Tag strategic studies

The U.S. Army’s Theory of Warfare…?

TP 525-3-1Last week, I touched on the ongoing effort by the U.S. Army to assess the nature of Russian advances in military technology and how they might affect the nature of combat on future battlefields. In a previous post, I highlighted that the Army’s preliminary conclusions about changes in near-future ground combat were being challenged by the other armed services in the context of debates over the next fiscal year U.S. military budget.

According to recently-confirmed Secretary of the Army, Eric Fanning, in order to persuade its critics, the Army needs to a better job of explaining the role it plays. “What I would have to do first of all is… tell the Army story… and the reason to do that is to make sure that the Army is properly resourced.”

Nadia Schadlow, a senior program officer at the Smith Richardson Foundation, pushed back against the idea that the Army needs a better narrative. She contends that the Army has already developed a theory of warfare that spells out how it believes near and medium-term wars will be fought and that it is now up to the critics to explain what aspects of this theory they object to and why.

Schadlow sketched out the U.S. Army’s current theory of warfare as it has been explained by senior Army leaders and in doctrinal publications.

The Army view is that conflicts in the future, like those in the past, will ultimately be resolved on land. Army forces will be essential components of joint operations to create sustainable political outcomes while defeating enemies and adversaries who challenge U.S. advantages in all domains: land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace. Army contributions to joint operations provide multiple options to civilian and military leaders. These capabilities include tailorable and scalable combinations of special operations and conventional forces, regionally aligned and globally responsive combined arms teams, and foundational theater capabilities to enable joint operations.

The notion of a military service defining its own theory of warfare—as opposed to adopting a general theory of warfare—is an interesting one. [Schadlow drew the paragraph above from TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1 The U.S. Army Operating Concept 2020-2040: Win in a Complex World (2014)] Schadlow referenced a recent article by U.S. Army Major Robert Chamberlain that assessed the German Army’s theory of warfare in the context of its military defeat at Verdun in 1916. Chamberlain defines a theory of warfare as

[A] description of how a military intends to produce strategic outcomes. In making a decision to apply a military remedy to a strategic problem, one employs a theory of warfare to determine how and if the proposed solution will work. In the modern world, the development of grand strategy often receives theories of warfare as a given. Due to the time and expense required to develop and train a modern military, the strategic decision-makers are bound by the military capabilities and doctrine that exist when they assume power.

He spelled out what a theory of warfare does for a military organization.

A theory of warfare provides the ordering principles of a military whether made explicit or not. It is a description of the strategic environment, of what the military is, and how it applies itself against an adversary. Everything else that a military does—how it dresses, organizes itself, procures equipment, imposes discipline, generates force, sees terrain, treats captured enemies, deals with civilians, and so forth—is largely a function of how it defines and achieves  success in war.

Chamberlain’s definition for a theory of warfare is idiosyncratic and he does not make reference to the very large body of existing scholarship on warfare theory. It sounds a good deal more like an operating concept rather than a general theory of warfare. Schadlow’s definition is also problematic in that it seems like a self-referential description of how the U.S. conceptualizes the contemporary operating environment and the tasks the Army carries out as part of the overall joint force responsibilities. She twice cites the Army’s contention that future conflicts will be ultimately decided on land, but does not explain why. An Army theory of warfare would be more compelling if it also explained warfare in the other domains, not just on the ground.

Nevertheless, theories and theorizing are useful exercises in critical thinking. Even if Chamberlain’s concept does not rise to the level of a theory of warfare, it does show that effort is being made within the U.S. military to break down these ideas into their constituent parts and rethink how they work together. This is a subject I plan to return to in the near future.

Can Russia Cow Europe into Submission?

My previous post addressed a famous 1980s U.S. policy and strategic debate in which quantitative analysis featured prominently. Such debates are ongoing, of course. The International Security Studies Forum just posted a roundtable discussion of a recent book by MIT political scientist Barry R. Posen, Restraint:  A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy. The prolific Posen is the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of MIT’s Security Studies Program. He played a role in the 1980s NATO/Warsaw Pact debate and his ongoing research “focuses on US military strategy, force structure and capabilities, and force posture (the global distribution of U.S. military forces.)”

