West Point class of 1986. Platoon and Company commander, then went to medical school becoming a doctor. Was a flight surgeon in special operations. Served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Was the doctor who first sat with and interviewed Saddam Hussein when he was captured. Wrote a book about it: night-saddam-Mark-Green-md
Left service in 2006 after 20 years. Founded a medical company. Elected to the Tennessee Senate in 2012.
I guess we will have to see how the third nominee for Secretary of the Army fares.
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 question of how insurgencies end is crucially important. There is no consensus on how to effectively wage counterinsurgency much less end one on favorable terms. Even successful counterinsurgencies may not end decisively. In the Dupuy Insurgency Spread Sheets (DISS) database of 83 post-World War II insurgencies, interventions, and stabilization operations, 42 are counterinsurgent successes and 11 had indeterminate conclusions. Of the counterinsurgent successes, about 1/3 failed to bring about stability or achieve long-term success.
George Frederick Willcoxon, an economist with the United Nations, recently looked into the question of why up to half of countries that suffer civil conflict relapse into violence between the same belligerents within a decade. He identified risk factors for reversion to war by examining the end of civil conflict and post-war recovery in 109 cases since 1970, drawing upon data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the Polity IV project and the World Bank.
Long-standing international conventional wisdom prioritizes economic reforms, transitional justice mechanisms or institutional continuity in post-war settings. However, my statistical analyses found that political institutions and military factors were actually the primary drivers of post-war risk. In particular, post-war states with more representative and competitive political systems as well as larger armed forces were better able to avoid war relapse.
These findings challenge a growing reluctance to consider early elections and political liberalization as critical steps for reestablishing authoritative, legitimate and sustainable political order after major armed conflict.
The non-results are perhaps as interesting as the results. With one exception discussed below, there is no evidence that the economic characteristics of post-war countries strongly influence the likelihood they will return to war. Income per capita, development assistance per capita, oil rents as a percent of GDP, overall unemployment rates and youth unemployment rates are not associated with civil war relapse.
Equally significant is there is no evidence that the culture, religion or geopolitics of the Middle East and North Africa will impede post-war recovery. I introduced into the statistical models measures for Islam, Arab culture and location in the region. None of these variables showed statistically significant correlations with the risk of war relapse since 1970, holding everything else constant, suggesting that such factors should not distinctively handicap post-war stabilization, recovery and transition in Iraq, Libya, Syria or Yemen.
Willcoxon’s research suggested a correlation between numbers of security forces and successfully preventing new violence.
Perhaps not surprisingly, larger security sectors reduce the risk of war relapse. For every additional soldier in the national armed forces per 1,000 people, the risk of relapse is about seven percent lower. Larger militaries are better able to deter renewed rebel activity, as well as prevent or reduce other forms of conflict such as terrorism, organized crime and communal violence.
He also found that the types of security forces had an influence as well.
The presence of outside troops also has significant influence on risk. The analysis lends support to a well-established finding in the political science literature that the presence of United Nations peacekeepers lowers the risk of conflict relapse. However, the presence of non-U.N. foreign troops almost triples the risk of relapsing back into civil war. There are at least two potential interpretations on this latter finding: Foreign troops may intervene in especially difficult circumstances, and therefore their presence indicates the post-war episodes most likely to fail; or foreign troops, particularly occupying armies, generate their own conflict risk.
These findings are strikingly similar to TDI’s research that suggests that higher force ratios of counterinsurgent troops to insurgents correlate with counterinsurgent success. You can check Willcoxon’s paper out here.
This is the third and last posting on the thirteenth 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/
My first post on his lecture did not get past his second page as I ended up pontificating about his two rather significant statements on data. They were:
To get anywhere with empirical research you need to have a reasonably large number of data points. (This is a basic fact about empirical analysis that many students beginning research projects overlook)
So we need to ask ourselves — where are all of these data points going to come from?
My second post covered the part when he looked at Colombia. The rather interesting conclusion from that was (slide 18): “Dube and Vargas [the study authors] calculate that the fall in coffee prices between 1997 and 2003 translates into an additional 1013 deaths in coffee growing areas….”
