Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
I think if you can get an insurgent to give up or change sides, you should. Point being he is only likley to do that, once you have subjected him to some harm or threat.
This is not always the case. In the Philippines in the last years of the Marcos regime, the Communist New People's Army had roughly 40k armed members and was approaching strategic parity with a poorly led and demoralized AFP. In '86 Marcos fell, and his network of local governors, mayors and village captains, many of them in place for decades and responsible for a wide variety of abuses that served as recruiting tools for the NPA, were removed and replaced. NPA numbers dropped drastically, and by the mid 90s they were down to 6-8000. The hardcore ideologues stayed with the fight, but the followers abandoned it en masse - not because they were harmed or threatened, but because the regime they perceived as their enemy was no longer there, elections were happening, and there was potential for change within the existing political framework.

Only one case of course, but it illustrates the importance of understanding why the insurgent fights - not "the insurgency", as a whole, but the individual insurgent. The insurgency may be Communist, Islamist, Separatist, what have you, but it's often the case that many of the individual insurgents are fighting not because they are devoted to those goals but because of some more immediate and often more local grievance. Addressing those grievances may not eliminate the insurgency, but it can dramatically reduce the appeal of the insurgency to the populace, reducing recruitment and increasing defections.