Global Guerrillas: WAR'S NEW EQUILIBRIUM:"Unlike the previous models of guerrilla wars which sought to replace the state, these new wars have moved to a level of decentralization that makes them both unable to replace the state and extremely hard to eliminate."
A "progressive" call to arms: strengthen States (even those with leaders we frown upon) or be prepared to contend with powerful nonstate entities - that are far more difficult to engage, influence, or coerce.
So Muqtada al-Sadr is back a bit more prominently in the news over the last few days. Once again, he is urging Shiites (in general) and his followers (specifically) to "resist" the American occupation. And, once again, I see a hint of rejoicing amongst those who stubbornly refuse to understand that Sadr and his militia learned their lessons from the hard fighting of 2004. Yes...from a military perspective, Sadr's militia took a drubbing in 2004 - both in Najaf and in Sadr City. No...they have not chosen to fight in that manner since - despite all of his proclamations, political maneuvering, and paramilitary activity. Instead, the militia has secured the populace from which it draws support, aggressively moved against the population from which it feels most threatened (Sunnis), waged a shadowy campaign against US and British forces relying on effective roadside bombs, and undermined US efforts to build popular support with the Iraqi Shia community - while still benefiting from the heavy Shia hand in government.
So...the same day we see some folks reveling in the "fact" that Sadr wants to "get it on," we also see what "getting it on" means in a war that is much more communication and political maneuvering as it is fighting:
Large crowds of men, women and children, holding flags and anti-US banners, gathered in Najaf and the nearby twin city of Kufa for the protest which is also seen as a show of strength for the cleric who himself has been in self-exile for more than two months, an AFP correspondent said.What does he give us to swing at? Where is a target for us to engage? Who has better learned the lessons of this war?[...]
Members of Sadr's movement were seen guiding the crowds, while Iraqi police and army soldiers guarded key checkpoints in and around Najaf and Kufa.[...]The cleric, who launched two bloody rebellions against US forces in 2004, is known for his anti-US stance and has emerged as a powerful force in the present Shiite-led Iraqi government.
His political bloc has 32 lawmakers in the 275-member Iraqi parliament and six cabinet ministers in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's embattled government.
Global Guerrillas: THE VIRTUAL CALIPHATE
Well, okay. Maybe a bit of an exaggeration. Still...I found this little snippet particularly interesting:
While territory is claimed, it cannot always be held. As a result, the territory it does hold is very similar to a description of a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) :For him, a state’s perimeter extends only so far as men stand with guns to defend it. Tamimi’s vision of statehood suggests he conceives of the ISI as a governmental amoeba, constantly shifting its zone of control across Iraq’s western expanses as ISI forces redeploy. It never controls all of the territory it has claimed, but demands that all residents of that territory swear allegiance to the ISI’s Emir.The political goods this organization delivers do not include the material. It is assumed that is taken care of by the global marketplace and by the people themselves. What it desires to provide is enforcement of a code of conduct (the PCC has its own rules for this, the ISI's is Sharia).
Wired News: UAV Fooled to Hide Iraq Murder
Marines acting as a death squad: sickening.
Deliberate deception operations conducted at the lowest tactical level to fool UAVs and other aerial platforms: a peek into the future of warfare - and proof that additional technology and unmanned platforms will always have difficulty replacing boots on the ground.
Author Rupert Smith's lengthy career in the British military has provided him with a set of unique insights with which to judge modern war. As a conventional commander, he led Great Britain's 1st Armored Division during the first Gulf War in 1990 and 1991. As a less conventional commander, he led British forces in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 1998. In between these two starkly different British commands, he as also served as the commanding general of UN forces in Bosnia (UNPROFOR) during 1995. From this varied experience at the top of both British and international military organizations, General Smith has arrived at what might, at first glance, be viewed as a shocking conclusion:
War no longer exists. Confrontation, conflict, and combat undoubtedly exist all around the world...[n]onetheless, war as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as a battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in international affairs: such war no longer exists(pg 3).
