Center of Gravity Construct

[slapout9]

Lastdingo, didn't Clausewitz talk about war of limited objectives? Do you think he was talking about small wars in that context. Briefly I remember sections where he talks about seizing a vital province of the enemy or doing him damage in a general way without his complete overthrow? Your comments on this?

[tequila]

I think sometimes it's difficult for us to realize that people who blow up civilians, torture and behead have a sense of duty, honor and loyalty.

Let's not romanticize. Native Americans did not hesitate to do any of the above against civilian populations, either from rival tribes or against European colonists. Such attacks were much more common than battles against other warriors or armies, similar to the ravaging that made up so much of medieval and early modern warfare. European armies did not hesitate to pay them back in full and more.

What made the Native American COIN experience different was that it was also a struggle over territory, where control of the civilian population did not constitute the main objective.

TROUFION: I see kind of where you are going, but it is important to note that Mao and the Communists were Long Marching somewhere - another secure base, in this case. OBL and AQ decamped from Afghanistan to another secure base, this time in Pakistan. Ideas are critically important, but every fighter needs someplace to rearm and rest to sustain the fight.

[TROUFION]

Tequila, very true, Mao had to occupy a physical space as does UBL. What I was looking at is that the actual space is not important, he could set up in the south or the north, so long as he could live.

I'm going to extemporize a bit here, because I'm not clear as to what the answer is. When I read about Lettow-Vorbeck I asked myself how could he survive, how could he keep his men together against the overwhelming odds. Also I was looking at Lawrence and comparing his actions to Lettow, both took small forces and targeted the enemies bases and lines of communication, in this case railroads and supply dumps, physical in nature. The destruction of these caused reaction in great disproportion to the efforts expended by both Lawerence and Lettow. Further the Turks and Brits could not gain the same reaction from Lawerence or Lettow, respectively, by doing the same thing. The loss of physical bases hurt them but did not demoralize them to the point of giving in. They fought on, perhaps it is the underdog mentality?

In the American Revolution the British took Manhatten and Philadelphia, it was a crushing blow, in a European war at the time it would have been all over. Yet Washington retires to Valley Forge then crosses the Deleware and wins a stunning small victory and suddenly the cause is reborn.

Also in the American Revolution, when the Indian raids got out of hand on the frontier. Washington sent General Sullivan to destroy the Iroquis Nation. He ran straight into their base and burned it down, they never recovered. Yet as goesh points out the native american resistance lasted a long time beyond that, ever pushing their bases further west until they ran out of physical space in which to allow their ideology/way of life to exist.

What I am seeing is that an insurgent unlike the counter-insurgent can move his physical base freely to any location where his ideaology base can exist without direct attack from the government. From this base he can strike in small groups at will destroying fixed bases of the government.

I think of Che at this point, in Bolivia, he was unable to develop the physical base to allow himself the freedom of action, eventually being pinned and killed.

How would this twin bases -physical and ideological- concept equate to trans-nationals or to local insurgents? What are the weaknesses?

[Lastdingo]

Lastdingo, didn't Clausewitz talk about war of limited objectives? Do you think he was talking about small wars in that context. Briefly I remember sections where he talks about seizing a vital province of the enemy or doing him damage in a general way without his complete overthrow? Your comments on this?

I don't think so. The wars with limited objectives that he meant were rather the cabinet wars of 18th century (not the seven years war) than what we call small wars today.

The versions that he mentioned were a war waged to disarm and therefore break the enemy and a war that merely consisted of favorable maneuvers to improve the position for peace talks (no decisive, grand battle). Serious peace talks aren't necessary in the more total version of war that ended in the defenselessness of one warring party.

So his less intense version of war fits many modern small wars, but doesn't even remotely describe them. It's like saying water is blue - the relevant properties and consequences are not mentioned, yet the description is sort of correct.

Both types of war could - as history shows - also be present in a single conflict. Look at the Second Boer War. The British wanted to break the Boers and make them defenseless, achieving total victory in a small war (a challenging one, as it turned out).
The Boers practiced the limited war version - they merely wanted a status quo ante peace treaty.



Van

Mao relocated his sanctuary with the Long March, and never lost his sanctuary in the Soviet Union, a source of support through out the revolution. Castro launched from Mexico and preserved his sanctuaries in the hills of Cuba. Yes, the Algerians lost most, but not all sancuaries, and preserved the ones outside the borders of Algier. Sanctuaries can be dynamic and can be numerous, and this is the greatest single issue of the GWOT.

I would accept the argument that disruption of a guerrilla sanctuary starts a countdown for the movement, but that countdown can be reset with the establishment of a new sanctuary. More important than the sanctuaries within the area of operations are the ones the established government can't reach (like Cambodia and China in Vietnam, like Iran in Iraq today, like the USSR for so many small movements through the Cold War).

If the loss of a sanctuary is so easily compensated for, then it's most likely not a critical loss. The interesting weak point needs to be searched somewhere else than in something that's so easily replaced. Supporting states can hardly count as sanctuary unless they act as operations base as in the similar Hezbollah example.


By the way, I don't believe that in the so-called GWOT (another term not easily agreed on) it's important at all what the military can do. Most of AQ, for example, is/was rather a third world private army than a group of persons actually able to execute intelligent strikes in the west. Killing them helps little if at all. Several thousand persons were AQ personnel at some time, but only a small fraction of them were the right kind of people for complex strikes. Most were simply using AQ as a kind of travel & logistics agency to Jihad inside of a muslim country.
If I was tasked to fight AQ based on my current open source knowledge, I would concentrate on the hard core and make recruiting of more hard core fighter (actual terrorists, not just jihadists) as tough as possible to dry the pool out over time. But my information on AQ is certainly very inferior to that of our government agencies.

[Van]

If the loss of a sanctuary is so easily compensated for, then it's most likely not a critical loss. The interesting weak point needs to be searched somewhere else than in something that's so easily replaced. Supporting states can hardly count as sanctuary unless they act as operations base as in the similar Hezbollah example.

A planned transition of sanctuaries is not the same as an unplanned loss. Systematic denial of sanctuaries is historically a successful strategy in counter-guerrilla ops, going all the way back to the English versus the Welsh centuries ago.

Supporting states can represent a form of sanctuary, especially in a highly decentralized system like AQ when enabled by modern communications and transportation.

Tacitus nailed it with the observation that AQ is not monolithic. Al Qaeda, The Base, is just that; a finacial, training, and philosophical/religious base for Sunni extremism. Traditional patterns of guerrilla organization resemble a old fashioned computer network with one node setting the clock and the other nodes falling in on it, and occasionally there would be a guerrilla organization like more modern networks where the nodes would be more autonomous. AQ is more like a petri dish for a highly contagious disease. AQ feeds the disease, but the spores spread the disease and cause the damage. Please, please, please don't read too much into the analogy, it's just an attempt to describe the high degree of autonomy of cells supported by AQ, and the way it propogates.

The strategic solution is "immunizing hosts"; changing conditions in countries that provide sanctuary so that they will stop providing sanctuary. And the cornerstone of this is twofold; education and economies. Military operations can only provide time and space for the diplomatic/informational/economic facets of the solution.

The challenge presented by the organization (or lack of organization) of AQ is that it makes some very ugly solutions sound viable. The attitudes and beliefs of these coward mufsid who practice hirabah create a situation where the West's willingness to negotiate is frustrated at every turn. As the incidents of violence add up, the options appear to be reduced. The unwillingness of AQ and affiliates to negotiate or consider compromise, combined with it's invasive and, for lack of a better word, contagious nature invites the use of words like "extermination" and "annihilation".