His new book addresses the relationship between contemporary U.S. national strategy and net assessments of military power. In it, Posen makes an argument for a new grand strategic approach, as described in its blurb:

The United States, Barry R. Posen argues in Restraint, has grown incapable of moderating its ambitions in international politics. Since the collapse of Soviet power, it has pursued a grand strategy that he calls “liberal hegemony,” one that Posen sees as unnecessary, counterproductive, costly, and wasteful. Written for policymakers and observers alike, Restraint explains precisely why this grand strategy works poorly and then provides a carefully designed alternative grand strategy and an associated military strategy and force structure. In contrast to the failures and unexpected problems that have stemmed from America’s consistent overreaching, Posen makes an urgent argument for restraint in the future use of U.S. military strength… His alternative for military strategy, which Posen calls “command of the commons,” focuses on protecting U.S. global access through naval, air, and space power, while freeing the United States from most of the relationships that require the permanent stationing of U.S. forces overseas.

In his response to the comments of the roundtable participants, Posen offered his capsule assessment of Russia’s current strategic situation in the context of his recommendation that the U.S. scale back its military commitment to European security:

Russia, under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, has made itself into a meaningful military power, and is practicing a muscular foreign policy. It seized Crimea, subverts the Donbas, and backs the Assad regime in Syria. This does not mean that it is no longer possible to implement Restraint in Europe. Russia’s power must be put in perspective. The National Intelligence Council assesses Russia’s net power as a fraction of the European Union’s today, and expects little improvement by mid-century. Its disastrous economic policies show no sign of change and the decrease in oil prices has made things even worse. Europe, taken as a whole, will remain quite capable. The question is whether Russia, by virtue of a sustained commitment to the generation of military power from a deteriorating economic base, can somehow cow Europe into submission. Would the Europeans invest so little in defending themselves in the absence of the U.S. military commitment that Russia could win what the Soviet Union could not–hegemony in Europe? [Emphasis added]

In light of recent debates over the correlation of military of forces and alleged military vulnerability of the Baltic States, a realistic assessment of overall strategic and military power seems like a good question to address. Posen’s arguments are well interrogated in the roundtable and his response is illuminating. It is all worth the time to read.

[Post edited for contextual clarity.]

The Military Budget Wars Are Headed Back to the Future

When I mused over how much new strategic debates are sounding like old Cold War strategic debates, I really had no idea. The U.S. national security debate really is going Back to the Future.  Mark Perry has an article in POLITICO exploring arguments being advanced by some U.S. Army leaders in support of requests for increased defense budget funding, and the criticism they have drawn.

In early April, a panel comprised of several senior Army officer testified before a Senate Armed Service subcommittee on modernization.

[They] delivered a grim warning about the future of the U.S. armed forces: Unless the Army budget was increased, allowing both for more men and more materiel, members of the panel said, the United States was in danger of being “outranged and outgunned” in the next war and, in particular, in a confrontation with Russia. Vladimir Putin’s military, the panel averred, had outstripped the U.S. in modern weapons capabilities. And the Army’s shrinking size meant that “the Army of the future will be too small to secure the nation.”

These assertions are, predictably, being questioned by, also predictably, some in the other armed services. Perry cites the response of an unnamed “senior Pentagon officer.”

“This is the ‘Chicken-Little, sky-is-falling’ set in the Army,” the senior Pentagon officer said. “These guys want us to believe the Russians are 10 feet tall. There’s a simpler explanation: The Army is looking for a purpose, and a bigger chunk of the budget. And the best way to get that is to paint the Russians as being able to land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. What a crock.”

Perry boils the debate down to what it is really about.

The fight over the Army panel’s testimony is the latest example of a deepening feud in the military community over how to respond to shrinking budget numbers. At issue is the military’s strategic future: Facing cuts, will the Army opt to modernize its weapons’ arsenal, or defer modernization in favor of increased numbers of soldiers? On April 5, the Army’s top brass made its choice clear: It wants to do both, and Russia’s the reason.

Perry’s walk through the various arguments is worth reading in full, but he accurately characterizes the debate as something more than an ecumenical disagreement among the usual Pentagon suspects.

