There's a lot of attention being paid just now to a recent article in Foreign Affairs by the American defence analyst Andrew Krepinevich titled 'How to Win in Iraq' which I'd like to comment on for my first Blog post. Having been (and remaining) a supporter of the War in Iraq and, moreover, having a good deal of respect and admiration for Bush and Blair particularly, I am increasingly frustrated by the absence of any sensible or articulate strategy for winning it. The problem isn't a lack of clear Policy. That was made quite clear by Bush in his November 2003 speech at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy:
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in
the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run,
stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle
East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of
stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of
weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it
would be reckless to accept the status quo. (Applause.)
Therefore, the
United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the
Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism
we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in
Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.
The problem is that Bush conflates a laudable Policy of advancing democracy in the Middle East with a Strategy--a plan for making policy reality--which lamentably does not exist nearly three years after the fall of Baghdad! (For more on the abstract problem of relationship of policy and strategy see Hew Strachan, 'The Lost Meaning of Strategy', Survival, Vol. 7, No. 43 (Autumn 2005), pp. 33-54, which is on-line but requires an Athens password--if you've got a password you'll know how to get to the article and if you haven't, well, why don't you know your Athens password?) What Krepinevich outlines is just such a strategy and one with which I am broadly in agreement--although the fact that this is really basic counter-insurgency doctrine and ought not to have to be explained by this point also gets up my nose.
Indeed, I've been thinking along similar lines lately attempting to apply the principles of manoeuvre warfare to counter-insurgency. In theory, this isn't too difficult. As Richard Simpkin explains in his magisterial book Race to the Swift: Thoughts on 21st Century Warfare the theories of manoeuver warfare and insurgency or guerrilla warfare are very similar--indeed they derive from similar sources, pursue similar objectives and arrive at largely the same basic prescriptive rules for success. What Mao Tse-Tung said of guerrilla warfare holds equally as true of manoeuvre warfare:
In guerrilla warfare, select the tactic of seeming to come from the East and
attacking from the West; avoid the solid, attack the hollow; attack; withdraw;
deliver a lightning blow, seek a lightning decision. (On Guerrilla
Warfare, Samuel B. Griffith trans., New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1978,
p,. 43)
In practice, however, it gets a little confusing for two reasons. First, because the terms manoeuvre warfare and mechanized warfare were for a long time in the West taken to mean the same thing, which they are not. Manoeuvre is basically one of the two basic elements of combat--the other being fire. It means more than just movement (though it does mean that too as well as, at first glance paradoxically, not moving); it is traditionally understood in spatial terms of manoeuvring in space relative to one's opponent to gain a positional advantage. It has long been recognized that skillful manoeuvre is the sine qua non of military efficiency.
Aptitude for manoeuvre is the supreme skill in a general; it is the most
useful and rarest of gifts by which genius is measured. (Napoleon, as
quoted in J. Colin, The Transformation of War, 1895).
Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general,
the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.
(Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. II, 1923).
In the trenches of the First World War, however, manoeuvre disappeared, trumped by the metal hail of machine gun bullets and artillery shrapnel which made major military movements in open terrain and out of cover essentially suicidal. Towards the end of the war the Germans developed the Storm Troop techniques of infiltration, bypassing of strongpoints, and use of short, sharp fire-suppressing artillery barrages aimed at facilitating forward movement of friendly forces moreso than the destruction of the enemy per se, which proved capable of breaking the tactical stalemate. The problem which remained was operational mobility: the Germans could achieve tactical breakthroughs but because they had to advance on foot with horse-drawn artillery while the Allies could shift forces by rail to build new defences behind collapsed sectors of the line they could not achieve substantial and sustained operational success. The German solution seen in Poland in 1939 and France in 1940 was the Panzer Division: mechanized forces consisting of tanks and other armoured an unarmoured vehicles able to carry infantry, artillery and supplies forward faster than a defender could shift forces laterally to close breaches.
