Forthcoming National Interest Article on COIN

[Ken White]

Nice to see my thoughts expressed by someone people might actually listen to. We might want to add, "Bomb the hell our of your palaces, party headquarters, army, secret police etc." Since new regimes will understand the US reluctance to take causalities, they are much less likely to call our bluff if we threaten bombing which we can do without causalities.

I think that the "US reluctance to take casualties is restricted to about a third of the population -- the most visible and vocal third, to be sure -- and that they are joined in this concern only on occasion and that occasion is whne the casualty causing effort is either taking too long (Steve's three years, my two...) or is obviously not doing well. The remaining third is comfortable with the casualties.

I'd like to suggest that the respective 'thirds' are immutably the same people but they are not. A great deal of objection is ideology based. Look no further than Kosovo and Iraq, respectively, to see who goes to which third.

Apply that rule of thumb to any war we've ever been including the current efforts and you see the American people will accept massive casualties if results are being produced; if there are no good results in their belief then the tolerance starts to slip. You can even review the domestic history in WW II -- after the summer of '44, tolerance for the war started downward precipitously.

As a corollary and an aside, that same two years (or three) applies to those fighting; after a couple of years, it gets really old. That really need to be considered. Troop run down or wear out can have really adverse consequences...

Thirty percent of the country is going to call that "cutting and running." How could we execute your recommendations in the current political environment?

Just by leading and accepting that 30% will ALWAYS exist; that's been true in every war from the American Revolution forward (again to WW II -- the nation was not as unified on that as many now like to believe). The key is not that 30%, it's the 30% in the middle, the swing vote as it were. As long as they see 'progress' of a sort, they will vary from 'tolerate' to 'support' and that gives the Admin of the day about 60%. That's enough for government work.

All that does not even address the chimera of "bomb" -- that just flat doesn't work, it NEVER has (the Serbs in Kosovo didn't start coming undone until the KLA was in on the ground). That aspect of Air Power (a power which I support and respect) is a very dangerous myth -- as the Israelis found out last year.

[Rank amateur]

Funny thing (well, not I mean funny like I'm a clown, not like I amuse you, I make you laugh) but I was just writing a section on that. I was arguing that President Bush seems inclined to a high risk/high potential payoff leadership style. In terms of the initial intervention in Iraq, he greatly overstated the certainty of his case. Since then, he has portrayed the only options in Iraq as "victory" or "cut and run."

But here's what I tried to suggest: our conundrum is that to get the public and Congress to support involvement in counterinsurgency in the first place, we have to overstate the threat and the extent of American interests. Americans don't want their sons and daughters dying for something that is peripheral. That then limits our strategic flexibility because it creates the impression that disengagement would be disastrous. It would be a defeat.

To me, that is just one more reason why the United States is ill equipped to undertake major counterinsurgency operations. My solution is that we no longer "do" counterinsurgency, but we do peace enforcement/stabilization. Two strategic and political advantages of that: it makes it easier to disengage when the costs exceed the expected benefits (while Clinton's withdrawal from Somalia and Reagan's withdrawal from Lebanon may, as commonly believed, give al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and others the impression that the United States can be influenced by terrorism, they were probably the right moves). So long as we treat counterinsurgency as a variant of war, that means that one side (the side we support) is "right" and the other is "wrong." Americans don't like ties.

Second, casting the activity as peacekeeping/stabilization rather than counterinsurgency (with its Cold War overtones) will make it easier to attract multinational support.

As a marketing guy, this positioning makes sense. Am I correct in assuming that you're focused on countries other than Iraq and Afghanistan?

[SteveMetz]

As a marketing guy, this positioning makes sense. Am I correct in assuming that you're focused on countries other than Iraq and Afghanistan?

Yea. I'm trying to offer recommendations for the next time we get this bee in our bonnet rather than ideas on how to deal with the ones we're already in.

[Rank amateur]

(the Serbs in Kosovo didn't start coming undone until the KLA was in on the ground). That aspect of Air Power (a power which I support and respect) is a very dangerous myth -- as the Israelis found out last year.

You make two important points.

1. Finding someone else to be the boots on the ground works extremely well. (Even Rumsfeld couldn't screw up the first few weeks in Afghanistan.)

2. I agree that for certain tasks, soldiers are absolutely necessary, but Hezbollah hasn't launched an attack into Israel since the war which supports my point: if the objective is deterrence, a ground war isn't always necessary. (With all the work Hezbollah has done rebuilding, they don't want it all destroyed again over minor disagreements and airpower can easily destroy bridges, buildings etc.)

