Do All Roads Lead to Violence? A Geospatial Analysis of Insurgent Diffusion in Iraq

Abstract

“The art of war is the art of the logistically feasible” - Admiral Rickover. The practical constraints of geography are often thoroughly examined before the undertaking any conventional military campaign. These factors set boundaries. They are sometimes obscured by the blind ambition of military commanders yet are attributable to victory or defeat after the guns fall silent. Despite considerable research on geography for traditional military purposes, the application of similar analysis on the spread of insurgent violence remains sparse. In 2012, Dr. Yuri Zhukov categorized insurgent logistics into two theories; cellular and self-sufficient, or extremely mobile and flexible. In response to these two theories, he proposed that insurgency was instead most significantly reliant on modern infrastructure and networks of travel (primarily roads). To test his hypothesis, Dr. Zhukov used data from insurgent violence in the Russian Caucuses from 2000 to 2008. Dr. Zhukov found significant quantitative results that confirmed his theory that a network-based model is a more consistent predictor of the spread of insurgent violence. This thesis looks at these same theories in the case of the Islamic State in Iraq from 2003 to 2020. In aggregate, the results concur with Dr. Zhukov’s findings that roads are the best predictor for the spread of insurgent violence. However, by temporally disaggregating the data, this thesis finds that the strength of these models change over time as an insurgency learns, fights, and evolves.