The Western allies for the most part failed to recognize that German success was based on revolutionary tactical employment of tanks and vehicles (the Soviets, on the other grasped this very well and by the end of the war had improved the German techniques while adding elements of their own) not merely the tanks and vehicles alone, preferring instead base their campaigns on attritional tactics, notably massive firepower and materiel superiority. This attritional mindset in the West prevailed until at least the 1980s when the United States and Britain both adopted it in their official doctrine--which is to say not a great deal of time in terms of military innovation and adoption of new ideas which in peacetime tends to happen with glacial slowness.
Second, after its defeat in Vietnam the United States Army (far less so the Marines) was willfully determined not to contemplate the complexities of guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency ever again. The solution to 'Low-Intensity Conflicts', 'Small-Scale Contingencies', 'Small Wars', or 'Operations Other Than War' (euphemisms abounded for this sort of war, all of which reflected in some way the sense that this was just not proper warfighting and therefore a distraction)? Don't do them in the first place. Henceforth, the US Army trained and equipped itself to fight an all out, combined arms, force-on-force battle with the Soviets on the plains of Central Europe--and virtually nothing else. When it thought about manoeuvre, it conceived of it in terms of 'Deep Battle', 'Follow-on-Forces Attack' and 'AirLand Battle'. That is to say it finally began thinking in terms of 'Operational Art', of military actions taking place simultaneously, and synergistically in great depth--which was a step forward--but still in terms of heavy masses of machines and men manoeuvring against each other which is a mindset that proves rather problematic to have when faced with an opponent who eschews movement in open terrain, declines (for the most part) to engage in force-on-force combat, seeeks to blend into the landscape and hide amongst the non-combatant population while employing 'asymmetric' tactics, notably terrorism in forms ranging from suicide bombing to terrorism, and seeks always to counter superiority in mass and firepower with superior patience and cunning.
In other words, it begs the question as to whether the concepts of manoeuvre warfare are relevant to unconventional opponents. A recent article in Military Review asks 'Is There a Deep Fight in Counterinsurgency?'. The answer is yes, but unfortunately the deep area of an insurgency exists much less in the physical sense (thuogh it does require logistical bases, command and control centres, refuges and training areas which may be attacked) than it does in the psychological and cognitive sense which means the weapons used to produce operational shock in the traditional deep battle (eg., long range precision strike) are not terribly useful. Moreover, neither does current doctrine provide much direction for how to win the deep battle in counterinsurgency. I think, however, that we should not abandon current doctrine--after all we may one day have to fight a more traditional force-on-force deep battle even thuogh at the moment candidates for putative 'peer competitor' status are thin on the ground consisting with some (but not much!) of a militarily powerful and strategically ambitious China some decades hence and, decidedly implausibly, a resurgent Russia--but return to its manoeuvrist essentials.
The US Marines Warfighting manual explains that manoeuvre consists of much more than jockeying for positional advantage:
...in order to maximise the usefulness of maneuver, we must consider movement in
time as well; that is we generate faster operational tempo than the enemy to
gain a temporal advantage. It is through maneuver in both dimensions that an
inferior force can achieve decisive superiority at the necessary time and place.
(As a sidebar, it should be noted that the Marines are very prominently engaged in an intellectual and doctrinal process of coming to grips with the problem of fighting 'Small Wars--as they should be since this is a function they have provided since the early days of the United States, even if it has taken historians a long time to catch up with that fact. The vaunted Marine Corps Small Wars Manual is being updated and highly useful work looking at adapting the venerable Principles of War to the context of future Small Wars is being undertaken. If the war in Iraq ever produces something like Colonel C.E Callwell's Small Wars or Robert Thompson's Defeating Communist Insurgency it will most likely be written by a Marine.)
Achieving greater operational tempo than one's opponent, getting inside their 'Boyd cycles' or 'OODA Loops' is as integral to success in counter-insurgency as it is in conventional warfighting.
