Category Lessons of History

The Military Reform Debate (1982)

Continuing chronologically through the box that was supposed to be trash….next item is a “background pamphlet” for Senior Conference XX: The Military Reform Debate: Directions for the Defense Establishment for the Remainder of the Century, dated 3-5 June 1982. It is 228 pages.

Interesting time period, new president, defense budgets were back on the upswing….so what are they saying? Papers presented in that rather thick book are:

  1. The Challenge of Military Reform by Captain Timothy L. Lupfer
  2. The Case for Maneuver by William S. Lind
  3. Toward a New American Approach to Warfare by Lt. Col. Huba Wass de Czege
  4. The Case for More Effective, Less Expensive Weapon Systems: What “Quality versus Quantity” Issue? by Pierre M. Sprey
  5. The Quantity versus Quality Quandry by William J. Perry
  6. Heavy and Light Ground Forces in the Context of U.S. Grand Strategy by Jeffrey Record
  7. Heavy versus Light Forces: A Question of Balance by John D. Mayer, Jr.
  8. Deficits and the Future of the All Volunteer Force by Major Thomas W. Fagan

Hmmm…looks a little bit like deja vu all over again. I think I will keep it.

One paragraph did footnote a Trevor Dupuy article in Army: “U.S. Military Strategy Has Been Getting a Bum Rap” (September 1980). The paragraph was in the Huba Wass de Czege article and states (page 49):

“It was often been stated that the ‘reformers” are misinformed. At least one noted historian [Dupuy] has taken them to task for their selective use of history. Many “reformers” picture the American tradition of war very selectively.”

Of course, that was way back in 1982.

 

P.S.: Turns out that this report is available on-line at the Hathi Trust Digital Library: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002589401

 

 

 

Battle Outcomes: Casualty Rates As a Measure of Defeat

This third article in the box I was about to trash was also written by someone I knew, Robert McQuie. It was a five-page article published in Army magazine in November 1987 (pages 30-34) called “Battle Outcomes: Casualty Rates As a Measure of Defeat.” I was an article I was aware of, but had not seen for probably around three decades. It was based upon data assembled by HERO (Trevor Dupuy). It was part of the lead-in to the Breakpoints Project that we later did.

The by-line of the article is “A study of data from mid-twentieth century warfare suggest that casualties–whether the reality or the perception of them—are only occasionally a factor in command decisions to break off unsuccessful battles.” 

The analysis was based upon 80 engagements from 1941-1982. Of those 52 were used to create the table below (from page 34):

Reasons for a Force Abandoning An Attack or Defense:

Maneuver by Enemy…………………………..Percent

  Envelopment, encirclement, penetration……..33

  Adjacent friendly unit withdrew………………..13

  Enemy occupied key terrain…………………….6

  Enemy achieved surprise……………………….8

  Enemy reinforced………………………………..4

Total………………………………………………64

 

Firepower by Enemy

  Casualty or equipment losses……………………10

  Heavy artillery or air attacks by enemy…………..2

Total…………………………………………………12

 

Other Reasons

  No reserves left……………………………………….12

  Supply shortage………………………………………..2

  Truce or surrender…………………………………….6

  Change in weather…………………………………….2

  Orders to withdraw…………………………………….2

Total…………………………………………………….24

 

He then goes on in the article to question the utility of Lanchester equations, ending with the statement “It appears as well that Mr. Lanchester’s equations present a drastic misstatement of what drives the outcome of combat.” He also points out that many wargames and simulations terminate simulated battles at 15% to 30% casualties a day, ending with the statement that “The evidence indicated that in most cases, a force has quit when its casualties reached less than ten percent per battle. In most battles, moreover, defeat has not been caused by casualties.”

Robert McQuie was a senior operations research analyst for U.S. Army’s CAA (Concepts Analysis Agency). In 1987 I was working at HERO and considering heading back to school to get a graduate degree in Operations Research (OR). At Trevor Dupuy’s recommendation, I discussed it with Robert McQuie, who stated strongly not to do so because it was a “waste of time.” His argument was that while Operations Research was good at answering questions where the results could be optimized, it was incapable of answering the bigger questions. He basically felt the discipline had reached a dead end.

Anyhow, another keeper.

