Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win

Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win. By Jeffrey Record. Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2007.192 pages. $24.95. Beating Goliath attempts to answer an interesting and important question: Is there some dynamic at work that explains why insurgents are capable of defeating larger, stronger powers? As a historian, this reviewer is inclined to deny that an infinitely complex human endeavor like warfare can be reduced to a simple model, preferring instead to explain the results of particular conflicts in terms of contingent circumstances. That inclination may be misplaced. Recently, insurgents have prevailed over major powers often enough to make one suspect the existence of some underlying dynamic. Similar outcomes in such disparate circumstances seem unlikely to be the result of sheer coincidence. The mantra that "every war is different" is singularly unhelpful to statesmen who cannot hope to master the social intricacies of every possible arena of conflict, or to the military bureaucracy which develops forces for those wars. Jeffrey Record does us all a service by raising the question in such a concise and readable form. The author does a good job of assessing previous attempts to articulate that dynamic. Early on, he makes the point that most insurgencies fail, something we should all remember. The major schools of thought on why insurgencies succeed or fail include asymmetry of commitment (Andrew Mack), strategic interaction (Ivan Arreguin-Toft), and democracies' inability to employ sufficient brutality in an effort to win (Gil Merom). There are significant theoretical and empirical shortcomings with each theory, which Record ably and dispassionately identifies. The biggest shortcoming, in Record's view, is their failure to accord the factor of external support its due weight. As the author puts it, "There are few if any examples of colonial or post-colonial insurgencies that prevailed without foreign help." He illustrates the importance of such help with brief but pithy analyses of prominent insurgent victories, including the American Revolution, the Spanish guerrillas against Napoleon, the Chinese Civil War, France and America in Indochina, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. In each of these cases, external support sustained the insurgency and sometimes, as the French, Spanish, and Dutch war against Britain during the American Revolution, subsumed it. Record reminds us that external help can be indirect, often in the form of exerting military pressure on the stronger power in other theaters. These analyses amply support Record's argument that the role of external assistance has to be considered along with Arreguin-Toft's theory of strategic interaction and Mack's thesis of disparity of interests. Unfortunately for Record, his analysis of the current war in Iraq is a "snapshot in time" and no longer up to date. Beating Goliath was published in the spring of 2007, when conventional wisdom held that the situation there was an irredeemable mess. One need not contend that the war is virtually won to maintain that conditions have substantially changed. …