Category Lessons of History

The Timeless Verities of Combat

Understanding WarJames Jay Carafano, historian and Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy at the Heritage Foundation, recently issued a call for the U.S. defense community to back off debates over “the latest doctrinal flavor of the month” and return to a focus on the classic principles of war. “Most modern military doctrine should be scrapped,” Carafano wrote. “The Pentagon would be far better served if our military thinkers got back to the basics and taught the principles of war—and little more.”

The principles of war are a list of basic concepts of warfare distilled from the writings of mostly Western military leaders and theorists that had become commonly accepted by the late 18th century, more or less. They vary in number depending on who’s list is consulted, but U.S. Army doctrine currently recognizes nine: Objective, Offensive, Mass, Economy of Force, Maneuver, Unity of Command, Security, Surprise, and Simplicity.

In 1987, Trevor N. Dupuy published what he termed “the timeless verities of combat.” These were a list of thirteen “unchanging operational features or concepts” based upon his previous twenty-five years of empirical research into a fundamental aspect of warfare, the nature of combat. He did not intend for these verities to substitute for the principles of war, but did believe that they were related to them. Dupuy asserted that the verities “describe certain fundamental and important aspects of warfare, which, despite constant changes in the implements of war, are almost unchanging because of war’s human component.”[1]

Trevor N. Dupuy’s Timeless Verities of Combat

  1. Offensive action is essential to positive combat results.
  2. Defensive strength is greater than offensive strength.
  3. Defensive posture is necessary when successful offense is impossible.
  4. Flank and rear attack is more likely to succeed than frontal attack.
  5. Initiative permits application of preponderant combat power.
  6. Defender’s chances of success are directly proportional to fortification strength.
  7. An attacker willing to pay the price can always penetrate the strongest defenses.
  8. Successful defense requires depth and reserves.
  9. Superior Combat Power Always Wins.
  10. Surprise substantially enhances combat power.
  11. Firepower kills, disrupts, suppresses, and causes dispersion.
  12. Combat activities are always slower, less productive, and less efficient than anticipated.
  13. Combat is too complex to be described in a single, simple aphorism.

Each of these concepts will be explored further in future posts.

NOTES

[1] Trevor N. Dupuy, Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat (New York : Paragon House, 1987), pp. 1-8.

History News Network (HNN)

hnn-logo-new

We do have a half-dozen links listed down at the bottom of the right hand column of this blog. One is the History News Network

I have five articles posted on HNN. Two of them being posts from this blog. They are:

How Military Historians Are Using Quantitative Analysis

Did the Pentagon Learn from Vietnam?

Defeating an Insurgency by Air

Did I Just Write the Largest History Book Ever?

Are Russians Really Long-Suffering

Now, they do choose the headlines, and sometimes that gives a different feel to the article. So for example, one of my blog posts was titled “Russian Revolutions.” The exact same article on the HNN is titled “Are Russians Really Long-Suffering.” This apparently got a couple of people up in arms because the article did not talk about all the famines and oppression in Russia and the Soviet Union. It did not, because it was about revolutions, and in particular was about revolutions that succeeded. The famines in the 1890s, 1920s and 1930s did not directly lead to a successful revolution (a point that I think is pretty significant).

The article “Did I Just Write…” is actually a shorter version of an article I posted on the Aberdeen Bookstore website: Long version of “Did I Just Write…” Part of the reason that I wrote that article was to see if someone would come out of the woodwork and post that there was a larger book published (usually these postings start with something like “the author is an idiot because….”). I did not get that for this article. This does sort of confirm my suspicion that this is indeed the largest single volume history book ever written (no disrespect intended for the 11-volumes done by the Durants…which were four million words and 10,000 pages). I wonder if this is something I should submit to the Guinness Book of World Records? Will I get free beer for that?

 

Will This Weapon Change Infantry Warfare Forever? Maybe, But Probably Not

XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement (CDTE) System

The weapon pictured above is the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement (CDTE) precision-guided grenade launcher. According to its manufacturer, Orbital ATK,

The XM25 is a next-generation, semi-automatic weapon designed for effectiveness against enemies protected by walls, dug into foxholes or hidden in hard-to-reach places.

