Category War by Numbers

War by Numbers Page Proofs

Well, I do have the page proofs for War by Numbers, which I must absolutely get back to the publisher next week. It turns out the book is 374 pages. The Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press site was saying 498 pages, which kind of mystified me as my Word final draft was only 342 pages. They also claim the book has 218 tables, 1 chart and 49 graphs, which sounds about right.

So looks like we are on track (barely) for an August release date.

Anyhow, probably should be busy reviewing and editing instead of writing blog posts.

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).

Economics of Warfare 14

Well, I managed to turn Dr. Spagat’s last lecture into three blog posts. Probably could do that for most of them. There is a lot in them. Moving onto the fourteenth 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 focuses on the impact of foreign aid on a conflict and starts with a study by Nunn and Qian (link to it is on slide 1). It is another cross-national study (by the way, I love cross-national studies). As always, Dr. Spagat’s asides are loaded with meaning. In this case, on slide 2 he again mentions the problem of reverse causation, where the subject you are trying to measure (the dependent variable) is in fact, probably influencing the so-called independent variable. In effect, you are trying to establish cause-and-effect when there is also a flow the other way (the effect is affecting the cause).

Moving through to slide 14 is the rather counterintuitive conclusion of the study done by Nunn and Qian which is that “US food aid seems to contribute to prolonging conflicts but not to starting new ones.” Not sure what to make of that.

He then shifts to a study that focuses just on the Philippines using an approach called the “regression discontinuity approach” (which is something I have never played with). What gets my attention is that the paper’s author’s (Crost, Felter and Johnston)  set up a way to do a side-by-side experiment looking at different municipalities that received aid vice ones that did not. As Dr. Spagat notes on slide 16: “Once again, the idea is to create a situation that resembles a controlled experiment.”

This “controlled experiment” or “side-by-side approach” was the basis of our three urban warfare studies done for the Center for Army Analysis and our situational awareness study that we did for OSD Net Assessment. In the first we looked at engagement results in urban areas vice non-urban areas; and in the situational awareness study we compared engagement results for situations where they knew a lot about their enemy compared to those where they did not. Both of these studies are discussed in some depth in my upcoming book War by Numbers, which I still think will be released this August.

The discussion after that gets a little dense, but the conclusion presented on slide 26 is that also that “…aid leads to conflict.” and “…that insurgents work specifically to prevent aid flowing so that they can prevent local governments from winning over its citizens by providing them with good services.” Interesting. We really have not done any comparable work on this.

Starting on slide 27, he looks are an analytical paper examining the issue rape during Civil War. Again, this is not something we have examined, but the paper is available through a link on slide 27 and discussed by Dr. Spagat in slides 27-34.

Anyhow, I could have easily broken this discussion into three or even four blog posts….but did not this time. Probably more useful than reading my blog post is to actually read Dr. Spagat’s lecture. The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2014.pdf

The Iraqi Army Has Entered the Old City

The offensive is continuing and they have entered the old city: Iraq-forces-seize-ground-mosul-old-city

The estimate is that there are about 2,000 ISIL fighters left behind in Mosul (along with 700,000 civilians): in-mosul-a-heavy-but-not-crushing-blow-to-is-group

In Fallujah in 2004, they left behind about a 1,000 fighters. The November 2004 Fallujah operation did turn into a slow mop-up that cost the U.S. Army and U.S. Marines 65 KIA, 582 WIA, 1 NBD (non-battle death) and 54 NBI (non-battle injury).

Right now, I am editing Chapter 16 of my book War by Numbers. That chapter is called “Urban Legends” and covers the findings from the three reports we did on urban warfare in 2002-2004. So, if I have not been posting much lately on the blog, there is a good reason for it. Trying to keep the book on its scheduled August release date.

1979 to present

We try to stay away from politics in this blog, which is hard to do when discussing national security policy. Still, there are enough political and opinion piece websites and blogs out there, that we do not wish to add to the noise! This article by Major Danny Sjursen borders on the edge of being overtly political but I found it very interesting regardless: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165261

I have not read his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge but I did invest parts of two chapters in my book, America’s Modern Wars, discussing the surge in Iraq and its later adaptation to Afghanistan. His book will also be added to my growing reading list (right now I am struggling with getting the final edits to War by Numbers completed on time…and should not be blogging at all).

Anyhow, I do like his theme that U.S. involvement and policies in the Middle East fundamentally started shifted with the events on 1979. I think it is a useful timeline.

 

War by Numbers is on Amazon

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My new book, with a release date of 1 August, is now available on Amazon.com for pre-order: War by Numbers (Amazon)

It is still listed at 498 pages, and I am pretty sure I only wrote 342. I will receive the proofs next month for review, so will have a chance to see how they got there. My Kursk book was over 2,500 pages in Microsoft Word, and we got it down to a mere 1,662 pages in print form. Not sure how this one is heading the other way.

Unlike the Kursk book, there will be a kindle version.

It is already available for pre-order from University of Nebraska Press here: War by Numbers (US)

It is available for pre-order in the UK through Casemate: War by Numbers (UK)

The table of contents for the book is here: War by Numbers: Table of Contents

Like the cover? I did not have a lot to do with it.

