Chris and I both have discussed previously the apparent waning interest on the part of the Department of Defense to sponsor empirical research studying the basic phenomena of modern warfare. The U.S. government’s boom-or-bust approach to this is long standing, extending back at least to the Vietnam War. Recent criticism of the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment (OSD/NA) is unlikely to help. Established in 1973 and led by the legendary Andrew “Yoda” Marshall until 2015, OSD/NA plays an important role in funding basic research on topics of crucial importance to the art of net assessment. Critics of the office appear to be unaware of just how thin the actual base of empirical knowledge is on the conduct of war. Marshall understood that the net result of a net assessment based mostly on guesswork was likely to be useless, or worse, misleadingly wrong.
This lack of attention to the actual conduct of war extends beyond government sponsored research. In 2004, Stephen Biddle, a professor of political science at George Washington University and a well-regarded defense and foreign policy analyst, published Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. The book focused on a very basic question: what causes victory and defeat in battle? Using a comparative approach that incorporated quantitative and qualitative methods, he effectively argued that success in contemporary combat was due to the mastery of what he called the “modern system.” (I won’t go into detail here, but I heartily recommend the book to anyone interested in the topic.)
Military Power was critically acclaimed and received multiple awards from academic, foreign policy, military, operations research, and strategic studies organizations. For all the accolades, however, Biddle was quite aware just how neglected the study of war has become in U.S. academic and professional communities. He concluded the book with a very straightforward assessment:
[F]or at least a generation, the study of war’s conduct has fallen between the stools of the institutional structure of modern academia and government. Political scientists often treat war itself as outside their subject matter; while its causes are seen as political and hence legitimate subjects of study, its conduct and outcomes are more often excluded. Since the 1970s, historians have turned away from the conduct of operations to focus on war’s effects on social, economic, and political structures. Military officers have deep subject matter knowledge but are rarely trained as theoreticians and have pressing operational demands on their professional attention. Policy analysts and operations researchers focus so tightly on short-deadline decision analysis (should the government buy the F22 or cancel it? Should the Army have 10 divisions or 8?) that underlying issues of cause and effect are often overlooked—even when the decisions under analysis turn on embedded assumptions about the causes of military outcomes. Operations research has also gradually lost much of its original empirical focus; modeling is now a chiefly deductive undertaking, with little systematic effort to test deductive claims against real world evidence. Over forty years ago, Thomas Schelling and Bernard Brodie argued that without an academic discipline of military science, the study of the conduct of war had languished; the passage of time has done little to overturn their assessment. Yet the subject is simply too important to treat by proxy and assumption on the margins of other questions In the absence of an institutional home for the study of warfare, it is all the more essential that analysts in existing disciplines recognize its importance and take up the business of investigating capability and its causes directly and rigorously. Few subjects are more important—or less studied by theoretical social scientists. With so much at stake, we surely must do better. [pp. 207-208]
Biddle published Military Power 12 years ago, in 2004. Has anything changed substantially? Have we done better?
Keying off Shawn’s previous post…if the DOD figures are accurate this means:
In about two years, we have killed 45,000 insurgents from a force of around 25,000.
This is around 100% losses a year
This means the insurgents had to completely recruit an entire new force every year for the last two years
Or maybe we just shot everyone twice.
It is clear the claimed kills are way too high, or the claimed strength is too low, or a little bit of both
We are getting three kills per sortie.
Now, I have not done an analysis of kills per sorties in other insurgencies (and this would be useful to do), but I am pretty certain that this is unusually high.
We are killing almost a 1,000 insurgents (not in uniform) for every civilian we are killing.
Even if I use the Airwars figure of 1,568 civilians killed, this is 29 insurgents for every civilian killed.
Again, I have not an analysis of insurgents killed per civilian killed in air operations (and this would be useful to do), but these rates seem unusually low.
It appears that there are some bad estimates being made here. Nothing wrong with doing an estimate, but something is very wrong if you are doing estimates that are significantly off. Some of these appear to be off.
