Category Iraq

CTS Reaches Tigris In Mosul

Mosul districts liberated by Iraqi Security Forces (in green), as of 7 January 2016 [Ninevah Media Center]

A spokesman for the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service (CTS) announced that CTS units reached the eastern bank of the Tigris River in central Mosul today, securing a damaged bridge over the river. The Tigris runs north-south through the center of the city. Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) have made steady progress against stiff Daesh opposition since renewing offensive operations on 27 December 2016.

Though the battle is far from over, recent gains suggest that ISF might be winning the battle of attrition with the vastly outnumbered defenders. However, it likely will still be some time before ISF fully occupies and secures the city.

Economics of Warfare 7

Examining the seventh 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, which starts by discussing the “Dirty War Index”, remains focused on civilian casualties. He presents on slide 4 the “Dirty War Index” (DWI), which is actually something we could have used for our insurgency work.

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%207.pdf

We did something very similar in pages 88-92 in the section on “Use of Firepower” in America’s Modern Wars. On page 89 we have a chart with three columns tracking civilians casualties. They are 1) (civilians killed)/(CI/INS killed); 2) civilians killed/insurgents killed; and 3) total civilians killed/100,000 population. We only have data for nine cases (nine insurgencies). The first two formulations are ratios but the same data could be used to calculate an ersatz DWI. We then discussed the problem with Irish Loyalists Militias on pages 89-90 (using the exact same data as Dr. Spagat used on slide 6) and then we looked at 35 insurgencies compared to 1) rules of engagements, 2) civilians killed/insurgents kills, and 3) total civilians killed/100,00 population (pages 90-91). Our conclusions were (page 92):

In general, there does seem to be a pattern where insurgencies win more often if the number of civilians killed compared to the number of insurgents killed is greater than 10, but there is no statistical support for such an assumption.

This was a case where we needed to do a lot more work, but never got back to it (read: defense budget cuts and sequestration).

Slides 5 and 6 of Dr. Spagat’s lecture are worth looking at. You will note that in Colombia that while the guerrillas and government forces were responsible for their share of civilian casualties, it was the paramilitaries who were doing a lot of the bloodletting. Government ties to some of these paramilitaries have been an issue. As Dr. Spagat puts it (slide 7) “Their relationship with government forces is murky and controversial.” Slide 6 is from Northern Ireland. Again the “Loyalist Paramilities” are the worst offenders. Probably good policy to keep the Shiite militias out of Mosul.

On slide 10, Dr. Spagat switches from the rather depressing discussion of civilian casualties (which is a subject that needs to be discussed and analyzed more than it has) to a discussing of the “Benefits of Peace.” Because of the nature of our customers, we haven’t done a lot of work on peace…not that we don’t want to. He ends up looking at housing prices in Northern Ireland. Slide 13 has the total killings in Northern Ireland by quarter, although only from 1983 and on. The war was far more bloody in the early 1970s and the violence declined notably after that. The figures on slide 14 catches my attention because at one point in our insurgency studies we also looked at distribution of casualties by region in Northern Ireland, compared to Vietnam and compared to two other wars. We noted at the time that unequal distribution of casualties by geography was at a similar ratio between Northern Ireland and Vietnam. We did not go any further with this effort, because we needed a whole lot more cases and we could not see a pattern with what we had examined (and it took a lot of time). This effort was discussed in our report on terrain (Report I-12: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub3.htm) but I am pretty sure I left it out of my book.

Anyhow, Figure 15 shows housing prices in Northern Ireland. Not particularly surprising, peace is good for housing prices. You probably could have guessed that without a statistical analysis. The rest of the slides just go into more depth on the statistics behind this (slides 17-19). Then there is a discussion on “sampling rare events” (slides 20-29). Note the mention of bootstrapping on slide 29: Bootstrapping_(statistics)

Iraqi Time

Nothing earthshaking here, but I just liked the article for its quote: “In terms of timeline, we’re on Iraqi time, this is going to take some time.”

Article is here: general-sees-islamic-states-capability-waning

A few highlights:

  1. ISIL is starting to run out of resources in the third month of the campaign.
  2. Second phase of the campaign started last week after a month of deadlock and is making slow progress.
  3. “They’ve got a finite amount of resource that are on the eastern side and the fact that their capability is waning indicates that those resources are starting to dwindle.”
  4. “…the Mosul campaign was on track, but ‘in terms of timeline, we’re on Iraqi time. This is going to take some time.'”