On slide 26 of his lecture he starts an examination of a study done by Blazzi and Blattman that does a cross-country approach examining changes in commodity prices to analyze the impact of income on armed conflict (and although Dr. Spagat is American…he has disciplined himself to spell it “analyse” in the British fashion).
The next slide (slide 26) talks about three facets of their work, looking at 1) opportunity cost (making a decent living vice rebelling), 2) state capacity, and 3) state prize. This last idea caught my attention because it harkens back to the work of Feierabend & Feierabend and Ted Gurr. In their seminal work done in the 1960s on causes of revolution they found that political violence was less in really poor countries than in developing countries. Here they are looking whether a state is so poor that there is no incentive to rebel because of the small “prize” you will win if you succeed. Certainly a viewpoint more in line with an economists’ training. I believe Feierabend & Feierabend (a political scientist and psychologist if I remember correctly) concluded that if you are struggling to survive in a poor country, this may take priority. Political revolt is luxury afforded by a developing economy (for example, the Russian economy before World War I). I am not sure I buy into the “state prize” explanation. I don’t really think people revolt for profit.
The next slide (slide 27) is also interesting, as it talked about 1) conflict onset, 2) conflict ending and 3) conflict intensity. As Dr. Spagat states: “Many people mix these things together so this attention to detail is welcome.” These first two points go back to areas I wanted to examine with our insurgency studies which was (to quote myself):
First, future analysis should be clearly focused, so that it addresses one of the three distinct time frames:
a. Before an insurgency starts (pre-insurgency)
b. In the early stages of an insurgency (proto-insurgency)
c. As an insurgency has clearly developed (developed insurgency)
(see Chapter 24: “Where Do We Go From Here” in American’s Modern Wars, pages 294-298)
And of course, withdrawal and war termination (see Chapter 19: “Withdrawal and War Termination” in AMW, pages 237-242).
Needless to say, we could never locate budget to examine the early stages of an insurgency (pre-insurgency and proto-insurgency) or examine how they end (which in 2008…I thought was kind of an important subject)..
Anyhow, the results from the Blazzi and Blattman study are summarized in the next slides. In short they are:
“…suggests that there is no connection between price shocks to exports on the onset of armed conflict (or coups)”
“…weak evidence…that positive export price shocks help to end wars…”
“…rather weak evidence…that positive export price shocks help to decrease (a lot) the number of battle deaths in ongoing wars.”
“The opportunity cost and state capacity ides do get some support.”
“The state prize idea gets no support at all” (and this is really not surprising, as I thought that construct was kind of “batty” to start with…Lenin was not in it for the money)
The U.S. Air Force (USAF) has fielded a formidable force, demonstrating air dominance in conflicts fought, as well as those threatened, across the globe for decades through the Cold War (1945-1991); think Strategic Air Command (SAC) under Gen Curtis LeMay. Pax Americana has been further extended to the present. A “pax” (Latin for peace) being a period of relative peace due to a preponderance of power. The French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine famously defined the U.S. as a “hyperpower”, or “a country that is dominant or predominant in all categories” (NY Times, 1999-02-05). The ability to project power by the U.S. military, especially by the USAF, is and was unparalleled.
According to Gen David Goldfein, Air Force Chief of Staff, “We’re everywhere. Air power has become the oxygen the joint team breathes. Have it, you don’t even think about [it]. Don’t have it, it’s all you think about. Air superiority, ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance], space, lift [airlift, or transport services] are just a few examples.”
Indeed, “Land-based forces now are going to have to penetrate denied areas to facilitate air and naval forces. This is exact opposite of what we have done for the last 70 years, where air and naval forces have enabled ground forces,” according to General Mark Milley, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. War on the Rocks claims “there is no end in sight to the [U.S.] Army’s dependence on airpower.”
The USAF Fights as a Joint Force
The photo above illustrates a joint team across U.S. and allied forces, by combining assets from the USAF, the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC), as well as the Royal Air Force (RAF), and Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) into a single fighting force. But it also demonstrates this preponderance of power by the USAF, which provided almost all of the aircraft used by the operation. Pictured aircraft include (clockwise from left):
U-2S (USAF) – provides ISR.
