Guns, Guerrillas, and Social Norms: Exploring Obstacles to Learning in Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency campaigns led by foreign powers are often wrought with successive failures to adapt to threats posed by non-state adversaries. Why do policymakers face barriers to learning in counterinsurgency? I introduce a new theory of counterinsurgent learning that emphasizes the tightness of social norms in national security organizations. Changes in the strength of social norms, specifically those related to conformity and deference to authority, impact learning by shaping the sharpness of insurgent signals and the weight of prior beliefs about an insurgent threat. Relying upon recently declassified documents, I process trace these mechanisms, as well as alternative ones on rebel technology and force structure, through a case study of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. I also test key hypotheses with cross-national data on wars of counterinsurgency. This research has implications for the literature on organizational learning, threat assessment, and counterinsurgency.