The argument over numbers and capabilities might strike some Americans as exotic, but the debate is much more fundamental—with enormous political implications. “You know, which would you rather have—a high-speed rail system, or another brigade in Poland? Because that’s what this is really all about. The debate is about money, and there simply isn’t enough to go around,” the Pentagon officer told me. “Which is not to mention the other question, which is even more important: How many British soldiers do you think want to die for Estonia? And if they don’t want to, why should we?”

Those looking for a sober, factual debate over the facts and the implications of these issues are likely to be disappointed in the current election year atmosphere. It will also be interesting to see if strategic analysts will offer more than chum for the waters and warmed over versions of old arguments.

The Meaning of Military Expenditures II

In response to my last blog post I basically threw out a menu of possible conclusions. I received a very nicely thought out response to that post from Mike Johnson, which I felt was deserving its own blog post. His response is below (with his permission, of course):

With regard to the 20 April 2016 blog entry about military expenditures, I appreciated the list of possible conclusions and thought I would throw discussion points.

The comparison between US and other country defense spending is interesting, including the often mentioned statement that the US spends as much on defense as the next 10 countries combined.  I remember, from when I was in OPNAV N80 a couple of decades ago, that our NATO allies had twice as many active duty personnel and twice as many reservists as all the US Services combined. Yet, their combined defense budgets were less than what we were spending on our people in our military personnel and reserve personnel appropriations. Of course, back then Germany and France and many others still had conscription and less is usually spent on conscripts. But, it still leads to some serious questions about how to compare defense budgets when our allies could have twice the personnel and their total budgets were less than what we spent just on our personnel.  Several factors come into play. First, we have retirees being paid starting around age 40 or even earlier.  I don’t know of any other country that pays retirees before the mid-50s if not the 60s. Second, the retirement and a lot of the heath care are paid by other departments in most other governments, but in the US DoD pays into these programs.  Base pay for British military, by comparable grade, is actually more than in the US military; but we then add BAH and BAS on top (tax free); in the UK, the MOD subsidizes housing, but the serviceman has to pay a part. It isn’t clear whether the UK or the US serviceman of comparable grade has more “take home pay” so I don’t think the difference is that we pay our servicemen significantly more than other countries.

When it comes to Russia and China, in particular, conversions using market rates understate what is spent for most of the defense spending.  I had a colleague over the years–an expert on the Soviets–who would argue that Russian Federation soldiers had to be underfed, and suffering from malnutrition, because of the amount they were paid and given for meals.  I pointed out that meals certainly should use PPP and not market rates to convert and at the time the ratio between the two was about 7 (PPP converted into about 7 times as many US dollars compared with what market rates; it is less dramatic today but still to be of consideration). Anything internal to the Russian or Chinese economies should, in my opinion, use PPP for the exchange (which compares the cost of comparable items in each system).  This is particularly true of personnel pay, messing, accommodations, and most of logistics.  I am not sure about weapon systems. These are paid for internally, but they do have a connection to the outside world.

The way we count is different.  For example, funding is appropriated to the Services and to agencies in OSD as a top line that can be obligated.  How that is paid for may come from many sources including revenue collected by the Service.  In European budgets, we routinely see factors like total resource and then they subtract from that number expected receipts amounting to several percent of the budget.  In other words, they spend more because they can spend their revenues (such as payments made by service members for their housing) for whatever they want, but they are deducted from the top line used for comparison.

The US military does spend a lot more than any other country, despite the above factors.  Part of that is what it takes to maintain 6 regional combatant commands. Part of it is maintaining a constant level of forces around the world.  A war with most of our enemies is much more likely to be in their front yard and not ours.  We spend a lot on R&D and a lot on keeping equipment modern. And we spend a lot on training personnel.

PPP is purchasing power parity, which is a comparison between the currencies of two countries at which each currency when exchanged for the other will purchase the same quantity of goods as it purchases at home. So, for example, when the ruble dropped from 30 to 60 to a dollar, the Soviet defense budget suddenly did not really drop in half. So a direct comparison of exchange rates between countries often de-values the defense expenditures of less developed countries, where good and services are relatively cheap. Comparing countries based upon PPP tries to adjust for that.

