BALANCE OF POWER International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game Microsoft Press Copyright 1986 Chris Crawford DEDICATION To Kathy, my wife... ...and my cast of supporting critters: Betsy, Tom, Sally, Sherry, Sherlock, Sheeba, Ginger, Lucy, Bunny, Sammy, Sasha, Andy, Kiwi, Velvet, and Flannel. ----------------- TABLE OF CONTENTS ----------------- Introduction ix 1 'Balance of Power' and the Real World 1 2 The Wonderful World of Insurgency 17 3 Coups d'Etat 61 4 Finlandization 101 5 Crises 129 6 The Unincluded Factors 169 7 Strategy for 'Balance of Power' 193 8 How 'Balance of Power' Was Created 211 Appendix: A Sample Expert-Level Game 241 Bibliography 301 INTRODUCTION I never dreamed while I was working on 'Balance of Power' that I would someday be writing a book about it. The problems of writing a book about this game remind me of the problems of the military historian attempting to describe a battle. Battlefields are notoriously confusing places, for the people present are much too busy saving their skins and being terrified to clearly take note of events. The historian must distill a kaleidoscope of bullets, screaming, and blood into neat diagrams with arrows and boxes. I feel the same way about this book: It will undoubtedly make the game seem much more rationally prepared than was the case. Nevertheless, I accept the necessity of imposing order on a potpourri of random events that went to make up the finished game. I wrote this book with three audiences in mind. The first audience is those persons who have purchased 'Balance of Power', played it, and thereby developed a curiosity about geopolitics. To this group I offer more information on geopolitics than I could put into the game's manual. I hope that the additional information in this book will increase their enjoyment of the game, and maybe even their scores. The second audience is comprised of people moving in the opposite intellectual direction, from geopolitics to games. They know a great deal about the real world but are curious about the expression of real-world concepts in the alien medium of the computer. I tried to present the logic of this process in a fashion that would be understandable to a non-programmer. The third audience is those people who are curious about the game design process itself and want to follow the effort in detail. For those people I inserted occasional digressive paragraphs on the finer points of game design. I believe that the triply schizophrenic nature of this book does not interfere with its clarity; the transitions between personalities went so smoothly as to convince me that I am a truly polished madman. Those readers who have not played 'Balance of Power' can refer to the short description of the game provided in Chapter 1. I also provide an Appendix in which I play a sample game, complete with numerous screen dumps, comments on my thinking as I went through the game, and an endgame analysis of my mistakes. I organized the main chapters around the central themes of the game: insurgencies, coups d'etat, Finlandization, and crises. Each of these chapters is broken into three parts. The first part provides the historical background on the topic. The second part describes the algorithms used in the game. The third part is a random collection of colorful tidbits and historical anecdotes generally related to the topic. I chose to present the algorithms in an unconventional manner. The simplest and most direct solution would have been to reprint sections of the program listing. This would have had the added benefit of creating an aura of great authenticity to the descriptions. However, it suffers from two drawbacks. First, readers unfamiliar with the Pascal programming language would have been unable to decipher the listings. Second, all readers would have been forced to struggle through the many trivial complexities of a real computer program. I wanted to discuss the ideas behind the game, not the dirty details of programming. I therefore decided to present my equations in a sanitized format that should be intelligible to anybody with an understanding of high school algebra. I do not use short variable names like "x" or "y"; instead, I write out full names for every variable. For example, if we wanted to calculate a person's average income over the last two years, the traditional computer listing might read like this: AveIncm := (Incm[t-1] + Incm[t]) div 2; My own presentation of such an equation would read like this: Average Income = Last Year's Income + This Year's Income --------------------------------------- 2 While this approach will fail to satisfy those few dedicated person who want to delve into the innards of the program, I think it will satisfy the needs of the greater number of people who wish to understand the concepts behind the game. Finally, I apologize to all those readers more knowledgeable about geopolitical matters than myself, who may wince at the necessary simplifications. I am first and foremost a game designer, not a political scientist. Simplification to achieve clarity is the essence of my work; clarity can be extracted from a muddy reality only by denying some of reality's richness. BALANCE OF POWER AND THE REAL WORLD 'Balance of Power' is a game about geopolitics in the nuclear age. You, the player, choose the role of President of the United States or General Secretary of the Soviet Union; the computer plays as the other leader. Your goal is to enhance your country's prestige. Prestige in 'Balance of Power' is the extent to which your country is liked and respected by the other countries of the world, weighted by their respective military strengths. You want to have many powerful friends, but few and weak enemies. The geopolitical stage is full of activity: All over the world, internal rumblings threaten the stability of almost every nation. Insurgencies develop to challenge governments with military action. Coups d'etat strike down the leadership of governments and install new leaders. Diplomatic intimidation induces weak nations to 'Finlandize' to the superpowers, in the hope that an accommodating stance toward the powerful nation will prevent an attack. These processes are the vehicles that you use to enhance your country's prestige. If an unfriendly government fights a desperate battle against guerrillas, you can provide weapons to the insurgents. If you are adventurous, you can even send your own troops into the country to intervene for the rebels ("freedom fighters"?). If the rebels succeed in overthrowing the government, their new regime will reward your assistance with friendly relations. Another unfriendly nation might be vulnerable to domestic destabilization; a judicious push by the CIA could topple the government and install a friendlier leader. Or perhaps a little diplomatic muscle-flexing could intimidate a small nation into a sensible Finlandization toward your country. Of course, your computer opponent can take any of the same actions against your friends. To defend your friends, you have a number of options. You can help a friendly government with weapons shipments or even troop deployments (especially useful against insurgents). You can soothe domestic discontent with economic assistance which will bolster the regime against the possibility of a coup d'etat. Or any threat. This will enhance its confidence against attempts at intimidation by your opponent. Of course, you must honor your treaty commitments if they are to have any meaning. You are free to engage in any of these policy actions anywhere in the world, as is your opponent. However, every move you make is subject to the acquiescence of your opponent. Should you perpetrate an action that your opponent finds objectionable, he might demand that you revoke your policy. This triggers the most dramatic moment of the game: the crisis. You can respond to his demand in one of two ways. You can accept his demand, back down, and countermand your action. Or you can stand firm and reject his demand, escalating the crisis to the next level. The ball goes to your opponent's court, where he must decide whether to back down himself, or emphasize his determination in the matter by escalating the crisis to an even higher level. This process of escalation or retreat continues until either one side backs down, or the crisis escalates to what is called 'DefCon 1'. If one side does back down, it loses considerable prestige in the eyes of the world, for nations lose respect for a superpower that talks big but backs down in a crunch. If neither side backs down and DefCon 1 is reached, then the missiles are launched and the world is destroyed in a nuclear conflagration. Both sides lose. 'Balance of Power' is thus a game of judgment. In your role as a superpower leader, you must carefully gauge your opponent's likely response to every action you take. You must study the world situation carefully in order to be able to recognize those matters over which your opponent will not retreat. You must be able to differentiate these vital issues from opportunistic acts or bluffs on the part of your opponent. To help the player in this effort, 'Balance of Power' provides a mass of data on the nations of the world. A system of "smart maps" makes it easy to call up graphical representations of the state of insurgency, domestic discontent, diplomatic affinity, and many more variables for each nation of the world. (If you want to know how many television sets there are in Zambia, the figured is provided.) The end result is a game that is complex and difficult. The richness of detail creates a compelling impression of verisimilitude. But there is a vast difference between the impression of verisimilitude and its reality. Just how accurate is this game in modeling the dynamics of geopolitical processes? The complete answer to that question will take another five chapters. In this chapter, I wish to present some introductory thoughts on the problem of realism in 'Balance of Power'. With this as an orientation, the reader will be better prepared to digest the material in the following chapters. GAMES VERSUS SIMULATIONS The first source of confusion that trips up many people is the difference between a game and a simulation. Most people do not trace any clear distinction between the two. Since the true meaning of a word is defined by the perceptions of the people who use the word, it is not possible for me to authoritatively define the ultimate, true, and final meaning of the word 'game'. However, the word has taken so broad a meaning as to lose its utility, so I feel some justification in attempting to more precisely fix my use of the word. Moreover, when the ambiguity of a word contributes to confusion, any attempt at clarification is justified. Games and simulations are similar in that they attempt to represent reality, but they differ in the intentions of their designers. A simulation is a serious attempt to represent the operation of some system with a verisimilitude that the most knowledgeable experts in the subject would find acceptable. A simulation is often created with the intention of predicting the behavior of the system under situations not otherwise obtainable. For example, aircraft designers use computer simulations in the early stages of their work to test their ideas. It is much cheaper to simulate the behavior of an aircraft in a computer than to build the aircraft, watch it crash, and go back to the drawing board. Similarly, designers of nuclear weapons rely heavily on simulations to refine their designs. It's difficult to find spare cities laying around on which to test one's newest 20 megaton H-bomb. So they try it out on the computer. Another common use of the simulation is for training purposes. The military has used simulations since their creation in the 1830s by a Prussian staff officer. On a large table with markers representing military units, officers consulting a detailed manual of rules maneuvered their armies in imaginary campaigns. The training value of such simulations was scoffed at by other armies until 1866 and 1870, when the Prussian army smashed firs the Austro-Hungarian army and then the French army in two stunning campaigns. The rest of the world very quickly adopted the use of military simulations. An unfortunate problem in translation, though, has been the source of some confusion. The German term for these simulations is 'Kriegspiel', which can be translated literally as "war-play," and was translated into English as "wargame." However, the German word did not carry with it the connotation of frivolity that the English word carries. Certainly the German approach to the simulation, with its huge array of formidable rules and its unyielding emphasis on their precise application, and the grim mien with which the German staff officers approached their Kriegspiel, would contradict any thought that this was playful activity. Simulations are also used in business training. The aspiring executive can make her mistakes more cheaply in the confines of a simulation. She can try different marketing strategies, variations in the amount of money invested in research and development or manufacturing, and see how well her simulated company fares against its competition. The simulation allows one to see the complex interrelationships in any functioning business more clearly. It also provides a common basis for thinking within the organization. If all executives in a company have experienced the same simulation, they have a better basis for communicating their thought processes to each other. In all these cases, a dominant factor in the utility of the simulation is its verisimilitude in detail. The simulation must accurately predict the lift of the new aircraft's wing - if it is wrong, the airplane might crash. If the nuclear weapons simulation miscalculates the neutron budget of the hydrogen bomb, it might not detonate in combat; this would create an acute embarrassment to its designers. If the business simulation leads its students to misjudge their advertising budgets, their companies could go out of business. In all cases, the simulations are required to correctly predict a great many details. In most cases, these details are expected to be numeric quantities. A game is dramatically different in its intentions. A game is to a simulation as a painting is to a blueprint. A painting of a house gives you an emotional impression of the house; a blueprint of the house tells the carpenter exactly where to put the windowsill. A game is no mere approximation of a simulation or a lower-quality version of a simulation. Instead, a game focuses on presenting broader, less quantifiable concepts. One would not use a painting as the basis for building a house, nor would one use a blueprint to convey his feelings about the house in which he spent his childhood. The difference is a matter of "soft concepts" versus "hard concepts" - those things that cannot be measured as opposed to those things that can. A simulation and a game attempt to communicate entirely different messages. The simulation communicates technical information, while a game communicates something closer to an artistic message. COMPLICATIONS In actual practice, the "information versus art" distinction between simulations and games is muddied by a variety of additional considerations. Consider, for example, a