External Assistance: Enabler of Insurgent Success

Abstract

Victorious insurgencies are exceptional because the strong usually beat he weak. (1) But all power is relative, and if an insurgency has access to external assistance, such assistance can alter the insurgent-government power ratio even to the point where the insurgency becomes the stronger side. This is what happened during the American War of Independence. This is what did not happen during the American Civil War. External assistance made Yorktown possible; its absence condemned the Confederacy to Appomattox. To be sure, external assistance is no guarantee of insurgent success, but there are few if any examples of unassisted insurgent victories against determined and resourceful governments. Much of the key theoretical literature on the phenomenon of weak victories over the strong discounts or altogether ignores the importance of external assistance. Andrew Mack argues that the best explanation of insurgent success is possession of superior political will and therefore greater readiness to sacrifice; the insurgents win because they wage a total war against an enemy that fights but a limited war. (2) Ivan Arreguin-Toft contends that superior strategy--e.g., protracted irregular warfare against a conventional foe--best explains insurgent victories. (3) Gil Merom believes that chances of insurgent success hinge greatly on government regime type; insurgencies fare much better against democracies than against dictatorships because the former lack the stomach for brutal repression. (4) These explanations share a common assumption: the key to offsetting the stronger side's material superiority lies in the weaker side's possession of superiority in such intangibles as political will and strategy. The United States was defeated in Indochina because the Vietnamese Communists displayed a far greater willingness to fight and die (5) and pursued a strategy that simultaneously limited their exposure to US military strengths (firepower, air mobility) and exploited American political vulnerabilities (the electorate's aversion to indecisive, protracted wars for limited objectives). However, even the most committed and cunning insurgency cannot hope to win without material resources. A rebellion must have arms. The Vietnamese Communists, among the most tenacious and skilled enemies the United States has ever fought, could hardly have prevailed unarmed, which is how they would have had to fight absent the massive Soviet and Chinese assistance they in fact received. North Vietnam, the political and military engine of the Communist war in Indochina, had no arms industry; it had to import even small arms and small-arms ammunition from the Soviet Union, China, and other Communist Bloc countries. The Soviets and the Chinese also supplied trucks, radios, medicines, medical equipment, artillery, tanks, fighter aircraft, naval vessels, an integrated state-of-the-art national air defense system, thousands of technical advisors, and over 300,000 (Chinese) logistics troops who manned and maintained North Vietnam's railroad system against US air assault. (6) Had the Vietnamese Communists been isolated from external assistance, as were their fellow Communist insurgents in Malaya and the Philippines in the latter 1940s and early 1950s, they almost certainly would have suffered the same fate: defeat. But the United States was never in a position to seal off North Vietnam from the Communist Bloc, much less South Vietnam from North Vietnam. It was the combination of stronger political will, superior strategy, and foreign help that decided the Vietnam War. The same is true of the American War of Independence. As in Vietnam, the rebels in America fought a total war while the metropolitan power fought a limited war. The rebels gambled their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on victory, whereas, for British commanders, defeat meant reassignment elsewhere or a return to the pleasures of London society. For the British, North America was a distant theater of operations; for the Americans, it was home. …