The XM25 provides the soldier with a 300 percent to 500 percent increase in hit probability to defeat point, area and defilade targets out to 500 meters. The weapon features revolutionary high-explosive, airburst ammunition programmed by the weapon’s target acquisition/fire control system.

Following field testing in Afghanistan that reportedly produced mixed results, the U.S. Army is seeking funding the Fiscal Year 2017 defense budget to acquire 105 of the weapons for issue to specifically-trained personnel at the tactical unit level.

The purported capabilities of the weapon have certainly raised expectations for its utility. A program manager in the Army’s Program Executive Office declared “The introduction of the XM25 is akin to other revolutionary systems such as the machine gun, the airplane and the tank, all of which changed battlefield tactics.” An industry observer concurred, claiming that “The weapon’s potential revolutionary impact on infantry tactics is undeniable.”

Well…maybe. There is little doubt that the availability of precision-guided standoff weapons at the squad or platoon level will afford significant tactical advantages. Whatever technical problems that currently exist will be addressed and there will surely be improvements and upgrades.

It seems unlikely, however, that the XM25 will bring revolutionary change to the battlefield. In his 1980 study The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare, Trevor N. Dupuy explored the ongoing historical relationship between technological change and adaptation on the battlefield. The introduction of increasingly lethal weapons has led to corresponding changes in the ways armies fight.

Assimilation of a significant increase in [weapon] lethality has generally been marked (a) by dispersion, thus reducing the number of people exposed to the new weapon in the enemy’s hands; (b) by giving greater freedom of maneuver; and (c) by improving cooperation among the different arms and services. [p. 337]

As the chart below illustrates (click for a larger version), as weapons have become more lethal over time, combat forces have adjusted by dispersing in greater frontage and depth on the battlefield (as reflected by the red line).

[pp. 288-289]

Dupuy noted that there is a lag between the introduction of a new weapon and its full integration into an army’s tactics and force structure.

In modern times — and to some extent in earlier eras — there has been an interval of approximately twenty years between introduction and assimilation of new weapons…it is significant that, despite the rising tempo of invention, this time lag remained relatively constant. [p. 338]

Moreover, Dupuy observed that true military revolutions are historically rare, and require more than technological change to occur.

Save for the recent significant exception of strategic nuclear weapons, there have been no historical instances in which new and more lethal weapons have, of themselves, altered the conduct of war or the balance of power until they have been incorporated into a new tactical system exploiting their lethality and permitting their coordination with other weapons. [p. 340]

Looking at the trends over time suggests that any resulting changes will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The ways armies historically have adapted to new weapons — dispersion, tactical flexibility, and combined arms —- are hallmarks of the fire and movement concept that is at the heart of modern combat tactics, which evolved in the early years of the 20th century, particularly during the First World War. However effective the XM25 may prove to be, it’s impact is unlikely to alter the basic elements of fire and movement tactics. Enemy combatants will likely adapt through even greater dispersion (the modern “empty battlefield“), tactical innovation, and combinations of countering weapons. It is also likely that it will take time, trial and error, and effective organizational leadership in order to take full advantage of the XM25’s capabilities.

[Edited]

Quote from America’s Modern Wars

On Amazon.com
On Amazon.com

Just to reinforce Shawn Woodford’s point below, let me quote from Chapter Twenty-Four, pages 294-295, of my book America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam:

Many years ago, I had the pleasure of having a series of meetings with Professor Ivo Feierabend. I was taking a graduate course in Econometrics at San Diego State University (SDSU). I decided that for my class paper, I would do something on the causes of revolution. The two leading efforts on this, both done in the 1960s, were by Ted Gurr and the husband and wife team of Feierabend and Feierabend. I reviewed their work, and for a variety of reasons, got interested in the measurements and analyses done by the Feierabends, vice the more known work by Ted Gurr. This eventually led me to Dr. Feierabend, who still happened to be at San Diego State University much to my surprise. This was some 20 years after he had done what I consider to be ground-breaking work on revolutions. I looked him up and had several useful and productive meetings with him.

