Mystics & Statistics

A blog on quantitative historical analysis hosted by The Dupuy Institute

What Multi-Domain Operations Wargames Are You Playing? [Updated]

Source: David A. Shlapak and Michael Johnson. Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank: Wargaming the Defense of the Baltics. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[UPDATE] We had several readers recommend games they have used or would be suitable for simulating Multi-Domain Battle and Operations (MDB/MDO) concepts. These include several classic campaign-level board wargames:

The Next War (SPI, 1976)

NATO: The Next War in Europe (Victory Games, 1983)

For tactical level combat, there is Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank (SSI/Shrapnel Games, 1996- )

There were also a couple of naval/air oriented games:

Asian Fleet (Kokusai-Tsushin Co., Ltd. (国際通信社) 2007, 2010)

Command: Modern Air Naval Operations (Matrix Games, 2014)

Are there any others folks are using out there?

A Mystics & Statistic reader wants to know what wargames are being used to simulate and explore Multi-Domain Battle and Operations (MDB/MDO) concepts?

There is a lot of MDB/MDO wargaming going on in at all levels in the U.S. Department of Defense. Much of this appears to use existing models, simulations, and wargames, such as the U.S. Army Center for Army Analysis’s unclassified Wargaming Analysis Model (C-WAM).

Chris Lawrence recently looked at C-WAM and found that it uses a lot of traditional board wargaming elements, including methodologies for determining combat results, casualties, and breakpoints that have been found unable to replicate real-world outcomes (aka “The Base of Sand” problem).

C-WAM 1

C-WAM 2

C-WAM 3

C-WAM 4 (Breakpoints)

There is also the wargame used by RAND to look at possible scenarios for a potential Russian invasion of the Baltic States.

Wargaming the Defense of the Baltics

Wargaming at RAND

What other wargames, models, and simulations are there being used out there? Are there any commercial wargames incorporating MDB/MDO elements into their gameplay? What methodologies are being used to portray MDB/MDO effects?

An Administrative Weakness

Another post is response the comments to this blog post:

The Afghan Insurgents

The comment was “…the insurgents are one side of the coin and the other is the credibility of the government we are trying to create in Afghanistan…If the central government is seen as corrupt and self serving then this also inspires the insurgents and may in fact be the decisive factor….”

This immediately brought to mind David Galula’s construct, which was based upon four major points (see pages 210-211 of America’s Modern Wars):

  1. Insurgents need a cause
  2. A police and administrative weakness
  3. A non-hostile geographic environment
  4. Outside support in the middle to late states.

He specifically state that: “the first two are musts. The last is a help that may become a necessity.”

Now, the problem is that we never took the time to measure an “administrative weakness” or even define what it was. Nor did David Galula. Furthermore, there is also probably an “administrative weakness” or two on the guerilla side. If the culture of Iraq/Afghanistan/Vietnam make it difficult to create government structures and armed forces that are highly motivated, unified and not corrupted, well I suspect some of those same problems exist among the guerillas drawn from that same culture. Therefore, to measure this requires some way of defining what these “administrative weaknesses” are, but also quantifying them, and then determining how they affected both (or more) sides. Needless to say, this was not going to be done in the initial phase of our analysis. We were never funded to conduct follow-up analysis.

This is the problem with David Galula’s construct. There is no easy way to measure it or analyze it. Galula offers no definition of what an “administrative weakness” is. If he does not define it, then how do I define it for his “theory?”

One does note that Galula in his description of the Viet Cong in 1963 states that:

The insurgent has really no cause at all: he is exploiting the counterinsurgent’s weaknesses and mistakes….The insurgent’s program is simply: “Throw the rascals out.: If the “rascals” (whoever is in power in Saigon) amend their ways, the insurgents would lose his cause.

As I note on page 48 of my book:

This was a war that eventually resulted in over 2 million deaths and insurgent force in excess of 300,000. As it is, one could infer from Galula’s statement that he felt that the insurgency could be easily defeated since it was based upon “no real cause.”  We believe that this view has been proven incorrect by historical events.

Clearly identifying insurgent cause and administrative weakness was also a challenge for David Galula.

