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What Makes Heroic Strife?

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04.21.2012 at 01:02pm

The Economist offers a piece about breakthroughs in modeling civil wars.  I, for one, am highly skeptical that our wunderkinder can do anything of the sort that is truly faithful to the massive complexity of human interactions.

 

For in the war-games rooms and think-tanks of the rich world’s military powers, bright minds are working on the problem of how to model insurrection and irregular warfare. Slowly but surely they are succeeding, and in the process they are helping politicians and armies to a better understanding of the nature of rebellion.

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gian gentile

The article may have value, but it is premised on the seemingly never-ending notion of irregular warfare as the graduate level of war, and that conventional warfare is somehow easier. In this article the author says that conventional war is easy to figure out…

“Guerrilla warfare, however, is harder to model than open battle of this sort, and the civil insurrection that often precedes it is harder still.”

I dont buy it. Shoot, Bradley and his subordinates thought that they had Omaha Beach pretty neatly modeled yet they got it wrong, very wrong, and the troops that hit the beach paid a heavy price in their mistakes. Was Bradley et al just stupid because they could not figure out a simple problem of open battle on Omaha Beach. No, maybe in fact, open battle in whatever form it takes in the future is in fact quite complex, perhaps even more so than the experts of coin and irregular warfare have come to believe.

I propose that the author of this piece, just as many so-called experts on coin and irregular war may indeed know a good deal about those things, but they know squat about what terms like “open battle” actually mean, nor do they know squat about military history and this history of warfare in general.

ADTS

First, I think the Go-Gos said roughly the same thing some time ago as Gian Gentile and Dave Maxwell: “It look[s] so easy, but you know, looks sometimes deceive” (“Head Over Heels”).

Second, I, like Carl, would like to know more about interservice (e.g., Army and Marine Corps) and intraservice (e.g., Army in the Western Pacific and Mediterranean theaters) and perhaps even transnational (e.g., Krulak’s observations of Japanese operations at Shanghai) development, dissemination and diffusion of WW II amphibious warfare doctrine and TTPs.

Third, the author of the article, per the usual for The Economist, does not have a byline, but I suspect her/his/its beat is probably not even military affairs. (Does The Economist even have such a person?) I would imagine the author’s beat is probably social science, academic research, science writ large, or even computer science, etc.

Fourth, what strikes me, first, is the extremely wide range covered by the article. I think a more accurate description of the latter half of the article’s content is the use of social media to monitor and predict. Moreover, I would contend most of the phenomena predicted is not necessarily *war* per se, but rather “political instability” which may or may not be a precursor to war. Really, arguably the only reference to modeling “small wars” is the reference to SCARE. (I am a bit surprised the Human Terrain System did not make the article.)

Fifth, Jay Ulfelder at “Dart-Throwing Chimp” worked on the Political Instability Task Force (another unfortunate omission, I would perhaps think), and while I don’t read it regularly, I think his blog is fairly pertinent to much of what is covered in the article. Similarly, I would perhaps be at fault for not mentioning “The Monkey Cage”: while it is a general political science blog, it is a very good one, and at least one if not more of its contributors could probably provide intelligent commentary.

Sixth, in terms of net assessment with respect to convenional warfare, I have passing familiarity with the work of Mearsheimer and Posen in International Security in the early-to-mid 1980s, and consider it pretty solid.

Best
ADTS

gian gentile

ADTS: I know Dave and I keep pounding this drum, but it is important to keep pointing out that war in general is difficult and the graduate level; however the purveyors of Coin have concluded that it is the opposite and quite easy. It is not. If we are not careful with this kind of thinking combined arms skill in conventional warfare will be kicked under the rug because folks assume that it is easy and therefore it doesnt need work and training.

Carl and ADTS: The best book on Omaha Beach planning is Adrian Lewis’s “Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory.” It is true that Bradley and his planners were aware of Pacific amphibious operations just as they were quite well aware of army amphibious operations in the Med. What Bradley and his planners did, after considering these different experiences, was to construct an “out of the box” landing and assault doctrine for Omaha. They reasoned that what they were dealing with was so different and knew it required jettisoning other experiences and methods. In the end this “disruptive” and different doctrine and assualt plan assumed too much about the efficacy of air delivered fire power, of tactical suprise, and of an overly tight timeline that offered no flexibility at all to move quickly across the beach. Instead of coming up with something different, they should have used their experiences in the Med and in the Pacific. To me it teaches that “disruptive thinking” or out of the box thinking is not by rule always the answer.

Peter: Agree, I dont trust the whiz kids either.

zenpundit

While I generally agree with the criticisms offered here by Gian – while adding that computer modeling tends to be oversold whenever/wherever it is applied – let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater:

“RiftLand is being developed on the navy’s behalf by Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, a professor of computational social science at George Mason University in Virginia. It is specific to the part of East Africa around the Great Rift Valley (hence the name). That this area includes Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia and Uganda, each of which has been the scene of present or recent civil strife, is no coincidence. But the ideas involved could be generalised to other parts of the world, with due alteration for local conditions.”