In the 1960s, he had an entire team doing this work. Several professors were involved, and he had a large number of graduate students coding events of political violence. In addition, he had access to mainframe computers, offices, etc. The entire effort was shut down in the 1960s, and he had not done anything further on this in almost 20 years. I eventually asked him why he didn’t continue his work. His answer, short and succinct was, “I had no budget.”

This was a difficult answer for a college student to understand. But, it is entirely understood by me now. To do these types of analytical projects requires staff, resources, facilities, etc. They cannot be done by one person, and even if they could, that one person usually needs a paycheck. So, the only way one could conduct one of these large analytical projects is to be funded. In the case of the Feierabends, that funding came from the government, as did ours. Their funding ended after a few years, as has ours. Their work could be described as a good start, but there was so much more that needed to be done. Intellectually, one is mystified why someone would not make sure that this work was continued. Yet, in the cases of Ted Gurr and the Feierabends, it did not.

The problem lies in that the government (or at least the parts that I dealt with) sometimes has the attention span of a two-year-old. Not only that, it also has the need for instant gratification, very much like a two-year-old. Practically, what that means is that projects that can answer an immediate question get funding (like the Bosnia and Iraq casualty estimates). Larger research efforts that will produce an answer or a product in two to three years can also get funding. On the other hand, projects that produce a preliminary answer in two to three years and then need several more years of funding to refine, check, correct and develop that work, tend to die. This has happened repeatedly. The analytical community is littered with many clever, well thought-out reports that look to be good starts. What is missing is a complete body of analysis on a subject.

Why Are We Still Wondering Why Men (And Women) Rebel?

Gurr, Why Men RebelThe New York Times published a very interesting article addressing the inability of government-sponsored scholars and researchers to provide policymakers with an analytical basis for identifying potential terrorists. For anyone who has worked with U.S. government patrons on basic research, much of this will sound familiar.

“After all this funding and this flurry of publications, with each new terrorist incident we realize that we are no closer to answering our original question about what leads people to turn to political violence,” Marc Sageman, a psychologist and a longtime government consultant, wrote in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence in 2014. “The same worn-out questions are raised over and over again, and we still have no compelling answers.”

Ample government resourcing and plenty of research attention appears to yield little in advanced knowledge and insight. Why is this? For some, the way the government responds to research findings is the problem.

When researchers do come up with possible answers, the government often disregards them. Not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for instance, Alan B. Krueger, the Princeton economist, tested the widespread assumption that poverty was a key factor in the making of a terrorist. Mr. Krueger’s analysis of economic figures, polls, and data on suicide bombers and hate groups found no link between economic distress and terrorism.

More than a decade later, law enforcement officials and government-funded community groups still regard money problems as an indicator of radicalization.

There is also the demand for simple, definitive answers to immediately pressing questions (also known as The Church of What’s Happening Now).

Researchers, too, say they have been frustrated by both the Bush and Obama administrations because of what they say is a preoccupation with research that can be distilled into simple checklists… “They want to be able to do things right now,” said Clark R. McCauley Jr., a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College who has conducted government-funded terrorism research for years. “Anybody who offers them something right now, like to go around with a checklist — right now — is going to have their attention.

“It’s demand driven,” he continued. “The people with guns and badges are so eager to have something. The fact that they could actually do harm? This doesn’t deter them.”

There is also the problem of research that leads to conclusions that are at odds with the prevailing political sentiment or run contrary to institutional interests.

Mr. McCauley said many of his colleagues and peers conducted smart research and drew narrow conclusions. The problem, he said, is that studies get the most attention when they suggest warning signs. Research linking terrorism to American policies, meanwhile, is ignored.

However, the more honest researchers also admit that their inability to develop effective modes of inquiry into what are certainly complicated problems plays a role as well.

In 2005, Jeff Victoroff, a University of Southern California psychologist, concluded that the leading terrorism research was mostly just political theory and anecdotes. “A lack of systematic scholarly investigation has left policy makers to design counterterrorism strategies without the benefit of facts,” he wrote in The Journal of Conflict Resolution.