 

Back to the Future

The opening sentence of an article by Dan Goure caught my attention: “Every decade of so since the 1960s, the U.S. Army creates a requirement for what can nominally be described as a light tank.” The article is here: http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/its-back-the-future-mobile-protected-firepower-20539?page=show

It reminds me of a meeting we had in late 2000 with Walt Hollis, Deputy Under Secretary of the Army (Operations Research). He started the meeting by telling us that something like “Every now and then, someone seems to want to bring back the light tank.” He then went on to explain that these requirements are being pushed from the top (meaning by the Chief of Staff of the Army) and they should probably have a study done on the subject. He then asked us to do such an effort.

We did and it is here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/mwa-2lightarmor.pdf

We decided to examine the effectiveness of lighter-weight armor based upon real-world experience in six possible scenarios:

  1. Conventional conflicts against an armor supported or armor heavy force.
  2. Emergency insertions against an armor support or armor heavy force.
  3. Conventional conflict against a primarily infantry force (as one might encounter in sub-Saharan Africa).
  4. Emergency insertion against a primarily infantry force.
  5. A small to medium insurgency (includes an insurgency that develops during a peacekeeping operation).
  6. A peacekeeping operation or similar Operation Other Than War (OOTW) that has some potential for violence.

Anyhow, I am not going to summarize the report here as that would take too long. I did draft up a chapter on it for inclusion in War by Numbers, but decided to leave it out as it did not fit into the “theory testing” theme of the book. Instead, I am holding it for one of my next books, Future American Wars.

The interesting aspect of the report is that we were at a meeting in 2001 at an Army OR outfit that was reviewing our report, and they told us that the main point of action they drew from the report was that we needed to make sure our armor vehicles were better protected against mines. As our report looked at the type of tank losses being suffered in the insurgencies and OOTWs, there were a lot of vehicles being lost to mines. Apparently they had not fully realized this (and Iraq did not occur until 2003).

Battle of Tarigo Convoy

The Italian Destroyer Lampo

On 16 April 1941, four British destroyers operating out of Malta, moved to intercept an Axis convoy moving along the coast of Tunisia. The British were able to intercept the convoy due to intercepted radio messages (but it was not Ultra). The Axis convoy consisted of three Italian destroyers protecting four German troopships and an Italian ammunition ship. The British attacked at night, having radar on several of their destroyers, which the Italians did not have. This night action that started at only 2,000 yards and at times closed to within 50 yards, with the Italians having all three destroyers and all five cargo ships sunk or beached. This one sided affair also ended up costing the British one destroyer, torpedoed by a sinking Italian destroyer, now commanded by an Italian junior officer. Around 1,800 men were killed in this convoy.

The British Destroyer Mohawk

While I was researching this, I came across a poorly translated article called the “Sinking of the Tarigo Convoy” by Cristiano D’Adamo. This article got my attention because he tracks the accounts of this battle as presented in nine books and accounts from 1948 to 1998. Of those nine accounts, only four mention that the British had radar and only two mention the interception of Italian signals. Seven of the nine accounts were missing critical material as to why the battle shaped up the way it did and why it was so one-sided. His article is here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060910011054/http://regiamarina.net/engagements/tarigo/tarigo_us.htm

This is an exercise similar to what I did in Appendix VII “A History of the Histories” in my book Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka. In that appendix, I tracked a number the accounts of the battles of Kursk and Prokhorovka that had been written over the years. It continues to surprise me how many major errors and significant omissions are made in widely published military historical works.

So, Who’s Your Favorite Admiral?

Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice by Capt. Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., (USN, ret.)

Over at Tom Ricks’ Best Defense blog at Foreign Policy, Captain Wayne Hughes (U.S. Navy, ret.) has written an entertaining and informative series of posts about four of his favorite U.S. Navy admirals and why he finds them notable.

Hughes is a familiar figure to TDI; he was a colleague and contemporary of Trevor Dupuy and a long-time member of The Military Conflict Institute (TMCI). Currently a Professor of Practice in the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California, Hughes is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate with 30 years of active duty service. He is perhaps best known for authoring the seminal volume Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice (1986), Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat (2000), and Military Modeling for Decision Making (1989). In 1997, he co-authored A Concise Theory of Combat with Edmund Dubois and Lawrence Low for TMCI.

