Counter-Unconventional Warfare Is the Way of the Future. How Can We Get There?
10.23.2014 at 09:35pm
Counter-Unconventional Warfare Is the Way of the Future. How Can We Get There? – By Robert A. Newson, Defense in Depth
This commentary comes courtesy of Captain Robert A. Newson, CFR’s U.S. Navy fellow and a SEAL officer. He argues that the newly outlined “Counter-Unconventional Warfare” strategy will be the best way to counter the emerging threat of hybrid warfare witnessed most recently in Ukraine. Captain Newson acknowledges that this new mode of warfare will be difficult to adopt—yet failing to do so will carry much worse consequences…
I am so tired of hearing some Navy guy with Seal behind his name create a new language to intellectually elevate himself and say this is the way of the future. He doesn’t get it. Special Operations are necessary but Special Operations folks up against regular forces with air, tanks and artillery and they get their butts kicked. Hybrid warfare, counter unconvential warfare? A fight is is fight, you do what you have to do to win. American soldiers have always been able to adapt. Someone has to have their backs. Sounds to me like the author has not been in a fight against other regular forces. Your strategy speaks to “lets get by on the cheap”. Why don’t you develop a strategy that overwhelms your potential enemies and puts the word Defeat or Win in your language. I don’t like the way you think!
The U.S. has conducted C-UW for an extended period during the Cold War. It was largely a UW fight between two opposing ideologies that were incompatible. Unfortunately the C-UW white paper limits itself to our legacy COIN and FID doctrines, and fails to break new ground. These doctrines will always have relevance, but assuming the character of the threat is different in some regards, that would imply a need to break new ground. If you disagree with my assumption that the character of UW has not changed, then the paper is sufficient as written.
However, looking are continued inability to achieve our aims with our existing COIN and FID doctrines, that indicates we need to change. We tend to confuse temporary tactical victories during our FID and COIN operations as progress, when recent history tells us repeated that those victories are too often fleeting in nature. We also tend to ignore how our adversaries are using UW to make progress over time. As the author knows these are not wars of mass, where we can apply mass against a specific decisive point and achieve our aims. Mass will always play a role at the tactical level for short duration, but deploying a large number of ground force or throwing billions of dollars at a problem will neither solve, nor is the approach sustainable. While we have the capabilities, probably 70% of the doctrine we need to prepare our forces, we do not have a good strategic appreciation of the challenge. We do not readily accept critical assessments of our current operational and strategic approaches. We also do not have the necessary authorities and approvals needed to rapidly adapt to how the threat adapts to us. We are still largely stuck with a legacy Cold War system of Title 10 authorities.
We need to expand our view on this topic if we are going to make progress.
A way to understand why counter-unconventional warfare may, indeed, be the way of the future:
a. The United States, post-the Cold War, adopted an expansionist strategy (think, for example, of “engagement and enlargement”); the purpose of which was — and still is — to gain greater power, influence and control over the human and other resources of the world.
b. The manner by which this political objective was/is to be achieved was/is via (1) the initial transformation of such lesser states and societies as those contained in the Greater Middle East and via (2) the further transformation of such great powers as Russia and China; all to be transformed/further transformed more along modern western political, economic and social lines.
c. For their part, certain entities within the Greater Middle East — and within China and Russia — sought/seek to prevent the United States from gaining such greater power, influence and control over their human and other resources.
d. The manner by which these entities seek to prevent our such expansionist efforts (much as we sought to prevent the expansion of Soviet/communist influence during the Cold War) was/is via the common strategy of “containment” and/or “roll back;” an integral part of which was, is and could be the adoption and use of unconventional/hybrid warfare ways, means and methods.
e. Given these facts and circumstances, then our “whole of government” and “political warfare” mission becomes:
1. How to counter/overcome, specifically, the unconventional/hybrid warfare ways, means and methods that our opponents are using/may use to resist our expansionist efforts.
2. How to counter/overcome, generally, their common “containment/roll back” strategies — designed and adopted to achieve this same end.
