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

[Presley Cannady]

Question is right in the title. Most recently, the number 25,000 (of "Taliban-led" fighters) has been kicked around in the media, the source being an anonymous leaker of classified information. So:

1. Why are official, public estimates of enemy strength so rare?
2. Why does the community feel the need to classify numbers like these in the first place?

After all, the other side presumably already knows his head count.

[Steve the Planner]

Cones of Silence.

In Iraq, US highway maps were classified from civilian Iraqi use because they labels Route 1 as "Route Tampa," the secret US government name for the road.

Of course, there were no Iraqis that didn't know the military names for these routes. They were marked with informal signs. Go figure?

[Rex Brynen]

I can think of several reasons why such estimates are hard-to-come-by and may be classified:

1) Who is an insurgent? Just full-timers? Part-timers? Support personnel? Sympathizers who may, under some conditions, pick up a gun? Camp followers? Abductees pressed into service? This issue typically bedevils post-conflict DDR programs too.

2) I wouldn't at all assume that the opposition knows their armed strength, since in many insurgencies the insurgents are far from unified. Moreover, field commanders may, in some political situations, lie to their superiors--especially when larger numbers gain them political influence or greater resources.

3) If estimates of insurgent strength are wrong, or qualified in ways that the public doesn't understand, it may send unwanted or even unintended signals about the counterinsurgent's intelligence capabilities, strategic intent, political will, and so forth.

4) Every time you change the public numbers it is liable to misinterpretation. Did the insurgency get bigger/smaller? Or did we just change our methodology or improve our intel?

4) Given all of this, why get into a public numbers game?

See also: body counts.

[MikeF]

Presley,

MG Mike Flynn discusses the issue here with AF Times.

I attempted to sort through it in this thread.

Basically, under the current organizational structure, we draw lines and define them as areas of operation and responsibility. As platoons, companies, batalions, and brigades report the narrative of what they "see" as the enemy threat, we assume that they are correct. We confuse ourselves with an illusion of omnipotence.

That may sound harsh, but it's not meant to be. Sometimes, we simply don't comprehend the delta between what we think we know and what is actually going on.

Every report is simply a narrative that should be combined towards a better understanding (military view, political view, HN govt view, HN military view, LN view, NGO view, etc...) The only way to try to discern a better view and gain some semblance towards control are a thorough census and restrictive population control measures.



Mike

[Steve the Planner]

There are a lot of different ways to get at credible estimates of a population and sub-population size, especially in a war zone.

A census is not really a good one for strategic/tactical purposes. Example: The US census is done every ten years, with an annual and mid-point revised estimate.

Usually, the census preliminary figures follow the census by about six months, with the final "agreed" population data out in about three years. Those are the figures used for political reapportionments and per head fund allocations. They result from lots of arm wrestling about how many homeless people and categories of undercounts. If somebody is using decennial census data for, or relying on it for future use for strategic and tactical decisions, they are uninformed, and probably wrong.

Population figures, especially at the district, subdistrict level are real time dynamic figures, like political boundaries. They need to incorporate real-time refugee movements, temporary displacements, and any number of factors.

Like political boundaries in a conflict zone, they are highly-dynamic, and, in part, evidence of conflict patterns.

To break that down even further to subterranean folks (bad guys) requires real time analysis---aggregation of field data---in a way that current battlefield intel does not routinely provide.

I was, at first, frustrated by military folks having little faith in data processes and planning systems, but I always remind myself that there are two different things: (1) high quality information created and managed by experienced professionals, and (2) the GIGO that floats out to the field.

They are getting old, and often out-dated information instead of real-time dynamic stuff that they need.

Every time a group moves from a village to a tent outside of Kabul, they register as refugees to get food (and the tent). Refugee folks know exactly where people come from, and why they left. Mil needs a real-time civilian interface to that data.

From experience, if you want to know how many people are in a town, ask an SF about the town he watches, or use a thermal scan. Or, count the number of occupied dwelling units in a village (that's air photo count minus destroyed/uninhabitable), and randomly sample the population per household in that village (How many families, people? Most of this is routinely done anyway but not systematized).

Want to get down to bad guys. My understanding is, sometimes, that is a count best done at night. Who is out wandering around?

Soldiers, in their normal course of business, are doing census work---it is just not being compiled. How many people live in that settlement? How many high-top sneakers per male population? Is that recorded settlement formally occupied, and by who?

Again, this stuff needs to be routinely updated (by standing FRAGO if necessary) if it is to be accurate and meaningful.

As much as anything, it is the changes in patterns that tell the stories and contain predictive and measurable capabilities, but, for that, you have to have a base line.

There is just no system for boring and mundane stuff like this. Yet....

Steve

[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'.

[tequila]

How many men did Cortez and Pizarro have? How many men did Castro start with?

True, but how many did they end with? They certainly did not win with miniscule numbers alone.

This goes especially for wars that seek to mobilize populations rather than those aimed at toppling and replacing small elites.

[Rex Brynen]

I think Wilf is slightly overstating the irrelevancy of numbers. They are a key element of capability (although far from the only one), and to the extent that they can be tracked (a big "IF") may be an important indicator of other things too.

That being said, all the various other reasons that we've identified for not relesing official figures hold true--including what I think Wilf's central point is, namely a risk that we get into a head-count fetish rather than doing the real work of assessing threats, capabilities, recruitment and sustenance dynamics, etc.

[William F. Owen]

That being said, all the various other reasons that we've identified for not relesing official figures hold true--including what I think Wilf's central point is, namely a risk that we get into a head-count fetish rather than doing the real work of assessing threats, capabilities, recruitment and sustenance dynamics, etc.

Exactly. My basic take is info on numbers is never going to be right, it's not really going to tell you anything (supporters versus combatants versus sometime combatants) and making assumptions about enemy numbers versus your numbers is always pointless. - so why do it?