low-cost entertainment flight simulator commonly available for microcomputers. Surely the fundamental factors calculated by the program are no different than those modeled by the multi-million dollar professional flight simulators. Even a consumer flight simulator must calculate lift, altitude, airspeed, and the like. How, then, is it different from a professional flight simulator? The answer lies in my earlier phrase "verisimilitude in detail." If your simulated aircraft is moving at an altitude of 8,000 feet, with a bank of 30 degrees and an airspeed of 180 knots, the microcomputer flight simulator is under no obligation to calculate the resultant lift with any great accuracy. If it makes some approximations here and there, if it cuts a few corners, nobody will be upset with it. By contrast, the professional simulator had better compute the lift accurately - that is its only reason to exist! If a pilot training on a professional flight simulator learns an incorrect response to a problem because of a flaw in the simulator, he could repeat the mistake in a real aircraft and jeopardize people's lives. This is one reason why professional flight simulators require large and powerful computers with lots of RAM, while entertainment flight simulators can operate on microcomputers with far less power. It takes a lot of computer horsepower to compute all the little details correctly. A simulation running on a mere microcomputer must cut a few corners. The home flight simulator faces a set of requirements that is different but not lesser than that of the professional product. The home flight simulator must create the illusion of accuracy, not its substance. A great deal of effort must be expended to create that illusion, to orchestrate the small visual or mental cues that will convince the user to suspend his disbelief. The user must, at some emotional level, believe that he is not sitting at the keyboard of his computer, but flying an airplane. This requirement does imply that a certain level of accuracy be achieved. When the player puts the plane into a dive, it had better accelerate. But the exact rate of acceleration is utterly unimportant to the home user. More important would be the sound of the wind rushing by the cockpit faster and faster and the scream of the engine as the plane picks up speed. The simulation designer regards such factors as secondary and concentrates attention on the rate of acceleration. But the game designer sweats blood over the creation of his illusion. Another difference between the game and the simulation arises from the player's expectation of a clear conflict. In the real world, conflict is tamed by a variety of social inhibitions. Conflict exists and is unavoidable in a wide range of human activities, but we have developed a complex array of mores and psychological repressions that soften the conflict and divert it to productive ends. The businessman snarls, "Let's get out there and sell so many units that the competition won't know what hit 'em!" While these mores make possible our civilization, they grate against a physiology that is adapted to resolving conflicts with claw and tooth, not a handshake and a smile. There thus exists a craving for entertainment that provides simple, direct conflict with simple, violent resolution. Any game that hopes to achieve commercial success must accentuate the conflict and remove the inhibitions that frustrate our bloodlust. This does not mean that all games must be blood-soaked shoot-'em-ups. They must, however, clarify, and emphasize the conflict inherent in the situation and provide the emotionally satisfying resolution that our real-world conflicts so often lack. A third differentiating factor is the accessibility of the game. A simulation need not balk at requiring its users to study long documents or undergo lengthy preparations. A game, on the other hand, must be immediately accessible to its user. Consumers will not tolerate a game that requires them to read long, boring manuals before they can derive any benefit from it. In this respect, 'Balance of Power' is one of the most demanding games in the marketplace, for its hefty manual is a necessary component of the game. IMPLICATIONS FOR A GAME MODELING GEOPOLITICS The considerations discussed so far make it possible to understand the basis for answering the question, "How realistic is 'Balance of Power'?" The fact that it is a game does not mean that it must be fundamentally inaccurate; it is, after all, a representation of reality. But it will necessarily distort reality in a variety of ways. For example, the game accentuates the conflict in the geopolitical scene and presents a simplified view of the complex processes of the real world. These are distortions of reality but they do not make the game untruthful. A good portrait painter accentuates those facial features that reveal character and simplifies away those features that compromise his representation; in the process, the painter distorts reality to reveal truth, not deny it. Consider, for example, a very simple question: How many of the world's countries should be represented in the game? At first blush, most people would declare that all of the world's countries should be included in the game. That certainly seems to be the safest and most accurate answer. But this is a game about geopolitical interactions; the question is, would the inclusion of all countries enhance or obscure the clarity of presentation of geopolitical interactions? A great many of the 150 countries of the world spend long decades in peaceful obscurity before some chance event propels them onto the world stage. How many Americans had heard of Grenada before the American invasion? How many Americans have heard of such countries as Cabinda, Andorra, San Marino, Oman, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, or Gabon? How many know the difference between Mauritania and Mauritius? Would learning about all these tiny countries add to one's understanding of grand geopolitical forces, or would it distract one's attention from such forces? The geopolitical system consists of two superpowers, a dozen major powers, a few dozen minor powers, and a host of non-powers. The role played by the non-powers in the geopolitical arena is little more than that of a pawn. Any game purporting to illuminate the nature of geopolitical processes must focus primarily on the superpowers. Such a game must obviously have some pawns for the superpowers to squabble over, but their role will always be minor. In designing 'Balance of Power', I decided that the inclusion of too many non-powers would be detrimental to a game, even though it would be a positive factor in a simulation, so I settled on a final count of only 62 countries. Verisimilitude of detail is desirable in a simulation, so more countries add to the value of a simulation. But the inclusion of many non-powers would only create a distraction. An excessive number of tiny countries in 'Balance of Power' would be like verbiage in a sentence, clutter on a desk, or busyness in an image. RELATIVE REALISM The final general point I must make about the realism of the game is that the concept of realism is always measured relative to the perception of the viewer. A professor of political science will necessarily view the game in a different light than a twelve-year-old. The level of accuracy of the game must be gauged against the intellectual background of its likely audience. This is one of the reasons I chose the Macintosh as the initial target machine - my hunch was that the Macintosh audience would be an intellectually mature group. A complex game such as 'Balance of Power' demands a great deal of intellectual effort from its players. The game designer must pick a target level of realism appropriate to his audience. By doing so, he gains the scorn of those more educated than his target and loses the comprehension of those less educated than his target. The distribution of education in a large population being what it is, most game game designers tend to target toward a sixth-grade education. It takes a strong-willed (in the words of one editor, "fanatic and obstinate") game designer to shoot for a college level of education in his game. I must admit that I aimed a little too high with 'Balance of Power.' I assumed a good deal more understanding of geopolitical issues of the average American computer than appears to be the case. Many players seem to regard the game as unwinnable. This has been a source of dismay and embarrassment to me. "REALISM AS PROCESS" VERSUS "REALISM AS DATA" Another important consideration regarding the nature of realism concerns the realism of the process as opposed to the realism of the data. Most people think of realism in terms of data. They ask if the Gross National Product is correctly reported, or if the number of troops in this country is accurate. But data is not the most important element in realism - process is. Thoreau made the point in 'Walden': If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad of instances and applications? What is important is the principle, not the instance, and principles are processes. The actual amount of the GNP of Ghana is less important, for the purposes of a game on geopolitics, than the manner in which GNP changes with time. The fact that Nicaragua has poor diplomatic relations with Washington is less important than the reasons why Nicaragua has poor diplomatic relations with Washington. You can't interact with a fact. It's like a dead fish - it just lies there. But you can interact with a process. You can shape it, change the parameters that affect its behavior. Ultimately, you can learn about it. Facts are best relegated to books and other static media, and computers are best applied to problems involving processes, for computers are not "Data processors" but "data Processors." Processes are the real stuff of the world. If we have the wisdom to survive the next 100 years, our descendants will look back on our squabbles with Nicaragua as so much irrelevant nonsense. But the same principles, the same processes that govern our relationship with Nicaragua, will still be in force. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides, writing about the Peloponnesian War, said, "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta." Replace "Athenian" with "American" and "Sparta" with "Russia" and you may have our epitaph. The facts of Athens and Sparta are dust, but the principles have not changed. This concept - which I call 'process intensity' - is the organizing principle of this book. The chapters focus on the four processes of geopolitical interaction that I chose to emphasize in the game: insurgency, coups d'etat, Finlandization, and crises. I give the facts themselves short shrift. Facts are transitory, while processes are the enduring truths. A number of people have asked if I plan to prepare an update to the game, incorporating the latest changes of the international scene. They seem to believe that events like the fall of Marcos and the American attacks on Libya somehow change the circumstances of the game. These events change only the cosmetics of the game, not its substance. 'Balance of Power' is a game about geopolitical interaction, the principles of which have not changed fundamentally since the introduction of the nuclear-tipped ICBM. It would take but a few hours' work to rearrange the game to include the events of the last year. For that matter, it would not take much more time to make the game cover the period of the 1960s. In the last twenty-five years the details have changed but the principles have not, and 'Balance of Power' is a game about principles and not details. I have no plans for any updates, for there is nothing in the game to update. REALISM AND LEARNING If the realism of the game is measured relative to the level of expertise of the perceiver, then it follows that the learning process of the game must itself make the game seem less realistic. That is, the beginning player will accord the game a great deal of respect, but as he plays the game and learns the principles behind it, his growing understanding of geopolitical processes will make it easier for him to see the flaws in the design. This is a natural and predictable phenomenon, and is in fact the best measure of success of the game. A game that fails to change its player is a failure. A game should lift the player up to higher levels of understanding; in the process, the player who once stood at its feet later stands on its shoulders. THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF INSURGENCY An insurgency is an armed attempt by native elements acting outside the government to overthrow the government or repudiate its control over a region. It is characterized by a protracted campaign between the armed forces of the state and those of the insurgency. An insurgency is differentiated from a coup d'etat by the facts that a coup is a very sudden event and one that often involves persons working from within the machinery of the government. Insurgency is as old as the institutions of government; presumably, the act of asserting governmental authority over a group creates the possibility that they will violently resist that authority. But the postwar era has seen a new dimension added to insurgency. It is now used by the superpowers as a vehicle for furthering their own geopolitical interests. The revulsion that nations of the world have developed for blatant imperialism has forced the superpowers to take their imperialism underground and cloak it in more "respectable" garb. The native insurgency offers a superpower an ideal opportunity to further its own interests while playing the role of benefactor rather than invader. Insurgency is thus the first vehicle of competition in 'Balance of Power.' PRIMARY INGREDIENTS Three primary ingredients are necessary to cook up an insurgency. First, you must have a government or other legitimate authority against whom the insurgency is directed. After all, you can't have a rebellion against no one! Second, you must have the insurgents themselves: the people who rebel against the government. Third, the insurgents must be willing to use armed force against the government. The element of armed force is not necessary to ensure success (witness Mohandas Gandhi), but without it you have civil disobedience or a coup d'etat, not an insurgency. THE GOVERNMENT The first ingredient in this ugly stew is the government. The government seems to hold all the cards. It has a great deal of military power at its disposal, in the form of the regular armed forces. Contrary to common American beliefs, the armed forces of most Third World nations exist not to defend against external enemies, but to keep the local population under control. For most of history, these nations did not need much in the way of armed forces to maintain order. A few thousand troops armed with rifles were sufficient to contain almost any situation. When you remember that the average peasant had little weaponry, the poor state of Third World armies makes a great deal of sense. But since World War II, we have seen a dramatic leap in the size of Third World armies and the weapons available to them. Part of this is due to increases in population, but the superpowers have played a major role in militarizing the Third World