Introduce students to the main facts about conflict. Apply theoretical and empirical economic tools to the study of conflict. Give students an appreciation of the main questions at the research frontier in the economic analysis of conflict. Draw some policy conclusions on how the international community should deal with conflict. Study data issues that arise when analysing conflict.
An understanding of the people and culture of the host country is an important aspect of counterinsurgency. Here, 1st Lt. Jeff Harris (center) and Capt. Robert Erdman explain to Sheik Ishmael Kaleel Gomar Al Dulayani what was found in houses belonging to members of his tribe during a cordon and search mission in Hawr Rajab, Baghdad, Nov. 29, 2006. The Soldiers are from Troop A, 1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment. (Photo Credit: Staff Sgt. Sean A. Foley)
As the United States’ ongoing decade and a half long involvement in Afghanistan remains largely recessed from the public mind, the once-intense debate over counterinsurgency warfare has cooled as well. Interest stirred mildly recently as the Trump administration rejected a proposal to turn the war over to contractors and elected to slightly increase the U.S. troop presence there. The administration’s stated policy does not appear to differ significantly from that that proceeded it.
Fisher and Taub addressed the question of the seeming intractability of the Afghan war. “There is a reason that Afghanistan’s conflict, then and now, so defies solutions,” they wrote. “Its combination of state collapse, civil conflict, ethnic disintegration and multisided intervention has locked it in a self-perpetuating cycle that may be simply beyond outside resolution.”
The article weaves together findings of studies on these topics by Ken Menkhaus; Romain Malejacq; Dipali Mukhopadhyay; and Jason Lyall, Graeme Blair, and Kosuke Imai. Fisher and Taub concluded on the pessimistic note that bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan may be on a generational time scale.
Burke looked at a more specific aspect of counterinsurgency, the relationship between civilian casualties and counterinsurgent success of failure. Separating insurgents from the civilian population is one of the central conundrums of counterinsurgency, referred to as the “identification problem.” Burke noted that the current U.S. military doctrine holds that “excessive civilian casualties will cripple counterinsurgency operations, possibly to the point of failure.” This notion rests on the prevailing assumption that civilians have agency, that they can choose between supporting insurgents or counterinsurgents, and that reducing civilian deaths and “winning hearts and minds” is the path to counterinsurgency success.
Burke surveyed work by Matthew Adam Kocher, Thomas B Pepinsky, and Stathis N. Kalyvas; Luke Condra and Jacob Shapiro; Lyall, Blair and Imai, Christopher Day and William Reno; Lee J.M. Seymour; Paul Staniland; and Fotini Christia. The picture portrayed in this research indicates that there is no clear, direct relationship between civilian casualties and counterinsurgent success. While civilians do hold non-combatant deaths against counterinsurgents, the relevance of blame can depend greatly on whether the losses were inflicted by locals for foreigners. In some cases, counterinsurgent brutality helped them succeed or had little influence on the outcome. In others, decisions made by insurgent leaders had more influence over civilian choices than civilian casualties.
While the collective conclusions of the studies surveyed by Fisher, Taub and Burke proved inconclusive, the results certainly warrant deep reconsideration of the central assumptions underpinning prevailing U.S. political and military thinking about counterinsurgency. The articles and studies cited above provide plenty of food for thought.
Servicemen of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team (standing) train Ukrainian National Guard members during a joint military exercise called “Fearless Guardian 2015,” at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center near the western village of Starychy, Ukraine, on May 7, 2015. [Newsweek]
Last week, Wesley Morgan reported in POLITICO about an internal readiness study recently conducted by the U.S. Army 173rd Airborne Infantry Brigade Combat Team. As U.S. European Command’s only airborne unit, the 173rd Airborne Brigade has been participating in exercises in the Baltic States and the Ukraine since 2014 to demonstrate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) resolve to counter potential Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.
The experience the brigade gained working with Baltic and particularly Ukrainian military units that had engaged with Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian Separatist forces has been sobering. Colonel Gregory Anderson, the 173rd Airborne Brigade commander, commissioned the study as a result. “The lessons we learned from our Ukrainian partners were substantial. It was a real eye-opener on the absolute need to look at ourselves critically,” he told POLITICO.
