Category Insurgency & Counterinsurgency

Economics of Warfare 3

Examining the third 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 link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%203.pdf

This one starts with the war in Kosovo (1998-1999), which was actually a successful invention although very poorly done. It does pick on a constant theme of Dr. Spagat’s, which is how to get the correct counts of actual people killed in the conflicts, including civilians. For those of us who actually try to do things like quantitative analysis of insurgencies (for example America’s Modern Wars)….this is very useful. A lot of other people don’t particularly care, sometimes because a particularly high or low number serves their political agenda (or cosmology).

Starting on slide 11, Dr. Spagat discusses Iraq casualty estimates. This, along with Colombia, were the two areas we discussed with him when we were working on our Iraq and insurgency material (2004-2010). He was one of the few people out there doing work similar to ours. He points out that there were two estimates of deaths in Iraq, one of 150,000 and one of 600,000. Needless to say, the lower one was closer to correct. The higher number got heavily broadcast. This whole section is worth reviewing and remembering for any future conflicts. I like the picture on slide 14.

Sorry about this abstract look at some very sad and gruesome statistics.

P.S. Merry Christmas

Economics of Warfare 2

Examining the second 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 link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%202.pdf

It is all good stuff, but we don’t do a lot of work on terrorism, so don’t have any insights to add. We actually don’t have a category for “terrorism” so this is filed under “insurgencies.”

The point that got my attention was on slide 13 where he states: “Mueller and Stewart estimate that the US is spending about $75 billion per year more on terrorism after 9/11 happened than it was spending before 9/11. The real number is almost certainly bigger than this and, possibly, a lot bigger.”

Hmmm…..16 years since 9/11 times $75 = $1.2 trillion. Is this really the whole cost for the Global War on Terror?

Slide 12 gives economic “losses per incident.” The financial losses from 9/11 is estimated at $200 billion. Of course, there was considerable human life lost. Not sure how that is “costed.”

Anyhow, it is always interesting to see what the economists are looking at. It is worth flipping through the entire lecture. It is pretty interesting material.

Economics of Warfare 1

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

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%201.pdf

A couple of highlights:

  1. Slides 13 & 14 on the causes of casualties among civilians in Iraq.
  2. 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.”

So, is it 25,000?

I hate to keep harping on this…..but I do believe in reasonable estimates of opposing forces strength and losses. I am not sure we are doing that.

  1. The U.S. claimed in August that there were 19,000 – 25,000 ISIL:Islamic State strength estimates
    1. I don’t believe I have seen strength estimates from before this time that is more than 25,000: Global Security
    2. About half were in Iraq.
  2. The U.S. now claims there are 12,000 to 15,000 ISIL: white-house-isis-down-to-12000-15000-battle-ready-fighters
    1. This includes 3,000 to 5,000 in Mosul: War updates
  3. The U.S. claims were have killed 50,000 in the last two years: Over 50000 killed
    1. Including 25,000 in the last 11 months: pentagon-counts-isil-dead-refuses-discuss-them
    2. 25,000 – 50,000 = 15,000…meaning they recruited 40,000 new fighters in the last two years?
  4. The U.S. claims were have attrited 75% of ISIL: US-Officials-Say-ISIS-Has-12-000
    1. 15,00 times 4 = 60,000…meaning working backwards this was the ISIL strength….or this includes the 40,000 new recruits added to a strength originally equal to 25,000? This math actually works, if you accept the figure of 40,000 new recruits.
    2. Of course, this is exterminating and replacing the entire ISIL force each year for two years in a row. Can’t really recall the historical president for this.
  5. The UK estimates we have killed 25,000 ISIL: uk-us-number-isis-fighters-killed
    1. This seems more reasonable.

Of course, part of the problem is that ISIL and every other insurgency movement out there does not consists only of full-time fighters. For example (see America’s Modern Wars: Chapter 11: “Estimating Insurgent Force Size”), looking at some the insurgent strength estimates from Vietnam, Cabanas (Mexico) and Shining Path (Peru), we came up with some rules of thumb for determining the mix of insurgents (see page 120):

  1. Full-time insurgents make up 10 to 20% of the force.
  2. Full-time and part-time insurgents are 20 to 50% of the force.
  3. Casual insurgents are 40 to 80% of the force.

This was based on a very limited selection of marginal data and of course, may not be relevant to ISIL, as they have developed a more conventional-like force structure. But, it does bring up the issue that most insurgencies are not only full-time committed fighters, but lots of people that only sometimes active (often regional), and a large collection of people that are only occasionally active (and may become inactive if things are not going well). Also, many of the insurgents are “support personnel” vice fighters. It is an issue that I don’t believe I have seen anyone else attempt to deal with analytically. Our efforts were only preliminary.

Over 50,000 killed

OK…latest estimate from DOD is that they have killed over 50,000 ISIL fighters over the last two years: Body count = 50K+

Here is my post on the subject in August when the count was a mere 45,000: some-back-of-the-envelope-calculations

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).