This is, of course, a problem we encountered with Iraq and Afghanistan and is discussed to some extent in my book America’s Modern Wars. It was also a problem with the Soviet Army in World War II, and is something I discuss in some depth in my Kursk book.
It would be useful to develop a set of benchmarks from past wars looking at insurgents killed per sorties, insurgents killed per civilian killed in air operations (an other types of operations), insurgents killed compared to force strength, and so forth.
Over at Foreign Policy, Michah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has taken a critical look at the estimates of Daesh fighters the U.S. has killed provided by various Department of Defense sources since 2015. Despite several about-faces on a policy of releasing such figures, the lure to do so is powerful because of the impact they have on public opinion.
Zenko notes the inconsistent logic in the the numbers released, the lack of explanation of the methodology at how they were derived, and how denials about their validity undermine the public policy value of providing them in the first place. There is also the problem of acknowledging noncombatant deaths but asserting that only 55 civilians have been killed in over 15,000 confirmed airstrikes.
Here is the list Zenko compiled of Defense Department cumulative estimates of Daesh fighters killed in Iraq and Syria by U.S. airstrikes:
January 2015: 6,000
March 3, 2015: 8,500
June 1, 2015: ~13,000
July 29, 2015: 15,000
October 12, 2015: 20,000
November 30, 2015: 23,000
January 6, 2016: 25,500
April 12, 2016: 25-26,000
August 10, 2016: 45,000
The American RAND staff and Vietnamese interviewers on the front porch of the villa on Rue Pasteur. Courtesy of Hanh Easterbrook. [Revisionist History]
Although this blog focuses on quantitative historical analysis, it is probably a good idea to consider from time to time that the analysis is being done by human beings. As objective as analysts try to be about the subjects they study, they cannot avoid interpreting what they see through the lenses of their own personal biases, experiences, and perspectives. This is not a bad thing, as each analyst can bring something new to the process and find things that other perhaps cannot.
The U.S. experience in Vietnam offers a number of examples of this. Recently, journalist and writer Malcolm Gladwell presented a podcast exploring an effort by the RAND Corporation initiated in the early 1960s to interview and assess the morale of captured Viet Cong fighters and defectors. His story centers on two RAND analysts, Leon Gouré and Konrad Kellen, and one of their Vietnamese interpreters, Mai Elliott. The podcast traces the origins and history of the project, how Gouré, Kellen, and Elliott brought very different perspectives to their work, and how they developed differing interpretations of the evidence they collected. Despite the relevance of the subject and the influence the research had on decision-making at high levels, the study ended inconclusively and ambivalently for all involved. (Elliott would go on to write an account of RAND’s activities in Southeast Asia and several other books.)
Gladwell presents an interesting human story as well as some insight into the human element of social science analysis. It is a unique take on one aspect of the Vietnam War and definitely worth the time to listen to. The podcast is part of his Revisionist History series.
ARVN soldiers and U.S. advisor (U.S. Army Center for Military History)
Is it possible for an outside country to build an effective indigenous military? The United States inter-agency and national security communities have a strong current interest in helping other countries develop and sustain effective security establishments. This is officially termed Security Cooperation (SC). The assistance provided directly by the U.S. military to foreign military organizations is called Security Force Assistance (SFA). SC and SFA are both integral aspects of current U.S. foreign policy and military strategy.
The U.S. has been providing SFA since at least World War II, but its success in this undertaking has been decidedly mixed. A two-decade effort by the U.S. to build an effective South Vietnamese army culminated in abject failure at the hands of North Vietnam in 1975. Despite a decade of investment in money, resources, and manpower, the U.S. has yet to build (or rebuild) independently effective military establishments in Afghanistan and Iraq.
One consistent factor in each of these cases has been the lack of a stable, effective indigenous government to underpin the military forces. How important is effective governance to successful military establishments? History suggests that it may be integral.