Hausser Wielding Chalk

The Battle of Prokhorovka took place on 12 July 1943 (and for several days after, depending on definition). The most famous part of the fighting was the attack from the Soviet XVIII Tank Corps and XXIX Tank Corps against the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler Division.

Several stories posted on the web and I gather a few books mention something like: “Several German accounts mention that SS-Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser, commander of the SS Panzer Corps, had to use chalk to mark and count the huge jumble of 93 knocked-out Soviet tanks in the Leibstandarte sector alone.”

Now, this makes for an interesting scene: General Hausser, the 62-year old founder of the Waffen SS, is crawling around the battlefield marking up 93 tanks with chalk. With the Totenkopf SS Division having to continue the offensive on the 13th, and Das Reich SS Division in the days after that, I would think that the SS Panzer Corps commander would have a few more important things to do at this moment. Also suspect that significant parts of the battlefield were still under enemy observation. Its gets a little hard to imagine that Hausser was out there with chalk counting tanks.

Does anyone know the original source of this story?

Bernard Fall Quote

We have gotten several interesting comments to this blog post:

The Afghan Insurgents

One comment stated in part that “….I am thinking the road building, school building, and all that has zero impact on winning the people…..”

This reminds me of a Bernard Fall quote related to the Vietnam War. I used it as the introduction to Chapter 14 (page 147) of my book America’s Modern Wars:

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

 Bernard Fall, 1967

 

Forecasting the Iraqi Insurgency

[This piece was originally posted on 27 June 2016.]

Previous posts have detailed casualty estimates by Trevor Dupuy or The Dupuy Institute (TDI) for the 1990-91 Gulf War and the 1995 intervention in Bosnia. Today I will detail TDI’s 2004 forecast for U.S. casualties in the Iraqi insurgency that began in 2003.

In April 2004, as simultaneous Sunni and Shi’a uprisings dramatically expanded the nascent insurgency in Iraq, the U.S. Army Center for Army Analysis (CAA) accepted an unsolicited proposal from TDI President and Executive Director Christopher Lawrence to estimate likely American casualties in the conflict. A four-month contract was finalized in August.

The methodology TDI adopted for the estimate was a comparative case study analysis based on a major data collection effort on insurgencies. 28 cases were selected for analysis based on five criteria:

  1. The conflict had to be post-World War II to facilitate data collection;
  2. It had to have lasted more than a year (as was already the case in Iraq);
  3. It had to be a developed nation intervening in a developing nation;
  4. The intervening nation had to have provided military forces to support or establish an indigenous government; and
  5. There had to be an indigenous guerilla movement (although it could have received outside help).

Extensive data was collected from these 28 cases, including the following ten factors used in the estimate:

  • Country Area
  • Orderliness
  • Population
  • Intervening force size
  • Border Length
  • Insurgency force size
  • Outside support
  • Casualty rate
  • Political concept
  • Force ratios

Initial analysis compared this data to insurgency outcomes, which revealed some startlingly clear patterns suggesting cause and effect relationships. From this analysis, TDI drew the following conclusions:

  • It is difficult to control large countries.
  • It is difficult to control large populations.
  • It is difficult to control an extended land border.
  • Limited outside support does not doom an insurgency.
  • “Disorderly” insurgencies are very intractable and often successful insurgencies.
  • Insurgencies with large intervening third-party counterinsurgent forces (above 95,000) often succeed.
  • Higher combat intensities do not doom an insurgency.

In all, TDI assessed that the Iraqi insurgency fell into the worst category in nine of the ten factors analyzed. The outcome would hinge on one fundamental question: was the U.S. facing a regional, factional insurgency in Iraq or a widespread anti-intervention insurgency? Based on the data, if the insurgency was factional or regional, it would fail. If it became a nationalist revolt against a foreign power, it would succeed.

Based on the data and its analytical conclusions, TDI provided CAA with an initial estimate in December 2004, and a final version in January 2005:

  • Insurgent force strength is probably between 20,000–60,000.
  • This is a major insurgency.
    • It is of medium intensity.
  • It is a regional or factionalized insurgency and must remain that way.
  • U.S. commitment can be expected to be relatively steady throughout this insurgency and will not be quickly replaced by indigenous forces.
  • It will last around 10 or so years.
  • It may cost the U.S. 5,000 to 10,000 killed.
    • It may be higher.
    • This assumes no major new problems in the Shiite majority areas.