Local conditions are usually the rub with universal rules 🙂

This is a tool that seems useful in the sense of adding another kind of “rule of thumb” for a commander to consider, and I suspect it would be a far more useful enterprise if the computer scientist was joined by associates with area/local knowledge and military command/planning expertise. You’d get better answers wth the right questions using the right variables. It’s not unhelpful to know where subgroups like to congregate (young males, sectarians, wheeler-dealers, criminals) where traffic ebbs and flows, patterns of recurrent social conflict.

The danger is some CYA-minded fool ordering the program determine or drive military planning vice just being an interesting data point to think about.

Surferbeetle

‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’

Mathematical models are all around us and grow in strength every day. Piezoelectric fuel injectors rely upon such models to run the diesel trucks that delivery daily food and fuel to our stores of choice. FEMA uses one and two dimensional hydraulic and hydrology models to predict flooding which provide information for those who are not interested in living in flood zones. Finite element modeling helps us build structures (skyscrapers, etc) that protect us from the elements. Computational fluid dynamic modeling helps us to find where chlorine disinfection is not optimal in our water treatment plants and ensures that our drinking water does not sicken us. Everybody knows what Google is capable of and how our lives have changed because of it…

For those still unsure about the power of models, and with practical experience in an arena such as war, some common sense questions about how a ‘war’ model’s predictions were calibrated with real world events will provide some idea about the actual efficacy of the model.

Models do not absolve leaders of responsibility, but when used wisely they can increase the chances of making an informed decision. For those who read history, perhaps they remember the stories of the many european troops in WWI who thought they would be back home in just a few months? For those of us who experienced OIF1, remember how many of our young troops thought we were going back home ‘early’? Hopefully the models described in the article, and other models, will help leaders make better decisions about the necessity of war.

gian gentile

ADTS:
It is pretty clear from the sources (primary and secondary) that the US airborne drops in Normandy were quite effective in disrupting German operational response to the Utah beach landings, which is what they were designed to do all along. The irony though is that was caused the severe disruption to the Germans was the chaotic and unplanned dispersion of the drops. The German high command thought the Americans were doing some kind of new high-fangled swarm tactics and could not figure out what they were up to with paratroopers falling all over the Cotentin peninsula. So even when things dont go according to plan things sometimes work out anyway. Such is war. Drop me a line at [email protected] and i can offer up some specific sources if you wish. With regard to the German airborne drop at Crete, well what the Germans learned from that operation was the futility of putting elite infantry up in a symmetrical way against defending infantry without any advantages in firepower and protection where they were hammered and hammered hard. This should be important for the US Army to consider as it moves toward a light infantry dominated force and gives up the traditional advantages of American firepower and protection.

ZenP:
agree, in no way am i suggesting that modeling–aka wargaming–is not important and needs to be done well. As a graduate of Sams and a former planner in the 4ID I appreciate the value of modeling of the enemy and conditions when done correctly. I just grow weary of this never-ending and absurd reduction of higher end combat to the simple, like any dolt can do it.

Lamson719

Ha! Brilliant. I read this today in the magazine. It reminds me of the mass number crunching of data that was done in the Cu Chi area of Vietnam. Back then, the DARPA boffins were selling the idea that they could predict which way insurgencies would go just like the weather…decades later, we see the same crap being peddled in Afghanistan looking at metrics like the price of fruit at the market, which is a valid metric of stability, but we don’t need some Harvard “genius” to tell us this. And now we get this. It’s dangerous: the opposite of the NeoCon arrogance that took us to Iraq- this is techno hubris: intelligence as a platform for arrogance.

Peter, well done for bringing this future porn nonsense to our attention. We are right to be wary.

Robert C. Jones

War is forcing some other govrnment to submit to the will of a foreign power. COIN is forcing some populace to submit to a situation it finds intollerable, and that can be by either a foreign (resistance insurgency) or domestic power (revolution or separatist insurgency). The difference may seem subtle to many, but it is significant.

Too often where foreign powers struggle most is that they assume that the ability to succeed at the former automatically converts to success at the latter, but the two are completely unconnected. If what one forced through war onto some foreign government is deemed acceptable to the affected populace, than one’s COIN efforts are likely to be relatively easy (consider US post WWII occupations of Germany and Japan); if however, what one has forced through war (or coercion or undue influence) onto some government is deemed unacceptable, then no amount of COIN is likely to result in peaceful, natural stability (such as in Vietnam and in Afghanistan).

Understanding this fundamental aspect of the nature of such conflict is far more important than possessing a sophisticated process for modeling the character of the resistnace to one’s actions. “Might” may well “make right” in State on State conflicts, but will only buy one a ticket of admission to an insurgency. Our frustrations in recent conflicts are not due to our inablity to assess WHAT was going on around us, but rather due primarily to our unwillingness to accept WHY it was going on around us. This not because insurgency is more complex or complicated or dangerous than war. It is just because governments refuse to think of insurgency differently than war.

When we seek to control the outcome, and pick an outcome that is unacceptable to a significant portion of the populace, there arises an unsuppressable energy of resistance. One can suppress the fighters through the applicaiton of sufficient effort, but such effects will only be temporary until such time as that resistant energy subsides. Understanding what it is the people are resisting and why they resist gives one the best appreciation for how strong and durable that energy is apt to be.

In Afghanistan my assessment is that resistant energy is growing stronger. The more we push against it, the stronger it grows. Assess this energy, not one’s objective metrics of progress in programs designed to suppress it. The programs are growing. So is the resistant energy.