According to Ricks, Morillo made six implicit points:
To have an infantry, you have to get people together
To get them together and keep them together, you need a central authority
You also need to feed and house them, and that requires money, likely raised by taxes, which again requires central authority
To raise the taxes and collect them, you need assessors and collectors — that is, a bureaucracy
And that is why a soldier is different from a warrior. A tribe can field a warrior, and a good one. But it takes a state to develop and sustain an infantry soldier.
Historical experience would suggest not only that capable military forces are reflective of effective governance, but that strong governments are necessary in order to field strong military establishments. This fundamental lesson may be vital to the future success of U.S. SC and SFA efforts.
Even as James Quinliven’s assertion of the importance of force density became axiomatic during the dark days of the U.S. war in Iraq, other researchers began to take a closer look at the role force strength played in past insurgencies. What quickly became evident was that the lack of available empirical data to analyze limited the validity of the analysis. Quinliven’s conclusions had been based on just 13 cases. The persuasiveness of conclusions of similar studies were also limited by small sample sizes.[1] Larger data sets, such as those provided by the Correlates of War Project or the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project were available but did not contain the detailed strength data needed for force ratio analysis. The urgency of the Iraq conflict led to government funding to collect the specific data needed to facilitate large-N case studies based on samples that approached statistical significance.
The Dupuy Institute (TDI) undertook one of the earliest efforts to gather a significant sample of historical insurgency data for serious analysis. Between 2004 and 2009, sponsored by the U.S. Army Center for Army Analysis (CAA); Office of the Secretary of Defense, Net Assessment; and the National Intelligence Council of the Central Intelligence Agency, TDI amassed data on 109 cases of post-World War II insurgencies, interventions, and peacekeeping operations. 83 cases were used for analysis.
Led by Chris Lawrence, TDI’s analytical effort found that insurgency outcomes closely tracked the force ratio of counterinsurgents to insurgents. While overwhelming numbers were not required to defeat an insurgency, force ratios above 10-to-1 nearly always guaranteed a counterinsurgent victory. Conversely, lower force ratios did not preclude success, but conflicts with two or fewer counterinsurgents per insurgent greatly favored an insurgent victory.
When force ratios were assessed together with the nature of the motivation for the insurgency, TDI found that force ratios had little impact on the outcome of insurgencies with a limited political or ideological basis. However, when facing broadly popular insurgencies, counterinsurgents lost every time they possessed a force ratio advantage of 5-1 or less, failed half the time with odds between 6-1 and 10-1, but succeeded three-quarters of the time when outnumbering the insurgents by 10-1 or more.
TDI also examined the relationship between force density and conflict outcome, but was unable to find any correlation in the data.
In 2004, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) of the British Ministry of Defence initiated a multi-year research program into counterterrorist/counterinsurgency campaigns as an extension of previous research on asymmetric warfare. The three-year effort, led by Andrew Hossack, involved data collection on 44 post-World War I asymmetric conflicts, of which 34 were used for analysis.
Hossack’s study concluded that there is a relationship, albeit weak, between between the odds of military campaign success and force ratios as measured in terms of a ratio of median annual force strengths. The advantages were relatively modest. Each tenfold increase in the ratio of counterinsurgents to insurgents improved the chances of success by only 30%. A 10-1 manpower advantage yielded a 47% chance of success. Improving the ratio to 100-1 still only afforded a 77% chance of winning.
In 2006, the Office of the Secretary of Defense contracted RAND’s National Defense Research Institute for a comprehensive study of insurgency and counterinsurgency. In support of the project, Martin Libicki directed the compilation of data on 89 post-World War II insurgencies to analyze why they began, grew, and were resolved. The original list of cases was based upon a dataset of 127 insurgencies created by James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin[5] and modified.
With regard to force ratios, Libicki concluded that “as a general rule, the greater the government-to-insurgent force ratio, the lower the odds of an insurgent victory,” but that “the relationship is not particularly strong.”
