Category Insurgency & Counterinsurgency

Insurgencies, Civil Conflicts, And Messy Endings

[© Reuters/Navesh Chitrakar]

The question of how insurgencies end is crucially important. There is no consensus on how to effectively wage counterinsurgency much less end one on favorable terms. Even successful counterinsurgencies may not end decisively. In the Dupuy Insurgency Spread Sheets (DISS) database of 83 post-World War II insurgencies, interventions, and stabilization operations, 42 are counterinsurgent successes and 11 had indeterminate conclusions. Of the counterinsurgent successes, about 1/3 failed to bring about stability or achieve long-term success.

George Frederick Willcoxon, an economist with the United Nations, recently looked into the question of why up to half of countries that suffer civil conflict relapse into violence between the same belligerents within a decade. He identified risk factors for reversion to war by examining the end of civil conflict and post-war recovery in 109 cases since 1970, drawing upon data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the Polity IV project and the World Bank.

His conclusions were quite interesting:

Long-standing international conventional wisdom prioritizes economic reforms, transitional justice mechanisms or institutional continuity in post-war settings. However, my statistical analyses found that political institutions and military factors were actually the primary drivers of post-war risk. In particular, post-war states with more representative and competitive political systems as well as larger armed forces were better able to avoid war relapse.

These findings challenge a growing reluctance to consider early elections and political liberalization as critical steps for reestablishing authoritative, legitimate and sustainable political order after major armed conflict.

The non-results are perhaps as interesting as the results. With one exception discussed below, there is no evidence that the economic characteristics of post-war countries strongly influence the likelihood they will return to war. Income per capita, development assistance per capita, oil rents as a percent of GDP, overall unemployment rates and youth unemployment rates are not associated with civil war relapse.

Equally significant is there is no evidence that the culture, religion or geopolitics of the Middle East and North Africa will impede post-war recovery. I introduced into the statistical models measures for Islam, Arab culture and location in the region. None of these variables showed statistically significant correlations with the risk of war relapse since 1970, holding everything else constant, suggesting that such factors should not distinctively handicap post-war stabilization, recovery and transition in Iraq, Libya, Syria or Yemen.

Willcoxon’s research suggested a correlation between numbers of security forces and successfully preventing new violence.

Perhaps not surprisingly, larger security sectors reduce the risk of war relapse. For every additional soldier in the national armed forces per 1,000 people, the risk of relapse is about seven percent lower. Larger militaries are better able to deter renewed rebel activity, as well as prevent or reduce other forms of conflict such as terrorism, organized crime and communal violence.

He also found that the types of security forces had an influence as well.

The presence of outside troops also has significant influence on risk. The analysis lends support to a well-established finding in the political science literature that the presence of United Nations peacekeepers lowers the risk of conflict relapse. However, the presence of non-U.N. foreign troops almost triples the risk of relapsing back into civil war. There are at least two potential interpretations on this latter finding: Foreign troops may intervene in especially difficult circumstances, and therefore their presence indicates the post-war episodes most likely to fail; or foreign troops, particularly occupying armies, generate their own conflict risk.

These findings are strikingly similar to TDI’s research that suggests that higher force ratios of counterinsurgent troops to insurgents correlate with counterinsurgent success. You can check Willcoxon’s paper out here.

Economics of Warfare 13-3

This is the third and last posting on the thirteenth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

My first post on his lecture did not get past his second page as I ended up pontificating about his two rather significant statements on data. They were:

  1. To get anywhere with empirical research you need to have a reasonably large number of data points. (This is a basic fact about empirical analysis that many students beginning research projects overlook)
  2. So we need to ask ourselves — where are all of these data points going to come from?

My second post covered the part when he looked at Colombia. The rather interesting conclusion from that was (slide 18): “Dube and Vargas [the study authors] calculate that the fall in coffee prices between 1997 and 2003 translates into an additional 1013 deaths in coffee growing areas….”

On slide 26 of his lecture he starts an examination of a study done by Blazzi and Blattman that does a cross-country approach examining changes in commodity prices to analyze the impact of income on armed conflict (and although Dr. Spagat is American…he has disciplined himself to spell it “analyse” in the British fashion).