nations. By making them the arena for superpower competition, they have forced these nations to arm themselves heavily. Guerrillas armed with surface-to-air missiles and semi-automatic assault rifles can only be combated with pretty hefty military forces. Unfortunately, when all this firepower is unleashed among large numbers of ignorant peasants, it is the peasants who take most of the casualties. The second advantage of the government is legitimacy. Any government, no matter how corrupt or oppressive, has a tremendous moral advantage over those who would overthrow it. A government represents law and order, civilization, and stability. Those citizens who don't want to be bothered will support the government, if only by their inactivity. The third advantage of the government is its control of the nation's infrastructure - the web of basic services such as transportation, communication, and medical services that are essential for carrying on a protracted conflict. Against this well-established infrastructure the insurgents are hard pressed to communicate with each other, move troops and weapons, provide medical care for their wounded, and spread their propaganda to the masses. THE INSURGENTS Against the government are pitted the insurgents. The first question that occurs to most people is, "Why would anybody take on such a formidable power? What motivates people to engage in such seemingly hopeless efforts?" There are many reasons for insurgency. In modern times we most often hear of the "social revolution" - a revolution that seeks to supplant an oppressive social order with a supposedly more enlightened one. A large number of left-wing insurgencies operate under this banner. But there are other motivations for insurgency. A common one is separatism, the desire of one social group to break loose from its political ties with the larger nation. If the group is large enough, and its cultural or geographical differences with the parent state great enough, then we call such separatist sentiments "nationalist." For example, the Irish insurgency against Britain was, throughout most of its course, primarily nationalistic in sense. The early economic depredations that the English had visited upon the Irish had slowly abated, until the time of the final break, there were plausible arguments that a break with England would be economically disadvantageous to the Irish. Yet nationalism was not to be denied. The Irish break with England did make cultural and geographic sense, since the Irish differed from the English in religion, language, history, culture, and geography. This was a clean, nationalistic break. On the other hand we have Catalonia, a portion of Spain. Catalonians consider themselves distinct from the rest of Spain, but in language and culture the distinction is not so great as that between the Irish and the English. More important, Catalonia could not function as a separate economy; its economy is too closely woven into the fabric of the entire Spanish economy. Thus, efforts directed toward Catalonian autonomy are more separatist than nationalist. Religious factors, too, can play a role in insurgency. Westerns may think of religious insurgency in terms of recent expressions of Islamic extremism, but religious factors played a large role in insurgencies during the Reformation and were the primary expression of insurgency during Roman times. It is not that religion exerted life-and-death influence over people's hearts and minds in these societies; it's just that churches were the primary locus of social activity in these societies. Were a major insurgency to form in the United States, it would probably be based in shopping malls. A final motivation for insurgency is anti-colonialist sentiment. This is often closely associated with a developing sense of nationalism, but is more economic in flavor. The revolt of the American colonies against England was more anti-colonialist than nationalist. Many of the Founding Fathers considered themselves loyal Englishmen, but they could not acquiesce to the continuing economic penalties that the mother country extracted from them. These motivations are often mixed in any real insurgency. For example, the Vietnamese insurgency of 1945-1975 started out primarily as a nationalistic uprising, an assertion of Vietnamese national identity. The Japanese had done a great deal of propagandizing during World War II to present their war as a crusade of Asian against Westerner, and the propaganda left a mark in Vietnam. There was also a goodly dose of anticolonialism mixed in, for the French had not been the most benign of imperial powers. Only later, when Ho Chi Minh began to seek foreign support, did he seriously add a social agenda to his insurgency. His shift toward communism was primarily to curry favor with the Chinese and Soviets. There is nothing unique about this - insurgency leaders have been notoriously fluid in their ideological foundations. After all, when you're running an insurgency, you find it difficult to recruit people to risk near-certain death for a highly dubious proposition. So, it's nice to be able to spice up your insurgency with an enticing menu of causes to get the maximum number of recruits. ARMED FORCE Recruitment is at once the greatest weakness and greatest strength of any insurgency. The government can draft all the soldiers it needs, albeit of dubious quality and motivation. The insurgency is not so lucky. You can kidnap a bunch of people, and it is often attempted, but all too frequently the soldiers you shanghai run away at the worst possible moment, taking precious guns and ammunition with them. Most insurgencies must therefore run on volunteer power. That's tough - not many people are hot to die for a cause. On the other hand, insurgency soldiers are usually better motivated than the government troops they fight. The typical government conscript would much rather loaf around in the barracks than rummage around in the bush getting shot at. The typical insurgency fighter is there to fight. The insurgency has one other advantage, and it is a huge one: It has the initiative. The insurgents decide how, when, and where they will strike; the government can do very little until they act. The insurgents can remain hidden, looking for a weak spot, and then hit when they have local superiority. In this manner, a small force of insurgents can inflict repeated defeats on a much larger government force. This is the one factor that makes insurgency so effective in so many situations. DEVELOPMENT OF AN INSURGENCY Let's trace the history of a hypothetical generic insurgency. The story always starts with a government that is not totally popular with the people - this includes just about every government in human history. Some malcontents are angry enough to do something about it. Initially, opposition to the government is scattered; the various malcontents are all isolated from one another and unable to communicate. TERRORISM The first step comes when some hothead carries out an act of violence against the government. It is necessarily rather puny; after all, we can't expect every hothead to have much military power at his disposal (thank heaven!). This act, however, serves to galvanize opposition. Once people realize that there are others willing to fight back, they gravitate toward each other and the insurgency begins to take shape. During this early stage, the insurgents still lack any real military power. They operate as part-time rebels, living during the day as regular citizens, but plotting their revolution in secrecy and making occasional strikes. This stage of an evolving insurgency is characterized in 'Balance of Power' as terrorism. GUERRILLA WAR After a while, the terrorists establish a macabre sort of credibility by blowing up enough innocents. People start to fear and resent them, but they take them seriously as a real challenge to the government. As their credibility grows, they attract more recruits and possibly some weapons from a foreign source, most likely a superpower on the make. If all goes well, they graduate to the next level of insurgency: guerrilla warfare. Three factors differentiate the guerrilla from the terrorist. First, the guerrilla is normally a full-time operator while the terrorist is more likely a part- timer. Second, guerrillas tend to live together in camps, while terrorists more often split up in small groups. Finally, guerrillas normally operate in a rural environment, leaving the cities and towns to the government, while the terrorist is more of an urban animal. CIVIL WAR If the guerrilla war goes well, it will eventually graduate to the highest level of insurgency, the civil war. This requires the guerrillas to gain so much military power that they can stand up to the government forces in direct combat. Three factors differentiate a civil war from a guerrilla war. The first is the military power of the insurgents. Guerrillas can operate successfully with only a small fraction of the military power available to the government, but in a civil war, the force ratio is much closer to 1:1. The second indicator of a civil war is the fact that insurgents are able to control territory. Guerrillas may be able to operate freely in certain regions of the country, but they cannot claim to openly control land, for the government can occupy and hold any location it desires. In a civil war, this is no longer true; the rebels are able to assert control over a portion of the national territory and the government does not have the strength to oust them. This gives rise to the third distinguishing trait of a civil war: the claim to legitimacy. The rebels form a "provisional revolutionary government" and advance the claim that their government is indeed the true and proper government of the nation. INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION At this point a very tricky issue arises: international recognition. The old government claims that it is the true and proper government of the nation; the provisional revolutionary government claims that status for itself. The issue will probably be decided on the battlefield, but in the interim, whom will the other nations of the world believe? The matter is of great significance for several reasons. First, recognition by foreign nations confers great prestige upon a provisional revolutionary government and goes a long way toward swaying undecided citizens. A civil war is a battle for the hearts and minds of the nation, and prestige is as much a weapon as artillery. If a series of nations abandon the old government and recognize the rebels as the legitimate government, this creates a momentum of prestige that operates against the old government. A second major consequence of recognition is that it legitimatizes a greater level of military assistance to the rebels. Providing weapons, or, worse, troops, to an insurgency is generally recognized as a dirty business; a superpower must accept a certain amount of international opprobrium for such behavior, since it is undeniably meddling in the internal affairs of a nation against the wishes of the legitimate government. However, the situation changes dramatically once the superpower has recognized the provisional revolutionary government. It can now claim that it is only assisting the legitimate government of the country, at the express request of that government. This may sound like so much diplomatic doubletalk, but there is a great deal of substance to it. You see, a nation cannot recognize two governments for one country; the act of recognizing the provisional revolutionary government necessitates withdrawal of recognition from the old government. This requires the foreign power to withdraw its ambassador and terminate diplomatic relations. This step is fraught with risk. If the old government wins the civil war, the nation that severed diplomatic relations will be caught in an embarrassing position. Moreover, for the duration of the civil war, it will have no means of furthering its interests with the old government. None of the normal diplomatic housekeeping that goes on between nations will be possible. For this reason, most nations are quite conservative about recognizing new governments; they will wait until victory has clearly gone to the rebels before recognizing the new government. Sometimes a nation will withhold diplomatic recognition for reasons of policy. For example, the civil war in China led to an outright communist victory in 1949; the Nationalist forces fled to the island of Taiwan. At this point, most nations of the world recognized the communist government as the legitimate government of China. However, the United States had made strong commitments to the Nationalists, and refused to recognize the communist government. For nearly thirty years, we operated under the apparently ridiculous position that a group of bandits had seized control of a part of China (the mainland), but the real government continued to operate out of Taipei. This policy arose not from stupidity but from our refusal to abandon a down-but-not-out ally. What good are our commitments to our other allies if they know that the USA abandons its commitments when the going gets rough? After a decent interval of several decades, we could back off from the Nationalist government without overmuch damage to our credibility. THE ROLE OF THE SUPERPOWERS Insurgency would be a much more difficult game if it were not for the meddling of superpowers. Since World War II, there have been very few insurgencies that did not in some way benefit from the aid of a major power. Sometimes this aid is limited and indirect. The Soviet Union sometimes funnels small quantities of weapons to minor terrorist groups through a variety of middlemen. More often, the aid is provided without such attempts at concealment, such as the American aid to the contras of Nicaragua. PROVIDING WEAPONS Support in the form of weapons shipments is vital to the progress of an insurgency, for the weapons directly available to insurgents are not adequate to the task at hand. The central tactical maneuver of all insurgents is to carefully concentrate their power on a vulnerable target, pour large quantities of firepower onto the target from a safe distance, and then melt away. The ideal weapon for such an attack is an assault rifle, a semi-automatic rifle that can fire lots of rounds quickly. The problem for most insurgents is that an assault rifle has absolutely no civilian use, and hence is banned in most of the world. Insurgents who must make do with civilian weapons such as pistols and hunting rifles simply cannot bring much firepower to bear, and are easily outgunned by just a few soldiers armed with proper weapons. The good news, then, is that insurgencies cannot prosper without weapons shipments. The bad news is that such shipments are easily obtained. The United States alone has produced more than 6,000,000 M1 carbines, 3,500,00 M16s, and 1,500,000 M14s. That is 10 million weapons for a country with only 2 million soldiers. A great many of these weapons have made their way into the shadowy international arms market. When South Vietnam fell, for example, Hanoi captured nearly a million American M16s. When you have millions of loose weapons running around the world, it is not difficult for a few thousand to make their way to any given insurgency. A typical assault rifle with a small stock of ammunition costs about $300. Thus, a superpower can set up an insurgency with quite an arsenal for less than a million dollars. In the inflated world of arms procurement, that's loose change. And it buys a lot of power. In terms of projecting power around the world, arming insurgents is far and away the most cost-effective way for a superpower to throw its weight around. That's why it's done so often. PROVIDING SOLDIERS Of course, there is another way for a superpower to involve itself in an insurgency, and that is to directly intervene in the fighting with its own forces. This is far more effective than weapons shipments. As it happens, most armies of the world are hopelessly ineffective, at least when compared to the armies of the superpowers. Their soldiers just can't seem to get into the spirit of things. Thus, the injection of well-trained superpower troops can have a dramatic impact on the course of the fighting. However, intervention is politically and diplomatically a sensitive action, and so most interventions are sharply limited in both size and the freedom of action accorded the combatants; this has tended to cancel out the advantages of the superpower's superior troops. The American interventions in Vietnam and Lebanon are generally regarded as failures. