Why are public estimates of small wars adversary strength so rare and obscure?

[Steve the Planner]

MikeF pointed out one of the biggest problems in our discordant geographic assignment of battlespaces without relation to the civilian governance structure.

Salah ad Din Province was divided into four brigades---one at Speicher, one at Q West, one at Warhorse, and one at Balad--and, essentially, three PRTs. Salah ad Din had three satellites (Tuz, Balad, Bayji). Tuz was actually dependent on Warhorse, and the district primarily dependent on Kirkuk (roads, water, electricity, etc...). Shirqat province was managed out of Ninewa PRT.

Somehow or another, all of this was supposed to come together to reinforce and build local governance, but I never figured out how. Good thing that Salah ad Din, at the time, only had an interim Kurdish gov structure until the 2008 provincial election. Now, it is just turmoil. Who build that capacity????

That was an issue in last year's Iraq troop redeployment. How do you re-align to follow civilian government structures when, in fact, the US map sets didn't even have accurate provincial/district boundaries---just speculative junk from the early 1980s.

So, you take the Iraqi census data, which is very neatly and carefully arranged into census blocks and block maps in a hierarchy from nahia to qadda to province. But if you don;t use the same census maps and provincial governance arrangement, the population information contained therein is useless.

How to align meaningful data to accomplish a mission grounded in building the capacity of local and provincial governance without aligning forces to civilian structures?

I just don't get it.

Steve

[William F. Owen]

....and if you had an accurate estimate, how would it help? In fact estimating the enemies numbers is almost always a bad thing to do, in terms of anything other than fairly limited tactical estimates for planning.

[Steve the Planner]

Why so?

I come from that old boring Johns Hopkins technical training that is grounded in quantitative sciences: If you can count it, you can know something about it, then you can actually do something with it.

Maybe that approach represents a serious disconnect between how a military analyst approaches a problem, and how a civil administrator does. How does that get reconciled?

Steve

[William F. Owen]

Why so?

I come from that old boring Johns Hopkins technical training that is grounded in quantitative sciences: If you can count it, you can know something about it, then you can actually do something with it.

What are you counting? Numbers do not equal combat power, or anything indicative of capability. Do you base your plan on their numbers? I cannot see any reason to, as numbers in generally meaningless, in this context.

[Fuchs]

What are you counting? Numbers do not equal combat power, or anything indicative of capability. Do you base your plan on their numbers? I cannot see any reason to, as numbers in generally meaningless, in this context.

They're not entirely useless in regard to an estimate about their direct rule capability. You cannot take over Afghanistan with 2,000 Taliban. 20,000 it depends. 200,000 hell, yeah!

[William F. Owen]

They're not entirely useless in regard to an estimate about their direct rule capability. You cannot take over Afghanistan with 2,000 Taliban. 20,000 it depends. 200,000 hell, yeah!

How many men did Cortez and Pizarro have? How many men did Castro start with? Extreme examples maybe, but while I subscribe to military strength as a function of capability, I don't have much faith in just pure manpower numbers.

[UrsaMaior]

As a historian I might start with the age of enlightement, how it broke the coherence in western thinking (elevating pure, atheist science to the level of a goddess), or with liberalism which ended thinking in communities or with the cold war which brought us the technology conquers it all paradigms. Yet suddenly we fell on the other side. We (the west) believe in numbers with an almost fundamental, radical belief. Even those who believe or claim to believe in the Almighty are preplexed when confronted with convincingly high number of numbers. This 'numerology' defines our thinking way more than any of us would like to admit. Yet there are 'things' which we cannot measure. ''How happy you are?" "How much do you love me?" "How much do they hate us?" etc.

In COIN/pop centric ops/peackeeping etc. it does not matter. There is a golden number (20 reliable soldier, LEO / 1000 inhabitant). And that is it. We can't rely on 'safety in numbers'.