War Updates

We are not a news site or current affairs site (because it takes too much time)……but…a few things of note in the middle east:

  1. Mosul has still not fallen. Offensive started 17 October….we were on the outskirts of Mosul by the beginning of November, and now in a grind that some said would take 6 to 8 weeks. So far, it appears to be taking longer than that. We are claiming that 2,000 ISIL fighters have been killed or wounded. 2000-Islamic-State-militants-killed-or-injured-in-Mosul-offensive and us-says-2-000-is-fighters-killed-gravely-wounded-in-mosul
  2. The Syrians appear to be pushing hard to take all of Aleppo before the new U.S. president arrives in office. I suspect this is an attempt to get a negotiating advantage in light of what they perceive to be Trump’s attitudes towards Russia and Syria. According to this report, they have at least 85% of the city: thousands-flee-heavy-aleppo-fighting.
  3. ISIL has retaken Palmyra. latest-syria-says-98-percent-east-aleppo-retaken and recaptures-palmyra

The odd claim is the one made in the second article of this link, where Russia Foreign Minister Lavrov claims about the taking of Palmyra by ISIL that: “…it has been staged to give a respite to bandits in eastern Aleppo.” Of course, one person’s freedom fighters is another person’s bandits.

To take a quote from the first article from Lt. General Townsend: “‘At the start of the campaign, we estimated somewhere between at the low end 3,500, at the high end, about 6,000. By our calculations we think we have killed or badly wounded over 2,000. So if you do the math, that’s still 3,000-5,000’ militants remaining in Mosul, Townsend said.”

We assume he is talking 2,000 killed or seriously enough injured to no be able to return to action in the next couple of months….so, maybe 1,000 killed and 1,000 seriously wounded (kind of grabbing numbers out of thin air here). So, total losses are 4,000 – 6,000 if you count all wounded? That is kind of the entire opposing force.

Then there is the estimates that coalition has lost 14,000 killed and wounded since the start of the offensive (see our post at: Casualties in Iraq (November)). Does that mean that trained conventional counterinsurgency forces are losing something like 2.3-to-1 fighting the insurgents. That would be significant if that was the case.

Something if off somewhere in these various numbers. I not sure which number not to believe (although the estimate of insurgent strength has traditionally always been way too low).

World War IV

One of Roger Mickelson’s TMCI briefings is on-line at the Xenophon Group site: World War IV

Don’t know the date of this briefing, but it was fairly recent. I never quite bought into Roger’s construct that World War III was the Cold War….and now we are in World War IV. But I do find it to be an interesting categorization.

The Fatwa on “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders” dated 23 February 1998 is worth reading. It is on slides 16 and 17.

The Xenophon Group is run by John Sloan, a retired Sovietologist and historian. He used to work with Trevor Dupuy’s HERO (Historical Evaluation Research Organization) and played a major role in getting the Kursk project started (which turned into my book Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka). His site is here: http://www.xenophon-mil.org/xenophon.htm

The index to his site is here: http://www.xenophon-mil.org/xenindex.htm

This is worth trolling through. There are all kinds of interesting bits and pieces here. There is a review of my book America’ Modern Wars here: http://www.xenophon-mil.org/politicaleconomy/lawrencemodernwars.htm

All we need is generals who know how to win?

There was an article just published in the blog War is Boring by Andrew Bacevich called “American Generals Have Forgotten How to Win Wars”: american-generals-have-forgotten-how-to-win-wars

It is a long article with three completely different sections. The first section is that somehow or the other, all we have in Iraq and Afghanistan is generals who don’t know how to win. Really? Was that the problem in Korea when General MacArthur was in command and got driven out back from the Yalu and out of North Korea by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA)? His replacement was Matthew Ridgeway, who in World War II was commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps. He did not win in Korea either. Same for the next commander in Korea: Mark Wayne Clark.

Was that the problem with Vietnam, where a succession of generals, Harkins, Westmoreland, Abrams and finally Weyand, commanded? Was Abrams, who relieved Bastogne in World War II and had a tank named after him, one of these generals that did not know how to win? We did win the Gulf War in 1991, we were able to conquer Afghanistan in 2002 with few forces, and we were able to conquer Iraq in 2003. So, since World War II, we have been able to win under the right situation. I don’t think the issue is a “winning” versus a “non-winning” general. Bacevich gives a listing of the 17 commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan since they started. Of the 17 commanders listed, not a single one is a “winning general”? What are the odds of that being the case?

The second part of the article, starting with “Draining which swamp?”, actually makes a lot more sense and it would have been a better article without the first part. It is the nature of the war that is the problem. Napoleon, probably the winning-est general in history (over 60 battles fought), could never figure out how to solve the Spanish ulcer. That ulcer generated a new word: guerilla. It is the nature of guerilla wars and insurgencies that they generate a lack of clear wins.