Hughes selected some familiar names, World War II stalwarts Raymond Spruance and Chester Nimitz; another, lesser-known figure from World War II who had a greater impact on the post-war Navy, Arleigh Burke; and an obscure individual who had an outsized influence on the Navy’s transition from steam to iron, Bradley Fiske. The common thread Hughes identifies that links these admirals was a grounding in a technological understanding of ships and how that related to naval warfare. Hughes credits that deep knowledge of naval technology and warfare as the basis for strategic and operational brilliance, as well as successful political and bureaucratic management of periods of great change in sea power. The pieces are insightful and a delight to read. I well recommend them.

 

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.

 

A Roundup of Recent Reading Lists

Books in the vault, Deck C, Folger Shakespeare Library, 9/11/09

Everyone who is someone and every organization that is something seems to be putting out a reading list these days. Perhaps I can persuade Chris to put one together for TDI sometime. In the meantime, several lists have popped up recently that are worth the time to peruse. They are particular good for sparking arguments over what was omitted and should be added.

The first is from LTG H.R. McMaster (scroll halfway down for the sidebar), the newly appointed Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. He actually put this together a few years ago to outline his reading choices for military professionals. The list should be familiar to military historians and folks working in defense-related fields. It definitely delivers a sold grounding in theory and practice and informs McMaster’s view of the relationship between war and policy.

However, policy-making veteran Heather Hurlburt pointed out that McMaster’s list included no works written by women or non-Westerners. So she compiled a list of additional selections written primarily by women, including several contributors to the current ongoing national security conversation. As for non-Westerns, she only offers the ubiquitous Sun Tze, so there is room for more recommendations on that score.

The next comes from the membership of War on the Rocks and addresses the Vietnam War. It is an impressive mix of classic works on the subject and newer revisions based on declassified primary sources from all of the belligerents. The list also includes personal memoirs and novels. As a former Special Operations Forces historian, I lament the exclusion of any titles related to the covert side of that conflict.

The last list comes from Professor Andrew Bacevich, by way of West Point’s Modern War Institute. His list of five works includes Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Dr. Strangelove. Bacevich also cites the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr’s The Irony of American History. His admiration for Neibuhr’s work is shared by former President Barack Obama.

So, has anyone read anything interesting lately?

Trevor Dupuy and Historical Trends Related to Weapon Lethality

There appears to be renewed interest in U.S. Army circles in Trevor Dupuy’s theory of a historical relationship between increasing weapon lethality, declining casualty rates, and greater dispersion on the battlefield. A recent article by Army officer and strategist Aaron Bazin, “Seven Charts That Help Explain American War” at The Strategy Bridge, used a composite version of two of Dupuy’s charts to explain the American military’s attraction to technology. (The graphic in Bazin’s article originated in a 2009 Australian Army doctrinal white paper, “Army’s Future Land Operating Concept,” which evidently did not cite Dupuy as the original source for the charts or the associated concepts.)

John McRea, like Bazin a U.S. Army officer, and a founding member of The Military Writer’s Guild, reposted Dupuy’s graphic in a blog post entitled “Outrageous Fortune: Spears and Arrows,” examining tactical and economic considerations in the use of asymmetrical technologies in warfare.

Dr. Conrad Crane, Chief of Historical Services for the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center at the Army War College, also referenced Dupuy’s concepts in his look at human performance requirements, “The Future Soldier: Alone in a Crowd,” at War on the Rocks.

Dupuy originally developed his theory based on research and analysis undertaken by the Historical Evaluation and Research Organization (HERO) in 1964, for a study he directed, “Historical Trends Related to Weapon Lethality.” (Annex I, Annex II, Annex III). HERO had been contracted by the Advanced Tactics Project (AVTAC) of the U.S. Army Combat Developments Command, to provide unclassified support for Project OREGON TRAIL, a series of 45 classified studies of tactical nuclear weapons, tactics, and organization, which took 18 months to complete.

AVTAC asked HERO “to identify and analyze critical relationships and the cause-effect aspects of major advances in the lethality of weapons and associated changes in tactics and organization” from the Roman Era to the present. HERO’s study itself was a group project, incorporating 58 case studies from 21 authors, including such scholars as Gunther E. Rothenberg, Samuel P. Huntington, S.L.A. Marshall, R. Ernest Dupuy, Grace P. Hayes, Louis Morton, Peter Paret, Stefan T. Possony, and Theodore Ropp.

Dupuy synthesized and analyzed these case studies for the HERO study’s final report. He described what he was seeking to establish in his 1979 book, Numbers, Predictions and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles.