The core concepts of manoeuvre:
Mission tactics, aka Directive Control, which encourage the seizing of fleeting opportunities through decentralized decision-making while preserving unity of effort;
Focus of effort, meaning the concentration of resources where a point of decision presents itself;
Pitting strength against weakness, not against strength;
Objective, stated in terms of the enemy and the commander's desired 'end state' rather than as a piece of terrain; and,
The Reserve, a strong force comprised of the best units in a command held back from engagement is often the force which brings decision.
In Manoeuvre theory warfare is seen as highly unpredictable, subject to tremendous uncertainty and rapid change. The essence of tactical success is the seizing of tactical opportunities when and where they appear which is hard to predict (this may be somewhat less the case at the operational and strategic levels). Doing the unexpected is is highly valued. The fog of war is seen as inevitable, a natural and unavoidable feature of warfare, which means that the goal is to work as effectively possible within it while magnifying its effects on the enemy and degrading his ability to cut through it. This last point is especially salient in view of the recent rhetoric concerning a technological Revolution in Military Affairs which would, it was argued, see a veritable (nay virtual) Lifting of the Fog of War by a 'system of systems' consisting of advanced technical reconnaissance and command and communications systems twinned with long-range precision strike assets that has been delivered a sobering setback in the aftermath of the Iraq War. Manoeuvre theory, by contrast, stresses command and control via leadership and monitoring plus implicit communication based on a shared manner of thinking about tactical problems rather than through explicit communication through any of the myriad 'systems'. All of this, in sofar as it is intended to produce a force that is highly agile, fluid and flexible, is also entirely relevant to counter-insurgency.
It is sometimes said that a failing of manoeuvre theory is that it rejects attrition in the futile search of a flawless, bloodless victory. In a particularly over the top critique entitled 'In Praise of Attrition' Ralph Peters claimed:
There is no better example of our unthinking embrace of an error than our
rejection of the term “war of attrition.” The belief that attrition, as an
objective or a result, is inherently negative is simply wrong. A soldier’s job
is to kill the enemy. All else, however important it may appear at the moment,
is secondary. And to kill the enemy is to attrit the enemy. All wars in which
bullets—or arrows—fly are wars of attrition.
Of course, the term “war of attrition” conjures the unimaginative slaughter of
the Western Front, with massive casualties on both sides. Last year, when
journalists wanted to denigrate our military’s occupation efforts in Iraq, the
term bubbled up again and again. The notion that killing even the enemy is a bad
thing in war has been exacerbated by the defense industry’s claims, seconded by
glib military careerists, that precision weapons and technology in general had
irrevocably changed the nature of warfare. But the nature of warfare never
changes—only its superficial manifestations.
The US Army also did great
harm to its own intellectual and practical grasp of war by trolling for
theories, especially in the 1980s. Theories don’t win wars. Well-trained,
well-led soldiers in well-equipped armies do. And they do so by killing
effectively. Yet we heard a great deal of nonsense about “maneuver warfare” as
the solution to all our woes, from our numerical disadvantage vis-à-vis the
Warsaw Pact to our knowledge that the “active defense” on the old inner-German
border was political tomfoolery and a military sham—and, frankly, the best an
Army gutted by Vietnam and its long hangover could hope to do.
Peters is deliberately provocative, and for that reason is ever-quotable, and he makes a fair argument that manoeuvre exists in an ever-readjusting balance with fire. The argument, therefore, is worth considering--even if only to reject it later having had one's pretenses challenged but surviving because Peters' argument rests on a false premise: manoeuvre theory does not reject attrition any more than it does fire. On the contrary, manoeuvre theory conceives of military operations consisting of three key and utterly interdependent elements:
The Manoeuvre Force which achieves high combat worth by being highly mobile, trading mass for speed and the ability to sustain attritional combat;
The Holding Force which achieves high combat worth by having great mass at the expense of speed while retaining the ability to sustain attritional combat; and,
The Fulcrum, the 'hinge' between the two upon which everything depends.