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan has, so far, not been able to secure victory. INSURGENCY IN 'BALANCE OF POWER' 'Balance of Power' must calculate the behavior of the insurgency in each country of the world. This means that it must first calculate the strength of the insurgency and the strength of the government forces. It must then determine how these two forces fare in combat with each other. Then it must determine the significance of this outcome, such as whether the insurgency has graduated to the status of a civil war. Finally, the program must compute the consequences of an insurgency victory on the makeup of the government and its relationships with the superpowers. There are a number of special terms that must be defined before I can present the equations used in 'Balance of Power.' The first of these are: Soldiers - simply the number of soldiers that the government has in its army; Weapons - the amount of government money spent on weapons; Military Aid - the amount of weapons received from superpowers by the government; Government Power - the net military power that results from these soldiers and weapons; Intervention Power - the military power provided by any intervening superpower troops. The equation that determines the military power of the government is: Total Weapons = Weapons + Military Aid (2 * Soldiers * Total Weapons) Government Power = ------------------------------ + Intervention Power (Soldiers + Total Weapons) This equation says two things: First, more soldiers means more power; second, more total weapons means more power. That's natural and obvious. What is special about this equation is the way that it creates a natural balance between weapons and soldiers. Suppose, for example, that we have a country like China that has lots of soldiers but not many weapons. Suppose that the values for China are 100 soldiers and a total of 2 weapons. This would yield a total power of 3. Now comes the good part. Suppose that the Chinese added one more soldier; how would that increase their power? Well, if you try the equation with 101 soldiers and 2 total weapons, you still get a total power of only 3. Now suppose that the Chinese added one more weapon instead of one more soldier; then their military power would jump up to 5. The moral of this equation is that you need a proper balance between soldiers and weapons. If you have too many of either, it doesn't hurt you, but you just don't get much benefit from the additional resource. The military power of the insurgency (Insurgency Power) is computed in a similar manner, except that the number of insurgency fighters and the amount of insurgency weaponry must be computed in a different fashion. The number of fighters in the insurgency is based on three factors: the population of the country, the maturity of the political institutions in the country, and the degree of success of the insurgency. These last two require some explanation. Why is it that so many Third World nations seem to be caught in a perpetual cycle of violence? Whichever side is in power must torture and kill its opponents, while the opponents carry on a violent resistance. We Westerners shake our heads in dismay at the senseless violence and, perhaps, indulge in the vanity that we are spared such bloodshed because we are in some way superior. Our advantage lies in the stability of our cultural and governmental institutions. Our civilization has not known outright anarchy for more than a thousand years. We have slowly built up a common understanding as to what is fair and proper in societal behavior. When Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, people didn't grab their guns and head for the streets - we all shared a common respect for the institutions of a society and a confidence that our own interests would be protected by those institutions. That confidence has been developed over a thousand years of steadily growing lawfulness. Such is not the case with many countries of the world. Many of the sub-Saharan nations have no tradition of strong legal institutions before 1960. While we were struggling with the Magna Carta and developing concepts of representative government, they were still digging their way out of the Bronze Age. They may sit down at the parliamentary table to play by the rules, but they keep their hands close to their guns. And why shouldn't they? What basis do they have for trusting each other? This vitally important element is encoded in 'Balance of Power' as an array called 'Maturity.' The values are encoded at the beginning of the game and remain constant throughout the game. Serious students of political history will be dismayed to learn that I simply fabricated these values. I had to - there were none available. After all, what respectable scholar would attempt something so arrogant as to quantify the level of lawfulness of each nation of the world? So I relied on my vast knowledge of world affairs (ahem!) and performed a feat of prestidigitation. Some sample values used in the game are: Country Maturity Value USA 240 Mexico 130 Panama 34 France 226 Italy 218 Egypt 74 Mali 24 Zaire 32 Japan 220 China 100 Saudi Arabia 40 Philippines 80 There is, of course, plenty of room for argument about these numbers. I gave them a great deal of thought but cannot produce justification for any single number. The second factor in the recruitment rate for insurgency is the degree of success of the insurgency. This is a variation on the bandwagon effect. Nobody wants to have any part of a losing proposition, especially when losers get shot, but once the insurgents start to rack up some victories, the hopes of the discontented start to outweigh their fears, and recruitment picks up. Put it all together, and we have a pair of formulae for the number of fighters available to an insurgency: Square root of (6400 * Last Year's Insurgency Power) Success = ----------------------------------- Last Year's Government Power ((256 - Maturity) * Population * Success) Fighters = ----------------------------------------- 20480 Insurgency weaponry is computed in a different fashion. Insurgents don't have taxes or a military budget; they instead scrape together weapons from the international black market or whatever they can steal from the government. Their main source of weapons is always a Sugar Daddy superpower. In the rare absence of such a benefactor, they make do. Since insurgents tend to fight in a manner less dependent on weaponry, my formula compensates for this: Insurgency Weapons = 2 * Weapons Shipments from Superpowers IF Insurgency Weapons < (Fighters/8) + 1 THEN Insurgency Weapons = (Fighters/8) + 1 The first equation doubles the effective value of any weapons shipped to the insurgents. This is because insurgents tend to extract greater value from their weapons than government soldiers do. Since they have so little, they use it more carefully. The second formula says that if the insurgents are getting very few weapons compared to the number of fighters they have, then they scrounge up whatever they can, which isn't much. We can now calculate the value of insurgency power with this formula: (2 * Fighters * Insurgency Weapons) Insurgency Power = ----------------------------------- + Intervention Power Fighters + Insurgency Weapons This equation is analogous to the equation for government power and operates in the same fashion. In this case, intervention power applies only to those superpower troops who intervene in favor of the insurgency. The next task is to let the insurgency and the government shoot each other up for a year's time and ask how much damage they inflict each other in that time. Now, calculations of this nature can be quite involved. Many experts spend a great deal of time trying to develop such 'combat result systems.' One American expert, Colonel Trevor Dupuy (U.S. Army, Ret.), has devoted many years to studying the problem. My approach is, by such standards, ridiculously oversimplified. But 'Balance of Power' is not a game about combat, it is a game about geopolitics, and I felt a need to keep my combat results systems simple. I therefore settled on the following very simple system: Government Power = Government Power - Insurgency Power ---------------- 4 Insurgency Power = Insurgency Power - Government Power ---------------- 4 These equations mean that the amount of damage that each side can inflict on the other is equal to one-quarter of its own strength. The more powerful the government is, the more insurgents get killed, and the more powerful the insurgency is, the more government troops get killed. If they are both powerful, then lots of people die. This done, we are ready to see how well the insurgency is doing. The ratio of government strength to insurgency strength tells the story. If the ratio is greater than 512, then the government has everything under control, and 'Balance of Power' calls it peace. If the ratio is less than 512 but greater than 32, then we call it terrorism, and if the ratio is less than 32 but greater than 2, we call it guerrilla war. If the ratio is between 1 and 2, then we call it a civil war. And, should the ratio of government strength to insurgency strength ever fall below 1, then the rebels are stronger than the government and they win. When this happens, a whole host of changes take place. The insurgency trades places with the government; the old oppressors take to the hills and yesterday's freedom fighters enjoy the satisfying sound of the whip cracking in their own hands. If either superpower had intervened in favor of the insurgents in the civil war, then the insurgents gratefully compromise their political values to be more in tune with those of their beneficiary: IF USA intervened for Insurgency THEN Government Wing = (Government Wing + USA Government Wing) --------------------------------------- 2 IF USSR intervened for Insurgency THEN Government Wing = (Government Wing + USSR Government Wing) ---------------------------------------- 2 In this equation, the term 'Government Wing' refers to the political leaning of the government, with an extremely left-wing government having a value of -128, an extremely right-wing government taking a value of +128, and a moderate government taking a value of 0. 'USA Government Wing' is the political leaning of the government of the United States, which I set at about 20, while I set 'USSR Government Wing' to -80. The new government starts with a clean slate in its relations with the populace; its initial popularity decreases with the extremity of its political philosophy: Popularity = 10 + (128 - Abs(Government Wing)) ---------------------------- 2 Government popularity is important for determining the likelihood of a coup d'etat and will be discussed in the next chapter. Next, we must calculate the state of diplomatic relations between the new revolutionary government and the superpowers. This will be based on the political leanings of the superpower in question, and the amount of aid that the superpower had given the rebels or the government. I used these equations: Political Compatibility = Abs(Insurgency Wing - Superpower Wing) - Abs(Government Wing - Superpower Wing) In this equation, 'Insurgency Wing' is the political leaning of the now- victorious rebels, while 'Government Wing' is the political proclivity of the old government. Good Aid = Weapons Shipments to Insurgents + (2 * Intervention for Insurgents) Bad Aid = Weapons Shipments to Government + (2 * Intervention for Government) Again, 'Government' refers to the previous government. The result of all this is the diplomatic affinity of the new government for the superpower in question. Diplomatic Affinity = Political Compatibility + (8 * (Good Aid - Bad Aid)) ----------------------- 2 This equation covers two areas of affect: political compatibility and past support. It says that the warmth of relations between the superpower and the new government is greater if the new government is politically simpatico with the superpower. In other words, left-wing governments tend to favor the USSR and right-wing governments tend to favor the USA. The second part of the equation expresses the good or bad will generated by past support for, or opposition to, the old insurgency. If you helped the insurgency that won, you will be rewarded with good relations. If you helped the government that lost, then the new government will hate you. In both cases, the intensity of feeling is proportional to the amount of assistance you gave. I multiply by 8 to ensure that history is much more important than politics. This change in diplomatic affinity will, of course, generate a gain or loss of prestige points for both superpowers. And that is how 'Balance of Power' computes the development and results of an insurgency. HOW ACCURATE IS THIS MODEL? The system of equations used to model the behavior of an insurgency may strike you as rather brief. One might wonder how so short a set of equations could hope to accurately model so complex a phenomenon as an insurgency. There are two answers to this question, a positive one and a negative one. The positive answer is to point out that the descriptive power of mathematical equations is very high, so even a small set of equations can carry a great deal of meaning. I spent a great deal of time working out, tuning, and polishing the equations in this model. On the negative side, I must admit that there are many aspects of insurgency that are not properly covered by this model. One is that it doesn't factor in the basic asymmetries of style between right-wing and left-wing governments and insurgencies. 