If the numbers of military history mean anything, it appears self-evident that there must be some kind of relationship between the quantities of weapons employed by opposing forces in combat, and the number of casualties suffered by each side. It also seems fairly obvious that some weapons are likely to cause more casualties than others, and that the effectiveness of weapons will depend upon their ability to reach their targets. So it becomes clear that the relationship of weapons to casualties is not quite the simple matter of comparing numbers to numbers. To compare weapons to casualties it is necessary to know not only the numbers of weapons, but also how many there are of each different type, and how effective or lethal each of these is.

The historical relationship between lethality, casualties, and dispersion that Dupuy deduced in this study provided the basis for his subsequent quest to establish an empirically-based, overarching theory of combat, which he articulated through his Quantified Judgement Model. Dupuy refined and updated the analysis from the 1964 HERO study in his 1980 book, The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare.

Strachan On The Failures Of Western Strategists

Tom Ricks has posted a commentary on recent political events by Scottish historian Hew Strachan. Strachan is one of the current luminaries in field of strategic studies (his recent The Direction of War is excellent). He offers a fairly pungent critique of the failure of strategic thinkers in the West to understand and respond to the forces buffeting the U.S. and Europe that resulted in Brexit and the Trump presidency.

Strategists, for all their pontifications about the future, have failed on two counts. First, they have become too politically aware in their views. Politicians need to buttress current institutions, and in doing so feed the narrative that the institutions are robust and reliable, despite their need for reform and reinvigoration. Strategists need to be tougher, and to speak truth to power. Since the end of the Cold War, geopolitical pressures have taken the common ideologies of the “west” — democracy and liberal capitalism — in divergent geographical directions. Globalization, for all its rhetorical flourishes, has mattered less than regionalism. The United States has turned from the North Atlantic and the Middle East to the Pacific and East Asia. Meanwhile Europeans are driven by an opportunistic Russia and a flood of refugees to look to their eastern marches and the Mediterranean.

Secondly, strategists have failed because they have allowed their understanding of strategy to be dominated by their commitment to the status quo. Strategy has become obsessed with the mitigation of risk and the minimization of threats, rather than with the exploitation of the opportunities which risk presents. Strategy has to respond to and even initiate contingency, not to be fearful of it. Both the Brexit vote and the election of Trump amplify the risks which we face, but they also — like Hans Christian Andersen’s child — expose the emperor’s nakedness. We shall not master risk if we do not also embrace it.

This criticism applies not simply to the last eight years of the Obama administration, but really, to the international challenges that have manifested since 9/11. The notion that the only constant is change may be a worn cliche, but that does not mean it is not true. Many a great power has foundered due to the inability to adapt and master change.

War Stories-The Podcast for Military History Nerds

Angry Staff Officer says, "Safety is paramount in all things. Terrorists fear safety glasses that are also reflective."
The Angry Staff Officer says, “Safety is paramount in all things. Terrorists fear safety glasses that are also reflective.”

If you like military history and podcasts, then I would like to recommend that you give War Stories a listen. It is a new production from two members of the Military Writers Guild, Adin Dobkin and a serving Army National Guardsman who posts publicly under the nom de guerre, Angry Staff Officer. Seeking to bridge the gap between military history that focuses on engagements or battles, and broad sweeping analysis, Dobkin and ASO tell stories that link specific instances with a broader narrative arc. In doing so, they hope to “engage the human interest angle while also tracing broader trends in warfare, through balancing narrative and dialogue.”

The first season of the podcast is tracing the development of modern tank warfare from its dawn on the battlefields of France in the First World War, through the present day. The result is Basil Liddell Hart meets This American Life. Dobkin and ASO both have engaging personalities and military history nerd-wit in abundance. They bring a youthful perspective leavened by recent military experience and the perceptive eye of today’s well-trained and highly educated military officer corps.

The first four episodes begin with doomed British cavalry charges on the Somme battlefield in 1916, to George Patton’s first combat experiences at the St. Mihiel salient in 1917, to the clash of Russian and German inter-war tanks in the Spanish Civil War, to the baptism of fire of the American tank destroyer corps in Tunisia in 1943.

The results are both informative and quite entertaining. My only (minor) quibble is that it would help to have some maps and photographs to go with the narrative to help pin down places, faces, and tank silhouettes. If you appreciate the fact — as Dobkin and ASO do — that the Soviet T-34 tank owes its existence to the American engineer  J. Walter Christie, this is the podcast for which you have been searching.