Category Research & Analysis

TDI Friday Read: How Do We Know What We Know About War?

The late, great Carl Sagan.

Today’s edition of TDI Friday Read asks the question, how do we know if the theories and concepts we use to understand and explain war and warfare accurately depict reality? There is certainly no shortage of explanatory theories available, starting with Sun Tzu in the 6th century BCE and running to the present. As I have mentioned before, all combat models and simulations are theories about how combat works. Military doctrine is also a functional theory of warfare. But how do we know if any of these theories are actually true?

Well, one simple way to find out if a particular theory is valid is to use it to predict the outcome of the phenomenon it purports to explain. Testing theory through prediction is a fundamental aspect of the philosophy of science. If a theory is accurate, it should be able to produce a reasonable accurate prediction of future behavior.

In his 2016 article, “Can We Predict Politics? Toward What End?” Michael D. Ward, a Professor of Political Science at Duke University, made a case for a robust effort for using prediction as a way of evaluating the thicket of theory populating security and strategic studies. Dropping invalid theories and concepts is important, but there is probably more value in figuring out how and why they are wrong.

Screw Theory! We Need More Prediction in Security Studies!

Trevor Dupuy and TDI publicly put their theories to the test in the form of combat casualty estimates for the 1991 Gulf Way, the U.S. intervention in Bosnia, and the Iraqi insurgency. How well did they do?

Predictions

Dupuy himself argued passionately for independent testing of combat models against real-world data, a process known as validation. This is actually seldom done in the U.S. military operations research community.

Military History and Validation of Combat Models

However, TDI has done validation testing of Dupuy’s Quantified Judgement Model (QJM) and Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model (TNDM). The results are available for all to judge.

Validating Trevor Dupuy’s Combat Models

I will conclude this post on a dissenting note. Trevor Dupuy spent decades arguing for more rigor in the development of combat models and analysis, with only modest success. In fact, he encountered significant skepticism and resistance to his ideas and proposals. To this day, the U.S. Defense Department seems relatively uninterested in evidence-based research on this subject. Why?

David Wilkinson, Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Review, wrote a fascinating blog post looking at why practitioners seem to have little actual interest in evidence-based practice.

Why evidence-based practice probably isn’t worth it…

His argument:

The problem with evidence based practice is that outside of areas like health care and aviation/technology is that most people in organisations don’t care about having research evidence for almost anything they do. That doesn’t mean they are not interesting in research but they are just not that interested in using the research to change how they do things – period.

His explanation for why this is and what might be done to remedy the situation is quite interesting.

Happy Holidays to all!

Isolating the Guerilla

The Vietnam was significant in that it was third bloodiest war in U.S. military history (58,000 U.S. killed) and the U.S. Army choose to learn no lessons from it !!! This last point is discussed in my book America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

In 1965 Trevor Dupuy’s HERO (Historical Evaluation Research Organization) conducted a three-volume study called “Isolating the Guerilla.” It was an interesting survey of 19 insurgencies that included on its research team 26 experts. This included General Geoffrey Lord Bourne (British Army, ret.), Andrew C. Janos, Peter Paret, among others.

These guys:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Bourne,_Baron_Bourne

http://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/26/archives/col-r-ernest-dupuy-88-dead-publicist-and-military-historian.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_N._Dupuy

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_C._Janos

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2793254.William_A_Nighswonger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Paret

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/northjersey/obituary.aspx?pid=163090077

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Ropp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunther_E._Rothenberg

http://www.ur.umich.edu/9495/Oct03_94/29.htm

http://www.andersonfuneralhomeltd.com/home/index.cfm/obituaries/view/fh_id/12343/id/3994242

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/31/obituaries/frank-n-trager-78-an-expert-on-asia-dies.html

 

The first volume of the study, although developed from historical sources, was classified after it was completed. How does one classify a study that was developed from unclassified sources?

As such, the first volume of the study was in the classified safe at DMSI when I was there. I was aware of the study, but had never taken the time to look at it. DMSI went out of business in the early 1990s and all the classified material there was destroyed. The Dupuy Institute did not have a copy of this volume of the study.

In 2004 we did our casualty and duration estimate for Iraq. It was based upon a survey of 28 insurgencies. We then expanded that work to do an analysis based upon 89 insurgencies. This was done independently of our past work back in 1965, which I had never seen. This is detailed in my book America’s Modern Wars.