This state of affairs would be problematic enough considering it has been a decade-and-a-half since the events of 11 September 2001 made understanding political violence a national imperative. But it is even more perplexing given that the U.S. government began sponsoring basic research on this topic in the 1950s and 60s. The pioneering work of scholars Ted Gurr and Ivo and Rosalind Feierabend started with U.S. government funding. Gurr published his seminal work Why Men Rebel in 1970. Nearly a half century later, why are we still asking the same questions?

War by Numbers III

The table of contents for the book:

—             Preface                                                                                    6
One          Understanding War                                                                 8
Two          Force Ratios                                                                          15
Three       Attacker versus Defender                                                      22
Four         Human Factors                                                                      24
Five          Measuring Human Factors in Combat: Italy                          27
Six            Measuring Human Factors in Combat: Ardennes & Kursk   40
Seven       Measuring Human Factors in Combat: Modern Wars          55
Eight         Outcome of Battles                                                               67
Nine          Exchange Ratios                                                                  75
Ten           The Combat Value of Superior Situational Awareness        83
Eleven      The Combat Value of Surprise                                           113
Twelve      The Nature of Lower Level Combat                                   135
Thirteen    The Effects of Dispersion on Combat                                150
Fourteen   Advance Rates                                                                  164
Fifteen       Casualties                                                                         171
Sixteen      Urban Legends                                                                 197
Seventeen The Use of Case Studies                                                 248
Eighteen    Modeling Warfare                                                             270
Nineteen    Validation of the TNDM                                                    286
Twenty       Conclusions                                                                     313

Appendix I:   Dupuy’s Timeless Verities of Combat                           317
Appendix II:  Dupuy’s Combat Advance Rate Verities                       322
Appendix III: Dupuy’s Combat Attrition Verities                                 326

Bibliography                                                                                       331

Page numbers are based upon the manuscript and will certainly change. The book is 342 pages and 121,095 words. Definitely a lot shorter than the Kursk book.

 

War by Numbers II

What is it about (these two paragraphs are from my proposal):

War by Numbers looks at the basic nature of conventional warfare based upon extensive analysis of historical combat. Never passé, conventional combat capability has been a feature of the current growth of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and has returned as a threat in Eastern Europe. This book attempts to establish what we actually know about conventional combat and why we know it. It also provides an indication of how much impact various factors have on combat. It is the next step in analysis of combat that goes one step beyond what was addressed by theorists like Clausewitz.

It is the nature of the scientific process that hypothesis and theories do need to be tested and challenge. In a sense, we are attempting to add that rigor to a field that often does not operate with such rigor. In a profession where errors in judgment can result in the loss of lives, a rigorous understanding of warfare should be desired. War by Numbers attempts to provide such an understanding.

We May Not Be Interested in COIN, but COIN is Interested in Us

Photo By United States Mint, Smithsonian Institution [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Photo By United States Mint, Smithsonian Institution [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Is the United States Army turning its back on the experience it gained in Iraq and Afghanistan? Retired Brigadier General Robert Scales fears so. After recounting his personal experience with the U.S. Army’s neglect of counterinsurgency lessons following the Vietnam War, Scales sees the pattern repeating itself.

The Army as an institution loves the image of the big war: swift maneuver, tanks, heavy artillery, armed helicopters overhead, mounds of logistics support. The nitty-gritty of working with indigenous personnel to common ends, small unit patrols in civilian-infested cities, quick clashes against faceless enemies that fade back into the populace — not so much. Lessons will fade, and those who earned their PhDs in small wars will be passed over and left by the wayside.

U.S. Army War College professor Andrew Hill found the same neglect in the recent report of the National Commission on the Future of the Army, in which any reference to stability operations “is barely discernable.” As Scales put it, “here is the problem with that approach: The ability to win the big one is vital, but so is the ability to win the small wars. We paid a price for forgetting what we learned in Vietnam. I hope succeeding generations do not have to pay again.”

