Category Estimating Insurgent Force Size

We probably need to keep talking about Afghanistan

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Shawn posted a very nice summary a couple of days ago. It is worth reading if you have not already: Meanwhile in Afghanistan

Recent article reports the same trends: Afghan-government-lost-2-percent-territory

A couple of things get my attention in all this:

  1. They are talking about control of territory. I believe control of population is a lot better metric.
    1. One notes in Shawn’s write up that control of population is 68.5% (vice 61.3% of area).
  2. The insurgent level of activity is very high:
    1. 5,523 Afghan Army and police killed (15,000 casualties)
    2. 22,733 incidents from 8/1/2015 to 8/15/2016

Based on Chapter 11 (Estimating Insurgent Force Size) of my book America’s Modern Wars, working backward from this incident data would mean that there are something like 60,000 – 80,000 full-time and part-time insurgents operating. There is a lot comparing apples to oranges to get there: for example, how are they counting incidents in Afghanistan vice how were they counting incidents in the past cases we use for this estimate, what is the mix of full-time and part-time insurgents, how active and motivated are the insurgents, and so forth; but that level of activity is similar to the level of activity in Iraq at its worse (26,033 incidents in 2005, 45,330 in 2006 and 19,125 in 2007 according to one count). We had over 180,000 U.S. and coalition troops there to deal with that. The Afghani’s have 170,000 Army and Air Force or around 320,000 if you count police (and we did not count police in our database unless there were actively involved in counterinsurgent work). The 5,500+ Afghan Army and police killed a year indicates a pretty active insurgency. We lost less than 5,500 for the entire time we were in Iraq. The low wounded-to-killed ratio in the current Afghan data may well be influenced by who they choose to report as wounded and how they address lightly wounded (as discussed in Chapter 15, Casualties, in my upcoming book War by Numbers). Don’t know what current U.S. Army estimates are of Afghan insurgent strength.

Now, in Chapter Six of my book America’s Modern Wars, we developed a force ratio model based upon 83 historical cases (see chart at top of this post). It was very dependent on the cause of the insurgency, whether it was based on a central idea (like nationalism) or was regional or factional, or whether it was based on a overarching idea (like communism). I don’t still don’t really know the nature of the Afghan insurgency, and we were never funded to study this insurgency (we were only funded for Iraq work). So, I have not done the in-depth analysis of the Afghan insurgency that I did for Iraq. But…….nothing here looks particularly positive.

We never did an analysis of stalemated insurgencies. It could be done, although there are not that many cases of these. One could certainly examine any insurgency that lasts more than 15 years for this purpose. Does a long stalemated insurgency mean that the government (or counterinsurgents) eventually win? Or does a long stalemated insurgency mean that the insurgents eventually win? I don’t know. I would have to go back through our database of 100+ cases, update the data, sort out the cases and then I could make some predictions. That takes time and effort, and right now my effort is focused elsewhere. Is anyone inside DOD doing this type of analysis? I doubt it. Apparently a stalemate means that you can now pass the problem onto the next administration. While it solves the immediate political problem, is really does not answer the question of whether we are winning or losing. Is what we are doing good enough that this will revolve in our favor in the next ten years, or do we need to do more? I think this is the question that needs to be addressed.

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations

Keying off Shawn’s previous post…if the DOD figures are accurate this means:

  1. In about two years, we have killed 45,000 insurgents from a force of around 25,000.
    1. This is around 100% losses a year
    2. This means the insurgents had to completely recruit an entire new force every year for the last two years
      1. Or maybe we just shot everyone twice.
    3. It is clear the claimed kills are way too high, or the claimed strength is too low, or a little bit of both
  2. We are getting three kills per sortie.
    1. 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.
  3. We are killing almost a 1,000 insurgents (not in uniform) for every civilian we are killing.
    1. Even if I use the Airwars figure of 1,568 civilians killed, this is 29 insurgents for every civilian killed.
    2. 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.

Islamic State Fighter Estimates for Mosul

An article just quoted an estimate for the number of Islamic State fighters in and around Mosul: Retaking Mosul

They estimate that “IS fighters in Mosul, meanwhile, vary from a few thousand to “not more than 10,000.” according to the coalition.”