'Balance of Power' treats the right wing and left wing as two faces of the same coin. In the real world, right-wing governments and insurgencies are quite different from their left-wing counterparts. Both tend to be equally bloodthirsty, but their styles can be different. Left-wing insurgencies tend to be more populist in style, while right-wing insurgencies normally obtain more support from the upper classes. Because of this, left-wing insurgencies tend to be more weapons-poor and fighter-rich. Another shortcoming of the model is its assumption that right-wing governments favor the USA. Although there has been a statistical trend for right-wing governments favoring the USA and left-wing governments favoring the USSR, there is no universal law to this effect. The revolutionary government of the Ayatollah Khomeini is so far to the right that it is downright medieval and yet it cannot be called a friend of the USA. In some cases, American policies have pushed neutralist left-wing governments into the arms of the Soviet Union. The most renowned example of this is Cuba; a strong case has been made that Castro's swing to the USSR came only after it became obvious that severe American opposition to his regime would not abate. The model also suffers from an overly determinist style by assuming that the progress of an insurgency is a simple matter of military confrontation. No prevision is made for special events that can radically alter the course of history. Had Castro died before his victory, it is doubtful that his ragtag army could have held together without the binding power of his personality. The fall of South Vietnam in 1975 is partially attributable to a contradictory set of orders given to a crucial division rushing to stabilize the situation. Had it not been jerked around, South Vietnam might today be in existence. These are only the most important shortcomings of the model. There are also objections that can be raised against the model from those of strong political persuasions. For example, left-wingers could complain that the model makes no consideration of the element of "populist justice," the notion that most right-wing governments have no legitimacy and that insurgency against these right-wing governments is not merely a military action but an expression of cosmic justice, an act of righteous anger by the oppressed masses against an evil government. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, right-wingers could argue that the model fails to include factors for the perfidious talent that International Communism has developed for subversion of legitimate governments. There is some truth in the claim that left-wing insurgency has been better organized in the 1950s and 1960s than right-wing insurgency, but the renewed interest of the American government in supporting insurgency may be changing all this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ INSURGENCY SCORECARD, 1945-85 Despite all the press that insurgencies generate, insurgency is not a likely way to get ahead in the world. Most insurgencies fail, and rather ignominiously at that. There will always be maniacs crazy enough to take up arms for hopeless causes. In his book, 'A Quick and Dirty Guide to War,' James Dunnigan, a historian and Defense Department consultant, lists sixteen separate movements in the United States alone that have spawned political violence in recent years. Each of these could be termed an insurgency, albeit a very low-level insurgency. But that is precisely my point: Most insurgencies never go beyond the occasional bombing. The police round up the perpetrators, shoot or imprison some, and the rest lose heart and give up. Even though every single government in the world faces some degree of insurgency, very few insurgencies ever rise above pointless terrorism. I have not been able to locate data on the total number of terrorist campaigns in the last forty years. This should be no surprise, given the shadowy nature of terrorism. In the forty years since the end of World War II, there have been some two hundred insurgencies that passed beyond the threshold and generated significant numbers of casualties. Of these, about forty (20%) resulted in victories for the insurgents. The government won 80% of the guerrilla and civil wars. During these forty years, about 42 million casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) have been generated by insurgency. This figure is dominated by the Chinese Civil War of 1945-49, which generated 30 million casualties. Next come the Indochinese (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) wars, which accounted for about 8 million casualties. The remaining 4 million casualties are distributed among the many smaller insurgencies. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ MILITARY FACTORS IN INSURGENCY Insurgency presents special problems for both the rebels and the government. Guerrilla wars are fought in a completely different fashion than conventional wars. A few words on conventional warfare are necessary to bring the special problems of guerrilla war into focus. The central problem in conventional warfare has always been getting rational human beings to risk their lives in battle. The songs may sing of courage and self-sacrifice, but in the real world of blood and death, normal human beings, if they had their druthers, would much rather drop their weapons and run away. How does the commander prevent such undesirable but rational behavior? The solution has been to create a very strong social group with a powerful grip on the minds of its members. All of the odd customs and values of armies arise from this necessity. The uniforms, the marching about, the flags and the traditions - all these things exist to create a strong sense of identification with the group. If that bond is strong enough, the soldier will stay on the battlefield with his group rather than run away as an individual. Of course, this requires that the soldier fight with his group, as an obvious member of the group, rather than as an individual. Concomitant with this approach is the idea of achieving victory by breaking up the social bonds of the opposing army. If you can shock your opponent's soldiers into running away, you can achieve victory far more cheaply than by killing them all. The fact that some bloodshed is avoided with this philosophy is a pleasant secondary result of this form of military efficiency. This thinking has led to the high-density, set-piece battle which has become the standard form of conventional combat. Leaders of insurgencies quickly learn that their troops cannot fight in this manner, for several reasons. First, set-piece battles tend to favor the side with more and better equipment, and insurgencies are always under- equipped. It's insanity to face artillery, tanks, and fighter-bombers with rifles. Second, insurgency fighters tend to be poorly trained, especially when compared with their government opponents. The government can take the time to train its soldiers in safe havens; insurgency soldiers normally get on-the-job training. Third, insurgency forces are normally outnumbered by the government forces. In a set-piece battle, "God favors the side with the bigger battalions." For all these reasons, insurgency leaders have developed, over the centuries, a different style of warfare, a style that takes best advantage of the insurgency's strengths. The insurgency has two primary advantages, which are motivated soldiers and initiative. The issue of motivation is often clouded by government propaganda about guerrillas kidnapping young men and pressing them into service, and this probably does happen on occasion, but the bulk of the troops in any insurgency must be highly motivated. It is no great challenge for a guerrilla to slink away from his comrades, with far less fear of retribution than a government soldier might have. Insurgencies rely less on group identification than on cause-identification. The tremendous advantage of this approach is that it allows the soldiers to fight as individuals rather than as members of the group. This makes possible much lower troop densities during combat. It also makes possible far more diffuse approaches to combat. For example, during the Tet offensive in the Vietnam war, Vietcong fighters engaged government forces deep inside Saigon, Hue, and other major cities. They did not fight their way into the cities as organized units, but rather infiltrated and fought as small groups. Government soldiers could never have been trusted to demonstrate such initiative and drive. The other advantage that the insurgency holds is initiative. The insurgency leader can decide when, where, and how he will fight. The government commander can only sit and wait for the insurgency commander to make his move. A defense is only as strong as its weakest point; every defense has its weak spots; the insurgency commander need only find them and hit them. In this fashion, an insurgency commander can win one small victory after another, chipping away at the government forces, growing stronger as they grow weaker. Thus has evolved the classic guerrilla strategy: hit-and-run attacks on government outposts, nuisance raids, and night engagements. The guerrillas keep their forces dispersed, infiltrate government territory, then suddenly concentrate on their target, do their destruction, and immediately disperse again. They never give the government a large target unless they have local, temporary superiority. Against this strategy, governments have developed their own counter- insurgency techniques. Many experiments have been tried, and many have failed. Perhaps the most spectacular failures arose from the American attempts to win the Vietnam war with firepower. The American forces learned the hard way that hosing down the countryside with quantities of artillery, napalm, and Agent Orange is not an effective way to defeat guerrillas. It appears that victory over a guerrilla force requires a substantial amount of plain old infantry. However, there have been some successful counterinsurgency efforts. The defeat of the Malaysian insurgency is an example often used. The primary government tactic was to deny the insurgents sustenance from the population by securing the villages both militarily and politically. At least, that was attempted; it seems unlikely that so ambitious a goal was truly achieved in entirety. However, the Malaysian insurgency never reached the level of intensity that the Vietnam war reached; perhaps the tactics used can only be successful in low-level insurgencies. Another counterinsurgency technique is being developed by Soviet forces in Afghanistan. It is a variation on the classic "hammer and anvil" battle tactic, in which a mobile force (the hammer) drives the enemy into a static force (the anvil). The Soviet counterinsurgency version of this tactic is to maintain an extremely mobile force of infantry in helicopters. When the Mujahedeen strike, the airmobile infantry moves quickly to place itself astride the likely escape routes of the guerrillas. Meanwhile, the regular forces pursue the retreating Mujahedeen. When the scheme works, the Mujahedeen stumble into the airmobile infantry and are trapped and destroyed between the hammer and the anvil. The technique's success is founded on the vastly greater mobility of helicopters and the extended visibilities possible in the Afghan terrain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ INSURGENCY BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY We normally think of insurgency as a modern problem made possible only by Soviet largesse with AK-47 assault rifles. Insurgency has been with us as long as governments have. (The very first battle in recorded history, the Battle of Megiddo, was the culmination of an insurrection against Egypt. It gave us the name for what might be the last battle of recorded history: Armageddon.) As long as there has been a government, there has been somebody unhappy with it and willing to raise arms against it. Although the fundamental reason - dissatisfaction with the government's treatment of some group - has never changed, the focus of expression has changed somewhat. In ancient times, insurgency was mostly a tribal matter. The military reach of a powerful government, such as the Babylonian or the Egyptian empires, exceeded their cultural and economic spheres by such a large margin that subject peoples were seldom integrated into the fabric of the empire and bided their time in smoldering resentment until the opportunity for revolt arose. Insurgency in ancient times most often took the form of direct separatism: a town or city would kill the hated imperial tax collectors and close its gates, awaiting the inevitable retribution. Within a few months the imperial army would appear at the gates. Sometimes a magnanimous emperor or terrified populace would initiate a peaceful settlement in which the city got off easily with only an impoverishing tribute and the execution of their leaders. If not, the siege was played out to its bitter end, with either the besieging army departing in defeat, or the city stormed and sacked and the population massacred or enslaved. The Assyrian king Assurnasirpal II records his handling of one insurgent city: While I was staying in the land of Kutmuki, they brought me the word: "The city of Suru of Bit-Halupe has revolted, they have slain Hamatai, their governor, and they have set over them as king Ahiababa, the son of a nobody; whom they have brought from Bit- Adini." With the help of Adad and the great gods who have made great my kingdom, I mobilized my chariots and armies and marched along the bank of Habur. To the city of Suru of Bit-Halupe I drew near; and the terror of the splendor of Assur, my lord, overwhelmed them. The chief men and the elders of the city; to save their lives, came forth into my presence and embraced my feet. I took Ahiababa captive. In the valor of my heart and with the fury of my weapons I stormed the city: All the rebels I seized and delivered them up. Azu-ilu I set over them as my governor. I flayed all the chief men who had revolted; I cut off the limbs of the officers who had rebelled. I took Ahiababa to Nineveh, I flayed him, and I spread his skin upon the wall of Nineveh. (D.D. Luckenbill, Ancient Roman Records of Assyria and Babylonia) An interesting example of the timelessness of the problems of insurgency is the English attempt to subdue Wales during the thirteenth century. The Welsh had little love for English kings and stayed in a semi-permanent state of rebellion. The English strategy for pacifying Wales anticipated one American technique in Vietnam by 700 years. They built castles, or, in modern parlance, "strategic hamlets," in which government forces could station themselves in absolute safety against attack. By encouraging (or coercing) the population to settle in towns around the castle, they were able to bring a good portion of the Welsh population under the control of the government. The rebels found themselves driven deeper and deeper into the wilderness, cut off from the population. The insurgency withered and died. The Renaissance and Reformation brought a series of bloodthirsty insurrections. Although these wars are often characterized as primarily religious in nature, closer examination reveals the same old motivations to throw off oppression. The social makeup of the various Protestant and Catholic armies certainly indicates that these wars were as much social as religious. Most of the early conflicts were little more than peasant revolts dressed up in religious garb. The Hussite insurgency was typical. Bohemia in the early fifteenth century was infiltrated by Germans who displaced many of the resident Bohemians. The simmering resentment against these invaders exploded into violence when John Huss, a Bohemian heretic, was burned by the Church. The Hussites, as they were called, formed an army under the leadership of Jan Ziska, a one-eyed old knight, who created the very first tanks by mounting guns on wagons. For twenty years the Hussites fought off the armies sent against them, massacred Germans and Catholics, and maintained a defiant independence. However, their insurgency eventually disintegrated in fratricide and anarchy, and an exhausted population welcomed the return of law and order provided by the Holy Roman Empire. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE AMERICAN INSURGENCY 1765-83 The American Revolution followed the standard pattern of a successful insurgency, with several unique twists arising from the period and the special military circumstances. The insurgency began in the 1760s with the growing disenchantment of the American colonists toward the mother country. The Stamp Act of 1765 triggered widespread violent resistance; by the standards of 'Balance of Power,' this marked the onset of terrorism. It is noteworthy that the actions of the American terrorism phase were mostly directed against tea, property, and other symbols of British oppression rather than taking a bloodier expression. The pressure built up through the late 1760s and into the 1770s with increasingly bolder defiance of the Crown's authority, and the British response was to clamp down harder in a vain effort to assert its authority. The transition from terrorism to guerrilla war came at Bunker Hill in 1775. The Revolutionary War was not fought with so clean a division between the guerrilla phase and the civil war phase. The primary reason for this lay in the poor accuracy of the musket. Beyond about 50 yards, the concept of aimed fire was meaningless with the musket. Thus, there were only two ways to use a musket in combat: (1) get within 50 yards to deliver aimed fire, a very risky business, or (2) deliver the massed fire of several hundred muskets in the hope of getting a few dozen hits. Conventional European tactics stressed the latter, and the British fought in this manner throughout the war. The problem the Continentals faced was that only a tiny number of their soldiers possessed the marksmanship required for effective guerrilla tactics. Continental tactics were therefore divided between the conventional stand-up battle and the sneak-and-hide tactics used nowadays by guerrillas. They got away with premature resort to conventional combat only because the British forces were far too small for the task they faced. The French government quickly saw its opportunity to gain some geopolitical advantage and began shipping aid to the American insurgents. Later, they escalated their aid to direct military intervention, and in fact the participation of the French navy was crucial to the final American victory at Yorktown. The Spanish government also provided assistance. By 1778 the Continentals had gained the upper hand. Operations were conducted in the manner of a conventional civil war; it took three more years to achieve the final British surrender at Yorktown. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ INSURGENCY "OSCARS" If I were giving awards for the most notable insurgencies in history, my awards list would look like this: Bloodiest: This is a tie between the Thirty Years' War, an insurgency by North German (Protestant) groups against the (Catholic) Holy Roman Empire in 1618-48, and the Chinese Civil War of 1934-49; each took 30 million lives. Longest: The Basque separatist insurgency. The Basques have fought the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Arabs, and the Spanish, only achieving success for a few hundred years during the Dark Ages. One would think they would have given up (or won) by now. Most Confused: The Russian Civil War of 1918-22. The original government was overthrown in a coup, its replacement was overthrown six months later in another coup, and then a reactionary insurgency developed against the new (Red) government. We had the Reds (communists), the Whites (royalists and republicans) contesting the form that the new government of the Russian empire would take. Then we had the nationalists of the various subject peoples, trying to break away from the Russian empire: the Poles, Czechs, Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanian, Ukrainians, Cossacks, and Siberians. Then we had the interventions from France, Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan, half-heartedly pursuing a number of diverse opportunistic goals. The war rambled along for a while, generating millions of casualties, until it drowned in its own blood. The Reds did not so much win as simply outlast everybody else. Most Futile: A tough choice here, as there are so many worthy contestants, but the Jewish Revolt of 70 A.D. takes the cake for the utter futility of a small, unorganized people challenging the Roman Empire at the height of its power. The brutal truth was that the revolt against the Romans was doomed from the start. Under normal circumstances the majority of the population would have realized this and refrained from making matters worse. But the intensity of Jewish national and religious feelings drove the population into furious resistance, with consequent catastrophic casualties - perhaps a million people died in the fighting, and nothing was gained. Best Stage-Management: Castro's Cuban insurgency. The military reality was this: Castro's guerrillas skulked about impotently in the remote mountains, assiduously avoiding combat and generally losing when they did get into combat. The Batista regime was disintegrating under its own venality. At the moment it disintegrated, Castro came down from the mountains and declared himself the victor in the "heroic struggle." The fact that the 30,000-man Cuban army fell apart after sustaining only 200 killed is a pretty good indication of how little combat there really was. Best Supporting Role: The American assistance to the South Vietnamese government during its losing battle. Never has a supporting actor so completely supplanted the leading man. Best Special Effects: Again, the American effort in Vietnam takes the prize for its liberal use of smart bombs, napalm, Agent Orange, and a whole host of other ingenious devices. Best David-And-Goliath Scene: The Neuchatel affair. In 1856, republicans in the city of Neuchatel in southern Germany seized power and repudiated the suzerainty of Prussia over their city. They instead chose to federate with Switzerland. Prussia was at the time a major European power. It seemed to all that the Prussian elephant would simply step on the Neuchatel fly. However, the French and British, wary of Prussian power, sided with the insurgents and pressured Prussia into accepting an unfavorable settlement. Best Insurgency-Related Names: Top honors go to Stenka Razin, ill-fated leader of a sixteenth-century Cossack revolt against Moscow. He was taken to Moscow in a cage and executed. Honorable mention goes to Sendero Luminoso, the bloodthirsty "Shining Path" of Peru, for having the courage to shun trite acronyms involving "People," "Liberation," and "Fronts." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ COUPS D'ETAT A fruit of a successful insurgency is a revolution: a sudden and violent change in the basic makeup of a government. There is a less violent way of effecting governmental change. The most general term for this alternative is "change of executive." This is a rather unwieldy and academic term, so 'Balance of Power' lumps all such changes of power under the more familiar label 'Coups.' This chapter will explore the nature of coups d'etat and describe how 'Balance of Power' handles them. A coup produces a change of executive. The old leader is thrown out and a new leader is installed in his place. The middle and lower levels of government are left intact; only the top is changed. There are two variations on this: the "regular change of executive" and the "irregular change of executive." The first uses recognized legal procedures such as an election to remove an existing leader; the second uses less formal procedures such as a bullet through the head. The difference between a coup and a revolution lies primarily in the intensity of violence used. A revolution is a simple contest of military power between two implacable opponents. Each side believes that defeat is tantamount to death. Each side believes strongly in the fundamental truth and rightness of its position, and each side believes the other side to be evil. The wide gap separating the two sides in an insurgency makes negotiated solutions almost impossible. Most insurgencies are fought to the bitter end. The loser does not admit defeat until defeat (and gun barrels) is staring him in the face. Coups are normally resolved with less violence. Many coups are bloodless; even the most violent coups seldom involve more than a few hundred casualties. Moreover, bloodshed is seldom an intended side effect of a coup. It arises only when the coup falters and factions start to shoot. Although massive violence is the prime strategy of any insurgency, it is the first unraveling of a coup. Another difference between a coup and an insurgency lies in the time scale of their evolution. An insurgency takes years to develop and grow; some insurgencies have dragged on for decades, and even the fastest take several years. A coup, by contrast, spends perhaps some months in planning and hours in execution. Even the longest-running coup conspiracies seldom last more than a few years. A third difference between coups and revolutions is that revolutions normally generate dramatic changes in society, while coups seldom do so. In some cases, a coup generates almost no policy changes whatsoever; the only issue in question is the identity of the man in charge. In a very few cases, coups generate the kind of sweeping changes that we normally associate with revolutions. There is a reason for the less dramatic nature of the changes normally associated with coups. Any party that espouses dramatic changes - of any kind - will certainly frighten a large group of people. The fear of the entrenched and the opportunistic excitement of the deprived are seldom made compatible without recourse to violence. A SPECTRUM OF VIOLENCE There are many types of coups, or at least many political phenomena that I have chosen to lump into the broad category of coups. They can be sorted and categorized on the basis of a single major variable: the amount of violence associated with the coup. I shall start my discussion at the most violent end of this spectrum and work my way toward the more peaceful coups. VIOLENT MILITARY COUPS The most violent coups develop from attempts by factions within the military to seize power. Sometimes this can be accomplished without much fighting, but if a substantial base of loyal supporters of the existing regime can be mobilized before the plotters' seizure of power is consolidated, heavy fighting will ensue. The recent fighting in Yemen was of this nature, but it represented an extreme in which the units supporting the two sides were determined to achieve success, so the fighting proved to be long and bloody. The coup in Yemen demonstrates just how deadly modern weaponry can be when used in straight, stand-up fighting instead of the more protracted tactics of guerrilla warfare. Far more typical of the military coup was the attempted coup in Thailand of 1985. Several military units converged on the presidential palace. Loyal military units were rushed to the rescue. After several tense hours and a few warning shots, the rebellious units were convinced that their actions had not sparked a general revolt, and laid down their arms. There were only a few casualties. PALACE COUPS A variation on the military coup is the palace coup. This is an attempt to keep casualties down by focusing military power directly on the president and his immediate staff. The instigators show up at the presidential palace with a few soldiers and put a gun to the president's head. If all goes well, he gives in. Perhaps they simply shoot everybody and take over. Two problems make the palace coup more difficult these days. First, in the more rough 'n' ready nations, presidents have had the good sense to keep a powerful guard on the premises at all times. It gets harder and harder to pull off a simple invasion of the presidential palace. The Soviets found this out to their dismay when they assisted their fraternal brothers in Afghanistan. Their intention had been to take a few soldiers up to the presidential palace and put a bullet through the head of Hafizullah Amin, the Afghan president. Unfortunately, they did not bargain on the stiff defense that his guards put up, or their considerable number. A furious battle raged for nearly a day, with Amin himself manning the barricades. When it was over, there were quite a few casualties, not the least of which was the Soviet story that this was a simple political reshuffling with Soviet fraternal assistance. The second problem with the palace coup is that, in the more genteel nations, assassinating the president doesn't make you the new president; it only makes you an assassin. You suddenly find the entire nation - most importantly, the entire military - lined up against you. Oops! NONVIOLENT MILITARY COUPS The next step in our spectrum of coups is the nonviolent military coup. The idea here is to use the military to demonstrate power and intimidate your opponents while still avoiding violence. The attempted coup against Hitler in July, 1944, was of such a nature. The conspirators planted a bomb to kill Hitler and then moved to arrest his supporters in Berlin. Their only violent act was the bombing itself; otherwise, their coup was executed with pistols, guards, and a great deal of bluff. They failed, partially because several crucial military commanders refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of any leadership that was founded on naked military power. In effect, the conspirators failed because the German generals were too civilized to accept something as brutal as a military coup. How's that for irony? Often a military coup is a simple matter of the generals losing confidence in the civilian government and showing up at the presidential palace with a few tanks and announcing that the civilian government is being replaced by a military junta. Ostensibly, the junta will deal with the current emergency and then hold elections as soon as the situation has calmed enough to enable elections. Perhaps one of the most civilized military coups in history was the attempted coup in Spain a few years ago. A Spanish colonel showed up in the Cortes (the Spanish equivalent of our Congress) with a few soldiers, shot a few rounds into the ceiling, and announced that the fledgling democracy was suspended by the military. He expected other elements of the military to fall in with his initiative. Spain held its breath: What would the military do? At this moment, King Juan Carlos donned his military uniform and appeared on television, denouncing this "criminal act" and throwing the full weight of his prestige behind the democracy. That did it. Generals telephoned in their pledges of loyalty, and the entire affair was reduced to a nut case with a pistol in the