The study candidly assessed that the 173rd Airborne Brigade currently lacked “essential capabilities needed to accomplish its mission effectively and with decisive speed” against near-peer adversaries or sophisticated non-state actors. Among the capability gaps the study cited were
The lack of air defense and electronic warfare units and over-reliance on satellite communications and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) navigation systems;
simple countermeasures such as camouflage nets to hide vehicles from enemy helicopters or drones are “hard-to-find luxuries for tactical units”;
the urgent need to replace up-armored Humvees with the forthcoming Ground Mobility Vehicle, a much lighter-weight, more mobile truck; and
the likewise urgent need to field the projected Mobile Protected Firepower armored vehicle companies the U.S. Army is planning to add to each infantry brigade combat team.
The report also stressed the vulnerability of the brigade to demonstrated Russian electronic warfare capabilities, which would likely deprive it of GPS navigation and targeting and satellite communications in combat. While the brigade has been purchasing electronic warfare gear of its own from over-the-counter suppliers, it would need additional specialized personnel to use the equipment.
As analyst Adrian Bonenberger commented, “The report is framed as being about the 173rd, but it’s really about more than the 173rd. It’s about what the Army needs to do… If Russia uses electronic warfare to jam the brigade’s artillery, and its anti-tank weapons can’t penetrate any of the Russian armor, and they’re able to confuse and disrupt and quickly overwhelm those paratroopers, we could be in for a long war.”
While the report is a wake-up call with regard to the combat readiness in the short-term, it also pointedly demonstrates the complexity of the strategic “identity crisis” that faces the U.S. Army in general. Many of the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s current challenges can be traced directly to the previous decade and a half of deployments conducting wide area security missions during counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The brigade’s perceived shortcomings for combined arms maneuver missions are either logical adaptations to the demands of counterinsurgency warfare or capabilities that atrophied through disuse.
The Army’s specific lack of readiness to wage combined arms maneuver warfare against potential peer or near-peer opponents in Europe can be remedied given time and resourcing in the short-term. This will not solve the long-term strategic conundrum the Army faces in needing to be prepared to fight conventional and irregular conflicts at the same time, however. Unless the U.S. is willing to 1) increase defense spending to balance force structure to the demands of foreign and military policy objectives, or 2) realign foreign and military policy goals with the available force structure, it will have to resort to patching up short-term readiness issues as best as possible and continue to muddle through. Given the current state of U.S. domestic politics, muddling through will likely be the default option unless or until the consequences of doing so force a change.
Soldiers, of the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, tactically move a Stryker over the Mojave Desert during Decisive Action Rotation 15-10 at the National Training Center on Fort Irwin, Calif., Sept. 24, 2015. The Stryker and other ground combat vehicles are undergoing a number of upgrades, according to officials. (Photo Credit: Sgt. William Howard)
Since the Stryker’s introduction in 2002, SBCTs have participated successfully in U.S. expeditionary operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, validating for many the usefulness of Shinseki’s original medium-weight armor concept. However, changes in the strategic landscape and advances in technology and operational doctrine by potential adversaries are calling the medium armor concept back into question.
Medium armor faces the same conundrum that currently confronts the U.S. Army in general: should it optimize to conduct wide area security operations (which is the most likely type of future conflict) or combined arms maneuver (the most dangerous potential future conflict), or should it continue to hedge against strategic uncertainty by fielding a balanced, general purpose force which does a tolerable job of both, as it does now?
The Problem
In the current edition of Military Review, U.S. Army Captain Matthew D. Allgeyer presents an interesting critique of the Army’s existing medium-weight armor concept. He asserts that it is “is suffering from a lack of direction and focus…” Several improvements for the Stryker have been proposed based on perceptions of evolving Russian military capabilities, namely “a modern heavy-force threat supported by aviation assets.” The problem, according to Allgeyer, is that
The SBCT community wants all the positive aspects of a light force: lower cost, a small tooth-to-tail ratio, greater operational-level speed, etc. But, it also wants the ability to confront a heavy-armored force on its own terms without having to adopt the cost, support, and deployment time required by an armored force. Since these two ideas are mutuality exclusive, we have been forced to adopt a piecemeal response to shortcomings identified during training and training center rotations.
Even if the currently proposed improvements are adopted however, Allgeyer argues that updated Strykers would only provide the U.S. with a medium weight armor capability analogous to the 1960’s era Soviet motor-rifle regiment, a doctrinal step backward.
Allgeyer identifies the SBCT’s biggest weaknesses as a lack of firepower capable of successfully engaging enemy heavy armor and the absence of an organic air defense capability. Neither of these is a problem in wide area security missions such as peacekeeping or counterinsurgency, where deployability and mobility are priority considerations. However, both shortcomings are critical disadvantages in combined arms maneuver scenarios, particularly against Russian or Russian-equipped opposing forces.