[Ron Humphrey]

I think that the "US reluctance to take casualties is restricted to about a third of the population -- the most visible and vocal third, to be sure -- and that they are joined in this concern only on occasion and that occasion is whne the casualty causing effort is either taking too long (Steve's three years, my two...) or is obviously not doing well. The remaining third is comfortable with the casualties.

I'd like to suggest that the respective 'thirds' are immutably the same people but they are not. A great deal of objection is ideology based. Look no further than Kosovo and Iraq, respectively, to see who goes to which third.

Apply that rule of thumb to any war we've ever been including the current efforts and you see the American people will accept massive casualties if results are being produced; if there are no good results in their belief then the tolerance starts to slip. You can even review the domestic history in WW II -- after the summer of '44, tolerance for the war started downward precipitously.

As a corollary and an aside, that same two years (or three) applies to those fighting; after a couple of years, it gets really old. That really need to be considered. Troop run down or wear out can have really adverse consequences...



Just by leading and accepting that 30% will ALWAYS exist; that's been true in every war from the American Revolution forward (again to WW II -- the nation was not as unified on that as many now like to believe). The key is not that 30%, it's the 30% in the middle, the swing vote as it were. As long as they see 'progress' of a sort, they will vary from 'tolerate' to 'support' and that gives the Admin of the day about 60%. That's enough for government work.

All that does not even address the chimera of "bomb" -- that just flat doesn't work, it NEVER has (the Serbs in Kosovo didn't start coming undone until the KLA was in on the ground). That aspect of Air Power (a power which I support and respect) is a very dangerous myth -- as the Israelis found out last year.

I've been thinking something along those lines but couldn't get it together in my head to write down.

[slapout9]

I can't think of a single successful communist insurgency during the Cold War that really threatened a vital national interest (excluding China).

But the point I was trying to make is that the strategic costs of extensive, protracted involvement in counterinsurgency outweigh the damage that a hostile regime can do to us. Put differently, we're good at regime removal but we're not so good at counterinsurgency. So rather than break our military and our budget on a counterinsurgency, we make a modest effort and, if it fails, we just go to the new regime and say, "If you do X, Y, and Z (e.g. support transnational terrorism or support insurgents trying to overthrow your neighbor), we will come in and remove you. Then we'll leave. But you will no longer be in power."

Steve, Colonel Warden gave almost that exact speech during the workshop on SMART Wars. This is somewhat the basis of his decapitation strategy. The Air Force and the Army should get drunk togather and eat some of your BBQ and I think they might find out that their thinking is not always as differant as people assume.

[Ron Humphrey]

Steve, Colonel Warden gave almost that exact speech during the workshop on SMART Wars. This is somewhat the basis of his decapitation strategy. The Air Force and the Army should get drunk togather and eat some of your BBQ and I think they might find out that their thinking is not always as differant as people assume.

Does this come down to what we can do vs will do and concern oevr who will make that decision?

[slapout9]

Ron, I think that has a lot to do with it.

[Penta]

You'd be amazed at how often it comes up. And at very senior levels.

The Strategic Studies Institute has, over the years, been criticized for not "promoting Army equities." Every time I hear that I feel the need for a Howard Dean primal scream.

Thesis: A part of me senses it comes from the fact that the Acquisition Corps has such high promotion rates (per Congressional mandate, I think?), ergo a lot of senior people probably have done time in acquisition somewhere.

Any guess if I'm right?

I remember when I was 11-12 and read the stuff my dad brought home from work on occasion. I know acquisition work basically -is- the military gone corporate, knew it then...But it still unnerved me, when I really paid attention, to see the focus be on "profit" for the government orgs, etc. It all made sense within context, but I was always worried that the terminology seemed to make the whole matter too...pedestrian, I guess. (As I recall muttering to my dad after being nosey and looking at a powerpoint print-out he'd brought home, something like, "The fact that everybody else measures profit and loss on this by how many flag-draped caskets come home, rather than line item budgets and cost-plus contracts...There are people in these meetings who actually remember that, right? That we're not talking about production of chips for the PlayStation?")

As if fielding stuff for the guy out in God-knows-where, who lives or dies on the little things, was the same as producing cars for GM, or chips for Intel.

I saw plenty of times where that wasn't the case, where what was really being dealt with came slamming to the forefront, but I always wondered what that did to mindsets.

[Sargent]

I can't think of a single successful communist insurgency during the Cold War that really threatened a vital national interest (excluding China).