3. How to, in spite of such resistance, move forward to transform/further transform these states and societies anyway and, thereby,
4. Gain, as we desire, greater direct — or indirect — power, influence and control over their human and other resources.
Bill M, below, suggests that, to be effective, we may need to think outside the box.
This would, indeed, seem to be appropriate, given the post-Cold War role-reversal that I have outlined above.
Yes, Cold War style deterrence is a form “countering” anything ones adversary might be planning, or doing. To include UW.
When I first teed up the concept of C-UW here on Small Wars back in 2008 I was thinking more about how we counter in a more comprehensive and appropriate way the UW strategy of AQ than we continue to do with our counter tactic approach of CT and BPC.
We have been far too symptomatic, and essentially working to suppress those symptoms. Predictably our tactical efforts are actually being counter productive strategically.
C-UW bundles actors by their primary purpose for action, not their shared ideology, tactics or affiliations. C-UW seeks to out compete the UW actor for influence with the aggrieved populace targeted by the UW actor and offer them less disruptive approaches for addressing their reasonable concerns with governance in support of diplomatic pressure. C-UW works towards reducing the negative energy in the system.
We will do many of the same tactics, but with new focus, priority and purpose.
Hans Morganthau — 1967 — in his “To Intervene or Not To Intervene:”
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam/morgenthau.htm
“The United States and the Soviet Union face each other not only as two great powers which in the traditional ways compete for advantage. They also face each other as the fountainheads of two hostile and incompatible ideologies, systems of government and ways of life, each trying to expand the reach of its respective political values and institutions and to prevent the expansion of the other.”
Post-the Cold War, the United States came to be the only great power left that sought to advance (both through war and through other means) its ideology, its system of government and its way of life — and the only great power left that sought, via these methods, to expand the reach of its political, economic and social values and institutions; these such efforts being undertaken so as to gain greater access to, and greater power and control over, more of the world’s human and other resources.
It is against this backdrop, I suggest, that we must look at the more-recent “countering” efforts and approaches (to include political and unconventional warfare) that have been made by such less-powerful entities as Russia, China and Iran. Currently these nations — working together and/or separately and with other state and/or non-state actors — seek to prevent the further advance of our ideology, our system of government and our way of life, and seek to prevent the further expansion of our political, economic and social values and institutions; thereby preventing, they believe, the United States from gaining greater access to, and greater power and control over, the human and other resources contained (1) within their regions and (2) within the world.
Thus:
a. As the United States, post-the Cold War, has attempted to use the appeal of its ideology, system of government and way of life, etc., (the “shining house on the hill” approach) as a “political warfare” means/methods to advance its hegemonic(?) agenda (outlined above),
b. Various less-powerful entities have banded together — in classic “balancing” fashion — to counter our such efforts; herein, using political and unconventional warfare approaches of their own. These such approaches often being based on (1) the appeal of their own, more-indigenous/”close to home” identities and (2) the appeal of their own (albeit outdated) “shining houses on the hill” (ex: the Russian Empire; the Islamic Caliphate).
Is it from this hegemonic/anti-hegemonic-classic “balancing” viewpoint, that I have attempted to provide above, that we might better understand, and better study and address, the contemporary political and unconventional warfare problems, challenges, etc., that we face in the current era?
The more I think about it the less I understand “hybrid warfare”. So hybrid warfare is supposed to be a combination of UW and CW, right? So, it’s not new. It’s not even unusual. In all fact it seems so common as to be undeserving of a distinction. One could say, if one wanted to be ultra-conservative and recent, that it has been the norm ever since OSS went behind the lines in Europe.
The other thing I don’t quite understand is how UW is going to be “turned against the US”. I suppose one could construe AQ/IS recruitment and incitement of domestic terrorism as a form of UW. But I am not seeing a game changer, sky is falling, we can’t deal kind of argument here. Other than that, C-UW would be mostly a point-counter-point kind of strategy from us, which may have its place in the strategic tool box, but isn’t exactly a game changer. After all, isn’t that the sort of thing the all of the Cold War proxy games were about?