When TDI made its estimate in December 2004, the conflict had already lasted 21 months, and U.S. casualties were 1,335 killed, 1,038 of them in combat.

When U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq in December 2011, the war had gone on for 105 months (8.7 years), and U.S. casualties had risen to 4,485 fatalities—3,436 in combat. The United Kingdom lost 180 troops killed and Coalition allies lost 139. There were at least 468 contractor deaths from a mix of nationalities. The Iraqi Army and police suffered at least 10,125 deaths. Total counterinsurgent fatalities numbered at least 15,397.

As of this date, the conflict in Iraq that began in 2003 remains ongoing.

NOTES

Christopher A. Lawrence, America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Philadelphia, PA: Casemate, 2015) pp. 11-31; Appendix I.

U.S. Army Releases New Iraq War History

On Thursday, the U.S. Army released a long-awaited history of its operational combat experience in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. The study, titled The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 1: Invasion – Insurgency – Civil War, 2003-2006 and The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 2: Surge and Withdrawal, 2007-2011, was published under the auspices of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute.

This reflects its unconventional origins. Under normal circumstances, such work would be undertaken by either the U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute (CSI), which is charged with writing quick-turnaround “instant histories,” or the U.S. Army Center of Military History (CMH), which writes more deeply researched “official history,” years or decades after the fact.[1] Instead, these volumes were directly commissioned by then-Chief of the Staff of the Army, General Raymond Odierno, who created an Iraq Study Group in 2013 to research and write them. According to Odierno, his intent was “to capture key lessons, insights, and innovations from our more than 8 years of conflict in that country.[I]t was time to conduct an initial examination of the Army’s experiences in the post-9/11 wars, to determine their implications for our future operations, strategy, doctrine, force structure, and institutions.”

CSI had already started writing contemporary histories of the conflict, publishing On Point: The United States Army in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (2004) and On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign (2008), which covered the period from 2003 to January 2005. A projected third volume was advertised, but never published.

Although the Iraq Study Group completed its work in June 2016 and the first volume of the history was scheduled for publication that October, its release was delayed due to concerns within the Army historical community regarding the its perspective and controversial conclusions. After external reviewers deemed the study fair and recommended its publication, claims were lodged after its existence was made public last autumn that the Army was suppressing it to avoid embarrassment. Making clear that the study was not an official history publication, current Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley added his own forward to Odierno’s, and publicly released the two volumes yesterday.

NOTES

[1] For a discussion of the roles and mission of CSI and CMH with regard to history, see W. Shane Story, “Transformation or Troop Strength? Early Accounts of the Invasion of Iraq” Army History, Winter 2006; Richard W. Stewart, “‘Instant’ History and History: A Hierarchy of Needs” Army History, Winter 2006; Jeffrey J. Clarke, “The Care and Feeding of Contemporary History,” Army History, Winter 2006; and Gregory Fontenot, “The U.S. Army and Contemporary Military History,” Army History, Spring 2008.

 

T-34s on 5 July 1943

The biggest problem with the kill claims related to the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) Division’s Tiger company on 5 July 1943 is that they claim dozens of T-34s killed on the 5th of July, when there were few in the area.

These specific claims are discussed here:

Panzer Aces Wittmann and Staudegger at Kursk – part 1

There were no units armed with T-34s that were attached to the Sixth Guards Army, and the armored units in the area with T-34s were not in action for most of the 5th (this would include the III Mechanized Corps and the II Guards Tank Corps).  So either the LSSAH Tigers shot up a lot of M-3 Lees and Stuarts and they have become T-34s in the retelling, or the claims are just grossly inflated or flat out wrong.

But….there may have been a few T-34s in the area. According to the March-April 1944 Soviet General Staff Study done on Kursk, 10 or 15 tanks were deployed in the fortified areas as part of the defense. See page 284 of my Kursk book. But, in the unit records we had, we never had a report on them (including in the Sixth Guards Army records). We have not seen any record of them other than the single report in the General Staff Study.

