Why the Strong Lose and the Weak Become Strong
Abstract
Contemporary warfare’s emphasis on destruction capacity and cost imposition rests on a fundamental misreading of what sustains the will to fight. Drawing on behavioral and brain research and historical cases, it shows that “devoted actors” whose personal and collective identity is fused with sacred values will sustain extreme sacrifice and mobilize broader populations. As a result, they can blunt coercion and sometimes reverse asymmetries of power. The Revolutionary Guard’s cohesion, forged in the Iran–Iraq War, and Hamas’s sustained popular base despite military attrition, both illustrate why strategies of overwhelming force tend to fortify rather than fracture resistance; and why the decisive variable in protracted conflict often is not the scale of violence applied but—similar to Britain and Russia in the early stages of World War II and later with Vietnam and Afghanistan—the depth of commitment sustained and the tactical and strategic creativity that commitment engenders.
The early course of the U.S.–Israeli war with Iran reflects a recurring strategic illusion: that superiority in destructive capacity can be converted into rapid political collapse. Instead, initial operational success widened the conflict, hardened resistance, and drawn the attackers into a longer and more uncertain struggle.
The error lies not in a lack of information but in a failure to grasp meaning. Contemporary warfare can identify, track, and strike targets with extraordinary precision. But this is knowledge of position and behavior, not of motivation. It cannot capture how violence is interpreted within a society: whether as deterrence, humiliation, or confirmation of deeply held narratives about injustice and threat.
This distinction between operational intelligence and an understanding of what people believe they are defending is decisive. Violence is filtered through moral culture: historically grounded systems of meaning through which communities define what is worth defending and why. These systems are anchored in sacred values—cultural axioms treated as unfalsifiable and non-negotiable that render sacrifice intelligible even under extreme cost, such as God, country, family, freedom, honor, and dignity.
The pattern is familiar but persistently discounted. The German Blitz on London stiffened British resolve rather than breaking it. The saturation bombing of North Korea devastated infrastructure without producing capitulation. More recently, repeated drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities consolidated national resistance rather than fractured it. Across cases, once initial shock fails, the destruction of cities and even the killing of leaders rarely produce collapse.
From this follow the familiar failures of reductive realism. Leadership decapitation removes potential interlocutors as often as it disrupts command. The destruction of infrastructure is experienced not simply as loss of capacity but as an assault on dignity, sovereignty, and identity. External attack tends to fuse regimes and populations more tightly, mobilized by grievance and by commitments that cannot be bargained away.
Some contemporary advocates of hardline realism nevertheless insist that the overwhelming use of hard power is the only way to win wars or ensure peace. As U.S. Secretary of War Peter Hegseth put it to NATO: “You can’t shoot values, you can’t shoot flags, and you can’t shoot strong speeches. There is no replacement for hard power.” Warfighting, on this view, demands a laser-like focus on “overwhelming violence” to destroy the enemy’s capacity to resist. In reality, however, actors embedded in distinct moral cultures often respond otherwise: where sacred values are at stake, cost imposition can deepen rather than erode resistance, because what is being defended is not reducible to material interest.
In previous behavioral and brain research, my research team has identified several psycho-social factors that predict will to fight, focusing on what allows low-power groups to persist and sometimes prevail against groups with far greater material resources, firepower, and manpower. In battlefield studies in Iraq, for example, we found that among combatant groups (ISIS, Sunni Arab militia, Shia militia, Iraqi army, PKK, Peshmerga), those most willing to take casualties and fight on despite great loss—and most feared or respected by others—were groups whose members’ personal identities were most fused with their group. They were the most willing to sacrifice for non-negotiable sacred values regardless of cost, and their perceived spiritual formidability significantly outweighed their and others’ material strength. Even after ISIS was routed from Mosul, we found that many Sunni Arabs who rejected ISIS’s brutality remained committed to the non-negotiable value of strict Sharia rule and showed significantly greater willingness to sacrifice for it than those who favored secular democracy or a unified Iraqi nation- state. Similarly, during the recent Gaza War, in a representative field survey we found that although popular support for Hamas had declined, a plurality of Gazans expressed willingness to sacrifice for Hamas’s preferences and goals, including Sharia rule and dissolution of the Jewish State.