CAA
In 2008, CAA contracted with TDI to code the data for it had collected for 102 post-World War II conflicts and design a database for it, which was designated the CAA Irregular Warfare Database. The availability of the Irregular Warfare Database spawned two CAA analytical efforts.
The first was conducted by Justine Blaho and Lisa Kaiser in 2009, who sought to build a model to predict the outcome of irregular wars. They tested 34 independent variables from 74 of the cases in the database and found 11 with significant correlations to outcome, including the peak counterinsurgent-to-insurgent ratio for each conflict. Blaho and Kaiser removed the variable for counterinsurgent-per-civilian (force density) from their analysis because it did not demonstrate a significant correlation to outcome. Among other conclusions, they determined that counterinsurgents had a greater probability of winning an irregular war if the peak year counterinsurgent-to-insurgent ratio is high.[6]
In 2009, CAA undertook another study aimed at providing historical context for U.S. force levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their goal was to find the number of counterinsurgent forces required to arrest and reverse a given level of insurgent violence. The analysts whittled the number of cases from the Irregular Warfare Database to be analyzed to 42 by eliminating those not deemed to be insurgencies, those lacking complete data, and third-party interventions on the side of the insurgents.
In contrast to the previous work using data collected by TDI, the study analysts rejected the validity of counterinsurgent to insurgent force ratios. As justification, they cited the unreliability of data on insurgent force size, insurgent and civilian casualties, and counts of insurgent attacks. Instead, they adopted the force density construct “in accordance with doctrine and previous studies.” In contrast to Quinliven’s 20/1,000 ratio, the CAA analysis concluded that “the minimum counterinsurgent force is 2.8 soldiers per 1,000 residents, with more forces required as the violence level increases.”[7]
In preparation for the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, Office of the Director, Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE), Department of Defense asked the Institute for Defense Analysis to update a previous study estimating ground force requirements for stability operations. For the revised study, the IDA analysts also made use of the CAA Irregular Warfare Database, selecting 41 cases “with the objective of establishing a relationship between force density and outcomes.”
Like the second CAA study, the IDA analysts deemed force ratios to be a “flawed and unreliable indicator,” stating that “we do not believe that information about the size of insurgent forces is sufficiently credible to be subjected to statistical analysis.” Acknowledging previous studies that did not find a statistically meaningful link between force density and outcome, the IDA analysts adjusted the dataset in three ways: to use force densities based on their estimates for the local population of the actual areas of operation in historical cases (as opposed to the entire country); to count indecisive outcomes as military operational successes for the counterinsurgents; and rescoring several outcomes as indecisive, rather than failure for counterinsurgents.
Using this adjusted data, the IDA analysts found a statistically significant, though not robust, relationship between force density and outcome. They concluded that a density of 20‐25 troops per thousand population was consistent with a 50‐60% chance of success. Successful outcomes decreased greatly for force densities below 15 troops per 1,000, and for operations with ratios above 40 troops per 1,000, the success rate exceeded 75%.
In 2011, Jeffery Friedman, then a doctoral candidate in the Harvard Kennedy School, published a large-N academic study on insurgency force strengths, which addressed the basic question “how does manpower affect counterinsurgency?” As his starting point, Friedman adopted the dataset created by Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III of 173 post-World War I insurgencies.[10] After dropping two cases, he added his own data from 400 additional sources on foreign and indigenous counterinsurgent force strengths, the size and population of areas of operations, and insurgent force size.
Friedman subjected his data to a broader range of statistical testing than the previous studies. He concluded that there was no statistical correlation between overall numbers of counterinsurgents or counterinsurgents per area and outcome. He found that counterinsurgent to insurgent force ratios were significant only with controls on the data. However, troop density – measured as the ratio of counterinsurgents per inhabitant in the specific area of operations that the counterinsurgents sought to control – demonstrated a consistent, positive correlation with insurgent success.
