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During revolutions, strategic interactions among civilian policy makers, armed forces, and opposition groups shape political outcomes—most important, whether a regime stands or falls. Students from advanced industrial democracies frequently find these dynamics counterintuitive, even after completing readings and engaging in traditional instruction methods. We therefore sought to improve pedagogical outcomes by designing a simulation based on scenarios similar to those witnessed during the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution. We divided students into four teams representing the regime, the armed forces, and two distinct groups of anti-regime dissidents. Rules were designed to incorporate the best recent scholarship on each category of actors’ behavior, such as the probability of military units defecting to protesters and the ability of riot police to repress urban uprisings. By forcing student teams to make decisions under time pressure, we obliged them to wrestle with the uncertainties and fears of betrayal inherent in complex civil–military emergencies.

This article expands our understanding of how states respond militarily to threats and challenges by examining how organizational culture and institutional policymaking structures shape states' use of force. To evaluate the explanatory power of culture and institutions, I analyze the effect of each variable on how the United Kingdom and France conduct counterinsurgency operations. To preview the conclusions, although both organizational culture and institutional structures provide insights into how states fight insurgencies, institutional structures are much more decisive in shaping outcomes. In states where policymaking institutions promote maximal political control of the armed forces, the result will be strategic satisficing, whereby restricted force is surgically employed, along with diplomacy, to achieve the state's limited goals while minimizing the risks of casualties and/or escalation. Contrarily, in states where institutions accord operational autonomy to the armed forces, commanders will pursue their preference for decisive military victory by applying overwhelming force and conducting operations that risk escalating conflicts. In contrast to institutions, organizational culture plays a more modest role, limited to shaping how military leaders initially conceptualize the challenges they face and the techniques they employ at the tactical level. Thus, institutional structures, rather than organizational culture, offer a more convincing argument for why similar states, facing comparable challenges, use force in systematically different ways.