Category Insurgency & Counterinsurgency

Recent Academic Research On Counterinsurgency

An understanding of the people and culture of the host country is an important aspect of counterinsurgency. Here, 1st Lt. Jeff Harris (center) and Capt. Robert Erdman explain to Sheik Ishmael Kaleel Gomar Al Dulayani what was found in houses belonging to members of his tribe during a cordon and search mission in Hawr Rajab, Baghdad, Nov. 29, 2006. The Soldiers are from Troop A, 1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment. (Photo Credit: Staff Sgt. Sean A. Foley)

As the United States’ ongoing decade and a half long involvement in Afghanistan remains largely recessed from the public mind, the once-intense debate over counterinsurgency warfare has cooled as well. Interest stirred mildly recently as the Trump administration rejected a proposal to turn the war over to contractors and elected to slightly increase the U.S. troop presence there. The administration’s stated policy does not appear to differ significantly from that that proceeded it.

The public debate, such as it was, occasioned two excellent articles addressing Afghanistan policy and relevant recent academic scholarship on counterinsurgency, one by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub in the New York Times, and the other by Patrick Burke in War is Boring.

Fisher and Taub addressed the question of the seeming intractability of the Afghan war. “There is a reason that Afghanistan’s conflict, then and now, so defies solutions,” they wrote. “Its combination of state collapse, civil conflict, ethnic disintegration and multisided intervention has locked it in a self-perpetuating cycle that may be simply beyond outside resolution.”

The article weaves together findings of studies on these topics by Ken Menkhaus; Romain Malejacq; Dipali Mukhopadhyay; and Jason Lyall, Graeme Blair, and Kosuke Imai. Fisher and Taub concluded on the pessimistic note that bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan may be on a generational time scale.

Burke looked at a more specific aspect of counterinsurgency, the relationship between civilian casualties and counterinsurgent success of failure. Separating insurgents from the civilian population is one of the central conundrums of counterinsurgency, referred to as the “identification problem.” Burke noted that the current U.S. military doctrine holds that “excessive civilian casualties will cripple counterinsurgency operations, possibly to the point of failure.” This notion rests on the prevailing assumption that civilians have agency, that they can choose between supporting insurgents or counterinsurgents, and that reducing civilian deaths and “winning hearts and minds” is the path to counterinsurgency success.

Burke surveyed work by Matthew Adam Kocher, Thomas B Pepinsky, and Stathis N. Kalyvas; Luke Condra and Jacob Shapiro; Lyall, Blair and Imai, Christopher Day and William Reno; Lee J.M. Seymour; Paul Staniland; and Fotini Christia. The picture portrayed in this research indicates that there is no clear, direct relationship between civilian casualties and counterinsurgent success. While civilians do hold non-combatant deaths against counterinsurgents, the relevance of blame can depend greatly on whether the losses were inflicted by locals for foreigners. In some cases, counterinsurgent brutality helped them succeed or had little influence on the outcome. In others, decisions made by insurgent leaders had more influence over civilian choices than civilian casualties.

While the collective conclusions of the studies surveyed by Fisher, Taub and Burke proved inconclusive, the results certainly warrant deep reconsideration of the central assumptions underpinning prevailing U.S. political and military thinking about counterinsurgency. The articles and studies cited above provide plenty of food for thought.

Deployed Troop Counts

Well, turns out we have a little more deployed troops in Afghanistan than is previously reported. Previously it has been reported to be 8,400. Turns out we have 11,000. This does not include the 3,900 that have been recently authorized to go there.

We also have officially 5,262 in Iraq and 503 in Syria. These figures are low with a couple of thousand more troops in both countries (not sure if that is supposed to a couple of thousand more in each of these two countries).

So potentially we are looking at around 15,000 troops in Afghanistan and may have around 8,000 troops in Iraq and Syria.

Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-afghanistan-military-idUSKCN1BA2IF

 

 

Economics of Warfare 19 – 4

Continuing with a fourth and final posting on the nineteenth 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/

This lecture continues the discussion of terrorism, looking at whether poverty or poor education causes terrorism. The conventional wisdom, supported by a book by Alan Krueger, is that they do not. Dr. Spagat explores this in more depth and the data tends to support this theme, although there are exceptions.

On slide 39, Dr. Spagat leaves us with a gem of a quote. The data he had been looking at was responses to surveys about terrorism. As he notes: “It is one thing to voice support on a survey for terrorism or attacks–it is another matter entirely to strap on explosives and blow oneself up. In other words, suicide bombers have to be really committed individuals.”

He then goes to show Palestinian suicide bombers are generally less impoverished and better educated on average than the population they are drawn from. He sees a similar observation when looking at deceased Hezbollah militants (pages 39-41). This is not surprising if you are familiar with the history of revolutions and insurgencies.

The link to his lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2019.pdf

Pigs Blood

We do have a section on rules of engagement in my book America’s Modern Wars (Chapter 9). In that effort, I ended up coding by judgment the rules of engagement in five categories (polite, strict, restricted, unrestricted, brutal). The telling chart is here:

As one can see, success tends to be at either end of the spectrum, with the counterinsurgents winning around 75% of the insurgencies fought with strict rules of engagements and the counterinsurgents winning around 75% of the insurgencies fought brutally. Anything in between those two points does not work as well.

We ended up doing this for all “83 insurgencies, interventions and peacekeeping operations” (the only category that had the “polite” cases, and they were 100% successful), for the “62 insurgencies” (show above), for the “36 insurgencies versus foreigners” (same pattern as above), and for the “26 insurgent civil wars” (same pattern as above). See pages 85-86 of America’s Modern Wars.

While the results were not statistically significant (see pages 86-87), the fact that the four different tests were all pretty consistent in results no matter which way you cut the data tends to indicate that there is something there. Clearly more work needs to be done, but we were never able to get back to this issue. On the other hand, lots of people have strong opinions on the subject based upon a lot less data. 

This is explained in more detail in this post from 2015:

Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks?

Dupuy Institute Data Bases

Yes, I still use data base as two words, much to the annoyance of Jay Karamales.

Anyhow, War by Numbers does rely extensively on a group of combat data bases that were developed over several decades. The earliest versions were developed in the 1970s and they were assembled into a large data base of around 600 cases in the 1980s. They were then computerized (they were originally a paper data base), re-organized, re-programed in Access, and greatly expanded. The data bases we currently have include:

Conventional Combat Data Bases:

LADB = Large Action Data Bases of 55 cases

DLEDB = Division Level Engagement Data Base of 752 cases

BLODB = Battalion Level Operations Data Base of 127 cases

CLEDB = Company Level Engagement Data Base of 98 cases

SADB = Small Action Data Base of 5 cases

BaDB = Battles Data Base of 243 cases from 1600-1900

 

We also have:

CaDB = Campaign Data Base of 196 cases. While the other data bases address battles, or engagements of no more than a few days in length, this one summarizes campaigns, often extending for months.

Finally we have three databases tracking campaigns from day-to-day. They are all programmed in Access:

ACSDB = Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base (meaning Battle of the Bulge)

KDB = Kursk Data Base

Battle of Britain Data Base

These were primarily intended for model validation efforts.

We also have three insurgency/peaceeping/intervention/OOTW (Operations Other than War) data bases. They are:

WACCO = Warfare and Armed Conflict Data Base of 793 cases

SSCO = Small Scale Operations Data Base of 203 cases

DISS = Dupuy Insurgency Spread Sheets of 109 cases.

 

The DISS data base was the one that America’s Modern Wars is based upon. The other two were earlier efforts.

These links provides some snap shots of the data base content: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/dbases.htm

These are all company proprietary, although some have been released publicly in earlier forms or different forms (including the CHASE data base of 599 cases, the ACSDB in Dbase III and the KDB in Dbase IV). Our versions have been updated, including revisions to content.

