitimacy. These transitions are not always smooth, and insurgent groups often struggle with internal conflicts between factions that prioritize different objectives.

The Insurgent’s Dilemma also grapples with the problems that face insurgencies that achieve victory. Analyses normally stop once an insurgency defeats the government. Victory introduces new dilemmas such as post-victory fragmentation. As insurgents transition from a guerrilla movement to a governing entity, they often face internal fragmentation and factionalism. The differences in objectives that once were manageable in the insurgency phase become sharper as the group tries to consolidate control over a new and often fractured political environment.

Maintaining legitimacy is also a significant post-insurgency problem. Insurgents must convert their military victory into political and social stability. This is much more difficult than is often thought, as insurgents usually have limited experience in administering a state and managing complex societal issues. So many revolutionary governments morph into dictatorships as the challenges of governing can be as or more complex than overthrowing the previous government.

If Ucko only analyzed the insurgent side of the equation, this would be a significant book, but he goes beyond and discusses how counterinsurgencies can work, given the insurgent’s dilemmas. Just as the insurgency adapts so must the state adapt to neutralize insurgent adaptations, point-counterpoint. A particular problem of counterinsurgency is that so many states treat it as a purely military problem. While there is a significant military component, it is never solely a military task. This is particularly the case with global contextual shift requiring new insurgent approaches to goal realization.

In counter, then, military pressure, which has always been necessary, now also faces the need to adapt. It has always been known that too much military action can drive the population into the insurgent camp. Like the insurgents, the state may sometimes choose not to engage or moderate its military engagement against the insurgency to maintain the moral high ground and retain the loyalty of the population. This has become more important than ever. FARC erred spectacularly in this regard, as Ucko notes. Claiming to be a people’s war, it was, as Thomas Marks has written, a large foco [focus] searching ineptly for a mass base. Legitimacy, from first to last, remained with the state.

In The Insurgent’s Dilemma, David Ucko offers a thorough analysis of the strategic challenges faced by insurgent groups in both theory and practice. The book’s central thesis is that changing global (and thus national) context has compelled insurgents to balance components of approach in ways so dissimilar to the past as to create new syntheses. FARC is especially useful as a negative example. By examining the multiple dilemmas insurgents face at different stages of their struggle, Ucko provides a nuanced understanding of irregular warfare and insurgency dynamics. Moving beyond traditional coverage of how insurgents must balance their various lines of effort, he illuminates the new challenges faced by such groups in a transformed world. Ucko’s work is a significant contribution to the study of insurgency and counterinsurgency, offering valuable insights for scholars, policymakers, and military practitioners alike. JFQ