While he leads with what might, at first glance, appear to be a nonsensical statement, it is the caveats he follows with that shape his debate. He more specifically states that "industrial war no longer exists" (pg 4) before getting to the heart of his argument: war between states has largely been replaced by war amongst the people. As Gen Smith describes it, "[w]ar amongst the people is both a graphic description of modern warlike situations, and also a conceptual framework: it reflects the hard fact that there is no secluded battlefield upon which armies engage, nor are there necessarily armies, definitely not on all sides” (pg 5). Smith’s experiences in both Northern Ireland and Bosnia strengthen his understanding of this shift in the nature of war. In both theaters, he found himself struggling to adapt military formations to an enemy that often demonstrated few of the traits we associate with armed forces – all while striving to protect large bodies of civilians who moved freely across his battlefield.
Before delving more deeply into the history of modern European warfare – his chosen means of leading us to his own conclusions, Smith provides us with further clarification on war amongst the people. In essence, it “is characterized by six major trends… [t]he ends for which we fight are changing…[w]e fight amongst the people…[o]ur conflicts tend to be timeless…[w]e fight so as not to lose the force…[o]n each occasion new uses are found for old weapons…” and finally, “[t]he sides are mostly non-state” (pg 19).
After clearly laying out his thesis, Smith divides his book into three distinct sections as he walks us through the evolution from industrial war between states into war amongst the people. These three sections, “Interstate Industrial War,” “Cold War Confrontation,” and “War Amongst the People” start with the rise of Napoleon and his use of the state’s assets to force decisive battle, describe the Cold War’s effects on senior military leaders’ understanding (or lack thereof) of conflict and confrontation in a nuclear-armed world, and end with a hard look at the modern military struggle to deal with a style of warfare that fits uncomfortably outside the tenets of conventional Western military thought. Being a Western military leader, Smith cannot leave the book as merely an explanation of modern warfare. He finishes by describing what this new change in warfare means for the West - and how Western leaders must adapt to this new reality in order to re-establish what he repeatedly calls the utility of force.
In outlining the origins of interstate industrial war, Smith begins with Napoleon and his ability to both wield the tools of the state and to achieve strategic objectives through the use of concentrated military force (the decisive battle). For Smith, Napoleon’s genius rested in his ability to both harness the resources of the State and to deliver the product of those resources to the critical point on the battlefield in such a way as to force decisive battles. Napoleon, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, understood what he hoped to achieve through his use of force:
His strategic political aim was precisely to change rulers and states, largely in order to make them part of his empire. His genius lay in marrying the military means he created and the method he devised of using them to achieve the end: decisive defeat of the enemy force (pg 41).
From here, he takes us forward through the Prussian innovations that formalized Napoleon’s genius and created a more systematic framework for harnessing the tools of the state. As he guides us through Prussian innovations, he leans heavily on Clausewitz’s trinity and his own belief that military force must be applied to achieve political ends. The results of both the Austro-Prussian conflict and the Franco-Prussian conflict are held up to this light and, from Smith’s perspective, we see shrewd political maneuvering tied to the use of force – until the end of the Franco-Prussian War. As he sees it, Prussian posturing and unnecessary political humiliation inflicted upon France sets the groundwork for future conflict rather than successful integration of captured terrain. An example, as Smith puts it, of force moving beyond its utility (pp 105-106). Unstated in this assessment of the Franco-Prussian conflict is the fact that Prussia’s “decisive battles” with the French only set the conditions for World War One rather than permanently settling the conditions for Prussian/German security.
Smith’s approach to the evolution of European warfare from the 17th to 20th centuries is nothing earth-shattering. It is not intended to be so. Instead, he attempts to clarify conventional historical wisdom on the evolution of Western military thought as he proceeds toward the later sections of the book – those in which he will depart from convention and seek to impress his own ideas upon the reader. From the Prussian victories of mid-19th century, he brings us to the two perfect storms of industrial interstate war: World Wars One and Two. World War One presents two disturbing trends for Smith: the completion of Clausewitz’s trinity as the people became as fully engaged as government (under the Napoleonic model) and the military (under the Prussian model); and the horrible realization that this incorporation of government, military, and people did NOT lead to quick, decisive victory but, instead, to horrific casualties and bloody stalemate on all sides. Once again, in Smith’s eyes, the utility of force (in this case massive force) vanished (pp 116,119). Unfortunately, the German military refused to accept this harsh truth and thus invented the notion that a lack of popular support led to defeat, undercutting the military in the process. This refusal to accept the failure of military action to achieve political aims laid the groundwork for World War Two even as the first Great War came to a conclusion.