We probably need to keep talking about Afghanistan

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Shawn posted a very nice summary a couple of days ago. It is worth reading if you have not already: Meanwhile in Afghanistan

Recent article reports the same trends: Afghan-government-lost-2-percent-territory

A couple of things get my attention in all this:

  1. They are talking about control of territory. I believe control of population is a lot better metric.
    1. One notes in Shawn’s write up that control of population is 68.5% (vice 61.3% of area).
  2. The insurgent level of activity is very high:
    1. 5,523 Afghan Army and police killed (15,000 casualties)
    2. 22,733 incidents from 8/1/2015 to 8/15/2016

Based on Chapter 11 (Estimating Insurgent Force Size) of my book America’s Modern Wars, working backward from this incident data would mean that there are something like 60,000 – 80,000 full-time and part-time insurgents operating. There is a lot comparing apples to oranges to get there: for example, how are they counting incidents in Afghanistan vice how were they counting incidents in the past cases we use for this estimate, what is the mix of full-time and part-time insurgents, how active and motivated are the insurgents, and so forth; but that level of activity is similar to the level of activity in Iraq at its worse (26,033 incidents in 2005, 45,330 in 2006 and 19,125 in 2007 according to one count). We had over 180,000 U.S. and coalition troops there to deal with that. The Afghani’s have 170,000 Army and Air Force or around 320,000 if you count police (and we did not count police in our database unless there were actively involved in counterinsurgent work). The 5,500+ Afghan Army and police killed a year indicates a pretty active insurgency. We lost less than 5,500 for the entire time we were in Iraq. The low wounded-to-killed ratio in the current Afghan data may well be influenced by who they choose to report as wounded and how they address lightly wounded (as discussed in Chapter 15, Casualties, in my upcoming book War by Numbers). Don’t know what current U.S. Army estimates are of Afghan insurgent strength.

Now, in Chapter Six of my book America’s Modern Wars, we developed a force ratio model based upon 83 historical cases (see chart at top of this post). It was very dependent on the cause of the insurgency, whether it was based on a central idea (like nationalism) or was regional or factional, or whether it was based on a overarching idea (like communism). I don’t still don’t really know the nature of the Afghan insurgency, and we were never funded to study this insurgency (we were only funded for Iraq work). So, I have not done the in-depth analysis of the Afghan insurgency that I did for Iraq. But…….nothing here looks particularly positive.

We never did an analysis of stalemated insurgencies. It could be done, although there are not that many cases of these. One could certainly examine any insurgency that lasts more than 15 years for this purpose. Does a long stalemated insurgency mean that the government (or counterinsurgents) eventually win? Or does a long stalemated insurgency mean that the insurgents eventually win? I don’t know. I would have to go back through our database of 100+ cases, update the data, sort out the cases and then I could make some predictions. That takes time and effort, and right now my effort is focused elsewhere. Is anyone inside DOD doing this type of analysis? I doubt it. Apparently a stalemate means that you can now pass the problem onto the next administration. While it solves the immediate political problem, is really does not answer the question of whether we are winning or losing. Is what we are doing good enough that this will revolve in our favor in the next ten years, or do we need to do more? I think this is the question that needs to be addressed.

Wounded-To-Killed Ratios

Some wounded-to-killed ratios drawn from my upcoming book War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat. I have an entire chapter on the subject in my book (Chapter Fifteen: Casualties). This first chart is from Trevor Dupuy’s Attrition:

table01

A table I created to compare U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps ratios:

table02

A tabled I created looking at the U.S. units the I Corps area of Vietnam. This is after the Tet offensive, and these units are operating side-by-side and listed from north to south. The 1st Bde, 5th ID was up at the DMZ while the 23rd (Americal) Division was in the southern part of I Corps:

table03

And finally the ratios from Iraq and Afghanistan. Note these are higher ratios compared to what is reported in the previous post for the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga.

table04

This is why the Iraq Army and Peshmerga wounded-to-kill ratio in the previous post caught my attention.

NOTES

[1] Table from Attrition: Forecasting Battles Casualties and Equipment Losses in Modern War, page 49. The dates for the wars were added by this author.

Light Tanks

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Well, we are back to looking at light tanks: Griffin light tank general dynamics

And also:  http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/10/m1-tank-120-mm-main-gun-placed-on-demo.html

We did do a report over a decade ago on lighter-weight armor at the request of the Deputy Undersecretary of the Army (Operations Research), Walt Hollis.

It is “MWA-2. The Historical Combat Effectiveness of Lighter-Weight Armored Forces, 6 August 2001 (CAA) – Pages: 121″ in our publication list: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub3.htm

The pdf download file for it is here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/mwa-2lightarmor.pdf

Note that this report, which pre-dates our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, is discussing use of armor in Small Scale Contingency Operations (SSCO) and insurgencies, in addition to conventional wars.

This effort was not discussed in my upcoming book, War by Numbers. It may be picked up in a later book.

 

War by Numbers is in UK

War by Numbers is available in the UK for pre-order through Casemate: War by Numbers

I gather this is where the European customers can order the book. There is some restrictions as to who can sell where.

Interesting marketing blurb. Parts were pulled from the intro to my book and parts from the conclusions. Still no book cover picture, although I have seen a draft. Has a tank on the cover (tanks always sell).

U.S. pre-order sales are here: War by Numbers (U.S.)