Pigs Blood

We do have a section on rules of engagement in my book America’s Modern Wars (Chapter 9). In that effort, I ended up coding by judgment the rules of engagement in five categories (polite, strict, restricted, unrestricted, brutal). The telling chart is here:

As one can see, success tends to be at either end of the spectrum, with the counterinsurgents winning around 75% of the insurgencies fought with strict rules of engagements and the counterinsurgents winning around 75% of the insurgencies fought brutally. Anything in between those two points does not work as well.

We ended up doing this for all “83 insurgencies, interventions and peacekeeping operations” (the only category that had the “polite” cases, and they were 100% successful), for the “62 insurgencies” (show above), for the “36 insurgencies versus foreigners” (same pattern as above), and for the “26 insurgent civil wars” (same pattern as above). See pages 85-86 of America’s Modern Wars.

While the results were not statistically significant (see pages 86-87), the fact that the four different tests were all pretty consistent in results no matter which way you cut the data tends to indicate that there is something there. Clearly more work needs to be done, but we were never able to get back to this issue. On the other hand, lots of people have strong opinions on the subject based upon a lot less data. 

This is explained in more detail in this post from 2015:

Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks?

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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