In short, you don't fight manoeuvre warfare exclusively by manoeuvring and none of the major intellectual figures in 'manoeuvrism' have ever claimed so. It has always been implicit (and more often explicit) that hammering one's opponent into submission, or making it so patently clear that you are in a position to do so that they decide to forego the beating, is part of the deal. What they propose, in a nutshell, is that doing so in a manner or from a direction which is unexpected or delivers some other tangible advantage at one's enemy's expense is a better and less costly approach than straightforwardly bludgeoning each other until one side collapses from exhaustion and bllod loss.
And this is where I return to Krepinevich and the 'Oil-spot' strategy for winning in Iraq. I have been trying to operationalize manoeuvre warfare theory in the context of the counter-insurgency in Iraq, which admittedly involves a good deal of conceptual stretching but nonetheless has led me to some similar conclusions. As I noted at the beginning, these are not altogether novel. Indeed, one might say quite reasonably that they are Counterinsurgency doctrine 101. Thinking this through in manoeuvre theoretical terms, however, I think, allows me to generalize from Iraq some ideas about how Western militaries intending to fight more such 'small wars' in the future--though hopefully smaller!--can equip and train to do it better.
The first thing to take on-board is that most of the work in Counterinsurgency is done by the equivalent of the Holding Force. In fact, it's almost all about holding (or providing security, in Krepinevich's terms) which is why I put it first. The twist is that while in conventional force-on-force combat it makes a good deal of sense to put troops under a good deal of armour and provide them with the maximum amount of firepower they can physically carry--the bigger the better with the only caveat that occasionally being able to carry a lot more ammunition could make it worth having a lighter weapon. In other words, because the Holding Force is engaged in attritional combat it's all about maximizing firepower (killing the enemy faster and better) and force protection (preventing him from doing the same to you). In unconventional warfare none of the above holds. Putting troops under armour makes it all the more difficult for them to have any meaningful interaction with the non-combatant population thereby imperilling the 'Hearts and Minds' campaign.
This, for example, is an excellent vantage point from which to engage in high-intensity combat; for patrolling the streets, making contact with the locals and getting to know their concerns it is not so good.
It also impedes their real mobility because their movements are constrained by the road network and civilian traffic (you can drive over traffic, yes; but it doesn't do much for your reputation). It makes their movements predictable making it easier for insurgents to predict where they should place IEDs. Here is an illlustrative example of this from Mosul, Iraq. Moreover, while armour heightens damage protection it also means concentrating your troops in a way that compromises the damage limiting qualities of dispersal as was seen in this attack which resulted in the deaths of 14 Marines when their amphibious armoured vehicle was destroyed by an IED.
For the most part, what is required is 'mobility of the boot'--to quote Simpkin out of context--dismounted infantry able to:
behave naturally in close contact with the non-combatant population without sacrificing the ability to dominate in close combat when and if it comes to that;
have a sufficiently acute situational awareness of their environment that they can distinguish accurately and quickly between combatants and non-combatants in a situation in which the former wear no distinctive uniform and, up until the point of attack, probably look and behave in no major ways that will distinguish them from the latter; and,
have the means to respond appropriately to contingencies across the spectrum of conflict occurring within a short period of time (if not simultaneously) and within a small area (if not contiguously).
In short, they need to be tooled-up to fight what Marine General Krulak called the 'Three Block War' with something approaching the level of confidence in which they already approach conventional force-on-force conflict. For my part, at least as far as mobility is concerned LAVs and bicycles are quite sufficient--although, paradoxically, an armoured supply vehicle would be quite handy and mine resistant vehicles in general are needed in qunatity. This looks nice but is probably a waste of time and money being too heavy for the counterinsurgent Holding Force.