Our prior field and online studies in Western Europe and North Africa further indicate that while identity fusion and sacred values can independently motivate a willingness to make costly sacrifices, their interaction maximizes it. I describe this interaction in terms of “Devoted Actors,” first introduced in a briefing to National Security staff in the context of suicide terrorism. Subsequent studies across diverse cultures show devoted actors to be agents whose personal identities fuse with a primary group’s collective identity in a family-in-arms of imagined kin, and who are most likely to defend their sacred values through extreme sacrifice that disregards material self-interest, including life itself. Such actors violate the assumptions of the prevailing rational-actor paradigm—particularly transitivity of preferences and diminishing marginal utility—on which much of economic and strategic theory depends.
Evidence from our 2025 Gaza survey suggests that roughly twenty percent of the population qualify as devoted actors who fuse with Palestine, hold Sharia to be sacred, and maximize costly sacrifice for that value. The interaction between identity fusion and sacred values produces willingness to sacrifice beyond what either factor alone can explain. This pattern parallels findings among kin-like networks of jihadis in Moroccan neighborhoods linked to terrorist recruitment and attacks.
Failure to grasp the commitment of devoted actors—whose willingness to act is often dissociated from material costs and consequences—also obscures their disproportionate influence on the broader population’s will to fight. As Charles Darwin observed in The Descent of Man, there is an evolutionary logic to such commitment: devotion to “highly esteemed, even sacred” values can “give an immense advantage” when embodied by individuals who, “by their example, excite… in a high degree the spirit” of others to sacrifice for cause and comrades. This helps explain why, since World War II, insurgent and revolutionary movements have repeatedly resisted—and at times defeated—state forces with overwhelming advantages in firepower and manpower but reliant on material incentives. Groups like Hamas do not ignore material concerns; yet their fusion of identity with cause sustains commitment that outsiders systematically underestimate, as does, in different form, Israel’s reservist citizen army.
From this perspective, the enduring appeal of a contrary view becomes clearer: if wars are decided by force, then superior firepower should prevail. As Stephen Miller—a senior U.S. policy adviser associated with the Trump administration’s more unilateral, power-centered view of international relations—has argued: “We live in a world … governed by strength, by force, by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Yet such reasoning rests on a critical assumption: that adversaries will either be eradicated or respond to coercion in proportion to material loss.
This logic assumes that destroying an opponent’s material capacity will translate into political submission. Yet the postwar record of U.S. campaigns shows that this translation often fails; and when it fails, it produces protracted conflict rather than collapse.
Consider Iran. Only a minority of Iranians appear to share the regime’s most sacralized commitments, including maintaining a strict religious order reinforced by missile development and a nuclear program that the regime invokes as part of “the sacred jihad of the defenders of Iranian land.” But key religious authorities and Revolutionary Guard leaders remain willing to embrace martyrdom, eliminate opponents, and impose prolonged hardship. The regime’s coercive capacity and ideological cohesion allow a relatively small set of devoted actors to shape strategy. Such actors do not require broad popular support to influence outcomes. By widening the war politically, geographically, and economically, a materially weaker power can shift the arena in which outcomes are decided. Iran’s leverage lies in its—and the global economy’s—dependence on oil, a resource it has prepared both to disrupt and endure disruption over in order to generate escalation and international pressure.
The identity fusion of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, forged in the Iran–Iraq War, anchors this posture. Many senior leaders still carry the scars of that conflict. The shared ordeal created bonds of solidarity not easily eroded by external pressure; for those who survived, the current struggle is experienced not as a new crisis but as a continuation of an existential test already endured.
When such commitment anchors a regime’s strategic core, it does more than harden resistance; it reshapes the strategic environment for others. Adversaries confront an opponent unlikely to yield; allies must decide whether they share not only material interests but the moral logic sustaining the fight. It is at this junction, where internal resolve conditions external alignment, that alliances are made or unmade.