The next slide (slide 26) talks about three facets of their work, looking at 1) opportunity cost (making a decent living vice rebelling), 2) state capacity, and 3) state prize. This last idea caught my attention because it harkens back to the work of Feierabend & Feierabend and Ted Gurr. In their seminal work done in the 1960s on causes of revolution they found that political violence was less in really poor countries than in developing countries. Here they are looking whether a state is so poor that there is no incentive to rebel because of the small “prize” you will win if you succeed. Certainly a viewpoint more in line with an economists’ training. I believe Feierabend & Feierabend (a political scientist and psychologist if I remember correctly) concluded that if you are struggling to survive in a poor country, this may take priority. Political revolt is luxury afforded by a developing economy (for example, the Russian economy before World War I). I am not sure I buy into the “state prize” explanation. I don’t really think people revolt for profit.

The next slide (slide 27) is also interesting, as it talked about 1) conflict onset, 2) conflict ending and 3) conflict intensity. As Dr. Spagat states: “Many people mix these things together so this attention to detail is welcome.” These first two points go back to areas I wanted to examine with our insurgency studies which was (to quote myself):

First, future analysis should be clearly focused, so that it addresses one of the three distinct time frames:
a. Before an insurgency starts (pre-insurgency)
b. In the early stages of an insurgency (proto-insurgency)
c. As an insurgency has clearly developed (developed insurgency)
(see Chapter 24: “Where Do We Go From Here” in American’s Modern Wars, pages 294-298)

 

And of course, withdrawal and war termination (see Chapter 19: “Withdrawal and War Termination” in AMW, pages 237-242).

Needless to say, we could never locate budget to examine the early stages of an insurgency (pre-insurgency and proto-insurgency) or examine how they end (which in 2008…I thought was kind of an important subject)..

Anyhow, the results from the Blazzi and Blattman study are summarized in the next slides. In short they are:
“…suggests that there is no connection between price shocks to exports on the onset of armed conflict (or coups)”
“…weak evidence…that positive export price shocks help to end wars…”
“…rather weak evidence…that positive export price shocks help to decrease (a lot) the number of battle deaths in ongoing wars.”
“The opportunity cost and state capacity ides do get some support.”
“The state prize idea gets no support at all” (and this is really not surprising, as I thought that construct was kind of “batty” to start with…Lenin was not in it for the money)

 

Anyhow, all great stuff. The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2013.pdf

Predictions

We do like to claim we have predicted the casualty rates correctly in three wars (operations): 1) The 1991 Gulf War, 2) the 1995 Bosnia intervention, and 3) the Iraq insurgency.  Furthermore, these were predictions make of three very different types of operations, a conventional war, an “operation other than war” (OOTW) and an insurgency.

The Gulf War prediction was made in public testimony by Trevor Dupuy to Congress and published in his book If War Comes: How to Defeat Saddam Hussein. It is discussed in my book America’s Modern Wars (AMW) pages 51-52 and in some blog posts here.

The Bosnia intervention prediction is discussed in Appendix II of AMW and the Iraq casualty estimate is Chapter 1 and Appendix I.

We like to claim that we are three for three on these predictions. What does that really mean? If the odds of making a correct prediction are 50/50 (the same as a coin toss), then the odds of getting three correct predictions in a row is 12.5%. We may not be particularly clever, just a little lucky.

On the other hand, some might argue that these predictions were not that hard to make, and knowledgeable experts would certainly predict correctly at least two-thirds of the time. In that case the odds of getting three correct predictions in a row is more like 30%.

Still, one notes that there was a lot of predictions concerning the Gulf War that were higher than Trevor Dupuy’s. In the case of Bosnia, the Joint Staff was informed by a senior OR (Operations Research) office in the Army that there was no methodology for predicting losses in an “operation other than war” (AMW, page 309). In the case of the Iraq casualty estimate, we were informed by a director of an OR organization that our estimate was too high, and that the U.S. would suffer less than 2,000 killed and be withdrawn in a couple of years (Shawn was at that meeting). I think I left that out of my book in its more neutered final draft….my first draft was more detailed and maybe a little too “angry”. So maybe, predicting casualties in military operations is a little tricky. If the odds of a correct prediction was only one-in-three, then the odds of getting three correct predictions in a row is only 4%. For marketing purposes, we like this argument better 😉

Hard to say what are the odds of making a correct prediction are. The only war that had multiple public predictions (and of course, several private and classified ones) was the 1991 Gulf War. There were a number of predictions made and we believe most were pretty high. There was no other predictions we are aware of for Bosnia in 1995, other than the “it could turn into another Vietnam” ones. There are no other predictions we are aware of for Iraq in 2004, although lots of people were expressing opinions on the subject. So, it is hard to say how difficult it is to make a correct prediction in these cases.