So there were 10 or 15 tanks deployed in the fortified areas. They do not say where and what types of tanks. It could have been T-34s in the Sixth Guards Army area….or it could not be. They could have been deployed together or scattered.

There are a few reports of dug-in T-34s on 4 and 5 July 1943.

Guenther Baer, II Battalion of the LSSAH Tank Regiment, reports for the 4th of July, the pre-battle evening clearing attack on the Soviet outpost line that:

We also came upon scattered dug-in T-34s, who were then quickly disabled by our own tanks. (page 282…interview was done in 1999 by MG Dieter Brand).

Lt. Franz-Joachim von Rodde, an adjutant with the 6th Panzer Regiment, 3rd Panzer Division reports that:

That evening [5 July]…penetrated all the way to a small village [Krasnyii Pochinok] along a narrow front line and staggered towards the rear. The village itself could not be taken in time, though. Here we encountered T-34s dug-in up to their turrets for the first time. (page 367…interview was done in 1999 by MG Dieter Brand).

As I note on page 368:

Lt. Rodde’s memory of T-34s dug-in around Krasnyii Pochinok cannot be confirmed. The Soviet 245th Tank Regiment did not have T-34s. The nearest forces with T-34s would be the 59th and 60th Tank Regiment attached to the Fortieth Army. While these forces may well have been in the area (as this is not the only report of tanks we have on the front line of the 71st Guard Rifle Division, 67th Guards Rifle Division, or the Fortieth Army units), we have not accounts of them being there in the Soviet records.

Just to continue Rodde’s quote:

This was another measure hitherto unknown. These dug-in tanks were very dangerous. They were camouflaged extremely well–as usual with the Russians–and could only be reconnoitered once they opened fire. They usually fired at short range so as to have a maximum chance of hitting something.

Then there also the reports of dug-in tanks from Alfred Rubbel, 503rd Heavy Panzer (Tiger) Battalion, in the area where the 6th Panzer Division was attacking on the 5th, but this is out of the area of our concern (see page 403). Still just to quote:

Our Tiger company suffered the first losses as well. For the first time we saw dug-in enemy tanks in this sector. In a way this was a surprise as that was a use of tanks not at all typical. There dug-in tanks were firing with great precision from their position and were thus very dangerous for us. On that day alone, we have four losses due to enemy fire, which could all be recovered but nevertheless represented the highest number of losses in one day of battle we had to absorb during the entire operation.

Those tanks were most likely from the Soviet 262nd Tank Regiment, which started the battle with 22 KV-1s.

So we have reports of dug-in T-34s in front of the LSSAH Division and in front of 3rd Panzer Division. These are two widely separated locations. So it is distinctly possible that the SS Panzer Corps could have encountered 6-9 dug-in T-34s. This is still considerably less than what they claim, but probably there is some basis to their claims. Still, it would appear that they, or subsequent authors, either over-claimed or credited every tanks as destroyed as being a T-34, even though most were not.

Hard to sort it out 75 years after the fact…..but it is clear that many of the published claims for 5 July 1943 are not correct.

The Afghan Insurgents

Suicide bomber in Baghlan Jadid, April 2009. Photo by William A. Lawrence II

The charts looking at force ratios created by our regression analysis of 83 cases were very much based on insurgent cause, a subject that a lot of counterinsurgency analysts gloss over. The question is whether the insurgency is based upon a central political idea (like nationalism), an overarching idea (an ideology like communism) and a limited developed political thought (a regional or factional insurgency). This very much changes the difficulty of suppressing the insurgency. It also changes the odds of winning. The force levels and sometimes duration of insurgencies were significantly different for these cases. In my book America’s Modern Wars I end up spending three chapters on this subject: Chapter 4: Force Ratios Really Do Matter, Chapter 5: Cause Really is Important and Chapter 6: The Two Together Seem Really Important.

