WORKING PAPER - Stumbling out of the Gates: Security Strategy and Military Weakness after

controlled comparison.36 A high degree of similarity between the cases and a nearly dichotomous37 difference in the main independent variable of old regime security apparatus status facilitates macro-causal inferences38—while recognizing the limitations of examining a small number of cases and the differences between the countries. [...] Finally, the most important difference is in the status of the old regime security apparatus at revolutionary victory: The Nicaraguan National Guard (Guardia Nacional) remained loyal to the regime until the end and then suffered defeat and disintegration, but Iranian security forces defected en masse and maintained much of their prerevolutionary structure. [...] Though there was official shared power between the FSLN’s National Directorate and a broader governing junta, this ultimately proved a brief façade, with the FSLN asserting control and moderates on the junta soon resigning in protest.51 The new security forces took the form of the EPS military, the Sandinista Police, and the state security wing of the ministry of the interior, all technically stat. [...] The FSLN emphasized that the basis of EPS discipline was in “strong political consciousness and in the Sandinista education of its fighters, in the most broad understanding of patriotic duty, in personal responsibility for the defense of and loyalty to the homeland.”52 Politicization was structurally ensured, as “the general staff of the EPS consisted exclusively of veteran Sandinistas, and ‘Polit. [...] funding, did the FSLN shift its military structure and strategy, expanding the EPS’s troops and equipment to create new units and developing a new counterinsurgency-focused strategy, with help from new chief Cuban military adviser General Arnaldo Ochoa, hero of the war in Angola.82 In the initial period of the rebellion in 1981, the EPS created one set of new units, the Unidades de Lucha Contra Ba.