Perhaps of greater significance, Friedman also found that manpower did not necessarily have a decisive impact on insurgency outcome. He could find no discernible empirical support for Quinliven’s 20/1,000 ratio. A counterinsurgent troop density of 80 troops per 1,000 inhabitants was less than twice as likely to succeed as a counterinsurgent force sized an order of magnitude lower. In a model derived from his analysis, as force size increased from 5 to 80 troops per 1,000 inhabitants in the area of operations, the probability of success rose by less than 15 percent.
Conclusion
The quality of quantitative analyses of force strengths in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies improved greatly between 2003 and 2011, but the debate remains unresolved. My next post will look at the conclusions of these studies and evaluate whether they tip the scales one way or another in favor of force ratios or troop density.
Notes
[1] John J. McGrath, Boots on the Ground: Troop Density in Contingency Operations. Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 2006; James Dobbins, Keith Crane, and Seth G. Jones, The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building. Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, 2007; Joshua Thiel, “COIN Manpower Ratios: Debunking the 10 to 1 Ratio and Surges,” Small Wars Journal, 2011; Riley M. Moore, “Counterinsurgency Force Ratio: Strategic Utility or Nominal Necessity?” Small Wars & Insurgencies, 24:5, 2013
[2] Christopher A. Lawrence, “The Analysis of the Historical Effectiveness of Different Counterinsurgency Tactics and Strategies,” Presentation at the Cornwallis Group XIII: Analysis in Support of Policy, The Pearson Peacekeeping Centre Cornwallis Park, Nova Scotia, Canada, 17-20 March 2008; Christopher A. Lawrence, America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, Philadelphia, PA: Casemate, 2015
[3] Andrew Hossack, “Security Force & Insurgent Success Factors in Counter-Insurgency Campaigns,” Presentation at the Cornwallis Group XII: Analysis for Multi-Agency Support, The Pearson Peacekeeping Centre Cornwallis Park, Nova Scotia, Canada, 2-5 April 2007; Andrew Hossack, “Strategic Success Factors in Counter-Insurgency Campaigns: With Discussion of the Modelling Approach,” Presentation to ORS Defence Special Interest Group, 24 February 2010
[4] Martin C. Libicki, “Eighty-Nine Insurgencies: Outcomes and Endings,” Appendix A in David C. Gompert and John Gordon IV, War by Other Means: Building Complete and Balanced Capabilities for Counterinsurgency, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2008
[5] James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War” American Political Science Review 97, 1, Feb 2003
[6] Justine Blaho and Lisa Kaiser, “A Predictive Model for Irregular Wars Based on a Structured Historical Database.” Presentation at the 48th AORS Symposium, Working Group 5 – Irregular Warfare and Counterinsurgency, 14-15 October 2009
[7] Steven M. Goode, “A Historical Basis for Force Requirements in Counterinsurgency,” Parameters, Winter, 2009-10
[8] R. Royce Kneece, Jr., David A. Adesnik, Jason A. Dechant, Michael F. Fitzsimmons, Arthur Fries, and Mark E. Tillman, “Force Sizing for Stability Operations,” Arlington, VA, Institute for Defense Analysis, 2010
[9] Jeffery A. Friedman, “Manpower and Counterinsurgency: Empirical Foundations for Theory and Doctrine,” Security Studies, 20:556–591, 2011
[10] Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson III, “Rage against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars,” International Organization 63, no. 1, Winter 2009
DoD photo by Sgt. Kevin P. Bell, U.S. Army. (Released)
How many troops are needed to defeat an insurgency? This deceptively innocuous question is laden with political and military peril. The answer is, of course, that it depends. Some contend that a precise ratio of counterinsurgents to insurgents or to the local population will lead to victory, while others argue that force strengths are irrelevant to success or failure. In the wake of America’s decidedly ambivalent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the debate remains unresolved. However, there have been several recent analytical efforts focused on resolving the question. This will be the first in a series of posts that will review these studies and their conclusions.
