If you look at our “Interesting Links” down towards the bottom of the right side of the page, you will see a link to a blog called Wars, Numbers and Human Losses with the byline “The Truth Counts”: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/
This is the blog of Professor of Economics Michael Spagat of England’s Royal Holloway University. He is American. We think highly of Dr. Spagat’s work. In particular, there a series of blog posts that publish the lectures of his course “Economics of Warfare.” A look at the first lecture is worthwhile: economics-of-warfare-lecture-1
Slides 13 & 14 on the causes of casualties among civilians in Iraq.
Slide 20 is damn interesting. More on civilian casualties over the first years of the Iraq War.
For those few who have read my book America’s Modern Wars, I do address civilian casualties, primarily in Chapter 9 “Rules of Engagement and Measurements of Brutality.”
I don’t think I have much more to add to this without getting very sarcastic. Note that they refer to it as a “conservative estimate.” Something does not add up somewhere (either their loss estimates are way too high or their force size estimates have been way too low).
Slow progress in retaking Mosul and low casualties: mosul-battle
A couple of points that caught my attention:
“Baghdad doesn’t release official casualty figures, but some medics estimate that it is at least in the low dozens.”
“As of late October, US officials said ISIS had lost roughly 900 fighters.”
From 17 October to 1 November, 2,400 precision bombs, artillery rounds, missiles, and rockets were launched into the Mosul area.
So, Iraqi casualties less than 60?…..I have some doubts about the claimed 900 ISIL fighters killed.
Now….tempted to count number of bombs, artillery rounds, etc. per ISIL fighter killed….but not sure this is a particularly meaningful metric.
Anyhow, Mosul is effectively isolated. The main roads have been cut. I gather there is a open area of desert to the west that is not occupied, but any significant movement in the open with our airplanes and drones overhead is probably not advisable. This is fundamentally a mop-up operation, and not surprisingly, it is going slow and with low casualties. We shall see if they take the city in 6 weeks or so.
I still wonder how many ISIL fighters they actually left behind in Mosul.
The guy third on that list served 7 years in prison for taking $2.4 million in bribes. A pretty sad end to a career. He also supposedly shot down Col. Toon (and they made a documentary of this dog fight).
This article lacks the depth of the nicely done article in the Armata Tank vs the M-1 Abrams Tank and the TOW missile. A few points:
F-15C Eagle is now nearly 40 years old.
It may be in service for another 20 years.
The Flanker-E clearly has the advantage at low speeds.
The F-15C and F-15E have the advantage at long ranges.
I gather the author considers them overall roughly equal.
But the lines that catch my attention are:
“More likely to happen is that a F-15 would run into a Su-35 operated by some Third World despot. The pilots are not likely to have the training, tactics or experience to fight against an American aviator with a realistic chance of winning.”
I am not sure which “Third World despots” he is considering for his analysis. Indonesia is a democracy. Indonesia is not on bad terms with the U.S. I gather only Russia has the SU-35 with China and Indonesia having ordered them. Indonesia is using them to replace their aging fleet of U.S. F-5E Tiger IIs. The initial buy is something like 8 planes. Perhaps Algeria, Egypt, India, Pakistan, or Vietnam may purchase them at some point, but these are also not countries we are likely to conflict with. It does not appear that places like North Korea, Venezuela, and what remains of the government of Syria is going to obtain them (although Russia deployed at least 4 Su-35s in Syria). I think the author of the article probably needs to re-examine who is actually going to have and use these aircraft. So far, it seems to be only Russia, China (24 of them) and Indonesia (8 of them).
A2/AD stands for anti-access/aerial denial. There is a recently published article from The National Interest that laid out a potential scenario concerning such an effort in the Baltic Sea. It is only 4-pages and makes for a good read: Entering the Bear’s Lair: Russia’s A2/D2 Bubble in the Baltic Sea
There are a number of NATO members on the Baltic Sea: Denmark, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Non-NATO members are Sweden, Finland and Russia.
Kaliningrad is part of Russia. It is the old German city of Konigsberg and surrounding former Prussian territory. It was given to the Soviet Union at the end of World War II and they attached it to Russian SFSR (which became the independent country of Russia in 1991). The Kaliningrad Oblast had a population of 941,873 in 2010. It is named after the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Mikhail Kalinin (1975-1946), one of the original Bolsheviks.