P.S.: Yes, this post was inspired by my previous post on the Stanley Cup play-offs.

 

Economics of Warfare 13-2

Continuing the examination today of the thirteenth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

My last post didn’t get past his second page as I ended up pontificating about his two rather significant statements on data. They were:

  1. To get anywhere with empirical research you need to have a reasonably large number of data points. (This is a basic fact about empirical analysis that many students beginning research projects overlook)
  2. So we need to ask ourselves — where are all of these data points going to come from?

The lecture then looks in depth at one country: Colombia. He ends up looking at a paper that measured “commodity prices” compared to civil intensity. They looked at two issues 1) Do higher wages reduce conflict in coffee-growing municipalities (as measured by increased prices in coffee) and 2) does wealth attract violence from armed groups (as measure by oil prices in those municipalities that have oil).  Anyhow, they do find higher levels of violence in coffee growing regions compared to other regions during the time when international coffee prices fell. It also indicated that increases in oil prices did lead to some higher levels of violence for the paramilitaries in Colombia, but these effects were not very large. The rather interesting conclusion (slide 18) is “Dube and Vargas [the study authors] calculate that the fall in coffee prices between 1997 and 2003 translates into an additional 1013 deaths in coffee growing areas….”

Hmm…..I wonder if any of this could apply to growing opium poppies in Afghanistan?

Anyhow, still not finished with this particular lecture, and will pick up discussing the rest of it later. The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2013.pdf

Economics of Warfare 13 – 1

Hope you all have your taxes done….speaking of economics. Anyhow, picking back up on the Economics of Warfare posts by Dr. Spagat. The good news is that these blog posts by me apparently inspired (read: forced) Dr. Spagat to post all 20 of his excellent Economics of Warfare course lectures on his blog.

Starting an examination today of the thirteenth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

The lecture looks in depth at one country, Colombia. Dr. Spagat has done a lot of work there, and even helped set up a non-profit to analyze the Colombian civil wars. These have been the bloodiest series of conflicts in the western hemisphere in the period after World War II. It was through his work on Colombia, and our related work on insurgencies, that we first became acquainted.

Slide two of his lecture starts with the statement that: “To get anywhere with empirical research you need to have a reasonably large number of data points. (This is a basic fact about empirical analysis that many students beginning research projects overlook)”

Actually, it is a basic fact that many in the Army and Defense operations research community overlook!!! I remember getting into discussion with a senior OR practitioner, a retired corporate president who once shared an office with Geroge Kimball of Morse and Kimball fame (Methods of Operations Research, 1951), who tried to make the argument that all you need to 15 good data points. This was at the time we were doing the Bosnia Casualty estimate (see America’s Modern Wars, Appendix II). Needless to say, I strongly disagreed, especially as we were looking at “social science” type data.

The next line in Dr. Spagat’s presentation is: “So we need to ask ourselves — where are all of these data points going to come from?”

This is the issue, and quite simply, the gap that The Dupuy Institute has attempted to fill. For example, Dorothy Clark’s seminal study on Breakpoints (Force Changes to Posture) was based upon only 43 cases [Dorothy K. Clark, Casualties as a Measure of the Loss of Combat Effectiveness of an Infantry Battalion (Operations Research Office, Johns Hopkins University, 1954]. This is not a lot of data points, which of course, she understood. But, producing “data points” requires research, which takes time and money. There are some existing databases publically available that can help with some problems, but for many problems, there is simply not enough data points assembled for any meaningful analysis. There does not seem to be the mechanism in place to make sure that the Army or DOD has the data that it needs for all of its analytical work.

After starting page 2 with two rather significant statements, Dr. Spagat then goes into discussing Colombia in more depth. I will pick this up in a post tomorrow, as this blog post has already gotten long (and preachy).

