Quote Originally Posted by Cavguy View Post
It's all how you count settlements.
It is also all about how you count insurgency.

If you do COIN well, you nip an insurgency in the bud very early, before it reaches the stage of full scale civil war. None of these small proto-insurgencies (say, Uruguay vs the Tupamaros, Egypt vs Islamic Jihad, even Germany vs the Red Army Faction or Canada vs the FLQ) are counted in the "win" category in the RAND data, however.

Of course, you can choose not to "count" insurgencies until they reach a threshold of casualties--Lyall and Wilson use "a minimum 1,000 battle death inclusion rule, with at least 100 casualties suffered on each side." However, this is rather like not including boxing matches that feature a first round KO. (It is also never clear to me why insurgency should be measured by an absolute threshold, rather proportional to population or some other indicator of relative intensity and threat).

Second, there seem to be lots of cases missing from the RAND study. Omani suppression of the Dhofari insurgency? The consolidation of the Islamic Republic in Iran against various internal challengers, 1979-80? Syrian suppression of the Hama uprising (20,000 casualties in 1982, so not a minor case)? Iraqi suppression of the southern and Kurdish uprisings in 1991? The civil war (and collapse) of PDR Yemen? Those are just the ME examples.

Large n studies are very useful. They do (as you note) tend to have a lot of devils hiding in the details of how they are coded, however.