You must be trying to be generous to find an example counter to your argument, because by the time of the Cold War, the CCP/PLA was not involved in an insurgency but rather a party to an outright civil war. They were insurgents/guerillas against the KMT in the 30s (particularly amongst those who did not make the march north, best chronicled in Benton's Mountain Fires), and in WWII against the Japanese -- to the benefit of the Allies. Given the state of the KMT and its army (if Dreyer's account, China at War, 1901-49, is even 1/10th correct -- boy, is that a dismal chronicle) after the Japanese invaded, one has to wonder whether the latter might not have prevailed in China. The course of the war in Asia might have looked very different without the PLA* insurgency against the Japanese and amongst the Chinese. Who knows what course the Cold War might have taken -- for American national interest good or ill -- without the Chinese communist insurgency.

(*I use PLA specifically here, because the party (CCP), as an independent organization was not relevant at the time (since '29) -- the Army led the effort, both the fighting and the politics/policies.)

What I'm trying to say is that I think we overestimate the strategic costs of disengagement. And we do ourselves a double disservice by this. It leads us to throw good money after bad.

This I like very much. Ah, the Theory of Spilt Milk. It alone is a good reason for folks to study economics.

I sense something of a pathological fear in the American psyche about losing wars. There tends to be an apocalyptic view on the consequences of such an outcome. But if you only look at the Brits in the Rev War (loss is followed by 150 years as a superpower) such a preconception about what loss means is not entirely founded. I might call it an examined portion of the American Way of War.

Cheers,
Jill

[Ken White]

You make two important points.

1. Finding someone else to be the boots on the ground works extremely well. (Even Rumsfeld couldn't screw up the first few weeks in Afghanistan.)

2. I agree that for certain tasks, soldiers are absolutely necessary, but Hezbollah hasn't launched an attack into Israel since the war which supports my point: if the objective is deterrence, a ground war isn't always necessary. (With all the work Hezbollah has done rebuilding, they don't want it all destroyed again over minor disagreements and airpower can easily destroy bridges, buildings etc.)

you seem to have decided to ignore it. Not only did you miss or at least not acknowledge my contention that most Americans do not care about casualties as long as there are results but you took my very minor reclama of an afterthought to your point and twisted... I'm sorry, spun it, to make your point(s) again...

Good try.

Of course finding someone else to do ones dirty work is always preferable -- just not always possible. It also has the same downside as does commitment of Americans. To wit, if it takes too long and doesn't produce results, the clamor to disengage rises. I never cease to be amazed at how little journalists, marketing guys and politicians, of all people, know about the great unwashed. It seems some want to believe that Americans can be manipulated around their patience and tolerance levels. Those levels are really pretty high but they aren't inexhaustible nor are the finite levels really negotiable.

Deterrence is a very bad strategic policy. It, effectively, is bluffing. Never a good idea between Nations. Unless you're prepared to shoot, do not unholster your weapon...

Kosovo (among others) again offers an example.

I'd also point out that Hezbollah probably got told by the Pasdaran to cool their jets after last years unwanted war and that they have other problems right now. Not to mention that Rumsfeld and Franks DID screw up the first few weeks in Afghanistan. Badly...

[Rank amateur]

Ken: Maybe Rummy only had a good couple of days. Using the Northern alliance accomplished a lot. Assuming it would do everything, was of course a mistake. One that still hasn't been completely corrected.

You'll notice that the first thing on my original list was palaces. Libya is a good example of what airpower can accomplish if you hit targets that the leader cares about. UPI April 15, 1986.

Reports from Tripoli said there were heavy civilian casualties, including Khadafy's daughter, Hana, who died when U.S. bombs smashed into the Azizzia compound just outside Tripoli, which the colonel uses as a headquarters. Two of Khadafy's young sons also were injured.

Threatening to bomb where the leader lives isn't bluffing. All you need to do is program the Cruise missiles. And while your point about support for causalities was excellent, why take causalities if you don't need to? Khadafy stopped supporting terrorism. That's what really matters. Reagan was pretty popular, so bombing isn't bad politics either.

I sense something of a pathological fear in the American psyche about losing wars.

Interestingly, I was thinking about starting a thread on retreat. Mao renamed his retreat The Long March and made it a victory. The Brits celebrated Dunkirk. I was wondering if one of the reasons there is so much talk about adaptation here is because we have denied ourselves the use of the simplest and oldest way to adapt - retreating to regroup on better ground- because we have a pathological fear of moving backwards.