As this work was being completed I was contacted by a Lt. Colonel Michael F. Trevett in 2008. It turns out he had an unclassified copy of the study. He found it in the Ft. Huachuca library. It was declassified in 2004 and was also in DTIC. So, I finally got a copy of a study after we had almost completed our work on insurgencies. In retrospect, it would have been useful to have from the start. Again, another case of disappearing studies.

In 2011, Michael F. Trevett published the study as a book called Isolating the Guerrilla. The book is the study, with many of the appendices and supporting data removed at the request of the publisher. It was a self-publishing effort that was paid by Michael out of his personal/family funds. He has since left the Army. I did write the foreword to the book.

What can I say about this case? We did a study on insurgencies in 1965 that had some relevance to the wars we entered in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. It remained classified and buried in a library in Ft. Huachuca, Arizona and at DTIC. It was de-classified in 2004 and came back to light in 2008. This was through the effort of a single motivated Lt. Colonel who was willing to take the time and his own personal money to make it happen.

The SAIC Library

The story of the disappearing SAIC research library occurred in the middle of the 1990s, during the same time as the HERO Library was disappearing. SAIC had an “Military Operations Analysis Division” that for a time was a competitor to HERO/DMSI. In particular, around 1990, they hired three former HERO/DMSI employees and used them for studies that normally would have been done by us. Trevor Dupuy was on-the-outs with some people at the U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency (CAA). Some time in the mid-1990s, SAIC decided to close down their military operations analysis division.

The early 1990s were a difficult time for defense contractors. The Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union had disappeared and the defense industry was shrinking. SAIC got rid of the division that did analytical work for DOD as they realized it was a dying business (something that we could never get through our heads). Companies like BDM, one of the stalwarts in the industry since 1959, was sold off in 1990s; with Trevor Dupuy’s old company, DMSI, also going out of business in the 1990s.

Anyhow, SAIC had a library for this division. It was the size of two double offices, maybe 400 square feet or more. It was smaller than the HERO Library. They decided to dissolve the library along with the division. They told the staff to grab what they wanted and dumped the rest. Having never had access to this library, I do not know if there were any holdings of value, but as SAIC had been around since 1969, it is hard to believe that there was not something unique there.

 

This post is related to:

The HERO Library

Missing HERO Reports

 

The HERO Library

The first research library that I was aware of that was broken up and scattered was Trevor Dupuy’s library that was kept at HERO/DMSI (HERO was a division of DMSI at this stage).

One has to talk corporate structure here for a moment. HERO (Historical Evaluation Research Organization) had been established and built up by Trevor Dupuy. In an attempt to expand the business, he created a company called DMSI (Data Memory Systems Incorporated) of which he was just one of the owners (although with about 40% of the stock). In 1987-1989 period, the U.S. defense spending reached it peaked as did DMSI, which had 25 employees. With Glasnost, Perestroika, the Warsaw Pact dissolving and finally the Soviet Union collapsing in 1991, the defense budget collapsed. In the resulting collapse, so to did DMSI. With the business crashing, Trevor Dupuy having a falling out with the other management and quit his own company.

DMSI/HERO had an extensive library and an extensive collection of research files, dating back to its founding in 1962. They even had share library privileges with the Library of Congress due to some unique material in the HERO library. The library took up a large room and there were file cabinets full of research files.

This library was broken up. First, Trevor Dupuy took the report file he kept in his office with him. This was the entire collection of 120+ reports written by HERO. Those eventually ended up at TDI (The Dupuy Institute). The library remained at DMSI, except for those books that the Dupuy family took from the library, which I gather was considerable. These are still in the hands of the Dupuy family. Then DMSI went out of business around 1993, and the remaining files and library were scattered. The employees were invited to take what they wanted out of the files. After that, one employee decided to rescue the files that he thought were important and moved them to his barn in rural Virginia. These included most (but not all) of the Ardennes files and Grace Hayes files (the original VP of research at HERO). A few years later, we arranged with that ex-employee to reclaim the files and he graciously brought them to our office from his barn. After we blew the dust, dirt, hay and mouse droppings from them, we then refiled them at TDI. The files taken by other employees were not recovered. Most of the remaining library was taken by a principal at the company and moved to his basement. They were used for his business for a while. Eventually, he needed to clean his basement and the “HERO Library” ceased to exist.