Anyhow, still not sure how ISIL is going to manage to pull anything positive out of this effort. With over 100,000 troops with air support, it is hard to imagine that the coalition is not going to take Mosul in the near future.

 

Mosul and ISF Combat Effectiveness

The situation in Mosul, 16-19 December 2016 (Institute for the Study of War)

After a period of “operational refit,” Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) waging battle with Daesh fighters for control of the city of Mosul launched a new phase of their advance on 29 December. The initial phase of the assault, which began on 17 October 2016, ground to a halt due to strong Daesh resistance and heavy casualties among the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service (CTS) troops spearheading the operation.

For the new offensive, the CTS was reinforced with additional Iraqi Army ground units, as well as an armored element of the Federal Police. Additional U.S. combat forces and advisors have also been moved closer to the front lines in support.

Although possessing an enormous manpower advantage over the Daesh defenders, ISF had managed to secure only one-quarter of the city in two months of combat. This is likely due to the fact that the only ISF elements that have demonstrated any offensive combat effectiveness have been the CTS and the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, or Hash’d al Shaabi) Iraqi Shi’a militia mobilized by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in 2014. PMF brigades hold the western outskirts of the city, but thus far have been restrained from entering it for fear of provoking sectarian violence with the mostly Sunni residents.

Daesh defenders, believed to number only from 3,000-5,000 at the outset of the battle, have had the luxury of fighting against only one axis of advance and within urban terrain filled with trapped civilians, which they have used as human shields. They mounted a particularly effective counterattack against the CTS using vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), which halted the initial offensive in mid-December. ISF casualties appear to be concentrated in the elite 1st Special Operations Brigade (the so-called “Golden Division”) of the CTS. An unnamed Pentagon source was quoted as stating that the Golden Division’s maneuver battalions had incurred “upwards of 50 percent casualties,” which, if sustained, would have rendered it combative ineffective in less than a month.

The Iraqi government has come to rely on the Golden Division to generate reliable offensive combat power. It spearheaded the attacks that recovered Tikrit, Ramadi, and Fallujah earlier in the year. Originally formed in 2004 as the non-sectarian Iraqi Special Operations Forces brigade, the Golden Division was amalgamated into the CTS in 2007 along with specialized counterterrorism and national police elements. Although intended for irregular warfare, the CTS appears to be the only Iraqi military force capable of effective conventional offensive combat operations, likely due to higher level of combat effectiveness relative to the rest of the ISF, as well as its interoperability with U.S. and Coalition supporting forces.

Historically, the Iraqi Army has not demonstrated a high level of overall combat effectiveness. Trevor Dupuy’s analysis of the performance of the various combatants in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War ranked the Iraqi Army behind that of the Israelis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Syrians. He estimated the Israelis to have a 3.43 to 1.00 combat effectiveness advantage over the Iraqis in 1973. Dupuy credited the Iraqis with improved effectiveness following the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War in his pre-war estimate of the outcome of the 1990-91 Gulf War. This turned out to be erroneous; overestimation of Iraqi combat effectiveness in part led Dupuy to predict a higher casualty rate for U.S. forces than actually occurred. The ineffective performance of the Iraqi Army in 2003 should have not surprised anyone.

The relative success of the CTS can be seen as either indicative of the general failure of the decade-long U.S. effort to rebuild an effective Iraqi military establishment, or as an exemplary success of the U.S. Special Operations Forces model for training and operating with indigenous military forces. Or both.

Economics of Warfare 5

Examining the fifth 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 is about regressions and logistics regressions. Now, I think everyone should take a econometrics course….but just a warning, this is all pretty dry stuff. So, if you choose to skip it, don’t blame you.

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%205.pdf

On the other hand, what he is discussing is using regression models to analyze the nature of the civilian casualties, including in the Rwandan genocide. This gets a little hard to discuss. On slide 11, you can learn that in the Kibuye Prefecture in 1994 there were 31,117 people killed by machete, 9,779 killed by clubs and 442 burned alive. Not exactly relaxing reading.

Slide 20 tracks Israeli and Palestinian deaths from 2000-2005, which is a lot less.

Anyhow, Dr. Spagat’s work often focuses on civilian casualties. These are often a significant part of warfare, even if we don’t particularly like to address it. For example,. the United States lost over 4,000 troops in Iraq 2003-2011. Iraq lost over 150,000 people during that time. The same pattern for Vietnam, where the United States lost over 58,000 people in what was the third bloodiest war in our history. Vietnam lost one to two million people !

