National Will to Fight

This monograph looks at national will to fight. Some nations fight harder than others and it would be good for America to know how much we will fight, how much allies will fight, and how much enemies will fight.

Stable democracies and totalitarian states have the best record. But government type is only one variable.

I've asked, during the Iraq War counter-insurgency campaign, how you break the will of jihadis to fight? (Sorry, can't find it.) A nation endures pain and that is part of their will to fight. But the non-state jihad draws from a global pool of jihadi recruits in the Sunni world. How do you measure the will to fight for that type of "nation?"

Remember, even jihadi Iran (of the Shia variety) saw their soldiers' morale break in the Iran-Iraq War by 1987 when they endured a bloodletting battle that was finally too much for even the fanatics to take any longer. But that was one nation suffering deaths in conventional combat. How do you break the will of so many people dispersed around the world in such large numbers? Especially when there are few conventional campaigns to kill them in large numbers as Iraq could in the Iran-Iraq War?

It is frustrating. I've long said that the Long War is really an Islamic Civil War over who defines Islam.

But the military/intelligence/police fight is absolutely necessary to contain the problem until that civil war is won. Killing jihadis is not counter-productive. Indeed, for a time after defeating al Qaeda in Iraq, the desire to join the jihad declined by all appearances. But the sting of that defeat faded in time.

Did the defeat of ISIL's caliphate produce a similar decline? Certainly, there is no place to go now, so I wouldn't be surprised if jihadi recruiting is down now. But nothing yet done militarily or in the civil war has delegitimized jihad for a lasting victory.

It would be nice if we had an understanding of how a dispersed "nation" can lose the will to fight to focus both our military and security efforts and focus the efforts of the good guys in the Islamic Civil War.

UPDATED: How al Qaeda keeps going.