PAC-3 (USAF) – surface-to-air missile to attack airborne targets.
KC-10 (USAF) – provide in-flight refueling services.
F-15E (USAF) – provides both air superiority and precision strike capabilities.
E-3D Sentry (RAF or USAF) – provides command, control, communications and computers, plus ISR, which happily forms the unique acronym C4ISR, rather than “CCCCISR”
F/A-18C (USMC or RAAF) – provides both air superiority and precision strike capabilities.
F/A-22 (USAF) – provides penetrating strike and air dominance capabilities.
A330 MRTT (RAF?) – provides both in-flight refueling and airlift services.
Emergency Medical and Firefighting ground vehicles.
Thus, I’d assert, we have seen some strong evidence of great plans, and more importantly a planning capability by the U.S. military, including and especially the USAF.
According to a RAND study on the USAF pilot shortage, the real issue is experience levels in “Operational Units (i.e., those with combat responsibilities) are the only assignment options for newly trained pilots while they mature and develop their mission knowledge. Thus, these units require enough experienced pilots to supervise the development of the new pilots. As the proportion of experienced pilots in a unit drops, each one must fly more to provide essential supervision to an increasing number of new pilots. If the unit’s flying capacity cannot increase, new pilots each fly less, extending the time they need to become experienced themselves.”
Given that the career path from military pilot to airlines pilot has been in operation since the 1940’s, why should this be a critical issue now? Because the difference in pay has changed. “The Air Force believes much of the problem comes from commercial airlines that have been hiring at increased rates and can offer bigger paychecks.” All major U.S. Airlines, however, must report not only pilot quantities and salaries, but many other financial details to the Office of Airline Information (OAI), which provides this data to the public for free. Does the USAF not have the capability to analyze and manage the economics of pilot demand and supply? It seems they have been caught reacting, rather than proactively managing their most critical resource, trained human pilots.
“Drone pilots suffer a high rate of burnout, as they work 12 to 13 hour days, performing mainly intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, but also some strikes where mistakes caused by tired eyes can cost lives.” Given the autopilot capabilities of commercial airliners, why are Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) aircrews working so much? Why has autonomy not been granted to a machine for the long, boring and tedious tasks of loiter, and then a human alerted when required to make decisions? Perhaps because the RPA concept is not developed enough to allow for man-machine teaming, perhaps because military leaders do not trust technology to deliver the right alerts.
According to Goldfein, “I believe it’s a crisis: air superiority is not an American birthright. It’s actually something you have to fight for and maintain.”
As fighter pilots seem to be more likely to leave the USAF, these issues seem to be related. As “drones” (more properly RPA) became the star of the global war on terrorism since 2001, many USAF fighter pilots who were formerly physically flying USAF aircraft such as the F-16 were tasked with sitting in a cargo container and staring at a screen, while their inputs to controls were beamed across the world at the speed of light to the controlled drone, which was often loitering for hours over a target area that required persistent ISR. Several Hollywood movies (such as Good Kill (2014)) have been made about this twofold life of USAF pilots. Did the USAF not know that these circumstances would erode morale? Do they know why pilots sign up for service, and why they stay?
How About Battlefield Networking?
A Battle Network enabled by an F-15C with Talon HATE pod. [foxtrot alpha]
In previous posts in this blog, we’ve seen that information is a critical resource. The ability to share information on a battlefield network is the defining capability about how we will win future wars, according to Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work. Most units in the USAF (as well as most NATO units) have the Link 16 network (depicted in blue above). This was conceived in 1967 by MITRE, demonstrated in 1973 by MITRE, and developed as the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (JTIDS) in 1981 by what is now BAE Systems. “Fielding proceeded slowly throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s with rapid expansion (following 9/11) in preparation for Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
Not all units are equipped with Link 16 capability, especially the new stealth fighters, since broadcasting over this network gives away a units position. Instead, the F-22 was equipped with the In-Flight Data Link (IFDL), the red lines in diagram above. Since only the F-22 was equipped with this type of data link, legacy fighters like the F-15C could not communicate easily with F-22 units. Similarly, the F-35 program is being deployed with its own, the Multi-Function Advanced Data Link (MADL), which likewise preserves stealth, but also impedes communications with units not so equipped.