So…to paraphrase a college professor of mine, I don’t see an original hypothesis in this essay.
As for UW related to Russia, China, and Iran, Dave Maxwell and Outlaw have argued similarly that both Russia and China are pushing new forms of UW. Outlaw points out that the authoritarian nature of all three governments allows expedited coordination of such UW without the controversy that often accompanies Western whole of government and election politics-driven approaches. However, this argument falls short insofar as only adversary-inflicted kinetic warfare is likely to have incontrovertible immediate strategic effects on our NATO or Asian friends. Adversary UW efforts that are less than fully kinetic tend to alienate and consolidate the resolve of affected nations, meaning ultimately these means of UW will not matter much because they fail to win regional and world positive responses.
Nobody is fooled when Russians say their troops are on vacation or imply they are independent contractors hired by locally-oppressed peoples of Russian ancestry. Likewise, Chinese “lawfare” is unlikely to win favor in international law. Adversary UW means alone are more important as long-term means of building homegrown consensus for why Russia, China, or Iran are doing what they do. Our counter-UW efforts involving whole of government sanctions and (should I say it) sabotage may actually hurt our standing in the court of adversary and international opinion while having only temporary effects or even spurring adversaries to more drastic kinetic actions. Ultimately, however, countering UW comes down to conventional deterrence and credible Joint forces to include Army/Marine armored and light forces to stop or deter aggression with support from the air, sea, and multi-domain air defenses.
The major issue for the U.S. in any kinetic conflict is the combination of the tyranny of distance and the GRAMM capabilities of all three major adversaries. However, even given the extensive nature of A2/AD in the Pacific, China would have great difficulty consolidating gains from such UW attacks. In contrast in Europe, Russia (or China in North Korea) could easily exploit UW and missile attacks by simply driving across borders in dispersed armor rather than sailing amphibious forces one hundred (or more to the Senkakus, or mainland Japan and Philippines) miles under constant air and sea attack in easily-targeted Chinese sea and aircraft targets. Outlaw noted this elsewhere:
Well that and enemy armor sounds to me like weapons that our counter-UW would be powerless to halt while prepositioned and deployed regular forces could deal with them along with air and sea domain systems. It’s well and good to observe Russian and Chinese UW philosophies but the later UW phases that seriously should concern us are those involving actual kinetic attacks of places like Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, and NATO countries in east Europe. Unless the U.S. and coalition partners are better prepared than some minimally-capable ground rapid deployment force and counter-UW speed bump in both theaters, the long-term consequences may be far more serious.
The conventional Army is the service best able to overcome these capabilities through company-sized armored slice prepositioning protected by air and missile defenses given the inherent hardening and rapid dispersion of the armored systems. Others services located in port or on local airfields are larger and softer targets vulnerable to surprise missile attack. Rotating Army elements can secure multiple-country prepositioning sites augmented by lighter elements airlifted to join our prepositioned armor and allies to hold points of entry until sea-deployed forces arrive. It is much easier to move armor intratheater distance to “unknown/unknowable” locations at required times. Let’s face it, the adversaries and likely theaters of most wars that matter to us in terms of vital interests are known. The more nations we preposition small armored forces, the more instant the coalition of the willing when adversary missiles start to fly.
When most adversary nations other than China and Russia have under $10 billion in annual defense spending, it doesn’t require much math to calculate that they won’t field large modern armored and stealth aircraft forces, or capable navies within a decade plus. If new adversary states start to emerge, the unknowable starts to become better known. When half of Russian aircraft fall out of the sky in India and China must steal to gain technology that they then can’t reverse engineer or manufacture, we should be less concerned about future state and non-state technology and UW advances and more worried about getting credible defenses there in time as a “firstest with the mostest” deterrent with “there” being countries being attacked…not the deep interior of nuclear-armed nations.