Don't Send a Lion to Catch a Mouse

[Tom Odom]

Interesting article in the Post and thanks to Jed for the full draft article. I scanned the article for a list of the cases - haven't had time to read the whole thing yet - but could not find a list. That,alone, gives mepause.When Max Manwaring and I wrote our origninal piece in Small Wars and Insurgencies, wepublished the entire list of 43 cases. So, I wonder what the cases are. For example, do the authors address every single Indian War in the US beginning with 1800? I should note that the outcome, despite some significant setbacks for the US Army such as the Little Bighorn, was victory in every case! In all the post-WWII insurgencies in Latin America, there have only been 2 victories for the insurgents - Castro in Cuba and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (1979). So, the definition of victory and defeat is of importance as well. The track record of insurgents is simply not very good. So, at a minimum, caution is indicated when we read the paper in its entirety.

John

Can you provide a list of your 43 cases? I wonder how many of the Africa cold wars show up?

This paper has several implications for the study of warfare and its practice. It is clear, for example, that there is no uniform logic to warfare: states that excel at Type I war are precisely those states most at risk for suffering political defeat in so-called small wars. This points to both the need to bound our theories of conflict to specific types of conflict as well as to engage in fractal pooling to capture how variables’ significance change temporally. The results presented here do, however, point to the fact that leading explanations – both power-based realist theories and regime type accounts – are inadequate for explaining war outcomes outside of conventional conflicts. What we need now are better measures of more qualitative variables such as force employment and command climate at the unit level in order to capture how culture and economics interact to shape patterns of warfare.
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The paper’s findings also shed some light into current debates about US force restructuring. In particular, the paper raises the question of whether the current “Revolution in Military Affairs” is not, in fact, locking the US even further into a suboptimal path of war-fighting. To be sure, modular force restructuring and other technological innovations promise to deliver devastating amounts of firepower at the tactical level. Yet such practices may simply exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, the problems facing mechanized modern forces in Type II and III wars. An appreciation of how armies in the nineteenth century fared and, in particular, their use of local intelligence, foraging practices, and sustained interaction with the local populace over lengthy deployments, may lead to more successful tactics and outcomes. Interestingly, the paper suggests that the real revolution in warfare may not be RDO-type operations post-1918 but the opposite: the embrace of asymmetric tactics and methods by weaker opponents at the turn of the century. Devolution may, in fact, be the revolution in warfare. In sum, the paper’s findings, if still tentative, suggest that there is profit in rethinking the links between the political economy of war, market-based principles, and the way states (and militaries) conceptualize why and how fight.
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What I did not see in my quick read of the paper is an adequate examination of the leap of faith made regarding common military practices in the Age of Colonial Imperialism and how those practices--foraging to pick one--might play out in the 21st Century. The closest they come to this is in lightly discussing differences between the 101st and 4thID.

Interestingly, distance is highly significant and positively correlated with victory. This is a surprising result, for it suggests that states fighting insurgencies are more likely to win the greater the distance from their home capitals. By contrast, this result disappears and turns slightly negative in the 1900-2003 era. In effect, states in the nineteenth century appear to have had better power projection capabilities – if measured in terms of victories, and not quantities of material and men – than their twentieth century counterparts.

Here too is another weakpoint: the authors came up with the factor of "distance" as a physical measure and then to my mind misinterpret their own findings: that 19th Century States had great power projection than 20th Century states. What is missed is that the key variable in the equation was communications and what Dave Dillegge has talked about on here as strategic compression.

All of that said, however, I do have great empathy for the argument that our classic warfighting is defined by our own cultural parameters and we change only incrementally--usually at great cost. We go back to what we are most comfortable with and our arguments to support that position take on "10 Commandments-like" qualities.

Tom