It is not clear where the notion originated that force ratios mattered in counterinsurgency. It appears to have become an article of faith during the British campaign in Malaya, although Sir Robert Thompson — a British staff officer in that conflict and a counterinsurgency theorist influential during the Vietnam War — subsequently claimed that the rule-of-thumb that 20 troops were needed per 1,000 insurgents to succeed was the invention of a journalist.[1] Another Mayalan campaign veteran, Richard Clutterbuck, likewise later derided the validity of a “tie-down” ratio:
Much nonsense is heard on the subject of tie-down ratios in guerrilla warfare–that 10 to 12 government troops are needed to tie down a single guerrilla, for instance. This is a dangerous illusion, arising from a disregard of the facts.[2]
The relevance of force ratios made a comeback in the mid-1990s, albeit measured in a different way. Seeking a way of projecting force requirements necessary for sustained stability operations, RAND analyst James T. Quinliven looked at 13 historical cases and concluded that success required 20 troops were needed per 1,000 local inhabitants.[3] Defining ratios by the number of troops per population became known as force density.
The political volatility of force requirements for stability operations and counterinsurgency became vividly apparent during the lead up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Quinlivan published an update of his analysis to address Iraq and asserted that to meet a ratio of 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants, 500,000 foreign troops were necessary to stabilize 25 million Iraqis.[4] U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress that “several hundred thousand” American troops would be necessary to stabilize Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein. This drew a quick rebuttal from Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who testified that Shinseki’s estimate was “wildly off the mark.” The public disagreement led to Shinseki’s premature retirement and replacement as Army Chief of Staff.
Although the initial phase of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM quickly defeated the Iraqi military and toppled Saddam’s regime, the chaotic stabilization effort that followed and the emergence of an insurgency appeared to bear out the validity of Qunilivan’s and Shinseki’s assessments for force requirements. Certainly one influential group thought so: the authors of the revised U.S. Army and Marine Corps doctrinal manual FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5 Counterinsurgency, published in 2006. The manual rejected tie-down ratios but endorsed Quinlivan’s force density concept:
During previous conflicts, planners assumed that combatants required a 10 or 15 to 1 advantage over insurgents to win. However, no predetermined, fixed ratio of friendly troops to enemy combatants ensures success in COIN. The conditions of the operational environment and the approaches insurgents use vary too widely. A better force requirement gauge is troop density, the ratio of security forces (including the host nation’s military and police forces as well as foreign counterinsurgents) to inhabitants. Most density recommendations fall within a range of 20 to 25 counterinsurgents for every 1000 residents in an AO. Twenty counterinsurgents per 1000 residents is often considered the minimum troop density required for effective COIN operations; however as with any fixed ratio, such calculations remain very dependent upon the situation.[5]
FM 3-24 was often cited as the intellectual foundation for the subsequent success of the so-called Iraqi “Surge” in 2007 under General David Petraeus, who had overseen revision of the manual as the commander of the U.S. Army’s Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth.
Interestingly enough, however, this endorsement of force density ratios was qualified in the subsequent joint doctrinal manual, JP 3-24 Counterinsurgency Operations, published just three years later in 2009. While force density was still considered a useful measure, mention of the specific 20/1,000 ratio was omitted:
No force level guarantees victory for either side, insurgent or counterinsurgent. No predetermined, fixed ratio of friendly forces to enemy forces ensures success in COIN. The OE and insurgents’ approaches vary too widely. Such calculations remain very dependent upon the assets available and the situation. A better force requirement gauge is counterinsurgent force density, which is the ratio of land security forces (including both indigenous and foreign contributions) and supporting elements (which must account for technological sophistication and applicability) to inhabitants. Force density will depend on the overall context, especially the size and density of the population, and can change over time. In some situations, the necessary force ratio may be unattainable. In these situations, the commander will have to determine if there are ways to leverage other advantages through innovative operational design and interdependent joint operations. If not, this may lead the commander to adopt limited objectives or plan for a prolonged, multiphased campaign as alternatives.[6]
When JP 3-24 and FM 3-24 were again revised in 2013 and 2014, respectively, neither contained any references to force level requirements, tie-down ratios, or troop density.[7] As quickly as the concepts had been adopted, they were abandoned. This is likely the result of more careful examinations of the relationship between force strength and counterinsurgency outcomes conducted during the 2000s. I will take a closer look at these studies in subsequent posts.