We were able to save most of the critical files, meaning the reports, most of the Ardennes files and the Grace Hayes files. The rest was lost, which was a shame, although not overwhelmingly critical. Still, the process got my attention and this is potentially a problem with any private company. Unless someone goes through some extra-ordinary process to preserve the files and libraries of their work, then when a private company collapses (which most do at some point), those files are lost. I am aware of several other cases like this.

Missing HERO Reports

Back in 1987 I did a DTIC search for HERO reports (DTIC is the defense library of reports, HERO was Trevor Dupuy’s old company(s) that produced around 130 or so reports). My DTIC search ended up finding something like 40% of HERO reports in their files. As almost of all these reports were done under contract for the government, then the figure should have been something more like 100%.

Now, I guess if I was a responsible citizen, I would have made sure that all the missing reports were identified, copies made, and they were then sent to DTIC. I did not do this, because as I busy running a large project that was behind schedule and over budget (the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base).

But……this little survey got my attention concerning what was preserved in the national report library (like NTIS…National Technical Information Center) and what was not. It raises the question as to whether we are properly preserving the studies and results of all this analysis that various companies have done….or are we loosing some of it. Unfortunately, I have found enough cases over the years of significant and important studies and files disappearing or becoming difficult to find….that I have become concerned. Whether this is indicative of a larger problem I will leave to the reader to determine, but there will be a few blog posts about this subject or the next week or two.

All of our reports and studies are listed on our website here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipubs.htm

It is some 130 HERO reports and 80 TDI reports.

It would be possible to someone to search the NTIS site and see how many these reports can be found (and which ones they cannot find). I would be interested in knowing the results of that if anyone wants to spend a few days doing this. If the problem exists for HERO and TDI reports…then it probably exists for work done by a lot of other companies also.

So Why Are Iraqi Records Important?

Last preachy post on this subject:

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents

So, why does it matter? Well, Iraq has been involved in three wars in recent time that are significant.

We engaged them in the 1991 Gulf War. Even though this was a truly lopsided result, we do not have good two-sided data available for this war (it may exist, but it is classified/closed). As this was our largest conventional operation since the Korean War (1950-1953), then having good two-sided data for this war would be useful. As it is, the last major conventional fight that the U.S. participated in where there is good two-sided data is in Italy through June 1944. After that, German records significantly degrade and we do not have a good collection of opposing force data for Korea, Vietnam or Iraq….although we do have it for Grenada ;).

Then we invaded and conquered Iraq in 2003. This was effectively a three-division operation that went extremely well also. As this was the last major conventional operation we conducted, it would be useful to have good data for the opposing side (hopefully we do, but again, it is classified/closed).

But, probably most significant is the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-1988. This was the largest conventional war since the early 1970s (India-Pakistan in 1971 and the Arab-Israeli War of 1973). This was also the first major war that used chemical weapons since World War I (1914-1918). Chemical weapons and nerve agents were used extensively by Iraq against the Iranians, and also brutally against Kurdish civilians. Iran did make limited used of chemical weapons in response. It is also the only extensive use of nerve agents in warfare. This is probably important to understand and analyze. We do not have records from the Iranian side, so it would be nice to have records from the Iraqi side. Hard to analyze their operations if we have records from neither side. We really have no actual operational data on the effects of chemical weapons in combat since 1918, and we have no operational data on the effects of nerve agents in combat. This could be a major shortfall.

Now, the documents destroyed, according to the article we originally cited, was only the material captured during the 1991 Gulf War, with records dating back to 1978.  Some of it (at least 60%) was preserved on digital tapes. And, perhaps we have preserved all the military records we captured in 2003. So, in fact there may be an extensive collection available (at least 725,000 pages), although it is classified or closed to researchers. Based upon our track record of record preservation from Vietnam and onward, I have reason to be concerned.

Anyhow, a related link on our chemical warfare studies (including links to articles on the Iran-Iraq War):

Survey of German WWI Records

 

P.S. There are over a dozen counties in the world that still have chemical warfare arsenals, including Syria, Iran and North Korea.