Cortes. He surrendered and is now in jail. This affair demonstrates the immense value of a constitutional monarch. By remaining above politics, the monarch retains the confidence of all the people, regardless of their ideology. When the chips are down, and democratic fractiousness threatens to tear society apart, the monarch can step in and throw the weight of his prestige behind the forces of law and order. That is precisely what King Juan Carlos did. On that day, he earned his pay for many a year. We Americans, who swear loyalty to a Constitution, have some difficulty understanding the system, but we cannot deny that it works. POPULAR REVOLTS The next form of coup is the popular revolt. Popular resentment against the government boils over into street demonstrations which become riots. If enough people are angry with the government, they quickly realize one of the fundamental truths of the world: no government can function without the consent of the people. No military or police force, no matter how large or powerful, can maintain control over a population against its will. Having smarted under the whip for too long, the population goes wild in an orgy of rioting. This demonstrates that the government has lost all ability to govern. Let's face it, if you can't even keep peace in the streets, you don't have a functioning government. The only option is to fold up the tent and let a new government take over. This is how the people of Haiti overthrew the hated Baby Doc Duvalier. The Haitians overcame their fear of the Tontons Macoutes, Duvalier's murderous secret police, and overthrew his government. A similar set of circumstances led to the fall of the Shah of Iran, again in spite of Savak, the Shah's secret police. The Polish communist government of Edward Gierek was overthrown in a similar manner in 1970, despite the array of repressive measures available to a communist state. These examples of successful popular revolts are the exceptions, not the rule. Civil unrest is the norm in many nations of the world and it boils into the streets with depressing frequency. In all three of the above-cited cases, (Haiti, Iran, and Poland), the leadership refused to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation until it was too late. The reason for such a callous attitude is the frequency of civil disorder and its usual lack of issue. Most of the time, the police crack down and the crowds disperse after venting their rage. There have been some 10,000 riots in the last forty years; about 100, or 1% of these, yielded a change of executive. Little wonder that political leaders seldom see civil disorder as a threat to their jobs. POLITICAL COUPS The next form of coup is the purely political coup. The Soviet Union and many communist states rely heavily on this form of governmental renewal. They are able to do so because of the fundamental disciplines of any communist state is the maintenance of absolute party control over the military. Thus, the prospect of a coup involving the military is much less likely in communist states. Since there are also no true elections, the only means for replacing an ineffective leader is the political coup. This is normally carried out through a series of complex political intrigues, the goal of which is to create a new consensus against the current leadership and in favor of some new leader. The danger of this lies in the difficulty of hiding these intrigues from the leader and thwarting his subsequent countermoves. The 1964 ouster of Nikita Khrushchev illustrates the process. Khrushchev foolishly took a vacation in the south, giving the conspirators the opportunity to work openly in Moscow. Khrushchev threw away his last chance at retaining power when he failed to respond to warnings telephoned him by his loyalists. By the time he was ready to act, it was too late; the Brezhnev-Kosygin party had consolidated its political position within the Party hierarchy and Khrushchev's ouster was complete. INSTITUTIONALIZED "COUPS" Here we pass into the forms of coup that are institutionalized. These are primarily the preserve of the Western democracies. These nations have developed a more organized and less disruptive way of sweeping out the cobwebs. Most nations in the West use a parliamentary democracy with a coalition government that exists only so long as it enjoys the confidence of the Parliament. Once it loses a formal vote of confidence, it must dissolve itself and organize a new coalition. The system used by the United States involves regularly scheduled elections to replace the government executives. FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO COUPS Almost anything can contribute to the dissatisfaction that leads up to a coup. The Spanish colonel who raided the Cortes believed that democracy was rotting the moral core of Spain, and that military leadership was necessary to put Spain back in order. The Argentine generals who took over in the 1970s did so because they felt that the civilian government was impotent against the left-wing terrorism that was crippling the nation. Personal ambition can play a large part in coups; Napoleon's coup against the Revolutionary government was not an expression of any particular social grievance, but merely the bold stroke of an ambitious man grasping for power. ECONOMICS The single largest factor in coups, though, is simple economics. When people's stomachs grumble loudly enough, governments fall. Runaway inflation has been a common motivating factor in coups. In American politics, the performance of the economy plays a large role in every national election. A strong economy bodes well for the incumbents; a weak one gives the challengers a big boost. The real issue is not so much the total GNP as it is GNP growth. For example, the rapidly growing nations of Eastern Asia (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan) have enjoyed political stability as well. Their neighbors who have grown more slowly (Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia) have experienced more political instability. For the purposes of 'Balance of Power' I have chosen not to concentrate not on GNP growth, but instead on the growth of consumer spending per capita. Consumer spending is the amount of money that is left over to spend on the direct well-being of the population after military spending and investment is taken out of the GNP. It includes such things as food, clothing, and housing. Consumer spending is the only means by which the average citizen actually experiences the GNP. The government can announce all sorts of wonderful statistics, but such propaganda has far less credibility than the amount of bread on the table. Note that in some countries, the GNP is growing more slowly than the population, so that GNP per capita, and hence consumer spending per capita, is falling even though the GNP is growing. THE ROLE OF THE SUPERPOWERS The superpowers are unable to prevent or control coups around the globe, but they are able to create and influence them. A variety of schemes are available to the superpower; their effect is referred to as 'destabilization.' Efforts can be kept fairly sanitary, such as simply providing funds for the opponents of the regime. Henry Kissinger asserts that this was the extent of the Nixon administration's efforts to destabilize the Allende regime in Chile. Superpowers can go much further than this if they wish. They can provide assistance to the more determined opponents of the regime. The KGB has been implicated in a number of assassinations associated with political intrigues in a variety of countries. The strongest influence that a superpower can exert comes in the moments of crisis. At these times a superpower with domestic influence can encourage one side or the other. The United States, for example, played a role in encouraging the coup against Diem, leader of South Vietnam, in 1963. Similarly, the American refusal to support the Shah of Iran in the last days of his rule was a major factor in his decision to throw in the towel. ECONOMIC AID Superpowers do have some options to support a regime. The most effective of these is simple economic aid. Inasmuch as poor economic performance is a major contributor to the unrest that leads up to coups, any aid that improves the economy will strengthen the regime. Unfortunately, there are many limits on the value of foreign aid. In the first place, foreign aid must actually reach its destination; many Third World nations are so hopelessly tangled in corruption that only a fraction of the foreign aid they receive reaches its intended destination. Second, political considerations often result in the foreign aid being used in a manner not likely to achieve the maximum improvement in the GNP. The vanity of the recipient-nation's leadership, or the dictates of the giver, may result in the construction of a grandiloquent but useless dam, road, or factory. RESULTS OF A COUP A coup has two primary aftereffects. The first and most obvious is the replacement of the old executive with a new one. This can mean very little or it can mean a great deal. Many African coups merely replace one tribal dictator with another. On the other hand, the popular coup against the Shah of Iran led to radical changes in Iranian society. The second aftereffect of a coup occurs only with irregular changes of executive. Such events erode the society's confidence in, and respect for, its institutions. If Petty Tyrant #1 can march into the presidential palace, shoot the president, take the reins of power, and get away with it, why can't Petty Tyrant #2 do the same? And then how about Petty Tyrants #3, #4, and so on in an unending series? 'COUPS' IN 'BALANCE OF POWER' 'Balance of Power' treats coups in a very simple-minded fashion: economic performance is the primary factor that determines the generation of coups. A secondary factor is the political leaning of the government: Extremist governments of either stripe are accorded a small amount of resistance to coups. Because economic performance plays so large a role in the determination of coups, I shall also present a summary of the economics computations used in 'Balance of Power.' The first equations are: Consumer Pressure = (20 - Government Popularity) * 10 IF Consumer Pressure < 1 THEN Consumer Pressure = 1 Investment Pressure = (80 - Investment Fraction) * 2 IF Investment Pressure < 1 THEN Investment Pressure = 1 'Consumer Pressure' is the degree to which the government feels compelled to increase consumer spending at the expense of the other two main sectors of the economy (investment and military spending). 'Government Popularity' in 'Balance of Power' normally falls between 1 and 20, with a value of 20 indicating a very popular government. These equations say that the government feels more pressure to increase consumer spending when its popularity falls. 'Investment Pressure' is the degree to which the government feels compelled to increase investment spending. This is normally a small pressure. The investment fraction is the fraction of the total GNP that is invested in the form of new roads, schools, factories, and the like. In 'Balance of Power', it is measured not from 0% to 100%, as one might expect, but from 0 to 256; this range is better suited to the peculiar arithmetic considerations of a digital computer using 16-bit words. A typical investment fraction would be 40, corresponding to about 15% of GNP. The third economic factor used in calculating the incidence of coups is 'Military Pressure,' computed with a more complex formula: Military Pressure = Square Root of Insurgency Strength Ratio + Probability of Finlandizing to the USA + Probability of Finlandizing to the USSR If Military Pressure < 1 THEN Military Pressure = 1 Now we're getting messy. 'Military Pressure' is, as you might expect, the amount of pressure the government feels to increase its military budget. Three factors contribute to 'Military Pressure.' First comes the square root of the strength ratio between the insurgency and the government. If this number is large, then the insurgency is large and powerful, and the government had better strengthen its army. The second and third numbers are the "Finlandization probabilities" for each of the two superpowers. They measure the degree to which the government feels vulnerable to, and threatened by, each of the superpowers. Military spending is one way a government can increase its sense of security in such circumstances. One might argue that no minor power could seriously believe that it could defend itself against a superpower, but such is not the case. The Nicaraguan government of Daniel Ortega believes that by arming itself to the teeth, it will make the cost in blood of an American invasion too high for American planners to contemplate. These three forms of pressure on the GNP budget are then brought together to determine how the GNP will be allocated: Total Pressure = Consumer Pressure + Investment Pressure + Military Pressure Fractional Pot = 0 If Consumer Fraction > 16 THEN Consumer Fraction = Consumer Fraction - 8 AND Fractional Pot = Fractional Pot + 8 If Investment Fraction > 16 THEN Investment Fraction = Investment Fraction - 8 AND Fractional Pot = Fractional Pot + 8 If Military Fraction > 16 THEN Military Fraction = Military Fraction - 8 AND Fractional Pot = Fractional Pot + 8 The effect of these strange statements is to create a "Fractional Pot" of GNP fractions that we are then going to reallocate between the three primary sectors of the economy. The purpose of the IF-statements is to protect sectors that are so tiny (less than 16 parts in 256, or 6%) that they must be held inviolate. But any sector that has more than 6% of the total GNP must throw in 8 units of its fractional part of the GNP into the common pot, from which new GNP portions will be allocated: (Investment Pressure * Fractional Pot) Investment Fraction = Inv. Fraction + -------------------------------------- Total Pressure (Military Pressure * Fractional Pot) Military Fraction = Milit. Fraction + ------------------------------------ Total Pressure Consumer Fraction = 256 - Military Fraction - Consumer Fraction These equations say that each sector of the economy gets a portion of the fractional pot in proportion to the amount of pressure that it generated. The purpose of all this code is to simulate, in a very crude fashion, the type of decision-making that goes on in every society in the world. Leaders must always allocate limited funds to meet insatiable demands. By expressing this problem through the concept of pressure, I was able to get a very rough approximation of the decision-making process. This is not to say that my equations assume that the division of the GNP between the military, investment, and consumer sectors is decided upon by the government. The equations deal only in pressures operating on the society and how those pressures are resolved in a distribution among the three primary sectors (military, consumer, and investment). Whether that resolution is determined by a government minister, the marketplace, or by powerful bankers, is not the concern of the model. It is true that the model makes some strong assumptions about how different societies will react to military threats and the need for investment. In the absence of usable data on national differences of this kind, I opted for