The will to fight (Part I)
Scott Atran

Throughout history, the most effective combatants have powered to victory on commitment to core values and collective resolve.

Scott Atran

Scott Atran is co-founder of Artis International and emeritus director of research at France’s National Center for Scientific Research; he also holds research positions at the University of Oxford and University of Michigan, and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Talking to the Enemy (2010) and In Gods We Trust (2002).

(PART I): Leonidas, King of Sparta, arrived at Thermopylae with a small advance guard to hold off a massive Persian assault in 480 BCE. The invading Persian army was thousands-strong, and the Greek states had yet to mobilise a response. Plutarch records that Xerxes, Persia’s ‘King of Kings’, made a written offer he thought Leonidas could hardly refuse: ‘It is possible for you … by ranging yourself on my side, to be the sole ruler of Greece.’ Leonidas allegedly answered: ‘If you had any knowledge of the noble things of life, you would refrain from coveting others’ possessions; but for me to die for Greece is better than to be the sole ruler.’

Then Xerxes wrote again: ‘Hand over your arms.’

Leonidas famously retorted ‘Come and take them’ (μολὼν λαϐέ/molṑn labé). Leonidas and his ‘300 immortals’ who refused offers to save themselves were eventually slaughtered, but an inspired Greece would win the war. Or so goes the legend that became part of Western civilisation’s creation myth.

Throughout history, the most effective combatants, revolutionaries and insurgents have been ‘devoted actors’ fused together by dedication to non-negotiable ‘sacred values’ such as God, country or liberty. Military incursions nearly always plan for maximum force at the beginning to ensure victory.

But if defenders resist, or are allowed to recoup, then the advantage often shifts to those with the will to fight as they increasingly harness resources against their attackers who are maxed-out in terms of what they are able, or willing, to commit: consider Napoleon and then Hitler and their onslaught against Russia, or the United States’ invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Throughout history, those willing to sacrifice for cause and comrades, and for their leaders, have often prevailed against more powerful forces that mainly rely on material incentives such as pay and punishment.

Even when defeated and annihilated, the heroism and martyrdom of those with the will to fight often become the stuff of legend. Consider the Judeans under Eleazar at Masada, the Alamo defenders under Travis, Bowie and Crockett (note: that these men supported slavery or other unacceptable positions is irrelevant to the point here), or the Group of Personal Friends who fought to the end, defending the Chilean president Salvador Allende against Pinochet’s putschists. Or take the last holdouts at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol in what might well become a centrepiece of Ukraine’s national creation myth, along with its president Volodymyr Zelensky’s celebrated reply to a US offer of evacuation: ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’

Such legends continue to endure and inspire in political circles, at military colleges and among the public. And the outcomes of recent and current conflicts continue to demonstrate that non-material factors, such as value-driven commitment and collective resolve, can help mobilise forces and yield greater effectiveness on the battlefield.

Yet, with few exceptions, little scientific attention is ever paid to understanding why this is so or what to do about it. To help fill the void, my team has turned its attention to this issue, with studies of combatants in Afghanistan, Iraq and, most recently, Ukraine – where a heroic will to fight has taken much of the world by surprise.

Misjudging the will to fight has become routine, with often disastrous results for the planners and their publics

In testimony before Congress this March, Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, acknowledged misjudging Ukraine’s ability to resist Russia: ‘I questioned their will to fight. That was a bad assessment …’ It’s notable that, at a subsequent hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee in May, Berrier claimed that, overall, ‘the intelligence community did a great job’. The US senator Angus King interrupted: ‘General, how can you possibly say that when we were told explicitly that Kyiv would fall in three days and Ukraine would fall in two weeks?’ Fortunately, this near-fatal mistake in judging Ukraine’s chances, and the then-apparent futility of significant Western support, was offset by Russia’s equally ignorant appraisal of Ukraine’s will to fight.

Misjudging both allies’ and adversaries’ will to fight has become routine among military and political decision-makers, with often disastrous results for the planners and their publics. Addressing Congress in September 2021, General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, blamed ‘strategic failure’ in Afghanistan on neglecting the ‘intangible’ factor in war: ‘We can count the trucks and the guns and the units and all that. But we can’t measure a human heart from a machine.’ As the US president Joe Biden put it in August 2021: ‘We gave [Afghan forces] every tool they could need … What we could not provide them was the will to fight …’

When government agencies discuss the will to fight, the little data they mention involves public opinion polls (where, in fact, some polls monitored by the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence Research did indicate that Ukrainians would strongly resist). Although pollsters often claim to use ‘scientific methodology’, there is little science in the techniques most of them use. And seldom do the polls assess levels of intensity and behaviour related to the opinions proffered.

Of course, survey questionnaires can provide scientific insight if structured in ways that allow hypothesis testing, including the relationship between responses and actual patterns of behaviour – an approach embraced by academia but usually absent from standard ‘assessment tools’ used by the US departments of State and of Defense, as well as UK and EU government agencies, in evaluating foreign populations.

In fact, recent scholarship shows that the ‘will to fight’, at least in part, can be discretely measured and used to predict behaviour. Findings are clear, but uptake by the many officials and agencies who solicit briefings from my research team is constrained by fear of expending lives and money in vain over relatively short time horizons: that is, everything the sacred and spiritual are not.