The U.S. government appears to be repeating the pattern insofar as its support for basic research on insurgency and counterinsurgency. During the early years of the Vietnam conflict, the U.S. government invested significant resources to support research and analysis efforts. This led to some very interesting and promising lines of inquiry by organizations such as the Special Operations Research Office, and scholars like Ted Gurr and Ivo and Rosalind Feierabend, among others. However, as Chris Lawrence recently pointed out, this funding was cut by the end of the 1960s, years before the war ended. After, the fruits of this initial research was published in the early 1970s, further research on the subject slowed considerably.

The emergence of insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan led to another round of research and analysis funding by the U.S. government in the mid-2000s. This resulted in renewed interest in the foundations built during the 1960s, as well as new analytical work of considerable promise. Despite the fact that these conflicts remain unresolved, this resourcing dried up once more by 2009 and government sponsored basic research has once more ground to a crawl. As Chris has explained, this boom-or-bust approach also carries a cost:

The problem lies in that the government (or at least the parts that I dealt with) sometimes has the attention span of a two-year-old. Not only that, it also has the need for instant gratification, very much like a two-year-old. Practically, what that means is that projects that can answer an immediate question get funding (like the Bosnia and Iraq casualty estimates). Larger research efforts that will produce an answer or a product in two to three years can also get funding. On the other hand, projects that produce a preliminary answer in two to three years and then need several more years of funding to refine, check, correct and develop that work, tend to die. This has happened repeatedly. The analytical community is littered with many clever, well thought out reports that look to be good starts. What is missing is a complete body of analysis on a subject. [America’s Modern Wars, 295]

The ambivalent conduct and outcomes of the recent counterinsurgencies generated hotly contested debates that remain unresolved. This is at least partly due to a lack of a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of insurgency and counterinsurgency. This state of affairs appears to be a matter of choice.

Pouring Cold Water in ‘Boots on the Ground’

Both Chris and I questioned the proposed force size figures being bandied about by advocates and opponents of a U.S. ground force intervention to combat Daesh in Iraq and Syria. It turns out that we were not the only ones who found these figures to be curious. Kevin Benson, a retired U.S. Army colonel and the Deputy Chief of Staff, J-5 for the Army component of U.S. Central Command in 2002, found these proposed force levels to be far too low on simple logistical grounds. In an analysis published on War on the Rocks, he summarized the challenges and requirements:

In the case of a campaign against ISIL, the length of the lines of communication in this theater of war, from seaports and airports to key ISIL-held cities, is daunting. From our bases in Kuwait, it is roughly 1,000 kilometers to Mosul.  To Raqqa it is another 400 kilometers.  If we were to attack ISIL through the Syrian port of Latakia, the distance to Raqqa is 300 kilometers.  We can assume these lines of communication will be contested.   It may well only require two U.S. brigade combat teams, along with French, Russian, Turkish, Kurdish, Jordanian, and Iraqi forces to defeat ISIL in combat.  Nonetheless, it will take a lot more than 10,000 soldiers to deliver two brigade combat teams to Mosul and Raqqa in the form required to engage in battle with an enemy who clearly knows how to fight.

Two BCTs would be a minimum force level commitment just to defeat Daesh on the battlefield. They would clearly be insufficient for follow-on stability or counterinsurgency operations.

Benson concludes with an excellent point about the pitfalls of spitballing numbers in policy discussions:

Military and security professionals need to overcome policymakers’ fascination with low numbers of troops being the best course of action and their resultant tendency to micro-manage troop numbers down to the tactical level.  Military advice must be solid, fact-based advice on the structure we would need to put into place to truly defeat ISIL on its home turf.  After 14 years at war, we know no plan can look with certainty beyond initial contact with the enemy main body — the enemy gets a vote.  We know friction and the fog of battle are real.  Still, unsubstantiated numbers proposed through the media and other journals do not really help address the issue at hand.  Frankly, Sen. McCain and Gen. Zinni ought to realize that what they are saying about what it would take to defeat ISIL is not helpful in crafting the plans really needed to accomplish this task. Hurling low ball figures without considering the mathematics of war is not rendering sound military advice, it is chasing sound bites and re-tweets.