Thucydides recounts how Athens alienated its allies by treating them as subjects—interfering in institutions, extracting tribute, and disregarding autonomy under the dictum that “the strong do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must.” The result was not security but defection and systemic war. Power created the alliance; the erosion of legitimacy destroyed it. A similar dynamic is emerging today. As U.S. coercive rhetoric has extended to allies, the moral basis of alignment has weakened. Reluctance to support escalation against Iran reflects not a shift in material interests but erosion of the shared framework that once made cooperation sustainable.
The broader lesson is that war rarely turns on offensive prowess alone. It often shifts to the capacity to sustain sacrifice and reshape the strategic environment. In the first few weeks of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, more than a million Russian soldiers were dead wounded or captured and the country’s coal, iron and steel production was falling rapidly into German hands. US Navy Secretary Frank Knox wrote President Roosevelt: “it will take anywhere from six weeks to two months for Hitler to clean up on Russia.” But Wehrmacht General Günther Blumentritt observed that from the beginning: “Even when surrounded, exhausted, and deprived of the chance to fight, the Russians never back down.” Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the top Soviet military leader in WWII, judged that the common people and foot soldiers willingly sacrificed for the sacred honor and traditions of “The Motherland” (во имя Родины) rather than for communism.
Britain and the Soviet Union both drew life-saving advantages from geography—the English Channel that blunted Hitler’s reach and the Russian winter that slowed his armies—but water and cold alone cannot account for their survival. What sustained them in the early stages of World War II was a fighting spirit rooted in shared sacrifice, national myth, and the stubborn resolve of ordinary people who refused to accept subjugation even when material odds tilted steeply against them. Geography bought time; it did not create the will to use it. That will—grounded in moral commitment and collective identity—prevented collapse when defeat appeared imminent.
To be sure, overwhelming power was ultimately required to win the war. But the lesson drawn from that victory was subtly, and consequentially, misread. Because industrial force and total war proved decisive under those specific conditions, U.S. (and Soviet, later Russian) leaders came to treat material superiority as a general solution to conflict—applicable regardless of the adversary, the political context, or the moral commitments at stake.
Conclusion
The doctrines of overwhelming force that proved decisive in World War II have since been applied under fundamentally different conditions. In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, they contributed to immense costs alongside repeated strategic failure—not because force was irrelevant, but because it was misapplied under the assumption that material destruction would translate into political submission. That same assumption is again evident in the war with Iran.
Moreover, today, the spread of mass-produced, AI-guided drones—cheap relative to bombers and missile defenses—has made airpower accessible to weaker actors and eroded the advantages of large conventional forces. ISIS was the first non-state actor to weaponize commercial drones at scale, turning quadcopters into platforms for strikes, reconnaissance, and propaganda to create a rudimentary but effective low-cost air arm. This enhanced targeting, disrupted troop movements, and imposed constant surveillance; psychologically, it fostered persistent fear and forced adversaries onto the defensive, magnifying ISIS’s reach beyond its means. Building on this model, Iran and Ukraine have driven the new era of AI and drone warfare in diverging directions to check superpowers: Iran by industrializing low-cost loitering munitions like the Shahed for saturation attacks that strain defenses and resources, Ukraine by rapidly developing countermeasures: mass-produced interceptors, layered defenses, and AI-assisted targeting. The result is a shift from improvised tools to scalable, adaptive drone ecosystems in which cost,
volume, and learning speed rival raw firepower—and, paired with a strong will to fight, allow weaker actors to approach strategic stalemate with stronger powers.
The overgeneralization of the effects of hard power has often been reinforced by universalist beliefs in what constitutes the good life. Both rest on the same hidden presumption: that force can clear the way for the eventual convergence of others toward a supposedly universal right way of life. After 9/11, President George W. Bush declared that there is “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise… [these] values… are right and true for every person, in every society… across the globe and across the ages.” Yet this conviction has its mirror image in the claims of those it opposes. As Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asserted, “[Muslim] religious democracy is the only path toward human prosperity.” Both assume universal validity.
What they share is precisely what reductive realism cannot explain: that the most intractable wars are fought not only over power, but over incompatible visions of how life ought to be lived. Overwhelming power may win battles; ancient and contemporary history shows it does not determine how wars unfold or end. Reductive realism, focused on material capabilities, systematically overlooks this terrain—and with it, the conditions under which the strong lose and the weak prevail.