Potential Solutions
These observations are not new. A 2001 TDI study of the historical effectiveness of lighter-weight armor pointed out its vulnerability to heavy armored forces, but also its utility in stability and contingency operations. The Russians long ago addressed these issues with their Bronetransporter (BTR)-equipped motor-rifle regiments by adding organic tank battalions to them, incorporating air defense platoons in each battalion, and upgunning the BTRs with 30mm cannons and anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs).
The U.S. Army has similar solutions available. It has already sought to add 30mm cannons and TOW-2 ATGMs to the Styker. The Mobile Protected Firepower program that will provide a company of light-weight armored vehicles with high-caliber cannons to each infantry brigade combat team could easily be expanded to add a company or battalion of such vehicles to the SBCT. No proposals exist for improving air defense capabilities, but this too could be addressed.
Allgeyer agrees with the need for these improvements, but he is dissatisfied with the Army “simply reinventing on its own the wheel Russia made a long time ago.” His proposed “solution is a radical restructuring of thought around the Stryker concept.” He advocates ditching the term “Stryker” in favor of the more generic “medium armor” to encourage doctrinal thinking about the concept instead of the platform. Medium armor advocates should accept the need for a combined arms solution to engaging adversary heavy forces and incorporate more joint training into their mission-essential task lists. The Army should also do a better job of analyzing foreign medium armor platforms and doctrine to see what may be appropriate for U.S. adoption.
Allgeyer’s proposals are certainly worthy, but they may not add up to the radical restructuring he seeks. Even if adopted, they are not likely to change the fundamental characteristics of medium armor that make it more suitable to the wide area security mission than to combined arms maneuver. Optimizing it for one mission will invariably make it less useful for the other. Whether or not this is a wise choice is also the same question the Army must ponder with regard to its overall strategic mission.
Raytheon’s new Long-Range Precision Fires missile is deployed from a mobile launcher in this artist’s rendering. The new missile will allow the Army to fire two munitions from a single weapons pod, making it cost-effective and doubling the existing capacity. [Raytheon]
The active component of the Army currently consists of three corps, 10 divisions, 16 armored/Stryker brigade combat teams (BCTs), 15 light infantry BCTs, 12 combat aviation brigades, four fires brigades, three battlefield surveillance brigades, one engineer brigade, one Ranger brigade, five Special Forces groups, and a special operations aviation regiment.
U.S. Army Major Nathan A. Jennings and Lt. Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret.) have each proposed alternative force structure concepts designed to maximize the Army’s effectiveness for combined arms combat.
Jennings’s Realignment Model
Jennings’s concept flows directly from the precepts that MDB is being currently developed upon.
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 [MDB] should be accompanied by optimization of its order of battle to excel against integrated fire and maneuver networks.
To that end, he calls for organizing U.S. Army units into three types of divisions: penetration, exploitation and stabilization.
Empowering joint dynamism begins with creating highly mobile and survivable divisions designed to penetrate complex defenses that increasingly challenge aerial access. These “recon-strike” elements would combine armored and Stryker BCTs; special operations forces; engineers; and multifaceted air defense, indirect, joint, cyber, electromagnetic and informational fires to dislocate and disintegrate adversary defenses across theater depth. As argued by Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, then-director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, they could “fight their way through long-range weapons fire and gain physical contact with hard-to-find opponents” while striking “from unexpected directions with multiple forms of firepower.”
Exploitation divisions would employ more balanced capabilities to destroy enemy concentrations, clear contested zones and seize key terrain. Comprising a variety of light, airborne, motorized and mechanized infantry BCTs with modest armor and engineer support—all empowered by destructive kinetic, electronic and virtual fires—these commands would attack through windows of opportunity created by deep strikes to overmatch paralyzed defenders. While penetrating formations would rapidly bridge air and land component efforts, their more versatile and flexible exploitation counterparts would allow joint commands to decisively shatter adversary warfighting capabilities through intensive fire and maneuver.
The third type of division would be made up of elements trained to consolidate gains in order to set the conditions for a sustainable, stable environment, as required by Army doctrine. The command’s multifaceted brigades could include tailored civil affairs, informational, combat advisory, military police, light infantry, aviation and special operations elements in partnership with joint, interdepartmental, non-governmental and coalition personnel. These stabilization divisions would be equipped to independently follow penetration and exploitation forces to secure expanding frontages, manage population and resource disruptions, negotiate political turbulence, and support the re-establishment of legitimate security forces and governance.