The British seem to have a reputation as being counterinsurgency experts. They won in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. Yet, when it came to Northern Ireland, the conflict went on for over 30 years and was resolved by a settlement that included the political arm of the provisional IRA as a legitimate political party. Would we consider an arrangement in Afghanistan that included the Taliban as part of the government as a victory? Would we consider including ISIL or Al-Qaeda in a future Iraqi or Syrian government? It is kind of the same thing.

Anyhow, a clear win is sometimes elusive in guerilla wars, even for the British. Not only did they fight for over 30 years in Northern Ireland, but their victory in Malaya included giving the country independence. Seven years after they defeated the Mau Mau in Kenya, they also gave that country independence.  Their results in Palestine in the late 1940s, Cyprus in the 1950s and Aden in the 1960s were even less successful. In the case of Cyprus, the guerilla force leader also became the head of a Cypriot political party. So, the British appear to have a winning problem also.

In our original work on insurgencies, part of what the Center for Army Analysis (CAA) wanted us to do was analyze different tactics and approaches and see what worked and what did not. This become difficult to do analytically, for eventually in almost every single extended guerilla war, most of the counterinsurgents ended up developing over the course of years of fighting many of the same answers, whether they were British, American, French, Portuguese, Soviets, Rhodesians, etc. We could not connect the tactics to the outcomes. The end result we ended up looking at the bigger issue questions, like grand strategies and size of forces involved. This was where we could get an analytical result (marketing alert: See my book America Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam).

Bacevich picks up some of these questions in the second part of his article, where he states “The truth is that some wars aren’t winnable and no one should fight them in the first place.” He then concludes “In sum, a Trump administration seems unlikely to reexamine the conviction that the problems roiling the Greater Middle East will someday, somehow yield to a U.S.-imposed military solution.”

Not sure I agree with that conclusion, but I would strongly argue that understanding and defeating an insurgency is much more complicated than just changing a general. We have certainly changed enough generals in Iraq and Afghanistan that by happenstance one should have won, if it was possible. Some argue that Patreaus did win in Iraq (but he clearly did not in Afghanistan). Did Patreaus forget how to win when he went from one war to the next?

Anyhow, to win these wars requires a combination of proper professional approaches, proper resources, and proper engagement times. Our continued attempts to win these wars on the cheap, or shorten the commitment to them, or to find some magic trick (like a surge) that will win it…..have not really worked out. It is time to get serious.

Concrete and COIN

A U.S. Soldier of 1-6 battalion, 2nd brigade, 1st Army Division, patrols near the wall in the Shiite enclave of Sadr city, Baghdad, Iraq, on Monday, June 9, 2008. The 12-foot concrete barrier is has been built along a main street dividing southern Sadr city from north and it is about 5 kilometers, (3.1 miles) long. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
A U.S. Soldier of 1-6 battalion, 2nd brigade, 1st Army Division, patrols near the wall in the Shiite enclave of Sadr city, Baghdad, Iraq, on Monday, June 9, 2008. The 12-foot concrete barrier is has been built along a main street dividing southern Sadr city from north and it is about 5 kilometers, (3.1 miles) long. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

U.S. Army Major John Spencer, an instructor at the Modern War Institute at West Point, has written an insightful piece about the utility of the ubiquitous concrete barrier in counterinsurgency warfare. Spencer’s ode is rooted in his personal experiences in Iraq in 2008.

When I deployed to Iraq as an infantry soldier in 2008 I never imagined I would become a pseudo-expert in concrete. But that is what happened—from small concrete barriers used for traffic control points to giant ones to protect against deadly threats like improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and indirect fire from rockets and mortars. Miniature concrete barriers were given out by senior leaders as gifts to represent entire tours. By the end my deployment, I could tell you how much each concrete barrier weighed. How much each barrier cost. What crane was needed to lift different types. How many could be emplaced in a single night. How many could be moved with a military vehicle before its hydraulics failed.

He goes on to explain how concrete barriers were used by U.S. forces for force protection in everything from combat outposts to forward operating bases; to interdict terrain from checkpoints to entire neighborhoods in Baghdad; and as fortified walls during the 2008 Battle for Sadr City. His piece is a testament to both the ingenuity of soldiers in the field and non-kinetic solutions to battlefield problems.

[NOTE: The post has been edited.]

New Colombian Deal

Round Two: Colombia has signed a new deal with FARC: colombias-government-rebels-sign-modified-peace-agreement

  1. I gather it still needs to be approved (this was the problem the last time).
  2. Apparently he does not need to call a second plebiscite, but needs approval from congress (this is in the second article below).
  3. The agreement does not include the smaller more radical guerilla group ELN.
  4. There is a ceasefire in effect until 31 December.
  5. FARC is reported in the article to be 7,000 strong.
  6. ELN is reported in the article to be less than 2,000
  7. I assume no new Nobel prizes will be awarded.

Another article on the same subject: Colombia-agrees-to-modified-peace-deal-with-FARC