Smith does not dwell long upon World War Two – other than to make note of two key points: the deliberate targeting of civilians by all sides served only to strengthen the trinity of people, army, and state – thus achieving an effect opposite of that desired. Secondly, as the best example of both forms of military mass – massing of state resources and massing of destructive power on the battlefield – the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end World War Two changed the face of warfare irrevocably.
Despite the losses generated by total interstate industrial war, the two biggest winners of World War Two (America and the Soviet Union) deliberately designed their militaries in the post-war years to once again engage in decisive conventional battle. At the same time, they moved to develop the nuclear weapons systems and doctrines that would prevent these conventional forces from ever meeting in such an engagement. Nuclear weapons became the trump card that drained the utility of conventional force between nuclear-armed rivals while opening the door to smaller wars (or conflicts, in Smith's parlance) – those amongst the people (pg 154). The two large power blocs both sought to exploit this form of warfare for their own gain while attempting to avoid allowing these conflicts to spread and create larger confrontations. On those occasions when Soviet or American conventional forces – designed solely to face each other on the battlefields of Western Europe – were committed to these new conflicts, they often found little utility for the force they could bring to bear. Whether it was Afghanistan, Algeria, or Vietnam, conventional armies from the most powerful nations in the world routinely found it difficult to apply their military power in a manner that created the conditions for victory. To explain the growing Western inability to apply military force directly to small wars (a marked contrast from the previous two centuries’ examples of European colonialism and imperialism), Smith commits an entire chapter to describing the growing sophistication of guerrilla campaigns while focusing on a simple truth that explains the general difference between colonial wars of the 19th and 20th centuries:
The colonial expeditions of the 19th century succeeded because for the most part the polities they faced could neither conceive of acts that had an effect on the popular political will in some distant country nor were likely to empower the people by telling them to fight independently of the ruling authority” (pg 162).With the major conventional powers unable to bring massive force to bear – either because of the possibility of provoking nuclear war or because their people no longer showed a willingness to join the Clausewitzian trinity (effectively making “decisive” warfare nearly impossible within democratic societies), those who wished to practice war amongst the people were free to hone their craft. In fact, many of these combatants received substantial assistance from one (or both) of the two superpowers even as they worked toward perfecting a style of warfare that undermined their sponsors’ own military efforts. Smith describes the two primary “lines of operation” typically employed by partisans, guerrillas, or terrorists to neutralize larger conventional forces as “the propaganda of the deed” and “the strategy of provocation” (pg 169). Also key to this description of revolutionary war is the notion that revolutionaries tend to apply force only at the tactical level; the objectives at operational and strategic level revolve around shaping the will and intention of the population. This distinction changes the objective of applying force:
In industrial war the object is to destroy the opponent’s army and to prevent his government from making war and protecting the people, thus breaking the triangular linkage [of Clausewitz’s trinity]. In the antithesis the object is to constantly and expensively undermine the stronger army and to thereby break the will of the government and the people to make war (pg 177).
Key to Smith’s reinterpretation of warfare in the nuclear age is the notion that “war” has largely been replaced by - often long-running - confrontations that periodically escalate into conflicts. His central examples for this paradigm are the Cold “War” itself - to Smith, it is clearly a long-running confrontation rather than a war - and the American confrontation with Iraq – that essentially ran from 1990 into the present. Because the US chose to interpret Desert Storm as an older-style war in which force was applied to achieve immediate and permanent resolution, the confrontation dragged on and force applied by the US was often counterproductive since it was applied within the context of providing immediate resolution of a specific conflict rather than advancing toward a resolution of the longer-running confrontation.