The Meaning of Military Expenditures

My last post was a data dump without a conclusion. I probably need to add one, although I usually avoid providing opinions. There is no shortage of opinions in the American blogosphere and political landscape. I think a little less opinion and a little more data has value. If you want opinions, there are plenty of services out there who specialize in that, and from any perspective and viewpoint that you like.

From the previous Military Expenditures posting one could draw a number of conclusions:

  1. That the American allies in NATO and Asia are not carrying their weight…or…
  2. The threat from Russia and China is grossly overstated
    1. Russia’s defense expenditures are $51.6 billion while NATO (not including the U.S.) is around $300 billion.
    2. China’s defense expenditures are $145.8 billion (or is it $215 billion) while Japan, South Korea and Taiwan’s combined are $85 billion.
    3. The U.S. is spending $597.5 billion.
    4. …or….
  3. The U.S. is spending too much on defense.
    1. Beware of the “military-industrial complex?”
    2. …or….
  4. This is the cost of being the world leader (3.3% of GDP on defense)….or…
  5. The higher U.S. defense expenditures are certainly justified because:
    1. We are covering against Russia ($51.6 billion)
    2. We are covering against China ($145.8 billion)
    3. Then there is ISIL….and….
    4. Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia
    5. We have other missions, like nuclear deterrence, that adds to our cost.
    6. We need to continue to develop and maintain our technological edge, and that costs money.
    7. …or….
  6. The U.S. is spending too much on the wrong things…or….
  7. Maybe defense budget is not really a good measurement of military power….or…
  8. Maybe Russia and China are getting more “bang for the buck” then the U.S. and its western allies….or…
  9. Whatever else I forgot to mention….or….
  10. Some or all of the above.

Anyhow, one could interpret the figures in my previous post a number of different ways depending on their own political leanings and biases.

And…..I still didn’t really add a conclusion.

Military Expenditures

The American political campaign has ended up discussing NATO recently, including one candidate who states that NATO is “obsolete.” The sense is that America’s allies are not pulling their weight. Let us just look at some comparative defense budgets for a moment. Most figures below are estimates for 2015 from the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), a private UK based organization. I cannot vouch for their accuracy, but they have been doing this for a while.

United States: $597.5 Billion or 3.3% of GDP

Now, our NATO allies are spending much less. The big spender is the United Kingdom at 56.2 billion or 2% of their GDP. This is followed by Germany at 36.6 billion which is only 1.1% of their rather large GDP (largest economy in Europe). France is at 32.0 billion or 1.9% of their GDP (note that the SIPRI figures are much higher for France). Other large NATO countries include:

Turkey…..….22.6….2.2% (these are 2014 SIPRI figures)

Italy….…..….21.1….1.1%

Canada………14.0…..0.9%

Spain…………10.7…..0.9%

Poland…..…..10.3….2.1%

Netherlands…10.1.…1.2% (these are 2014 SIPRI figures)

Total NATO expenditures (not including United States) for 2014 was $310 billion (SIPRI figures). I gather it is now somewhat less. It was the goal once that every member of NATO spent 2% of their GDP on national defense. Many NATO members are far below that goal.

So, it would appear that the U.S. spending 3.3% of its GDP on defense, while no major country in NATO is spending much more than 2% of its GDP on defense. In contrast Russia is spending $51.6 billion or 4.1% of GDP. So certainly between England, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands they are spending at least $195.2 billon on defense, which is almost four times what Russia is spending.

If one looks to the Pacific, one sees the same pattern. The United States spends 597.5 billion on defense or 3.3%. Our ally Japan spends 41.4 billion or 1.0% of GDP. South Korea, sitting opposite the very unstable and dangerous North Korea, spends 33.4 million on defense or 2.4% of GDP. Taiwan, still claimed as a province by China, spends 10.2 billion or 1.9% of GDP.

In contrast China is spending 145.8 billion on defense or 1.2% of its GDP.