 

U.S. Records in the Gulf War (1991)

Of course, there were problems with the U.S. Army record keeping in the Gulf War (1991). There were serious problems with the U.S. Army record keeping in the Vietnam War (1965-1973), so not surprising, the problem had not been corrected, and the same problems existed 20 years later. In the Vietnam War, the 82nd Airborne Division pretty much threw away most of their records. According to Don Hakenson, Director, Center of Unit Records Research, Records Management and Declassification Agency; in the Gulf War, 86% or 87% of the battalion daily journals were not preserved (see War by Numbers, page 146).

This became a big issue when the “Gulf War Syndrome” became an issue. People became suspicious that U.S. soldiers had become exposed to hazardous materials or chemical weapons. Yet, when the Veterans Administration and others tried to figure out where the units were at the time, they found that the records no longer existed for many these units. In many cases, they could not determine where the unit or the people were during operations. Many of the records had simply been thrown out.

The Gulf War Syndrome was not a small issue. It has been estimated that 250,000 U.S. veterans were afflicted. It was a case where record keeping briefly became a major issue. Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_syndrome

Since the 1960s, there has been serious gaps in U.S. record keeping. There still was in 1998 when we conducted a survey of the subject for the U.S. Army. We have conducted no other surveys since then, but gather that corrective action has been undertaken.

U.S. Army Record Keeping

Command and Combat Effectiveness: The Case of the British 51st Highland Division

Soldiers of the British 51st Highland Division take cover in bocage in Normandy, 1944. [Daily Record (UK)]

While Trevor Dupuy’s concept of combat effectiveness has been considered controversial by some, he was hardly the only one to observe that throughout history, some military forces have fought more successfully on the battlefield than others. While the sources of victory and defeat in battle remain a fertile, yet understudied topic, there is a growing literature on the topic of military effectiveness in the fields of strategic and security studies.

Anthony King, a professor in War Studies at the University of Warwick, has published an outstanding article in the most recent edition of British Journal of Military History, “Why did 51st Highland Division Fail? A case-study in command and combat effectiveness.” In it, he examined military command and combat effectiveness through the experience of the British 51st Highland Division in the 1944 Normandy Campaign. Most usefully, King developed a definition of military command that clarifies its relationship to combat effectiveness: “The function of a commander is to maximise combat power by defining achievable missions and, then, orchestrating subordinates into a cohesive whole committed to mission accomplishment.”

Defining Military Command

In order to analyze the relationship between command and combat effectiveness, King sought to “define the concept of command and to specify its relationship to management and leadership.” The construct he developed drew upon the work of Peter Drucker, an Austrian-born American business consultant and writer who is considered by many to be “the founder of modern management.” From Drucker, King distilled a definition of the function and process of military command: “command always consists of three elements: mission definition, mission management and mission motivation.”

As King explained, “When command is understood in this way, its connection to combat effectiveness begins to become clear.”

[C]ommand is an institutional solution to an organizational problem; it generates cohesion in a formation. Specifically, by uniting decision-making authority in one person and one role, a large military force is able to unite subordinate units, whose troops are not co-present with each other and who, in most cases, do not know each other. Crucially, the combat effectiveness of a formation, as a formation, is substantially dependent upon the ability of its commander to synchronise its disparate efforts in order to generate collective effects. Skillful command has a galvanising influence on a military force; by orchestrating the activities of subordinate units and motivating troops, command is able to create a level of combat power, which supervenes the capabilities of each of the parts. A well-commanded force has properties, which exceed those of its constituent units, fighting alone.

It is through the orchestration, synchronization, and motivation of effort, King concluded, that “command and combat effectiveness are immediately connected. Command fuses a formation together and increases its determination to fulfil its missions.”

Assessing the Combat Effectiveness of the 51st Division

The rest of King’s article is a detailed assessment of the combat effectiveness of the 51st Highland Division in Normandy in June and July 1944 using this military command construct. Observers at the time noted a decline in the division’s combat performance, which had been graded quite highly in North Africa and Sicily. The one obvious difference was the replacement of Major General Douglas Wimberley with Major General Charles Bullen-Smith in August 1943. After concluding that the 51st Division was no longer battleworthy, the commander of the British 21st Army Group, General Bernard Montgomery personally relieved Bullen-Smith in late July 1944.

In reviewing Bullen-Smith’s performance, King concluded that

Although a number of factors contributed to the struggles of the Highland Division in Normandy, there is little doubt that the shortcomings of its commander, Major General Charles Bullen-Smith, were the critical factor. Charles Bullen-Smith failed to fulfill the three essential functions required of a commander… Bullen-Smith’s inadequacies are highly suggestive of a direct relationship between command and combat effectiveness; they demonstrate how command can augment or undermine combat performance.