Economics of Warfare 19 – 3

Continuing with the next posting on the nineteenth 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/

This lecture continues the discussion of terrorism, this time he is looking at a paper by Gassebner and Luechinger on terrorism (starts on page 13 of the lecture). This is similar to what was done for causes of war in a paper by Hegre and Sambanis that was presented in lecture 11:

Economics of Warfare 19 – 2 and 11 – 2

So, the two authors ended up running a large number of regressions trying out many different combinations of variables and looking for those that are consistently significant. They used three different terrorism databases, resulting in them testing 18 different variables to each of the three different databases and looking at locations, victims and perpetrators (see slides 14 and 15). This gets a little involved and you are probably not going to sort it all out unless you read their paper (which costs $40 to order a copy…I did not).

What is particularly interesting to me is that the same variable has different values depending on what database is used. The values are of Coef. (median coefficient estimate), CDF (cumulative distribution function) and % sig. (the percent the estimate was statistically signicant). For example “Ethnic tensions” has values of -0.0007, 0.544 and 18.4 in the Iterate database, has values of 0.040, 0.911 and 63.1 in the GTD databases, and has values of 0.011, 0.627 and 15.2 in the MIPT database. Not sure what this really means (see slide 14). I have never done any analysis using someone else’s data base. I have always collected by own data and analyzed it.

Anyhow, the results are (see slides 18 & 19).

  1. Strong police states with religious tensions seem to be favored targets of terrorists.
  2. Bigger, economically repressive and richer countries seem to attract terrorist attacks.
  3. “Law and order” seems to discourage terrorism (this does conflict with point 1 above).
  4. A more foreign portfolio investment seen positively associated with terrorism.
  5. Higher natural resource exports as associated with fewer attacks on a county’s citizens.
  6. Citizens from countries with a “youth bulge” are attacked relatively less and do not attack more often.
  7. Fewer telephones are associated with more attacks.
  8. Countries with centrist governments seem to export terrorists

Anyhow, not finished with this lecture yet. Will have one more posting to do. The link to his lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2019.pdf

Economics of Warfare 19 – 2 and 11 – 2

Continuing with a second posting on the nineteenth and second to last 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/

This lecture continues the discussion of terrorism, this time he is looking at a paper by Gassebner and Luechinger on terrorism. This is similar to what was done for causes of war in a paper by Hegre and Sambanis that was presented in lecture 11:

Economics of Warfare 11

This discussion of Hegre and Sambanis covered only the last two pages of the lecture (slides 23 and 24 of lecture 11) and I did not mention it when I first blogged about it.. I guess I probably need to now, turning this posting into the follow-up post on lecture 11. Hegre and Sambanis looked at 88 variables related to causes of war and by running regressions tried to determine which ones are consistently correlated with the onset of war.

  1. GDP per capita is negatively associate with civil war onset (meaning: rich countries are less likely to have civil wars).
  2. Having had a previous war is positively associated with civil war onset…the more recent the war the stronger the association (meaning: war beget wars?).
  3. Country size (population and territory) is positively associated with civil war onset (meaning: big countries tend to have more wars.).

This last point is interesting as country size and population also showed up in our insurgency studies related to the success of the insurgents. Big populated counties tended to have more successful insurgencies than small countries. In Chapter 3, page 47 of America’s Modern Wars I provided the following chart:

Insurgencies with Foreign Intervention

Circumstances                                                   Number of cases        Percent Blue Victory

Indigenous Population > 9 million                              10                                20

Intervening Force Commitment > 100,000                  8                                  0

Peak Insurgent Force Size > 30,000                         13                                23

“Blue Victory” = counterinsurgent victory

Anyhow, I have not gotten past the first sentence of slide 13 for this post, and we are already around 300 words in this post, so probably best to pick up the rest of lecture 19 in a subsequent post.