[5] Field Manual (FM) 3-24 Counterinsurgency, Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, December 2006, p. I-13
[6] Joint Publication (JP) 3-24 Counterinsurgency Operations, Washington, DC: Joint Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 5 October 2009, p. III-3
[7] Joint Publication (JP) 3-24 Counterinsurgency, Washington, DC: Joint Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 22 November 2013; Field Manual (FM) 3-24Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies, Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Army, May 2014
There are a lot of potential variables to consider in developing a casualty estimate for a potential large-scale intervention. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have floated various proposals to deploy 10,000 U.S. ground combat troops to both Iraq and Syria, with the most recent calling for 10,000 in Syria along with 10,000 Arab allies.
It is not clear if McCain, Graham, or Obama are assuming a U.S.-led ground offensive to be followed by the withdrawal of U.S. troops, or a ground offensive and an open-ended stability/peacekeeping mission. Nor is it clear if they assume an offensive against Daesh only or an attack on the Assad regime as well.
Potential ground offensive scenarios:
1. 10-20,000 U.S. advisors only in Iraq and Syria
2. 10,000 U.S. troops leading a ground offensive against Daesh in Iraq
3. 10,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 10,000 U.S. troops in Syria leading a ground offensive against Daesh only
4. 10,000 U.S. troops in Syria and 10,000 Arab coalition troops leading a ground offensive against Daesh only
5. 10,000 U.S. troops in Syria and 10,000 Arab coalition troops leading a ground offensive against Daesh and the Assad regime
A long-term stability and support operation in Syria would almost certainly require more than 10,000 U.S. and 10,000 Arab coalition troops, even if it were confined to areas currently held by Daesh, and even more if extended into former Assad regime areas.
Well, looks like President Obama is giving out casualty estimates for a potential intervention.
That used to be our job.
His estimate was for “sending significant ground forces back to the Middle East”
The results were:
1. “…could conceivably result in the deaths of 100 American soldiers every month.”
2. “…could take up to $10 billion a month…”
3. “….and leave as many as 500 troops wounded every month in addition to those killed…”
“Mr. Obama explained that his refusal to redeploy large numbers of troops to the region was rooted in the grim assumption that the casualties and costs would rival the worst of the Iraq war. “
Clearly this was a worst case situation based upon some study or analysis done. Do not know who did the study and I not think the study is in the public domain.
This is clearly just applying the Iraq War model to the current situation. In the case of Iraq, we had over 100,000 troops deployed and were directly and often by ourselves engaged with a major insurgency. This was generating 100 deaths on some months. This is 1200 a year. We lost people at that rate for four years in Iraq (2004 = 849, 2005 = 846, 2006 – 823, 2007 – 904).
On the other hand, it appear that most people talking intervention in Syria and Iraq appear to be discussing training missions with some ground support. I do not think anyone is seriously talking about putting a 100,000 troops back in. I think most people are talking about 10,000 to 20,000 troops primarily as trainers for the Syrian insurgents, the Kurds and the Iraq government. This is in effect what we currently have in Afghanistan. Our post surge losses there are more like 100 a year (2013 = 127, 2014 = 55, 2015 = 16).
Needless to say, loss rates are tied to the force size. A force fully engaged of 20,000 is not going to suffer the same number of losses as a force fully engaged of 100,000. And, we are looking at missions that are primarily training and support, which should suffer losses less than forces that are fully engaged.
Of course, The Dupuy Institute did a casualty estimate for a peacekeeping force of 20,000 for Bosnia, and we have done a casualty estimate for major counterinsurgency force of 100,000+ for Iraq. An estimate for a training and support mission of 20,000 people would be much lower than our estimate for Iraq.
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