To see how this plays out, it’s worth looking at the theatre of Iraq. For several years now, the Minerva Research Initiative of the US Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation have worked to understand value-driven sacrifice and a willingness to fight through a research partnership between Artis International (my team), the Changing Character of War Centre at the University of Oxford, and the National University of Distance Education and the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain.

Our findings on frontline combatants, including the Iraqi Army, ISIS and Kurdish PKK, among others, are clear. In 2015, when the ISIS frontline was relatively stable, and again in 2016, when the offensive to retake Mosul began, psychological measures in field surveys indicated that willingness to fight and die is greatest for those who fight for sacred values; these groups see ‘spiritual strength’ (ruhi bi ghiyrat, in both Arabic and Kurdish) as more important than material strength (manpower and firepower), and they are often right. As measured by casualties, time at the front and more, only the Marxist-inspired Kurdish PKK fighters matched the religious ISIS fighters for commitment to their beliefs and willingness to sacrifice for a cause.

During 2017, we followed young Sunni Arab men emerging from ISIS rule in the Mosul region. Most people we interviewed initially embraced ISIS as ‘the revolution’ (al-Thawra) against perceived oppression by the US-backed regime. Although many came to reject ISIS’s brutality, a series of psychological measures revealed that ISIS had imbued about half of our sample with its two most sacred values, for which they expressed willingness to self-sacrifice: strict belief in Sharia and in a Sunni Arab homeland. Those believing in these values expressed greater willingness to fight and die than did supporters of a democratic or unified Iraq. Whereas ISIS had lost territorial control, it had not necessarily lost the allegiance of young Sunni Arabs to its core values.

Sanctions against Iran’s nuclear energy programme only increased support for it as a sacred mission

Further studies zeroed in on brain activity through neuroimaging. There, we looked at supporters of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani associate of Al-Qaeda, and Moroccan immigrants in Spain who professed support for armed jihad and strict application of Sharia. Brain studies can be important for at least two reasons: they sometimes reveal neural connections between phenomena never before linked, and they rule out posturing – because neural responses to experimental stimuli are generally beyond conscious control or manipulation.

We identified participants’ sacred values and then probed their willingness to sacrifice for them. Based on brain scans of neural activity, participants showed significantly greater willingness to sacrifice for sacred values (for example, opposing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed) than for non-sacred values (for example, opposing women refusing the veil). Indeed, whenever sacred values were involved, we found evidence that brain activity was inhibited in regions involved with deliberative reasoning and cost-benefit analysis but activity was heightened in areas associated with subjective value and rule-bound judgments (‘just do it because it’s right’, whatever the costs or consequences).

We also found that, among the radical immigrant group, perception of social exclusion resulted in heightened embrace of and readiness to sacrifice for hitherto important but non-sacred values. This somewhat parallels our findings in Iran. There, international sanctions (a form of political exclusion) imposed against the country’s nuclear energy programme only increased support for that programme as a sacred mission. Further brain and behavioural studies indicate that far-Right extremists are also more likely to elevate misinformation to the ‘sacred sphere’ in communicating specious arguments that immigrants threaten their cultural purity. When these buttons are pushed, brain activity heightens in areas that support social cognition and identity processes.

Our latest research not only confirmed how empowering spiritual motivation could be in Iraq, Palestine, Morocco, Lebanon and Spain – it also found the same influence among US Air Force cadets. Spiritual formidability is a primary determinant of the will to fight across cultures, forging loyal bonds of trust and propelling not just combatants but also citizens to charge ahead at great risk to themselves.

History shows that, however strong the esprit de corps of one country’s fighting units, no amount of arms or training ensures its transference to foreign forces.

Just look at what happened in Afghanistan.

In the 19th century, the country became a buffer state between British India and Czarist Russia’s ambitions in Central Asia. The British gave up trying to occupy and rule Afghanistan after the first Anglo-Afghan War, which ended in 1842 when tribal forces slaughtered 16,500 soldiers and 12,000 dependents of a mixed British-Indian garrison, leaving a lone survivor on a stumbling pony to carry back the news.

Still, the British remained determined to control Afghanistan’s relations with outside powers. In 1879, they deposed the Afghan emir following his reception of a Russian mission at Kabul. But the Afghans wanted to recover full independence over foreign affairs, which they did following the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919. The British army missionary T L Pennell described the situation more than a century ago in his book Among the Wild Tribes of the Afghan Frontier (1908):

Waziristan [the country of the Waziri, the Mahsud and the Haqqani, whose descendants are current leaders of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban] is … never at peace except when … at war! … For when some enemy from without threatens their independence … they fight shoulder to shoulder, [although] even when they are all desirous of joining in some jihad, they remain suspicious of each other …

Mullahs sometimes … rouse the tribes to concerted warfare against the infidels … The more fanatical of these Mullahs do not hesitate to incite their pupils [taliban] to acts of religious fanaticism, or ghaza … The ghazi is a man who has taken an oath to kill some non-Muhammadan, preferably a European … but, failing that, a Hindu or a Sikh.

In short, the British realised that any attempt at permanent occupation or pacification of the warring tribes would only unite them, and that it would be nearly impossible to defeat their combined forces without much greater military and financial means than Britain could afford.