Dynamics of Insurgent Innovation: How Hezbollah and Other Non-State Actors Develop New Capabilities
Journal
Comparative Strategy
Type
journal article
Date Issued
2019
Author(s)
Abstract (De)
Few issues are more important to security studies scholars than understanding how violent non-state groups innovate. To shed new light on this subject, we examine Hezbollah’s innovations and the underlying processes that produced them. Based on this case, the most successful violent non-state groups are arguably those that systematically pursue incremental innovation. Although less dramatic than their discontinuous counterparts, a commitment to steadily improve an organizations' tactics and techniques can have dramatic effects. Indeed, even Hezbollah’s remarkable performance during the 2006 Lebanon War is attributable to the perfection of techniques utilized since the organization's inception. While innovations were incremental in character, a bottom-up process of learning and experimentation by field commanders was critical to generating most of these innovations. If generalizable to other violent non-state actors, these findings suggest that the most formidable insurgent and terrorist groups will actually be those that relentlessly pursue incremental innovations in a bottom-up fashion.
Language
English
HSG Classification
None
Refereed
Yes
Volume
38
Number
4
Start page
371
End page
400
Subject(s)
Eprints ID
256367