Controlling Territory and Population During Counterinsurgency: State Security Capacity and the Costs of Power Projection

Much of the literature on counterinsurgency focuses on the development of indigenous security capacity as the best policy for a state to achieve functional control over its people and territory, and, by extension, victory over an insurgency. This understanding serves as a guiding principle in Afghanistan. The policy erroneously maintains that a state's ability to exercise functional control over its territory is an almost exclusive product of state security capacity. In this article, I argue that the scope of a state's control over its national territory is more properly conceptualized as a function of both the state's aggregate security capacity and the costs of projecting power over distance. Functional territorial control, therefore, can be best maximized when the return on investment in security capacity is equal to the return on investment in factors that reduce the costs of power projection.