Shifting to the post-Cold War era, Smith presents a strong case that the removal of this strategic-level conflict has fundamentally forced the paradigm of “War amongst the people” from an underlying current to the forefront; powerful nations no longer view the sponsoring of revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries strictly from the perspective of weakening their major opponent – or as a minor sideshow in the larger strategic struggle to vanquish the other side through whatever means were deemed necessary.
In contrast to these hard strategic ends, we tend now to conduct operations for…sub-strategic objectives…we intervene in, or even decide to escalate to, a conflict in order to establish a condition in which the political condition can be achieved by other means and in other ways. We seek to create conceptual space for diplomacy, economic initiatives, political pressure and other measures to create a desired political outcome of stability, and if possible democracy (pg 272).This fundamental shift in responsibilities has not been accompanied by a fundamental shift in the organization of modern militaries. Instead, military leaders and planners have sought to identify the next conventional opponent they will face while leaving commanders in the field, saddled with the responsibility to succeed in these wars amongst the people, to make do with forces and equipment that are often wholly inappropriate.
In a Volatile Region of Iraq, U.S. Military Takes Two Paths - washingtonpost.com
...that highlights the difficulties American troops will likely encounter as they try to shift tactics more toward the touchy-feely rapport/reconnaissance work of Special Forces - but find themselves hampered by a training mindset and temperament that prefers direct conflict as a means to achieve objectives. The difficulty: military objectives can only lay the groundwork for political conditions. If those military operations create conditions that hamper political progress, they become meaningless at best and counter-productive at worst.
16 Civilians Die as U.S. Troops Open Fire in Afghanistan - New York Times
...with Strategic implications:"The shooting is a setback for American forces in Afghanistan, who have been working to contain the continuing insurgent attacks, in particular roadside bombs and suicide attacks, and win the support of the people with reconstruction and development projects. Deadly riots shook Kabul last May after American troops were involved in a fatal car crash and then opened fire on the crowd."
The Age of Individual Empowerment is going to continue to be a tough one for traditional powers.
Beijing increases defense spending - International Herald Tribune
I know there are a lot of pundits within the US who enjoy pointing to China as a new mega-villain - another black-hatted rogue that allows us to don our own white hat that has been gathering dust in the corner since the early 90s...but, frankly, trying to force China into that role worries me more than increased Chinese defense spending. Why?
The new MNF-I Commander's aggressive counter-insurgency strategy - focused on getting troops out into the populace in order to reduce insurgents' freedom of maneuver, increase the sense of security within neighborhoods, and stiffen the backbone(s) of Iraqi Security Forces - makes a lot of sense. If, that is, at the tactical level, soldiers understand how to carry out his mandate. Reports like these leave one wondering.
a psychological term which describes the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time. More precisely, it is the perception of incompatibility between two cognitions, where "cognition" is defined as any element of knowledge, including attitude, emotion, belief, or behavior.
'Waiting to Get Blown Up'
How do you make an Army realize the 'war' it wants...isn't:
"No one wants to be here, you know, no one is truly enthused about what we do," said Sgt. Christopher Dugger, the squad leader. "We were excited, but then it just wears on you -- there's only so much you can take. Like me, personally, I want to fight in a war like World War II. I want to fight an enemy. And this, out here," he said, motioning around the scorched sand-and-gravel base, the rows of Humvees and barracks, toward the trash-strewn streets of Baghdad outside, "there is no enemy, it's a faceless enemy. He's out there, but he's hiding."
"We're trained as an Army to fight and destroy the enemy and then take over," added Dugger, 26, of Reno, Nev. "But I don't think we're trained enough to push along a country, and that's what we're actually doing out here."I think the passage of time has created a false image of WWII...of morale, effectiveness, and the 'joy' of waging full-scale conflict every day. That being said, soldiers who have resigned themselves to getting "blown up" everyday while they search for an enemy to fight probably have not fully internalized the tenets of a counterinsurgency campaign.