The difficulty and complexity of fielding a battlefield network which allows aircraft to communicate without compromising their stealth is tough, which is why Lt Col Berke stated that “these networks have yet to be created.” The Talon HATE pod is a stopgap capability, requested by the Pacific Air Forces, prototyped and deployed by Boeing Phantom Works. “With the stealthy F-22 buy truncated at 183 aircraft and F-35s being introduced into service far more slowly than planned, the Air Force is being forced to devise a connectivity regimen among these platforms to maximize their capabilities in battle.” The Talon HATE pod also includes an IRST, which the USAF has learned is effective at detecting stealth fighters.
Indeed, as reported by Aviation Week, the USAF is still in the process to rolling out Link 16 to its older tankers the KC-135, which are among the oldest aircraft still flown by the USAF. Perhaps this is a reaction to the Chinese operationalized stealth fighter, the J-20. It has recently been photographed carrying four external fuel tanks, which may give it the range to attack potentially vulnerable targets, such as tankers.
I gather the reasons are because of a slow down of demand in China (which is interesting in and of itself) and Libyan oil returning to the market (which is a good sign). Brent Crude is now getting near $50 a barrel, whereas several weeks ago it was at $58.
This, of course, has a big impact in countries like Russia, where oil is a major percent of the government budget (ruble is at 57 to a dollar today) and Venezuela, which is currently in turmoil.
With the budget resolution voted in by congress that runs until the September of this year (end of the fiscal year), I gather the defense budget is the Obama proposed 2017 defense budget plus $15 billion (which is half of the additional budget that Trump requested for 2017)….so total budget of around $583 (2017 request) or $596 (actually spent) + $15 billion: https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/lawmakers-common-ground-1t-plan-201456675.html
The big increase will have to wait for the FY 2018 budget, proposed to be $639 billion (I gather, although the figure $603 was put out when Trump first announced his 10% increase). Of course, they did not fully sort out the FY2017 budget until five months before fiscal year 2017 ended, so I am not giving much of chance that they will get the FY 2018 budget sorted out before the start of the next fiscal year (this coming October), as I gather there a few controversial expenditures and cuts in the next government budget. So defense spending will remain fairly level for some months to come.
Because conflicts arising from Great Power rivalries and emerging regional challenges pose the greatest potential strategic danger to the U.S., some have called for optimizing the Army to execute combined arms maneuver warfare against peer or near-peer armies. Recent experience suggests however that the most likely future conflicts the U.S. will engage in will involve ongoing post-Cold War ethnic and nationalist-driven political violence, leading others to support a balanced force structure also capable of conducting wide-area security, or stabilization operations and counterinsurgency.
The Army attempted in 2011 to define wide-area security and combined arms maneuver as the two core competencies in its basic doctrine that would allow it to best prepare for these contingencies. By 2016, Army doctrine abandoned specific competencies in favor of the ability to execute “unified land operations,” broadly defined as “simultaneous offensive, defensive, and stability or defense support of civil authorities tasks to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative and consolidate gains to prevent conflict, shape the operational environment, and win our Nation’s wars as part of unified action.”
The failure to prioritize strategic missions or adequately fund modernization leaves the Army in the position of having to be ready to face all possible contingencies. Gates Brown claims this is inflicting an identity crisis on the Army that jeopardizes its combat effectiveness.
[B]y training forces for all types of wars it ends up lessening combat effectiveness across the entire spectrum. Instead of preparing inadequately for every war, the Army needs to focus on a specific skill set and hone it to a sharp edge… [A] well-defined Army can scramble to remedy known deficiencies in combat operations; however, consciously choosing not to set a deliberate course will not serve the Army well.