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2013.pdf

Sending More Troops to Afghanistan

Well, the head of the U.S. Central Command General Joseph Votel says that we need more troops in Afghanistan: Afghanistan-require-more-troops

This is not a particularly surprising statement. We currently have 8,400 there. This does not include U.S. contractors, U.S. police trainers and such, which still have a reduced presence there. I wonder what the proposed level will be. Last month the U.S. Afghanistan commander General John Nicholson said several thousand more troops were needed.

Anyhow, this is not a surprising conclusion. See America’s Modern Wars, in particular the chapter on Afghanistan; although the focus of our analysis was the number of troops required to fight an insurgency, vice the number of foreign trainers needed to support the indigenous troops fighting an insurgency.

I am guessing as both Nicholson and Votel have said it that it is now administration policy.

1979 to present

We try to stay away from politics in this blog, which is hard to do when discussing national security policy. Still, there are enough political and opinion piece websites and blogs out there, that we do not wish to add to the noise! This article by Major Danny Sjursen borders on the edge of being overtly political but I found it very interesting regardless: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165261

I have not read his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge but I did invest parts of two chapters in my book, America’s Modern Wars, discussing the surge in Iraq and its later adaptation to Afghanistan. His book will also be added to my growing reading list (right now I am struggling with getting the final edits to War by Numbers completed on time…and should not be blogging at all).

Anyhow, I do like his theme that U.S. involvement and policies in the Middle East fundamentally started shifted with the events on 1979. I think it is a useful timeline.

 

Troop Increase in Afghanistan?

Nicely prepared article that just reinforces my last post on the subject: Trump Mulls US Troop Surge in Afghanistan

  1. 8,400 U.S. troops and 4,900 from 38 other NATO countries.
  2. 57.2% of the countries 407 districts are under Afghan government control (and it used to be better).
  3. In 2010, the US/NATO peak strength was 130,000

We await a decision, but expect that it will be to increase U.S. troops levels (and keep on keeping on).

Stalemate in Afghanistan

By the way, there is a still a war going on in Afghanistan, by most accounts, it is not going that well; and we probably need to increase our troop levels. On Thursday General John Nicholson, commanding general of NATO forces in Afghanistan, told congress “I believe we are in a stalemate.”: nato-shortfall-troops-afghanistan-us-general

Also: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/u-general-calls-more-troops-003147055.html

And: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/02/09/top-us-general-says-afghanistan-war-at-stalemate-more-troops-needed.html

I have no reason to quibble with that assessment. Victory is certainly not just around the corner.

Some data from these articles:

  1. NATO has 13,300 troops in Afghanstan, about half of them American (8,400)
  2. Afghan losses in the first ten months of 2016 were 6,785 killed, an increase of a third over 2015.
  3. There were 11,500 civilians killed or injured in 2016, the most since the UN began keeping records in 2009 (nearly 3,500 killed and nearly 8,000 wounded).
  4. Afghan government forces control no more than two-thirds of national territory (60% according to another article).
  5. “We have roughly a two-to-one ratio of contractors to soldiers,” said Nicholson.
    1. So, this works out to be 17,000 contractors, 8,400 American troops and 4,900 other NATO troops.
  6. Cost of the 16 year war so far: around 2,000 American lives and $117 billion.

Needless to say, General Johnson has recommended that we increase troop levels there. He has asked for several thousand more. We did have around 100,000 troops there in 2011, now we have less than 10,000.

Timeline for Mosul and Raqqa

OK, we now have a new timeline for the taking of Mosul (and Raqqa): us-commander-mosul-raqqa-retaken-6-months

A few highlights:

  1. U.S. commander in Iraq, U.S. Army Lt. General Stephan Townsend, said “within the next six months I think we’ll see both (the Mosul and Raqqa campaigns) conclude.”
  2. Fight for the western half of Mosul to begin in days.
  3. “But on the ground inside Mosul, Iraqi troops said as they neared the Tigris, IS fighters launched few car bombs and largely fled their advances—unlike the heavy resistance they faced in the first few weeks of combat inside the city.”
  4. “ISIL morphing into an insurgent threat, that’s the future,” Townsend said.
  5. Concerning Raqqa: “What we would expect is that within the next few weeks the city will be nearly completely isolated….”

Anyhow……keep waiting for the point when ISIL realizes that an insurgency can’t hold ground forever against a conventional force and decides to go back to being an guerrilla force. This offensive is taking a very long time.