[Ron Humphrey]

Threatening to bomb where the leader lives isn't bluffing. All you need to do is program the Cruise missiles. And while your point about support for causalities was excellent, why take causalities if you don't need to? Khadafy stopped supporting terrorism. That's what really matters. Reagan was pretty popular, so bombing isn't bad politics either.

I think Reagan was one who understood the value of effective bargaining through clarity in purpose.

If bombing something or someone would facilitate that then great, but I think you would find that the greater part of what has been accomplished long term, would be more do to wisdom and smart communication.

[Sargent]

Interestingly, I was thinking about starting a thread on retreat. Mao renamed his retreat The Long March and made it a victory. The Brits celebrated Dunkirk. I was wondering if one of the reasons there is so much talk about adaptation here is because we have denied ourselves the use of the simplest and oldest way to adapt - retreating to regroup on better ground- because we have a pathological fear of moving backwards.

Don't forget O.P. Smith in Korea for a great victorious "retreat"! Oops, that wasn't a retreat, it was an attack in a different direction. Perhaps what it comes down to is how to frame the matter. (I am being a bit tongue in cheek with Smith's comment -- he was earnestly trying to make the point that getting from Chosin back to Hungnam was not going to be anything easy, that they were going to have to fight for much of it.)

This brings to mind Lupfer's point in his Leavenworth Paper on German tactical doctrine in WWI, that it was very hard for the German military, culturally, to accept that the utilization of a tactical retreat could be to their operational advantage.

I guess this is on my mind because the influence of culture upon warfare and military policy has emerged as a major theme of my dissertation. How we do things is significantly affected by culture, whether it's strategic, institutional, or even societal.

What I am grappling with is to what degree the notion that Americans tend to dismiss the importance of such irrational, qualitative, touchy-feely influences is correct. I don't have any hard evidence in support, but (and I recognize the irony of this construct) it seems that a part of American culture is the tendency to devalue "culture" itself. Ok, that's not very clear, but it's an idea still in the primordial stages.

Cheers,
Jill

[slapout9]

What ya'll are talking about also came up at SMART wars it was called the surrender option. In particular defeat at the military level can equal success at the political level. One example was the Cuban Missile crisis. The USSR quit,backed down,withdrew,whatever you want to call it but at the Political level they got everything they wanted. A communist Cuba and pledge not to invade Cuba...what did we get...we can run around saying we made them blink

[Ken White]

Ken: Maybe Rummy only had a good couple of days. Using the Northern alliance accomplished a lot. Assuming it would do everything, was of course a mistake. One that still hasn't been completely corrected.

The interference in the trooplist and the plans of people on the ground by both Franks and Rumsfeld had several adverse consequences. Using the Northern Alliance and the way things unfolded was as much serendipity as anything -- had little to do with either of the two named. Still, mostly it worked and that's all that counts.

You'll notice that the first thing on my original list was palaces. Libya is a good example of what airpower can accomplish if you hit targets that the leader cares about. UPI April 15, 1986.(url given)

I did and the gist of your report makes your paragraph below sort of moot...

Threatening to bomb where the leader lives isn't bluffing. All you need to do is program the Cruise missiles. And while your point about support for causalities was excellent, why take causalities if you don't need to? Khadafy stopped supporting terrorism. That's what really matters. Reagan was pretty popular, so bombing isn't bad politics either.

Mixed metaphors?

Causalities or casualties? If the latter, I agree, nothing wrong with avoiding casualties -- if you can. Sometimes we can, sometimes we cannot. If we cannot avoid taking them, then we'd better do a good job and do it quick. Regardless, under any sensible circumstances (not always a given with the overall caliber of our politicians) the bulk of the American people will not object to casualties as many seem to believe.

OTOH, if you meant causalities, I don't support 'em, I just have to live with them. Thus, I have to take some even if I don't wish to do so. Same thing applies to Nations, even this one.

Was Reagan popular because of the bombing or did his popularity allow him to commit an act of war by bombing a sovereign nation that had only allegedly been a participant in terrorist actions. Was he popular because after years of Carter and the Tehran debacle plus his own Beirut debacle, he did something even if it was sort of inconsequential?

Check the dates on El Dorado Canyon and Qaddafi's cessation of terror support. Causality or casualty? (LINK check the Europen reaction and said cessation, 2/3 of the way down the page).

In any event, what would you do with a guy like Saddam who was known to sleep at lots of places and to have doubles? As Kim is suspected to do. Put your faith in an air blockade and you're going to be disappointed, put it in Tomahawks and your potential for disappointment just rose. Both are great tools with many advantages and I'm sure glad we have them and that they work as well as they do but without really accurate intel, they are borderline inconsequential for your stated purpose.