In technological terms this is a tall order and one should be cautious about what technology can deliver. Whether or not Western ground forces can ever achieve the degree of conventional overmatch enjoyed by their colleagues in the air force and navy is an open question. If we had this then it would be as though the days of Hillaire Belloc had returned so we could say once again:
Whatever happens, we have got
the Maxim gun, and they have not.
But what we have is this and this and while that is a big step forward it does not change the basic parameters of the problem:
The dismounted infantry soldier, viewed as a 'system'--as is the current fashion--is decidedly underpowered with an abysmal power-to-weight ratio. We can infinitely come up with more kit for the soldier but his ability to carry more than a third, approximately, of his body weight without radically compromising his endurance is a constant.
The 'edge' given by high-technology and excellent training to troops in unconventional conflicts is less than conventional conflict because engagement ranges in the former, especially in cities, are much less which minimizes the impact of differences--a badly maintained and poorly aimed AK-47 is still pretty deadly at short range--but, more importantly, because conditions are such that generally they may not shoot first. In fact, they need to survive the first shots--something which depends on a combinatiuon of good luck (maybe the enemy will miss), expert contact drills and small unit teamwork and, should those fail, the quality of his body armour.
Firepower is problematic because while we can develop more weapons, in counterinsurgency bigger is not always better; indeed, many perceive a need for the widespread integration of non-lethal weapons giving warfighters an option between 'shoot' and 'don't shoot' into conventional Tables of Equipment and Organization.
And the overarching matter that counterinsurgency, to quote Colonel John Paul Vann speaking in 1962 of the then still young Vietnam War, 'This is a political war, and it calls for the utmost discretion in killing... The best weapon for killing is a knife, but I'm afraid that we can't do it that way. The next best is a rifle. The worst is an airplane, and after that the worst is artillery. You have to know who you are killing.'
Squaring this circle will not be easy but until we come up with technologies that provide greater personal body armour, more discrimate fire, and the benefits of the improved situational awareness conferred by the 'network' already enjoyed by pilots in aerial combat to infantry grunts slugging it out on the ground then it is far too early to talk of a Revolution in Military Affairs.
The second thing to take on board is that the Manoeuvre Force, while much, much smaller than the Holding Force would be equipped in a much heavier manner for some of its operations. On the whole, the missions of the manoeuvre force would be in large part non-military because the key targets in the insurgency--Leadership hierarchy, Financial activities, Movement infrastructure, Supporting population--are generally not 'targetable' with military force and when they are are the units involved would tend to be lightly-equipped, highly-skilled, highly-mobile Special Forces not meant to engage in sustained high-intensity combat. On occasion, however, when bands of armed insurgents outside of the 'oil-spot' to use Krepinevich's term or in an area which was has no intention of trying to 'hold' in my conception then a heavy raid would be in order in which case carrying the maximum firepower and the heaviest available armour (like the Israeli Achzarit, an infantry carrier which is not just lightly armoured tank with a medium gun--as most infantry fighting vehicles now are with not much protection or firepower--but an infantry carrying tank, albeit with no gun at all, or just a very small one) would be in order. In such cases, war is as it ever was and restraint would me misplaced.
You are 'the best of cut-throats': do not start;
The phrase is Shakspeare's,
and not misapplied:
War’s a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art,
Unless her cause by right be sanctified.
(George Gordon Byron, ‘Don
Juan’, 1821, Canto 9, Stanza 4).
