National Archives II
​Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Rebels in the Field: Cadres and the Development of Insurgent Military Power, Under contract at Oxford University Press

While the success of the Taliban's final push on Kabul in 2021 was overdetermined, the organization-building of the Taliban was not predetermined. Its military power was not uniform across space and time, and the group's behavior often ran counter to conventional wisdom. This begs two fundamental questions. First, how should we describe and capture meaningful variation in insurgent military power? Second, why can some insurgents deploy these various forms of power on the battlefield while others cannot? To answer these questions, the manuscript develops a novel spectrum of insurgent military power that integrates currently studied outcomes such as when violence is used, its scale, and its targets. The cadre theory argues that whether organizations can support complex forms of force employment, such as guerrilla warfare, is a function of whether they develop a cadre and which type. The book identifies four types of cadre: political cadre and three forms of military cadre. Without a cadre, the theory explains how some organizations can employ simple but still meaningful forms of military power, though they will be limited to these less complex military activities. After building the cadre theory through the lens of the Taliban (2001-2021), the book tests the theory by carefully evaluating 17 organizations in Vietnam (1940-1975) and Iraq (2003-2016) using archival documents, interviews, and secondary sources. Rebels in the Field adds to our understanding of civil wars and military organization. Perhaps most fundamentally, the book revises the conventional wisdom that organizations with strong pre-existing social and political foundations are often the most powerful.