Introduces the big questions asked in this book, namely: When do intervening forces have coercive leverage over local partners in large-scale counterinsurgency interventions? When can local partners coerce their powerful patrons? What makes these partnerships so notoriously problematic? This chapter specifies why local allies matter in counterinsurgency and what political dynamics have changed from the colonial to postcolonial era of intervention, including the effect of local partners exercising (nominal) legal sovereignty that provides important political opportunities for local partners. The chapter also summarizes the argument that certain structural incentives embedded within intervention motivate local counterinsurgency proxies to comply with certain requests from intervening patrons, while defying others, detailing that the record on local compliance is varied.