They also note that the current population of Mosul is estimated at between 500,000 and one million. Also: “Al-Hashimi, the analyst, estimated retaking Mosul would require 80,000 men, of whom 15,000 are expected to come from the government-sanctioned Shiite militias.’

Also note: “An official…said there was not yet a detailed plan for retaking Mosul. “for now, the plan is simply that Mosul is next.'”

Anyhow, estimating the size of an insurgency or irregular force is somewhat of a challenge. Part of the challenge is that a significant percent (the majority?) of the force and the support personnel for the force is not “full-time”….so to say. They are people that are activated irregularly and as needed. I ended up with an entire chapter in my book America’s Modern Wars on estimating insurgent force size. In the end, I concluded that you are probably best estimating the force size based upon their levels of activity (incidents occurred and people killed) compared to other insurgencies. This did produce estimates higher than the official U.S. DOD estimates for Iraq and Afghanistan. In retrospect, it appear our estimates were closer to reality.

Of course, all these “part-time” and “casual” insurgents disappear back into the population when you occupy an area and are available to be called upon again.

Pay Cut

Latest estimates for ISIL strength: Pay cut

A few things that caught my attention:

“U.S. intelligence estimates of the number of Islamic State fighters, which for the first 17 months of coalition operations ranged from 19,000 to 31,000, had been revised to 20,000 to 25,000 – a level he said the group would struggle to maintain.”

“”They have been able to replenish their forces at roughly the same rate as we’ve been able to kill their forces. That’s hard to sustain,” he said.”

It does not state, but I wonder how much of the pay cut for Jihadists is due to declining oil prices. Also, do they have health care and a retirement plan?

 

 

Bleeding an Insurgency to Death

The most meaningful quote I know of about the value of historical study is “The lessons of history are that nobody learns the lessons of history.” Some may write this off as just cynicism, but unfortunately, “history repeats itself,” and we have seen this all too often. There is 3,400 years of documented military history, and this rather extensive data base of material is often ignored; and when it is accessed, often it is to grab an example or two that supports whatever pre-conceived notion that the user already has. It is a discipline that has been poorly used and often abused. Part of our interest in quantified historical analysis is that we want to study the norms, not the exceptions; not the odd case or two, but what are the overall pattern and trends. Sometimes I think the norms get lost in all the interesting and insightful case studies.

Anyhow, there was a posting in another blog that my fellow blogger, Dr. Woodford, brought to my attention that included the formula 30,000 – 25,000 = 30,000. The link to his post is below:

http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2016/01/07/how-many-bombs-did-the-united-states-drop-in-2015/#

Mr. Zenko says in part:

The problem with this “kill-em’-all with airstrikes” rule, is that it is not working. Pentagon officials claim that at least 25,000 Islamic State fighters have been killed (an anonymous official said 23,000 in November, while on Wednesday, Warren added “about 2,500” more were killed in December.) Remarkably, they also claim that alongside the 25,000 fighters killed, only 6 civilians have “likely” been killed in the seventeen-month air campaign. At the same time, officials admit that the size of the group has remained wholly unchanged. In 2014, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated the size of the Islamic State to be between 20,000 and 31,000 fighters, while on Wednesday, Warren again repeated the 30,000 estimate. To summarize the anti-Islamic State bombing calculus: 30,000 – 25,000 = 30,000.

This post brings back a few memories of our work on Iraq in 2004-2006. If you note in my book America’s Modern Wars there is an entire chapter on “Estimating Insurgent Strength” (pages 115-120). Part of our concern, which we briefly documented on page 116, was that the officially release estimated of insurgent strength remained at 5,000 forever. It was a constant figure, no matter how nasty the situation got. We really did not believe it. Then, when everything fell apart and the insurgents grabbed Mosul (sound familiar?), the estimate was revised upwards to 20,000. This was better, but it still seemed too low to us, especially as the U.S. was claiming something like 12,000 insurgents killed a year. Needless to say, if they were killing 60% of the insurgents a year, this was an insurgency that was going to quickly be bled to death. As we now know with a decade of hindsight, this did not happen.

This was the reason for section in my book called “Bleeding an Insurgency to Death (pages 156-158). Needless to say, something was wrong with the math somewhere, and our own estimate of insurgent strength was something like 60,000 (see page 116). As Mr. Zenko’s blog post points out, something remains wrong with the math in the air war against ISIL.