The Army’s Identity Crisis
To this point, the Army has relied on a balanced mix of land combat forces divided between armor (heavy tracked and medium wheeled) and light infantry formations. Although optimized for neither combined arms maneuver nor wide-area security, these general purpose forces have heretofore demonstrated the capability to execute both missions tolerably well. The Active Army currently fields 10 divisions comprising 31 Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) almost evenly split between armor/mechanized and infantry (16 armored/Stryker and 15 infantry).
Designed to maximize diverse elements of joint, interorganizational and multinational power to create temporary windows of advantage against complex enemy systems, the Army’s incorporation of the idea should be accompanied by optimization of its order of battle to excel against integrated fire and maneuver networks. To that end, it should functionalize its tactical forces to fight as penetration, exploitation and stabilization divisions with corresponding expertise in enabling the vast panoply of American and allied coercive abilities.
This forcewide realignment would enable “flexible and resilient ground formations [to] project combat power from land into other domains to enable joint force freedom of action,” as required by Gen. David G. Perkins, commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. While tailored brigades and battalions would feature combined arms with the ability to maneuver in a dispersed manner, optimized divisions would allow functional expertise in rear, close, deep and non-linear contests while maintaining operational tempo throughout rapid deep attacks, decisive assaults, and consolidation of gains. The new order would also bridge tactical and operational divides to allow greater cross-domain integration across the full range of military operations.
The last sixteen years of ongoing military operations have been conducted at the expense of future requirements of all types. The modernization problems presented by “small wars” challenge the Army as surely as those related to high-intensity conflicts. While SFABs are a step in the right direction, greater investment is required to maximize the lessons learned after sixteen years of counterinsurgency. Training for specific missions like combat advising and security force assistance should be institutionalized for tactical units beyond the designated SFABs. The need for additional capabilities for operating in austere environments will also drive equipment requirements such as lighter power generation and enhanced tactical mobility. Greater expeditionary logistics, armor, and fire support assets will also be critical in future operations. Hybrid warfare, from the Russian campaign in Ukraine to the French campaign in Mali, will continue to change the nature of “small wars.” Megacities, climate change, and other similar challenges will require the same attention to detail by the Army as near-peer conflict in order to ensure future operational success.
No Simple Answers To Strategic Insolvency
Decisions regarding the Army’s force structure will be in the hands of senior political and military decision-makers and will require hard choices and accepting risks. Proponents of optimizing for combined arms maneuver concede that future U.S. commitments to counterinsurgency or large-scale stabilization operations would likely have to be curtailed. Conversely, a balanced force structure is a gamble that either conventional war is unlikely to occur or that general purpose forces are still effective enough to prevail in an emergency.
Hal Brands and Eric Edelman argue that the U.S. currently faces a crisis of “strategic insolvency” due to the misalignment of military capabilities with geopolitical ends in foreign policy, caused by the growth in strategic and geopolitical challenges combined with a “disinvestment” in defense resources. They contend that Great Powers have traditionally restored strategic solvency in three ways:
“First, they can decrease commitments thereby restoring equilibrium with diminished resources.”
“Second, they can live with greater risk by gambling that their enemies will not test vulnerable commitments or by employing riskier approaches—such as nuclear escalation—to sustain commitments on the cheap.”
“Third, they can expand capabilities, thereby restoring strategic solvency.”
Brands and Edelman contend that most commentators favor decreasing foreign policy commitments. Thus far, the U.S. has seemingly adopted the second option–living with greater risk—by default, simply by avoiding choosing to reduce foreign policy commitments or to boost defense spending.
The administration of President Donald Trump is discovering, however, that simply choosing one course over another can be politically problematic. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump called for expanding U.S. military capability, including increasing U.S. Army end strength to 540,000, rebuilding the U.S. Navy to at least 350 vessels, adding 100 fighter and attack aircraft to boost the U.S. Air Force to 1,200 aircraft, and boosting the U.S. Marine Corps from 24 battalions to 36. He signed an executive order after assuming office mandating this expansion, stating that his administration will pursue an as-yet undefined policy of “peace through strength.”
Estimates for the cost of these additional capabilities range from $55-$95 billion in additional annual defense spending. Trump called for an additional $54 billion spending on defense in his FY 2018 budget proposal. Secretary of Defense James Mattis told members of Congress that while the additional spending will help remedy short-term readiness challenges, it is not enough to finance the armed services plans for expansion and modernization. As Congress wrangles over a funding bill, many remain skeptical of increased government spending and it is unclear whether even Trump’s proposed increase will be approved.