a "one size fits all" model. With the GNP model divided between the sectors, we are ready to calculate the change in consumer spending: Old Consumer Spending Per Capita = 255*(Consumer Spending) ----------------------- Population Virtual GNP = GNP + Economic Aid From Superpowers GNP = GNP + (Virtual GNP * 2 * (Investment Fraction - 30)) ---------------------------------------------- 1000 The first equation is simple enough - it directly calculates the consumer spending per capita. The second is a little strange. It creates a "virtual GNP" that will be used for computational purposes but is not identical to the true GNP. Much of it is lost in the third equation, which makes the GNP grow by the portion of the economy that is invested in the future. Notice, though, that any investment fraction less than 30 (about 12% of the GNP) will result in negative growth of the economy. This is based on some simple empirical data I obtained on growth rates of GNPs and investment fractions. I plotted them against each other and found a roughly linear relationship with slope and intercept corresponding to the coefficients that are used in the third equation. This, apparently, measures the average depreciation of capital assets. In other words, if you don't invest at least 12% of your GNP each year, your roads, factories, schools, and so on will wear out faster than you can replace them, and your GNP will diminish. Now we are ready to calculate the new consumer spending with the equation: New Consumer Spending Per Capita = Consumer Fraction * Virtual GNP ------------------------------- Population And at last we are ready to calculate the percentage by which consumer spending per capita has grown: Improvement = 100 * (New Consumer Spending Per Capita - Old C.S.P.C.) ------------------------------------------------------- Old Consumer Spending Per Capita Now we are able to calculate this year's government popularity. The equation is simply: Government Popularity = Govt. Pop. + Improvement + Abs(Government Wing) - 3 -------------------- 64 Now I must explain each of the terms in this last formula. The first term, 'Government Popularity', simply says that the government starts off with the popularity it had last year and works from there. This takes into account the idea of loyalty: People who like the government will not turn on it overnight without strong incentives. In short, the government does not start with a clean slate each year; a good job last year will generate popular goodwill that will carry over into the next year. The second term, 'Improvement,' is the critically important economic term. If the government achieved an improvement in consumer spending per capita, the average citizen's life is better and the government's popularity is increased. If, on the other hand, consumer spending per capita went down, then improvement will be a negative number and the government's popularity will fall. The third term, using 'Government Wing', presents one of the most debatable assertions in the entire model. It declares that a government's popularity will increase in proportion to its radical-ness. Remember, extreme left-wing governments will have 'Government Wing' equal to up to -128, while governments with an extremely right-wing orientation will have 'Government Wing' equal to +128, and 'Government Wing' for centrist governments will be 0. Thus, the radical governments of either wing will get a one-point popularity bonus solely because they are so radical. I added this term to reflect two forces: the tendency of radical governments to suppress dissent, and the divisiveness that so often cripples centrist governments. Fortunately, the effect is small, only appearing as a single point for truly extremist governments. The last term is simple in appearance but carries a great deal of baggage in the way of assumptions. I subtract 3 from the government's popularity. This we might call the "natural expectation of the masses." The idea behind this term is that people expect economic growth. In fact, people expect a 3% growth rate in consumer spending per capita. If the government achieves that, they are satisfied. Not pleased, mind you, just satisfied. If, however, the government falls shorts of the expected 3% growth rate, then they are dissatisfied, even if the growth was still positive. How did I determine this magic number? Did I spend hours in the library compiling economic statistics and cross-checking them against expressions of political discontent? No! I arrived at it by experiment. I found that 2% was so low that people were always happy with their governments and there were never any coups in the game. That was too boring. On the other hand, 4% made it impossible for any government to survive the game, so that was too high. That left 3% as the happy medium that generated enough coups to make life interesting but not hopeless. If only the real world were as manageable as a game design... So now we have calculated the new popularity of the government. The next task is to determine if a coup is triggered. This is simplicity itself: IF Government Popularity < (USA Destabilization + USSR Destabilization) THEN Trigger a Coup Normally, neither superpower will be engaging in destabilization, so this IF-statement boils down to the simple question, Is 'Government Popularity' less than zero? If, however, one or both superpowers is indeed carrying out a program of destabilization, it will express itself as a positive number between 1 and 5, corresponding to the 5 levels of destabilization allowed in the window brought up by selecting Destabilization from the Make Policy menu. Thus, in the unlikely event that both superpowers were exerting maximum destabilization effort, the government would fall if its popularity were less than 10. If a coup takes place, a number of changes result. As with the insurgency, the 'Government Wing' is reversed, so that the left-wingers are replaced by right-wingers, and vice versa. The new government starts off with a fresh load of popularity, because people everywhere let their hopes exceed their judgment. On the other hand, the government's resistance to insurgency is weakened; its soldiers don't fight as well when they don't know for whom they are fighting. The other result of a coup involves the government's relationship to the superpowers. Change in Relations = (Abs(Insurgency Wing - Government Wing of Superpower) - Abs(Government Wing - Government Wing of Superpower)) / 2 The effect of this equation is to measure the "ideological distance" that the new government moved toward or away from the ideological stance of the superpower. If it moved closer to the superpower, then diplomatic relations between the two countries are improved; conversely, if it moved farther away, then diplomatic relations are worsened. And that is how the details of coups are handled in 'Balance of Power.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SCORECARD: COUPS, 1948-77 The 'World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators' (Taylor and Jodice 1983) presents a compendium of political events during the thirty years from 1948 to 1977. The following is a digest of some of the more interesting tidbits gleaned from that source. The authors define four types of events that fall within the purview of this chapter: 'regular executive transfers,' 'irregular executive transfers,' 'unsuccessful regular executive transfers,' and 'unsuccessful irregular executive transfers.' An irregular executive transfer is the "removal and replacement of the incumbent national executive outside the conventional procedures for transferring formal power." A regular executive transfer is the same process carried out through legal or conventional procedures. Thus, we normally think of an irregular executive transfer as a coup, but in the world of 'Balance of Power,' any form of executive transfer is treated as a coup. The term 'unsuccessful regular executive transfer' may perplex readers unfamiliar with parliamentary democracy. In such a system, a government (actually, not the entire government but the executive echelon of the government) operates only with the confidence of the Parliament. If for any reason the government is unable to survive a vote of confidence in the Parliament, the government is declared dissolved, which means that a new government must be formed. During the period of forming a new government, an out-of-power faction may make a legal attempt to form a majority government. If this attempt fails, it is considered to be an unsuccessful regular executive transfer. The authors report a total of 238 irregular executive transfers during their sample period versus 304 unsuccessful irregular executive transfers. In other words, about 44% of all coup attempts were successful. That's better than twice the success rate of insurgency. Regular executive transfers are even more impressive: 1645 successful regular executive transfers against 409 unsuccessful ones. That's a success rate of 80%! There is an interesting and reassuring relationship here. The most violent and brutal form of political change - insurgency - has obtained a success rate in the last forty years of only 20%; the next most brutal form, the irregular executive transfer, achieved a 44% success rate, while the most civilized form of political change, the regular executive transfer, enjoyed a success rate of 80%. Those who fear the world is descending into barbarism take note. For optimists and pessimists alike, another aspect of the data is bad news: there has been no clear secular trend in the incidence of coups, successful or unsuccessful. year in and year out, coups seem to march along with depressing regularity, neither increasing nor decreasing in frequency. Some countries have set records for the number of coups they have undergone. Top honors are shared by Bolivia, with 18 unsuccessful coups and 6 successful ones, and Syria, with 12 unsuccessful coups and 12 successful ones. Conspirators take note! Syria is a much friendlier place for a coup than Bolivia. Until Hafiz Assad took over in the 1970s, Syria was one of the most politically active nations in the world. In addition to its 24 irregular executive transfers (successful and unsuccessful), Syria has had more regular executive transfers (48) than any other nation in the world. It ranks sixth in unsuccessful regular executive transfers (with 24), and, believe it or not, 16th in national elections - with 15 - the same number as the United States has had in the same period. Hafiz Assad changed all that and brought "stability" to Syrian politics. This is not so bad as it might seem: During the sample period, before Hassad assumed power, Syria suffered nearly 2,000 deaths from political violence and 28 assassinations. In the field of national elections, the Swiss hold the record with 43 elections, with France coming in second with 26. Would you believe that Algeria has had more national elections (18) than the United States (15)? Or that the Soviet Union has had more national elections (7) than Hong Kong (1)? It should come as no surprise that France and Italy are the record-holders for unsuccessful regular executive transfers, with 61 and 41 respectively. However, most of the French instabilities arose during the fifties, and most of the Italian turbulence came in the sixties. Those who like to think of Western democracy as the proper role-models for governmental change for the Third World nations will cringe upon discovering that, of the top ten countries in the category of regular executive transfers, only Greece can be called a Western democracy. The other countries with the most regular executive transfers are mostly in the Middle East. France is 11th with 29 regular executive changes. And what do the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Afghanistan, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, Rumania, Kuwait, Uganda, Malawi, and the Philippines all have in common? They all have had more regular executive transfers than the United States, which has had only 6 such events in the thirty-year period. How are we to interpret this? One might argue that the infrequency of American regular executive transfers is an indication of stability, not lawlessness. Certainly one cannot claim that the number of elections or regular executive transfers is a measure of the quality of democracy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE HISTORY OF COUPS The history of coups is not as long as that of insurgency. The early civilizations weren't civilized enough to accept the notion that power could be transferred without violence. Throughout much of history, the transfer of power from one executive to another was a violent and bloody process that took a large toll of all bystanders, innocent or otherwise. Power struggles of this nature were so disruptive that most civilizations developed a deep-seated fear of them. From this fear rose a rich collection of values about the means by which a king should be replaced with minimal disruption to society. The exclamation, "Long live the king!" was not an altruistic expression of good wishes for the royalty; the longer the king lived, the lower the chance of a bloody dynamic struggle. Similarly, the birth of a male heir to the throne was always received by the commoners with great joy. The eldest male heir was universally regarded as having an unimpeachable claim to the throne upon the death of his father; such certainty of succession greatly reduced the likelihood of dynastic wars upon the death of the father. On the other hand, people dreaded the existence of multiple male heirs: Additional heirs injected an element of uncertainty into the succession that was all too easily exploited by ambitious siblings to generate bloody battles. The Turks came to accept the notion that royal siblings must ruthlessly murder each other until one emerged victorious. The first truly modern coup of which I am aware came from Roman history. Julius Caesar did not pull off the first military coup, but his crossing of the Rubicon and subsequent entry into Rome is certainly the most famous of early coups. Moreover, it set precedence and created the model for future Roman transfers of power. The Dark Ages were too primitive a time to allow much in the way of coup activity. Here is how King Sigibert of the Franks was removed from office in 575 A.D.: Two young men who had been suborned by Queen Fredegund then came up to Sigibert, carrying strong knives, which are commonly called scramasaxes, and which they had smeared with poison. They pretended that they had something to discuss with him, but they struck him on both sides. He gave a loud cry and fell to the ground. He died soon afterwards. (Lewis Thorpe, trans., History of the Franks: Gregory of Tours) The history of these times is twisted chronicle of murder and wild anarchy. The concept of a coup just doesn't seem to work in this environment. It was about as appropriate as raising a point of parliamentary procedure in a barroom brawl. By the time of William the Conqueror, things had progressed far enough that we can once again talk about transfers of executive power as opposed to bloody free-for-alls. The next seven hundred years were dominated by the development of the king-state relationship. Coups revolved around dynastic considerations. The developing rules for d