 

Now these are mostly IISS figures, there are somewhat different figures provided by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). For example they have the U.S. budget figures at 596.0 (vice 597.5) but this makes up 3.9% of GDP (vice 3.3%). Not sure why there is such a big difference in the figures for percent of GDP. They have a much higher figure for China (215 billion at 1.9% of GDP), Russia (66.4 billion at 5.4% of GDP) and France (50.9 billion at 2.1% of GDP). They have a world total figure of 1,676 billion (of which the United States spending makes up 35.6%) while the IISS has a world total figure of 1,563 billion (of which the United States spending makes up 38.2%).

Of course, this does not address how much “bang for the buck” people are getting.

Wargaming the Defense of the Baltics

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

RAND has published a new report by analysts David A. Shlapak and Michael Johnson detailing their assessment of the threat to the Baltic republics of conventional invasion by Russian military forces. The conclusions of the study are sobering — that NATO could do little to prevent Russian military forces from effectively overrunning Latvia and Estonia in as few as 60 hours. Their analysis should provide plenty of food for thought.

Just as interesting, however, is that Shlapak and Johnson used old-style paper wargaming techniques to facilitate their analysis. The image above of their home-designed wargame above should warm the cockles of any Avalon Hill or SPI board wargame enthusiast of a certain age. As to why they chose this approach, they stated:

RAND developed this map-based tabletop exercise because existing models were ill-suited to represent the many unknowns and uncertainties surrounding a conventional military campaign in the Baltics, where low force-to-space ratios and relatively open terrain meant that maneuver between dispersed forces—rather than pushing and shoving between opposing units arrayed along a linear front—would likely be the dominant mode of combat.

While they did state that they used rules and tables governing movement and combat based on “offline modeling,” it is very curious that they did not find any of the many sophisticated Defense Department computer models and simulations available to be suitable for their task. They outline their methodology in an appendix, but promise to provide a fuller report at a later date.

Why Men Rebel?

In the 1960s, there were two big-budget quantitative historical studies conducted of the causes of revolution. One was by Ted Gurr of Princeton University and resulted in the 1970 book Why Men Rebel? The other similar effort was done by a husband and wife team of Ivo and Rosalind Feierabend out at San Diego State University. They published their data and results in a series of articles and in 1972 in a compilation book (Anger, Violence and Politics: Theories and Research). Ted Gurr’s work is much more widely known, although in the 1980s when I reviewed both of their works in depth, I found them to be similar and of equal quality.

Both Ted Gurr’s and the Feierabend’s work was based upon measuring political violence, which was a very relevant subject back in the 1960s. I believe that both projects were U.S. government funded. They both collected extensive data on violence in every county in the world in the post-WWII era (their data cut off was in the late 1960s) and created an index of political violence by country. They then built a multi-variant regression model to try to measure what causes those levels of violence.

Although they were completely separate and isolated efforts, using different data collections, they ended up pretty much reaching similar conclusions (much like what happened with my work and Andrew Hossack’s work). They were both cross-national studies that tried to determine the level of political violence in a country based on a range of factors. Like with any extensive quantitative analysis, there were a lot of elements and interesting findings in this work. But, they both put front and center a “relative deprivation” hypothesis of the causes of political violence (and/or rebellion). Basically, what this said was that if things are going well, and then they start going badly, this creates the highest chance for ‘regime change.”

So, for example, in their data sample the rich (or developed) countries tended to be very stable. Very poor countries (undeveloped) were less stable. But the least stable countries are those somewhere between rich and poor that are getting wealthier (what they called at the time developing countries). They tend to be stable when they are economically growing, but once the growth stops, they become unstable. If there is any validity to this hypothesis (and there certainly was using the twenty years of data from around 1948 to 1968), then this leads to me to wonder about the long-term stability of Russia and China.

A summary of Why Men Rebel is here: http://wikisum.com/w/Gurr:_Why_men_rebel. As the summery notes: “(3) “Progressive deprivation” [the J-curve]–expectations grow [we expect continued growth] and capabilities do to, but capabilities either don’t keep up or start to fall (pg 53)–modernization, depression in a growing country, or other change could cause this. [What he wrote in 1970 about this describes nicely what happened with the fall of the USSR.]”

It would be interesting, in light of almost 50 more years of data since they did their work, if someone took their regression models and ran the last 50 years of data through them to see how they did. I always like to see a little model validation (although this is rarely done).

Iraq/Syria Intervention Scenarios

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.