Trump also said during the campaign that as president, he would end U.S. efforts at nation-building, focusing instead on “foreign policy realism” dedicated to destroying extremist organizations in conjunction with temporary coalitions of willing allies regardless of ideological or strategic differences. However, Trump has expressed ambivalent positions on intervention in Syria. While he has stated that he would not deploy large numbers of U.S. troops there, he also suggested that the U.S. could establish “safe zones” His cabinet has reportedly debated plans to deploy up to tens of thousands of ground troops in Syria in order to clear the Islamic State out, protect local populations, and encourage the return of refugees.
It does not appear as if the Army’s identity crisis will be resolved any time soon. If the past is any indication, the U.S. will continue to “muddle through” on its foreign policy, despite the risks.
Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice by Capt. Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., (USN, ret.)
Over at Tom Ricks’ Best Defense blog at Foreign Policy, Captain Wayne Hughes (U.S. Navy, ret.) has written an entertaining and informative series of posts about four of his favorite U.S. Navy admirals and why he finds them notable.
Hughes selected some familiar names, World War II stalwarts Raymond Spruance and Chester Nimitz; another, lesser-known figure from World War II who had a greater impact on the post-war Navy, Arleigh Burke; and an obscure individual who had an outsized influence on the Navy’s transition from steam to iron, Bradley Fiske. The common thread Hughes identifies that links these admirals was a grounding in a technological understanding of ships and how that related to naval warfare. Hughes credits that deep knowledge of naval technology and warfare as the basis for strategic and operational brilliance, as well as successful political and bureaucratic management of periods of great change in sea power. The pieces are insightful and a delight to read. I well recommend them.
We do like to claim we have predicted the casualty rates correctly in three wars (operations): 1) The 1991 Gulf War, 2) the 1995 Bosnia intervention, and 3) the Iraq insurgency. Furthermore, these were predictions make of three very different types of operations, a conventional war, an “operation other than war” (OOTW) and an insurgency.
The Bosnia intervention prediction is discussed in Appendix II of AMW and the Iraq casualty estimate is Chapter 1 and Appendix I.
We like to claim that we are three for three on these predictions. What does that really mean? If the odds of making a correct prediction are 50/50 (the same as a coin toss), then the odds of getting three correct predictions in a row is 12.5%. We may not be particularly clever, just a little lucky.
On the other hand, some might argue that these predictions were not that hard to make, and knowledgeable experts would certainly predict correctly at least two-thirds of the time. In that case the odds of getting three correct predictions in a row is more like 30%.
Still, one notes that there was a lot of predictions concerning the Gulf War that were higher than Trevor Dupuy’s. In the case of Bosnia, the Joint Staff was informed by a senior OR (Operations Research) office in the Army that there was no methodology for predicting losses in an “operation other than war” (AMW, page 309). In the case of the Iraq casualty estimate, we were informed by a director of an OR organization that our estimate was too high, and that the U.S. would suffer less than 2,000 killed and be withdrawn in a couple of years (Shawn was at that meeting). I think I left that out of my book in its more neutered final draft….my first draft was more detailed and maybe a little too “angry”. So maybe, predicting casualties in military operations is a little tricky. If the odds of a correct prediction was only one-in-three, then the odds of getting three correct predictions in a row is only 4%. For marketing purposes, we like this argument better 😉
Hard to say what are the odds of making a correct prediction are. The only war that had multiple public predictions (and of course, several private and classified ones) was the 1991 Gulf War. There were a number of predictions made and we believe most were pretty high. There was no other predictions we are aware of for Bosnia in 1995, other than the “it could turn into another Vietnam” ones. There are no other predictions we are aware of for Iraq in 2004, although lots of people were expressing opinions on the subject. So, it is hard to say how difficult it is to make a correct prediction in these cases.
P.S.: Yes, this post was inspired by my previous post on the Stanley Cup play-offs.