Jennings did not specify how these divisions would be organized, how many of each type he would propose, or the mix of non-divisional elements. They are essentially a reorganization of current branch and unit types.
Proposing separate penetration and exploitation forces hearkens back to the earliest concepts of tank warfare in Germany and the Soviet Union, which envisioned infantry divisions creating breaches in enemy defenses, through which armored divisions would be sent to attack rear areas and maneuver at the operational level. Though in Jennings’s construction, the role of infantry and armor would be reversed.
Jennings’s envisioned force also preserves the capability for conducting wide area security operations in the stabilization divisions. However, since the stabilization divisions would likely constitute only a fraction of the overall force, this would be a net reduction in capability, as all of the current general purpose force units are (theoretically) capable of conducting wide area security. Jennings’s penetration and exploitation divisions would presumably possess more limited capability for this mission.
Macgregor’s Transformation Model
While Jenning’s proposed force structure can be seen as evolutionary, Macgregor’s is much more radically innovative. His transformation concept focuses almost exclusively on optimizing U.S. ground forces to wage combined arms maneuver warfare. Macgregor’s ideas stemmed from his experiences in the 1991 Gulf War and he has developed and expanded on them continuously since then. Although predating MDB, Macgregor’s concepts clearly influenced the thinking behind it and are easily compatible with it.
The heart of Macgregor’s proposal are modular, independent, all arms/all effects, brigade-sized combat groups that emphasize four primary capabilities: maneuver (mobile armored firepower for positional advantage), strike (stand-off attack systems), ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) and sustainment (logistics). These modular groups would be the Army’s contribution to cross-domain, corps-level joint task forces, which is how he—and increasingly the rest of the U.S. armed forces—sees the U.S. military waging combat in the future.
Macgregor’s envisioned force structure adds his Reconnaissance Strike Group (RSG) to armored, mechanized infantry, and airborne/air-assault light infantry units. These would total 26 brigade-sized groups, down from the current 31 BCTs, with a ratio of 16 RSG/armored groups to 10 mechanized/airborne infantry.
Macgregor would also downsize the number of manned rotary wing combat aviation elements from 12 to four mostly be replacing them with drones integrated into the independent strike groups and into the strike battalions in the maneuver groups.
He would add other new unit types as well, including theater missile defense groups, C41I groups, and chem-bio warfare groups.
Macgregor’s proposed force structure would also constitute a net savings in overall manpower, mainly by cutting out division-level headquarters and pushing sustainment elements down to the individual groups.
Evolution or Revolution?
While both propose significant changes from the current organization, Jennings’s model is more conservative than Macgregor’s. Jennings would keep the division and BCT as the primary operational units, while Macgregor would cut and replace them altogether. Jennings clearly was influenced by Macgregor’s “strike-reconnaissance” concept in his proposal for penetration divisions. His description of them is very close to the way Macgregor defines his RSGs.
The biggest difference is that Jennings’s force would still retain some capacity to conduct wide area security operations, whether it be in conventional or irregular warfare circumstances. Macgregor has been vocal about his belief that the U.S. should avoid large-scale counterinsurgency or stabilization commitments as a matter of policy. He has also called into question the survivability of light infantry on future combined arms battlefields.
Even should the U.S. commit itself to optimizing its force structure for MDB, it is unclear at this point whether it would look like what Jennings or Macgregor propose. Like most military organizations, the U.S. Army is not known for its willingness to adopt radical change. The future Army force structure is likely to resemble its current form for some time, unless the harsh teachings of future combat experience dictate otherwise.
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 decided to examine the effectiveness of lighter-weight armor based upon real-world experience in six possible scenarios:
Conventional conflicts against an armor supported or armor heavy force.
Emergency insertions against an armor support or armor heavy force.
Conventional conflict against a primarily infantry force (as one might encounter in sub-Saharan Africa).
Emergency insertion against a primarily infantry force.
A small to medium insurgency (includes an insurgency that develops during a peacekeeping operation).
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).
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.
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.
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.
Below is an aggregated list of links to Dr. Michael Spagat‘s E3320: Economics of Warfare lecture series at the Royal Holloway University of London, and Chris Lawrence’s commentary on each. Spagat is a professor of economics and the course addresses quantitative research on war.