I don't know what your confidence in our intel capability to provide the timely information to do that with those tools is but mine isn't very high.

You seem to be looking for a not too costly way to apply military power and one that will be acceptable to those of the liberal or progressive persuasion or just those who may not be fully committed. Good luck; I doubt you'll find such. War isn't cheap; either do it right or don't do it. Regrettably, "don't do it" isn't always our call.

Interestingly, I was thinking about starting a thread on retreat. Mao renamed his retreat The Long March and made it a victory. The Brits celebrated Dunkirk. I was wondering if one of the reasons there is so much talk about adaptation here is because we have denied ourselves the use of the simplest and oldest way to adapt - retreating to regroup on better ground- because we have a pathological fear of moving backwards.

You and Jill might want to consider the fact that most British battles of great note and which are celebrated in little Victorian and Edwardian chapel stained glass windows all over the UK even up to the present day in Afghanistan are defensive battles. Most US battles given similar icon levels are attacks. Our cultures differ. So do our 'great' battles...

Consider also that for years at the NTC and JRTC the glaring errors made by units on rotations almost always involved two aspects of combat. Reconnaissance and Defense (and there's a big message in that...).

You might also give some thought to the well known quote from Captain Lloyd Williams, USMC.

Jill's on the right track -- it's the culture, that's what drives our doctrine; more importantly, it's what drives the troops who are perfectly capable of acting in the absence of doctrine. It's also the reason most American are willing to tolerate casualties -- if the job is done right

Doing the job right isn't that hard. Trying to find a substitute to avoid that or avoid the job altogether is quite difficult.

[Ken White]

What ya'll are talking about also came up at SMART wars it was called the surrender option. In particular defeat at the military level can equal success at the political level. One example was the Cuban Missile crisis. The USSR quit,backed down,withdrew,whatever you want to call it but at the Political level they got everything they wanted. A communist Cuba and pledge not to invade Cuba...what did we get...we can run around saying we made them blink

and they also got all our IRBMs pulled out of Germany, Greece and Turkey and a cut back in aerial reconnaissance near the borders of the USSR for a while.

Such a deal...

[Ken White]

"...it seems that a part of American culture is the tendency to devalue "culture" itself."

or, other than the so called educated liberal elite in the US, simply eschewing European sophistication and norms?

[Rank amateur]

Doing the job right isn't that hard. Trying to find a substitute to avoid that or avoid the job altogether is quite difficult.

Doing the right think is expensive: in blood and treasure. That's why it's worth "shopping around." Military/Politics/patience with Khadafy was cheaper and more effective than a military solution with Saddam.

"If you do X, Y, and Z (e.g. support transnational terrorism or support insurgents trying to overthrow your neighbor), we will come in and remove you. Then we'll leave. But you will no longer be in power."

Isn't this highly likely to lead to anarchy/failed state/growing extremism and other undesirable consequences?

How we do things is significantly affected by culture, whether it's strategic, institutional, or even societal.

I was wondering if an American could've written "The Art of War." It seems to be very much part of a ying/yang culture.

[Ken White]

Doing the right think is expensive: in blood and treasure. That's why it's worth "shopping around." Military/Politics/patience with Khadafy was cheaper and more effective than a military solution with Saddam.

Qaddafi got no military pressure to speak of; El Dorado Canyon was a feel good exercise and little more.

The military effort in Iraq had very little to do with Saddam, he was almost peripheral, an included benefit as it were. The only thing he offered that attracted a military effort was that he was resoundingly despised and that Iraq -- whose geographic centrality was the reason for the military effort -- was, due to him, a relatively (note that word) easy military task. The scope of effort was increased due to poor intel going in (and I'm not talking about WMD, they were also peripheral) not due to a flawed strategy.

So in essence, the right thing was done and "shopping around" occurred -- Iraq was far easier and far less disruptive to the world oil supply than would have been Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Syria -- all of which were practically speaking more 'deserving' targets for regime change. Aside from several difficulties with them that Iraq did not pose, the geographic centrality was absent.

The only valid comparison between Qaddafi and Saddam is that both were Muslim and apparently weird if not psychotic. That doesn't even address the fact that Libya is not in the ME and therefor the desired effect would not have been achieved, nor would the rest of the world have been as tolerant as they have been (due to Saddam's bad boy status when compared to Muammar who's just mischievous)...