Now, this came up when we were doing our estimate in 2004 of U.S. casualties and the  duration of an insurgency in Iraq (which is in Chapter 1 of my book). In this case we have a country that was maybe 60% Shiite Muslim and an insurgency that was centered around the population of around 20% Sunni Muslim. Was this a regional or factional insurgency? Probably. We built that estimate on only 28 cases (because, you know, research takes time). In those cases that were based upon a central political idea, the insurgents won 75% of the time. In those cases that were based upon a limited political idea, the insurgents did not win in any of those cases. This is a big, and very noticeable difference. It was the one bright spot in my briefings (as people weren’t too excited about my conclusions that we would loose 5,000+ and it would take 10+ years…as that was not what was being promised by our political leaders in 2004).

The challenge is sorting out which applies to Afghanistan. There is no question that when they were fighting the Soviet Union, it was based upon a central political idea (nationalism). The question is, what is this insurgency based upon?

Part of the problem in sorting out what is happening in Afghanistan is that the country’s demographics are very complex. For example 42% of the population is Pashtun, 33% is Tajik, 9% is Hazara (who are usually Shiite Muslims), 9% are Uzbek, 4% Aimek, 3% Trukmen, 2% Baloch and 4% others (source World Factbook, 2013 estimate, courtesy of Wikipedia).

Language is a little better with 80% speaking Dari, which is Persian or Farsi. 47% speak Pashto, the native tongue of Pashtuns. 5% speak English.

The country is usually considered 85-90% Sunni Muslim and 7-15% Shiite Muslim.

A 2018 population estimate for Afghanistan is 31,575,018 (pretty precise for an estimate).

The insurgents tend to also be separated in a bewildering array of groups (as was also the case when they were fighting the Soviet Union). Some of the insurgent groups are:

Taliban: These are the previous rulers of Afghanistan. Was close to Al-Qaeda.

Haqqani Network: Offshoot of the Taliban. Al-Qaeda affiliate.

Fidal Mahaz: Splinter group from the Taliban

IEHCA: Splinter group from the Taliban

HIG: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar group, who has been doing this since 1980s. He signed a peace agreement with the Afghan government in 2016.

IMU: Originally an Uzbek movement.

Islamic Jihad Union (IJU): Militant Islamist organization. Split off from IMU. Al-Qaeda affiliate

ETIM: Uyghurs from China.

LeJ: anti-Shiite group

Pakistani Taliban or TTP: Primarily focused on Pakistan

Lel: Primarily focused on Pakistan

ISIL-KP: Islamic state affilliate.

 

This is a quickly cobbled together list. Some with more expertise are welcome to add or modify this list.

Wikipedia does give strengths for some of these groups. Have no idea how accurate they are:

Taliban: 60,000

Haqqani Network: 4,000-15,000

Fidai Mahaz: 8,000

IEHCA: 3,00-3,500

HIG: 1,500-2,200+

al-Qaeda: 50-100

 

So….when I was coding the over 100 cases that we now have in our database, it was relatively easy to determine if an insurgency was based upon a central idea, or an overarching idea or was regional or factional. There was very little debate in most cases.

On the other…..it is a little harder to tell what it should be in this particular case.

Interesting enough, I stumbled across an article last week discussing the same issue: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/taliban-and-changing-nature-pashtun-nationalism-41182

New York Military Affairs Symposium

There is an 37-year old organization called the New York Military Affair Symposium that regular hosts speakers. Their website and speaker schedule is here: http://www.nymas.org/

This Friday (Jan 18), Max Boot will be presenting about his book The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.

I will be presenting on 26 April based upon my book War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat.

The presentations are at the Soldier Sailors Club, 283 Lexington Avenue, New York City at 7 PM.

Active Defense, Forward Defense, and A2/AD in Eastern Europe

The current military and anti-access/area denial situation in Eastern Europe. [Map and overlay derived from situation map by Thomas C. Thielen (@noclador) https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1079999716333703168; and Ian Williams, “The Russia – NATO A2AD Environment,” Missile Threat, Center for Strategic and International Studies, published January 3, 2017, last modified November 29, 2018, https://missilethreat.csis.org/russia-nato-a2ad-environment/]

In an article published by West Point’s Modern War Institute last month, “The US Army is Wrong on Future War,” Nathan Jennings, Amos Fox and Adam Taliaferro laid out a detailed argument that current and near-future political, strategic, and operational realities augur against the Army’s current doctrinal conceptualization for Multi-Domain Operations (MDO).