This keys off of the previous post by Shawn about the “Third Offset Strategy,” of which A2/AD is a part of.
Lockheed Upbeat Despite F-35 Losing Dogfight To Red Baron (Image by DuffelBlog)
Dan Grazier and Mandy Smithberger provide a detailed run down of the current status of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) over at the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). The Air Force recently declared its version, the F-35A, combat ready, but Grazer and Smithberger make a detailed case that this pronouncement is “wildly premature.”
The Pentagon’s top testing office warns that the F-35 is in no way ready for combat since it is “not effective and not suitable across the required mission areas and against currently fielded threats.”
As it stands now, the F-35 would need to run away from combat and have other planes come to its rescue, since it “will need support to locate and avoid modern threats, acquire targets, and engage formations of enemy fighter aircraft due to outstanding performance deficiencies and limited weapons carriage available (i.e., two bombs and two air-to-air missiles).”
The F-35’s prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, is delivering progressively upgraded versions of the aircraft in blocks, but the first fully-combat operational block will not be delivered until 2018. There are currently 175 operational F-35s with limited combat capability, with 80 more scheduled for delivery in 2017 and 100 in 2018. However, the Government Accountability Office estimates that it will cost $1.7 billion to retroactively upgrade these 335 initial F-35s to full combat ready status. Operational testing and evaluation of those rebuilt aircraft won’t be completed until 2021 and they will remain non-combat capable until 2023 at the earliest, which means that the original 355 F-35s won’t really be fully operational for at least seven more years, or 22 years after Lockheed was awarded the development and production contract in 2001. And this is only if the JSF Program and Lockheed manage to hit their current targets with a program—estimated at $1.5 trillion over its operational life, the most expensive weapon in U.S. history—characterized by delays and cost overruns.
With over $400 billion in sunk costs already, the F-35 program may have become “too big to fail,” with all the implications that phrase connotes. Countless electrons have been spun assessing and explaining this state of affairs. It is possible that the problems will be corrected and the F-35 will fulfill the promises made on its behalf. The Air Force continues to cast it as the centerpiece of its warfighting capability 20 years from now.
Moreover, the Department of Defense has doubled-down on the technology-driven Revolution in Military Affairs paradigm with its Third Offset Strategy, which is premised on the proposition that advanced weapons and capabilities will afford the U.S. continued military dominance into the 21st century. Time will tell if the long, painful saga of the F-35 will be a cautionary tale or a bellwether.
Keying off Shawn’s previous post…if the DOD figures are accurate this means:
In about two years, we have killed 45,000 insurgents from a force of around 25,000.
This is around 100% losses a year
This means the insurgents had to completely recruit an entire new force every year for the last two years
Or maybe we just shot everyone twice.
It is clear the claimed kills are way too high, or the claimed strength is too low, or a little bit of both
We are getting three kills per sortie.
Now, I have not done an analysis of kills per sorties in other insurgencies (and this would be useful to do), but I am pretty certain that this is unusually high.
We are killing almost a 1,000 insurgents (not in uniform) for every civilian we are killing.
Even if I use the Airwars figure of 1,568 civilians killed, this is 29 insurgents for every civilian killed.
Again, I have not an analysis of insurgents killed per civilian killed in air operations (and this would be useful to do), but these rates seem unusually low.
It appears that there are some bad estimates being made here. Nothing wrong with doing an estimate, but something is very wrong if you are doing estimates that are significantly off. Some of these appear to be off.
This is, of course, a problem we encountered with Iraq and Afghanistan and is discussed to some extent in my book America’s Modern Wars. It was also a problem with the Soviet Army in World War II, and is something I discuss in some depth in my Kursk book.
It would be useful to develop a set of benchmarks from past wars looking at insurgents killed per sorties, insurgents killed per civilian killed in air operations (an other types of operations), insurgents killed compared to force strength, and so forth.
If you scroll down the right hand side of the blog (depending on what device you are using to read this) you will see a section called categories. Click on “Air Power” and there have been 14 posts on the subject made in this blog, starting with my post “Defeating an Insurgency by Air.” These posts have resulted in two articles, one in the History News Network: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161601 and one in the Small Wars Journal: http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/airpower-just-part-of-the-counterinsurgency-equation
Anyhow, these categories often lump together a series of related discussion that is otherwise scattered across the blog. It is probably worthwhile to occasionally check out the posts by category and peruse the whole collection of blogs under that particular category.