The link to lecture 19 is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2019.pdf

The link to lecture 11 is here: https://dupuyinstitute.dreamhosters.com/2017/01/31/economics-of-warfare-11/

Defeating an Insurgency by Air II

One of my earliest blog posts, done in December 2015 was on “Defeating an Insurgency by Air.” It was in part inspired by the Republican debate at the time and people talking about “carpet bombing” ISIL.

The post is here: https://dupuyinstitute.dreamhosters.com/2015/12/29/defeating-an-insurgency-by-air/

The same article is was posted on the History News Network: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161601

An expanded article was posted on the Small War Journal: http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/airpower-just-part-of-the-counterinsurgency-equation

I gather the part of the article that gives people heartburn is: “So, we are left to state that we cannot think of a single insurgency that was defeated by airpower, primarily defeated by airpower, or even seriously undermined by airpower. Perhaps there is a case we are missing. It is probably safe to say that if it has never successfully been done in over a hundred insurgencies over the last hundred years, then it is something not likely to occur now.”

Now, we do go on a hunt for other cases. This led to the follow-up blog posts:

Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks?

Air Power Defeating an Insurgency

Chasing the Mad Mullah

Iraq Revolt of 1920

Bleeding an Insurgency to Death

KOSOVO 1999

Bombing Kosovo in 1999 versus the Islamic State in 2015

Of course, we are not the only people talking about this

Bleeding an Insurgency to Death

This last post was actually not tagged as an “air power” subject, but I felt it was particularly relevant….and yes, we do have two blog posts with the same title. But this second one has this cool graph:

 

Economics of Warfare 19 – 1

Continuing with the nineteenth and second to last 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/

This lecture continues the discussion of terrorism, a subject we often deliberately avoid. We actually don’t even have a category for terrorism on the blog, in part because I consider it a tool of an insurgency, not a separate form of warfare.

On the first slide is a paper on the determinants of media attention for terrorist attacks. This is a significant subject as terrorism does rely on media attention to make their points. If there was no coverage……then the terrorist act would be relatively ineffective. The purpose of terrorism is not to kill people, it is to attract attention. Modern international terrorism started with the Palestinian Black September attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, which turned the Palestinian issue from a Middle East concern into an issue that now garnered world wide attention.

Anyhow, the lecture starts with a paper by Michael Jetter, which is linked to on page 1 (one of the very nice things about this lecture series is that all the various papers he discusses are linked in the lecture…providing a extensive collection of interesting and useful papers to read). The question is “…why do some attacks generate more coverage than others do?” The answer is on slides 10 and 12, but the short answer is: attacks in wealthier countries, countries that trade with the U.S., that are closer to the U.S. get more coverage (in the New York Times).

Not sure how really meaningful this is except to note that obviously, terrorist attacks in Canada are going to get a lot more attention in the U.S. newspapers than terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka.

Anyhow, this is going to turn into a two-part posting, so will do the rest later this week. The link to his lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2019.pdf

 

Predictive Analytics

Linked here is the blog for a company that specializes in “data science & predictive analytics:” Elderresearch

It is run by Dr. John Elder, someone who I have known for more decades than I care to admit. We have not had much intersection in our respective businesses, although I did talk to him in 2007 about the use of classification trees when we were doing work on insurgencies. This work is summarized in my book America’s Modern Wars. In particular we were using them in our Task 12 report: Examining the Geographic Aspects of an Insurgency, dated 4 February 2008. We did both a logistic regression and several classification trees looking at terrain and its effects on insurgencies. I ended up getting a three page paper from John where he independently ran his own logistic regression from our data and ended up with results similar to ours. It was a useful (and free) confirmation of what we were looking at.

I generally was not happy with the results I was getting from these comparison and there was clearly some factors far more significant than terrain that was driving the results of these conflicts. This is what lead us to look at force ratios and insurgent cause. Somewhere between the first and final draft of the book, I did delete the classification trees from the book.

I gather some of Elder Research’s work is based upon classification trees. Most of his work is commercial. They do have a new blog, but with only one blog post so far in there “defense and intelligence” category. It addresses the third off-set strategy: defense-and-intelligence