I did attempt to address civilian casualties in our insurgency work. It is also addressed in my book America’s Modern Wars in Chapter 9 “Rules of Engagement and Measurements of Brutality” and Chapter 15 “The Burden of War.” I am not sure that this attention to civilian casualties was fully appreciated by our DOD customers, but it was there because sadly, it is always a significant part of warfare. Tragically, sometimes so is genocide, as recently demonstrated by ISIL. Dr. Spagat, in a course on the “Economics of Warfare,” is quite correct to focus on civilian casualties.

P.S. I have been informed by Dr. Spagat that he still has another ten lectures to post up on his blog.

 

Fresh Advance in Mosul

By the way, there is still a war going on in Iraq, and it is going slowly. The Iraqi’s actually made a good timely advance up to the city, isolated the city, entered east Mosul….and then things have slow down…considerably….immeasurably: Fresh Advance in Mosul

To summarize:

  1. They have 1/4 of Mosul.
  2. They will start advancing again in a couple of days.
  3. Americans will be deployed in the city and with the units.
  4. It was a planned “operational refit” (should I take this statement at face value?)
  5. “A heavily armoured unit of several thousand federal police was redeployed from the southern outskirts two weeks ago to reinforce the eastern front after army units advised by the Americans suffered heavy losses in an Islamic State counter-attack.”
  6. Three U.S. servicemen have been killed in northern Iraq in the past 15 months.
  7. The article states that there are up to 1.5 million people still in Mosul. This is higher than some other estimates I have seen.

Economics of Warfare 4

Examining the fourth 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 one is on “opportunity costs,” linear regression, comparing unemployment rates to violence, and the effectiveness of some civil action problems in Iraq to violence. This discussion does get into the weeds, so to say. It is not casual reading.  The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%204.pdf

To summarize:

  1. On slide 9 there are links to two papers by Dr. Eli Berman and others: 1) Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Philippines? (2011) and 2) Modest, Secure and Informed: Successful Development in Conflict Zones (2013).
  2. Conclusion on Berman’s first paper: It is a little more complicated than a simple trade-off between violence in an insurgency and unemployment (slides 11-13). In fact the relationship is “negative.” As Dr. Spagat notes (slide 26): “In summary, I would say that the relationship between unemployment and violence in Iraq is not tiny, but it is not big either.”
  3. Conclusions on Berman’s second paper: This one look at levels of funding versus insurgent attacks. There are of course problems with trying to determine cause and effect here (see slides 29-30). As Dr. Spagat notes (slide 41): “Again, we wind up with a statistically significant effect that does not have enormous practical significance.”

Now, I did discuss civil works briefly in Chapter 14 of America’s Modern Wars. It is a grab bag chapter called “Other Issues” that looked at 1) Duration of Insurgencies by Type of Insurgency, 2) Outcome of Insurgency by Type of Insurgency, 3) Winning Hearts and Minds, 4) Decapitating Insurgencies, 5) Early Suppression of Insurgencies, 6) Wounded to Killed Ratios, 7) Exchange Rates, 8) Bleeding an Insurgency to Death, and 9) Focus on Population.

In the section on “Winning Hearts and Minds” we ended up noting (on page 151) that:

As much as people talk about winning hearts and minds (a Vietnam-era phrase, which of course, was not entirely successful), there is no program, theory, agenda or list that tells the counterinsurgent what he must do to achieve this….

In the long run, there needs to be a focused analytical effort that looks at what efforts in other insurgencies have actually worked in the long run to gain support from the population, and what efforts in other insurgencies have not made that much of an impact. Considering the large amount of money being spent on these efforts, it is surprising that nothing systematic has been developed on this.

I do start the Chapter (page 147) with a great quote written by Bernard Fall in 1967:

Civic action is not the construction of privies or the distribution of anti-malaria sprays. One can’t fight an ideology; one can’t fight a militant doctrine with better privies. Yet this is done constantly. One side says, “Land Reform,” and the other side say, “Better culverts.” One side says “We are going to kill all of those nasty village chiefs and landlords.” The other side says, “Yes, but look, we want to give you prize pigs to improve your strain.” These arguments just do not match. Simple but adequate appeals will have to be found sooner or later.

Anyhow, it does not look like this has all been resolved yet. The line to remember is: “One can’t fight an ideology, one can’t fight a militant doctrine with better privies.”

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 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.”