What then of the third element? The Fulcrum. Here I am stretching the concept to breaking point perhaps, but the Fulcrum in Iraq today is the nascent Iraqi Army, the police and other internal security services. Not Baghdad, or Mosul, Basra or Kirkuk, in fact not a place at all. This is because firstly, if I understand Simpkin correctly, the Fulcrum is not just a) the link between the Manoeuvre Force and the Holding Force it is also b) the crucial centre of gravity. If it goes then the operation fails, full stop. Let's take these in order:
As the success of the actions of both the Holding Force and the Manoeuvre Force in counteriunsurgency is dependent on good intelligence, especially human intelligence; and, insofar as neither (owing to cultural/language and other barriers) is able to generate a really useful intelligence picture on their own, they will be dependent on the ability of Iraqis to gather actionable intelligence and their preparedness to share it with them.. That good intelligence is the crucial commodity has been shown not least in the operations of the Israeli Defence Forces in the West Bank and Gaza which have had the most success where specialist 'under cover' units familiar with the local terrain, speaking the local language and deployed for long periods in a particular region have helped to give regular troops a combat edge through better intelligence while conducting offensive activities of their own including ambushes and interdictions in enemy territory. (See, 'Israel: Centre Stage', Jane's Defence Weekly, No. 174, 1 May 2002, pp. 24.34, not available on-line). In short, the Iraqi forces are integral to both Forces, withuot which neither would be able to conduct sensible operations or in fact to interact easily with each other in an operationally meaningful manner.
Ultimately, the success of the operation in the long term depends on the Iraqis eventually being able to take over both roles for itself until such time as the insurgency is effectively ended. The Coalition could, in theory, keep up the current level of effort which means basically shouldering almost all of the burden ad infinitum but if that were the only plausible recourse for staying we'd probably be better off cutting our losses, adjusting the thermostat in our houses down a degree or two in Winter and learning how to make hydrogen-powered SUVs. Given the choice, there is a great deal to be said for accepting the simple formulation that the exit from this labyrinth of conflict is through the door labelled 'victory'. And when the President says, equally simply, 'stay the course' that is, in fact, the most appropriate thing to say in the circumstances.
I've italicized 'ultimately' above because, like Krepinevich, I am only guardedly optimistic about the chances of success in Iraq and for most of the same reasons: it would require, by my lights, an adoption by the US Army of an approach to warfighting which is anathema to the bulk of its senior leaders; it depends greatly on the increasing provision of good intelligence which is a mammoth job if the failures of our intelligence agencies thus far are a genuine measure of how far remains to go to make them really effective; and, it will require a lot more time, and patience and blood which makes it all the more alarming to hear in Washington and London talk of timetables for withdrawal--but given that most people are decidedly pessimistic guarded optimism is sticking my neck out a fair way! The truth be told, I would prefer that the President say more than stay the course'; what I'd prefer he said to his generals in private is something like this 'unless I hear some ideas for winning this war you guys are fired. And I'm gonna keep firing you until I do', and the American in people publicly something like what President Lincoln said after the Battle of Antietam in 1862:
I have not word of encouragement to give!... The fact is that people have not
yet made up their minds that we are at war with the South. They have not buckled
down to the determination to fight this war through; for they have got the idea
in their heads that we are going to get out of this fix somehow by strategy!
That's the word--strategy! General McClellan thinks he is going to whip the
Rebels by Strategy; and the army has got the same notion.... The people have not
made up their minds that we are at war, I tell you! They think there is a royal
road to peace, and that General McClellan is to find it. The army has not
settled down into the conviction that we are in a terrible war that has got to
be fought out--no; and the officers have not either... (Quoted by Sandburg,
Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, pp. 194-95).
I am aware of the irony of having started this post with an indictment of a current President for having a Policy but not a Strategy now ending it with a quote from a former President indicting the army of his time and its most senior General in particular for seeking after an illlusory Strategy! Well, I could claim that as is well known the essence of true genius resides in the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind simultaneously, which is true but too often deployed as a rationalization of faulty logic rivalled only by another formulation beloved by students, 'it's the exception that proves the rule.' And in any case, I needn't resort to low rhetorical tricks. Lincoln is, in fact, falling prey in this otherwise estimable quote to a fallacy concerning the meaning of strategy pointed out in the Strachan article noted above which is to equate it with what this man
Welcome to War in the Modern World.
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