[T]he US Army is mistakenly structuring for offensive clashes of mass and scale reminiscent of 1944 while competitors like Russia and China have adapted to twenty-first-century reality. This new paradigm—which favors fait accompli acquisitions, projection from sovereign sanctuary, and indirect proxy wars—combines incremental military actions with weaponized political, informational, and economic agendas under the protection of nuclear-fires complexes to advance territorial influence…

These factors suggest, cumulatively, that the advantage in military confrontation between great powers has decisively shifted to those that combine strategic offense with tactical defense.

As a consequence, the authors suggested that “the US Army should recognize the evolved character of modern warfare and embrace strategies that establish forward positions of advantage in contested areas like Eastern Europe and the South China Sea. This means reorganizing its current maneuver-centric structure into a fires-dominant force with robust capacity to defend in depth.”

Forward Defense, Active Defense, and AirLand Battle

To illustrate their thinking, Jennings, Fox, and Taliaferro invoked a specific historical example:

This strategic realignment should begin with adopting an approach more reminiscent of the US Army’s Active Defense doctrine of the 1970s than the vaunted AirLand Battle concept of the 1980s. While many distain (sic) Active Defense for running counter to institutional culture, it clearly recognized the primacy of the combined-arms defense in depth with supporting joint fires in the nuclear era. The concept’s elevation of the sciences of terrain and weaponry at scale—rather than today’s cult of the offense—is better suited to the current strategic environment. More importantly, this methodology would enable stated political aims to prevent adversary aggression rather than to invade their home territory.

In the article’s comments, many pushed back against reviving Active Defense thinking, which has apparently become indelibly tarred with the derisive criticism that led to its replacement by AirLand Battle in the 1980s. As the authors gently noted, much of this resistance stemmed from the perceptions of Army critics that Active Defense was passive and defensively-oriented, overly focused on firepower, and suspicions that it derived from operations research analysts reducing warfare and combat to a mathematical “battle calculus.”

While AirLand Battle has been justly lauded for enabling U.S. military success against Iraq in 1990-91 and 2003 (a third-rank, non-nuclear power it should be noted), it always elided the fundamental question of whether conventional deep strikes and operational maneuver into the territory of the Soviet Union’s Eastern European Warsaw Pact allies—and potentially the Soviet Union itself—would have triggered a nuclear response. The criticism of Active Defense similarly overlooked the basic political problem that led to the doctrine in the first place, namely, the need to provide a credible conventional forward defense of West Germany. Keeping the Germans actively integrated into NATO depended upon assurances that a Soviet invasion could be resisted effectively without resorting to nuclear weapons. Indeed, the political cohesion of the NATO alliance itself rested on the contradiction between the credibility of U.S. assurances that it would defend Western Europe with nuclear weapons if necessary and the fears of alliance members that losing a battle for West Germany would make that necessity a reality.

Forward Defense in Eastern Europe

A cursory look at the current military situation in Eastern Europe along with Russia’s increasingly robust anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities (see map) should clearly illustrate the logic behind a doctrine of forward defense. U.S. and NATO troops based in Western Europe would have to run a gauntlet of well protected long-range fires systems just to get into battle in Ukraine or the Baltics. Attempting operational maneuver at the end of lengthy and exposed logistical supply lines would seem to be dauntingly challenging. The U.S. 2nd U.S. Cavalry ABCT Stryker Brigade Combat Team based in southwest Germany appears very much “lone and lonely.” It should also illustrate the difficulties in attacking the Russian A2/AD complex; an act, which Jennings, Fox, and Taliaferro remind, that would actively court a nuclear response.

In this light, Active Defense—or better—a MDO doctrine of forward defense oriented on “a fires-dominant force with robust capacity to defend in depth,” intended to “enable stated political aims to prevent adversary aggression rather than to invade their home territory,” does not really seem foolishly retrograde after all.