King’s approach to military studies once again demonstrates the relevance of multi-disciplinary analysis based on solid historical research. His military command model should prove to be a very useful tool for analyzing the elements of combat effectiveness and assessing combat power. Along with Dr. Jonathan Fennell’s work on measuring morale, among others, it appears that good progress is being made on the study of human factors in combat and military operations, at least in the British academic community (even if Tom Ricks thinks otherwise).

Gulf War Records

We, of course, have never examined the other sides records for the Gulf War (1990-91). We have included in our various combat databases over 20 division and battalion-level engagements from the Gulf War. These were all assembled for us by C. Curtis Johnson, former VP of HERO and author of something like eight books.

At the time he was working for a project that had collected the U.S. Gulf War records. So he had access to the U.S. records of the various engagements, as was able to assemble the U.S. side. He had to assemble the estimates of Iraqi strength and losses based upon the U.S. intelligence records and a little educated guesswork. There are real problems in using intelligence estimates to determine the other side’s strength and losses. I can point out a number of cases where loss estimates were off by an order of magnitude (I discuss this in depth in my Kursk book). Still, as we had overrun most of the units involved, taking their records at the time, then it appears that these were reasonable and the certainly the best estimates that could be made at the time. Because the records Curt was working with were classified, and our database is unclassified, he could not leave a record of how he developed these estimates. There were, of course, also problems with the U.S. records, but that is the subject of another post.

Now, our engagements could be improved upon by a careful examination of the captured Iraqi records, which is why this caught our attention:

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents

Needless to say, this means that for all practical purposes, the 20+ engagements in our database can never be cross-checked or improved upon. It is the best that can be done.

Captured Records: Vietnam

There is a file of captured records for the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong, having political officers and a command structure, actually did keep records. The North Vietnamese Army also kept records. During the course of the war, some of these records were captured and are in a file at the National Archives. I don’t know of anyone who has used them. I did glance at the file, and there was no finders guide and nothing was translated. There did not appear to be much order to the file. I would have needed someone fluent in Vietnamese to help me (which is actually easy to find in Northern Virginia…for example General Nguyen Ngoc Loan ended up owning a Pizza restaurant in Springfield, VA).

** EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT ** South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the national police, fires his pistol, shoots, executes into the head of suspected Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem (also known as Bay Lop) on a Saigon street Feb. 1, 1968, early in the Tet Offensive. (AP Photo/Eddie Adams)

In the mid-1990s I did meet with Americans who had worked with the Vietnamese in trying to locate missing U.S. servicemen. They stated that the Vietnamese were very open and interested in researching and discussing the war. They felt that they would be receptive to a joint research project on Vietnam and would be willing to open their archives for us. As we had had access to the Soviet military archives since 1993, this looked like a fairly attractive next adventure for us. Unfortunately, we could not get anyone interested in funding research on insurgencies at that time. It was not something that U.S. had researched or analyzed since 1973.

Needless to say, after we got involved in insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, I again floated the idea to the Army of doing a joint research project on Vietnam. They listened to me a little longer, but in the end, there was really no interest in analyzing the insurgency in Vietnam. I am not sure why. It has the virtue of being one of the few insurgencies where the insurgents kept good records. This would allow us to do analysis based upon two-sided data. There was certainly something that could be learned from this.

Of course, one of the problems with studying Vietnam is that U.S. Army record keeping at that time was grossly substandard. It was the poorest quality records from the U.S. Army that I had ever observed. The files from most of the units were very scant. Sometimes it was difficult to even determine the units strength and losses. Some divisions were missing almost all of their files (like the 82nd Airborne). For the 1st Brigade, 5th Mechanized Division on the DMZ, we could not determine the tank strength of the unit. There was no periodic strength and loss reports for armor. For the assault helicopter battalion my father commanded, there was only a battalion newspaper and few other files. You could not tell what aircraft the unit had, nor their status or strength. It was embarrassing.

We did actually flag this problem to the active duty army of the time and they ended up giving us a contract to examine the state of current U.S, army record keeping, which is  discussed in this post:

U.S. Army Record Keeping

Anyhow, this is an extended discussion of captured records originally inspired by this post:

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents