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Abu Muqawama: October 2012

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  • Proxy War and the Continuing Pitfalls of Double Games
    October 22, 2012 | Posted by dtrombly - 5:26pm | 16 Comments

    In my last post here, we looked at some of the issues inherent in the use of client and partner states in tackling the issues of counterterrorism. However, there are many cases where the United States has and will have to work with non-state or parastatal actors. At a time when America’s appetite for full-bore conventional interventions into failed or collapsed states (or states which we would like to induce failure or collapse in) is low, proxies, paramilitaries, and rebels seem like appealing, low-cost, and safe ways for the United States to influence outcomes abroad.

    The problem is, as with working with state and military actors, the groups the United States frequently tries to enlist into its myriad efforts at proxy warfare possess a separate set of interests from the United States. This diversion in interests is not necessarily nefarious. Groups may primarily seek wealth, local political power, or ideological aims that are not inherently anti-American. Yet very few groups will have sets of interests so limited and circumstances so pliant to patronage that they will subsume themselves into straightforwardly reliable instruments of U.S. foreign policy aims.

    The indirect approach with proxies, as with client or partner states, tries to obfuscate or eliminate a fundamental policy problem with a different strategic execution. Few would claim they wish to engage in nation-building in Syria, or advocate launching a counterinsurgency or counter-terrorism campaign there. To do so would evoke images and memories of Iraq and Afghanistan, of thousands of American troops and strategic folly.

    But trying to create a friendly state or quasi-state out of the Free Syrian Army through supplying them with weapons requires precisely them to execute policies we would rather leave unspoken. When we look at the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, we recognize that a Libyan government which effectively translates its pro-U.S. proclivities into meaningful policy outcomes will have to engage in counter-terrorism operations against jihadists. It will need to undergo nation-building efforts to develop a military powerful enough to take on militias and other paramilitary organizations, and develop criminal justice institutions and practices to ensure that the rule of law can prevail.

    In Syria, we frequently hear that providing arms to the rebels will enhance U.S. goals to unify the opposition, marginalize jihadists such as Jabhat al-Nusrah which operate outside the FSA’s already loose command structure, and earn the loyalty of the future government in Syria. This would occur, supposedly, through the U.S. preventing Qatar or Saudi Arabia from taking control of arms flows, outgunning the jihadists, and collapsing the Syrian regime before they can establish a foothold within the country.

    For U.S. patronage to translate into those outcomes, though, the U.S. must induce some nasty behavior by its friends on the ground. It should be very obvious that Qatar and Saudi Arabia will search for preferred proxies. As recent reporting reveals, the Qatari and Saudi governments are trying to steer arms towards hard-line Islamists, and rebel groups, in turn, are shifting their behavior and appearance to cash into these arms. One the one hand, this is heartening, as it means that alternate arms provision might at least discourage aping hard-line Islamist or jihadist practices. But these faux jihadists are hardly the real concern.

    If the U.S. seeks out groups it believes align with its values, this encourages the Saudis and Qataris to more aggressively support their own proxies, in order to maintain leverage among the rebel co-belligerents. It is entirely possible to have a scenario where aggressive patronage produces unity within each patron’s preferred factions of the rebel forces, but creates starker divide among the coalition overall. As much as the United States would like to disassociate itself from the concept, using proxies to shape political outcomes and state consolidation is still a form of nation or state-building behavior, one made palatable by the lack of direct exposure but all the more difficult by the lack of leverage.

    Frequently, the first impulse of a proxy group, whether it takes arms or not, is going to focus using them on fighting its primary enemy (the Syrian state) rather than asserting dominance over fighters who are driving at similar aims. When relatively moderate rebels killed an extremist leader, it was not because he was initially unwelcome, but because he was trying to assert control over rebel activities. Attempting to marginalize the jihadists sounds well and good, but it involves engaging in a severe and likely violent power struggle that jeopardizes the interests of several major regional state and non-state actors engaged in the Syrian civil war and its broader proxy conflict.

    So the United States is left with a situation where it must potentially fracture the rebellion by attempting this marginalization during the course of the conflict, or by hoping its arms have bought enough loyalty, capacity, and willpower for the rebel groups to undertake a second or third phase of Syria’s civil war in order to purge the country of jihadist groups. In either case, U.S. anti-extremist efforts work at cross-purposes with either unifying the rebels or shortening the civil war. This is doubly problematic when one considers that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states have demonstrated their ability to resource and implement proxy strategies in countries such as Libya. Even in the case of Syria, the United States would need the support of the very countries propagating the movements it hopes to quash.

    When the U.S. engages in proxy warfare in the context of the Syrian civil war, it thus encounters not simply implementation problems, but these implementation problems, like those of partner and client strategies, reveal a fundamental lack of ability to prioritize policy aims. Advocates of proxy warfare cannot decide or agree about their policy objectives, let alone their prioritization. It is nice to say that the U.S. wishes to shorten the Syrian war, build opposition unity, protect safe areas, and marginalize radicalism. These goals all conflict at various junctures (shorten the Syrian civil war requires minimizing infighting among rebels or killing off undesired rebels postwar), and without prioritization, the result is a mess.

    The U.S. has frequently employed proxies, but the aims were narrowly focused. During the Cold War, paramilitary proxies broadly existed to inflict maximum damage on hostile forces, with the outcomes for civilian welfare, war termination (the goal very often necessitated the opposite) or long-term state-building or capacity building.

    At the end of the day, whether there are boots on the ground or not, the question of how the U.S. uses proxy forces to consolidate a friendly or relatively liberal state in Syria are nation-building and state-building problems, and the question of how the U.S. uses proxy groups to marginalize jihadists is a counter-terrorism problems. By their nature, proxy strategies compound on existing flaws in these policies because they delegate a central role in the strategy to self-interested third parties. By their practice, proxy wars in areas where the U.S. lacks the intelligence or logistical capability to unilaterally furnish its desired partners with weaponry involve yet another set of external actors with their own interests and goals.

    Unilateralism is a dirty word these days, but very often the problem with it is that the United States grafts unilateral aims and approaches to policies which require far more consensus and complicity from other actors. Squaring the circle through indirect approaches seems appealing, but the reality is that whether the U.S. is conducting drone strikes or distributing arms, it is putting its policy and strategy at the mercy not simply of the enemy, but of its would-be partners, clients, and proxies. The deep and entangling double games and strategic surprises the U.S. so often finds itself in now, if anything, highlight the need for the United States to develop a set of genuinely unilateral options appropriate for achieving limited aims. As American relative power declines, the more indirect the U.S. approach, the less leverage it will have to shape the implementation and outcome of that approach to its own liking.

     

    covert war, proxies, Syria

  • Beyond Borders?
    October 18, 2012 | Posted by aelkus - 5:11pm | 0 Comments

    There's been a flurry of commentary and scholarship examining the idea that the 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AUMF) enabled a new kind of fluid, boundary-skipping form of warfare. Some observe that the conflict against al-Qaeda and associated movements (AQAM) involves multiple political and spatial contexts. We balance between the interiority of the homeland, the exteriority of the battlefield, and a set of other spaces distinguished by the degree they permit access and power projection. All of these spaces are linked together by communication technologies, logistics networks, and financial flows. 

    From the late 1990s onwards, the disaggregated nature of emerging threats stimulated US government interest in interagency cooperation and networked military and security organizations. The refrain is familiar: an allegedly new threat requires novel methods that cross interagency lines and crack bureaucratic rice bowls. Of course the threat, while novel in character, is not entirely new. Similarly, the spate of analyses warning of unprecedented counterterrorist warfare reflect the same wrongheaded assumption:  AQAM is the only opponent political communities have fought whose uneven geography poses political, legal, and strategic challenges. Hence America's war against al-Qaeda sets a dangerous new trend.

    The historical record does not support this narrative. War beyond borders is actually more common than it might seem in today's very state-centric world. Transnational threats have never fit comfortably in neat political or legal categories, and states have often embraced unorthodox operating methods and organizations to enhance their security. Let’s start with a deep dive: in the premodern world, pirates, nomads, and secret societies were both geographically fluid and highly mobile. The anarchist writer Hakim Bey idolized the Assassins because they defied established borders and laws to create their own secret realm:

    Across the luster of the desert & into the polychrome hills, hairless & ochre violet dun & umber, at the top of a desiccate blue valley travelers find an artificial oasis, a fortified castle in saracenic style enclosing a hidden garden. ...As guests of the Old Man of the Mountain Hasan-i Sabbah they climb rock-cut steps to the castle. Here the Day of Resurrection has already come & gone--those within live outside profane Time, which they hold at bay with daggers & poisons.

    Bey argued that the Assassins and pirate communities were disaggregated communities of free spirits living in fortified sanctuaries; separated by oceans of sand and sea. In turn, nomadic powers moved as diffuse clouds throughout large landmasses and lived parasitically off of settled peoples. The Tartar peoples, Clausewitz observed, also constituted a collective warmaking entity that did not observe the neat separation between political, economic, and military divisions of labor common to states and empires.

    How did states and other political communities respond? You might be surprised how little really has changed. Pirates and bandits were regarded as "enemies of humanity" and were treated harshly. Sovereign boundaries were transgressed to capture non-state enemies that took refuge within settled political communities. Established legal and political concepts stress that only states have the “rightful authority” to wage war. Great powers also established counterterrorism networks and shared intelligence since the late 19th century. Upset about privatized war or the Human Terrain System? Contractor support, native intelligence networks, and targeted killings were also old hat to Army officers involved with the Indian Wars and Pancho Villa expedition.

    States may not want to admit that non-state networks can wage war against them, but transnational enemies won’t go away. States themselves use similar methods to mobilize power across borders, as Robert Kaplan observed of Iran's "virtual empire" of proxies and intelligence operators. The Soviet Union had a far-reaching global network of spies, client states, and proxies and the West feared the Comintern’s capacity for ideological subversion long before it feared the Soviet military.

    It’s hard not to conclude that World War II also stands as a giant rebuke to the idea that the global war on terror poses a unique challenge to questions of borders, neutrality, legality, and politics. As my blogmate Dan noted,  Axis naval, air, and mechanized power projection capabilities necessitated operating in neutral territory and sometimes invading and controlling entire states. Iran, Iceland, and Norway are just a few of the places that came under Allied power. World War II is also a case of "complex" war against a coalition held together by transnational ideologies. The Germans ruled a group of fascist states and non-state networks, and the Japanese and their local allies fought to establish a pan-Asian system radiating out from Tokyo.

    The West countered the complex threat by generating a astounding variety of interagency collaboration and hybrid organizations. Stanley McChrystal would be more at home during WWII than the Iraqi surge. Collaborative interagency research, analysis, and operations groups were assembled to plan economic warfare, crack codes, analyze adversary strategic culture, and assess asymmetric threats like the German U-Boat offensive. Indeed, WWII was also the heyday of groups ranging from covert operations organizations like the Office of Strategic Services and Special Operations Executive to oddball groups of mercenaries like the Flying Tigers.

    Just because the threat is old does not necessarily mean that we have a universal template that will erase the complicated political and strategic problems inherent in this kind of warfare. The AUMF is broad and wide-ranging because politicians and the public perceive that the threats are similarly unbounded. But that perception alone should not be a justification for hurrying down every rabbit hole and wasting resources and lives in the process. Policy and strategy can help clarify objectives and make them sustainable over time. Trying to develop a better understanding of the relationships between local and global threats is also necessary to avoid needless conflict, as are rigorous analysis of the effects of various political-military methods.

    What is not useful is an ahistorical narrative of unprecedented and spatially unbounded warfare that ignores the long record of states going beyond borders to fight threats to national security. One cannot expect politicians and security officials castigated for a failure to "connect the dots" and counter transnational threats before 9/11 to react sympathetically to such rhetoric. Pakistan exports terror abroad and is unwilling and unable to curb such negative externalities. Hence Pakistan's hue and cry over its sovereignty has fallen on deaf ears.

    The real risks lie in strategy and policy, not necessarily geography. What is the US theory of victory? How do we know who the enemy is? How do we know we are winning or losing? Are the costs of our effort sustainable? Are our targets enemies or bystanders we attack out of ignorance? The answers to these questions are still elusive. But the US public deserves to know, whether the enemy has a flag and capitol or hides in the shadows.

    networks, Strategy

  • The Persistent Dangers of Double Games
    October 13, 2012 | Posted by dtrombly - 6:16pm | 1 Comments

    Although America’s past and emergent counterterrorism strategies frequently raise concerns about unilateralism, the multilateral and cooperative aspects remain relatively low in visibility. Actual or merely perceived unilateral acts, such as JSOC direct action raids and drone strikes capture much of America’s attention, while the role of host governments, proxies, and third parties of all kinds retains a relative background role. In reality, the inclusion of a wide variety of consenting foreign actors, ranging from militias to militaries, play a supporting and prerequisite role that is as troubling as it is vital.

    Take, for example, the cases of drone strikes in Pakistan. As the infamous Drunken Predator Drone explains in this excellent post, the covert and lightly-publicized quid pro quo between Washington and Islamabad over American counterterrorism efforts in South and Central Asia complicates the policies of both. Noting the wide ranging problems within Pakistan, he notes:

    The Pakistani political class is much happier to instead see the nation’s outrage, ink and airtime dedicated to a safer topic. Like sovereignty violations.

    And by cooperating with our counterterrorism efforts (including drone strikes,) the influential Pakistani military gets access to some of the choicest American defense hardware...

    As has been obvious for 10 years, U.S.  counterterrorism assistance represents a golden opportunity for Pakistan’s armed forces to gear up for war with India. Ending drone strikes would derail a $4.3-billion gravy train. And that’s far from the only American aid in the mix; development groups receive billions of dollars for education, shelter and basic nutrition in Pakistan. (Of course, many Pakistanis have no idea. American markings are often removed from aid shipments out of fear that they will become targets for militants.)

    The elected, legitimate government of Pakistan has weighed costs and benefits, and made a clear decision. Granting permission (however grudging or tacit it may be) for drone strikes represents a better option than risking a strategic break with America.

    Far from being a simple trampling of Pakistan’s will, the U.S. and Pakistan play a delicate - and relatively obscure - game which buys permission for America’s counterterrorism initiatives while bolstering some of the core objectives of the Pakistani deep state. Unfortunately, for too long American policymakers and publics have assumed American aid will engender a more comprehensive confluence of moral values, political principles, and strategic interests between them. Rather than simply presenting tactical and pragmatic ways to mitigate U.S. coercive potential, cash in on its immense political-military resources, and use them to advance prior objectives, America has for too long relied on a notion that America could strongly influence or control a country’s political will without actually exerting control.

    The political benefits of such an indirect approach are as apparent in the American public arena as they are in Pakistan. While the consequences of dysfunctional clientelism are made more and more apparent with each insider attack in Afghanistan, where America’s force posture puts conventional boots on the ground and lives on the line, the clandestine assets in Pakistan elicit no such public attention or outcry because they create no similar degree of risk. Yet this basic crack in the policy assumptions of clientelism-enabled counterterrorism remains. C. Christine Fair has outlined a plausible way forward: acknowledging the two countries will sometimes have irreconcilable aims and mitigating the negative effects accordingly. But Pakistan is hardly the only country where we see the same problems.

    In Yemen, the elite units which received U.S. military aid were redirected to regime preservation rather than counterterrorism. But aid to the Yemeni regime was the cost of political acquiescence to U.S. strikes, helping to foster a Yemeni deep state (even if Saleh is gone) with interests that may tolerate anti-American radicalization, so long as its existence and internal power remains secure.

    While U.S. aid has had varying degrees of success in making military forces more organizationally cohesive, operational proficient, and generally professional, it has faltered when it comes to changing the policy objectives that guide the militaries and the regimes they serve themselves. Just as many rightly call for more scrutiny of the consequences of drone strikes, they are just the latest privilege the U.S. has purchased from regimes and militaries in exchange for enhancing their military power and political longevity. Distressingly, many alternatives proposed to drone strikes fail to solve this deeper problem. An effective capture program nearing the scale of the drone program would require similar, if not greater U.S. concessions to local regimes, while a policy of promoting partnership, training, and advisory roles for the U.S. necessitates capacity building for regimes even if their intentions remain in many respects malignant towards U.S. interests.

    Complicating this matter, few of the local regimes where the U.S. wages its counterterrorism campaigns (and assists in the counterinsurgency campaigns of others) have Huntingtonian security forces. The evolution of the “deep state” in many of our former Third World partners gave security forces and their partners and proxies a political, social, and economic role alien to the Weberian ideal or the misleading state/non-state typology. Given the known and possible radicalizing and destabilizing roles of harsh imprisonment regimes, brutal local security forces, and the political machinations of rentier states and their proxy forces, devising a policy that tackles the essential principal-agent problem in current U.S. counterterrorism operations is as essential a task as finding alternatives to the strategies such as targeted killing themselves. Even if the targeted killing strategy were to give way, the dangerous game that enabled it may yet persist.

    counterterrorism, Drones, Pakistan, Yemen

  • Untangling the Good War
    October 9, 2012 | Posted by dtrombly - 7:19am | 4 Comments

    Jason Fritz at Ink Spots has an excellent review up of Anthony Beevor’s new single-volume history of World War II. I haven’t read the work (although Fritz’s review has moved it further up my to-read list), but the post raises some excellent points about how we view World War II which have vital implications for today. First, Fritz praises Beevor for attempting to highlight the political and strategic complexity of the conflict:

    As a big-picture example, the United States did not just face a Pacific versus Europe resource competition. The United States faced resource competition between Stillwell’s command supporting the Chinese Nationalists, MacArthur’s forces, Halsey’s forces, the preparation for an invasion of western France, operations in North Africa and then Italy, strategic bombing campaigns on both sides, and Lend-Lease to many a slew of locations. To compound this, American leaders needed to maintain support for the war at home and keep the Alliance together while trying to shape the post-war world through a political minefield of communists, socialists, fascists, colonialists, revolutionaries, and democratists. All while trying to actually win the war. If you consider the number of facets and decisions required in this complex world, multiply these considerations by the same problems with which all of the other Allies (and enemies) were forced to contend. The result is an exponentially large equation to determine the outcomes of a world in flux moving at the speed of a tank.

    We frequently hear in foreign policy circles that the 21st century’s geopolitics is vastly more complex than that of the 20th, particularly with reference to the relative simplicity of great power politics in a state system or the simple strategic viewpoints which sufficed for the clash of bipolar blocs, along with changing trends in economics, technology, and society. Yet looking at WWII and its preceding decades show a world’s complexity that would be mind-boggling even to the sharpest, forward-looking policymakers and strategists today.

    World War II featured a system with a much more pronounced multi-polarity, both diplomatically and ideologically, and with a patchwork of sub-state party systems, insurgents, and factions of all kinds attempting to seize control of state machinery and the mass populace. The political tumult of 1930s Japan, with the vying Imperial Way and Control Factions seeking influence over the military and the state generally, emerged from a context of ideological, social, and political discord and actual false flags and outright coup attempts puts today’s grappling with modern political transitions in some perspective. Even in amidst the great power clash of WWII, non-state actors with obscure ideologies could exert profound effect. Take for instance Darlan’s assassination at the hands of a French Resistance cell led by an ultraconservative with monarchist and integral nationalist tendencies.

     While this world was undoubtedly different, dismissing it as irreconcilably simpler in a geopolitical sense risks privileging a post-hoc teleology. Despite the growth and change in populations, technologies, and economies, making the case for a policy-relevant epochal great is likely to obscure a far greater deal more than it reveals. While tacticians and students of operational art and military strategy frequently plumb the depths of World War II, the policy planning, diplomacy, and general foreign policy issues of the period frequently appear as so beholden to antiquity as to be irrelevant, or so straightforward as to become unexamined mantras.

    That brings us to the next issue, which is the problematic “good war” narrative of World War II. As Fritz explains:

    It is important to note that Beevor does not suggest that World War II was an unjust war, he in fact says that is (from the Allied perspective, naturally), but rather that we should remove our rosy glasses on the West’s activities during the war and understand analysis of the war and its events for what they are and why “good” is not a descriptor of this war. He describes the war as “so rich a source for the study of dilemmas, individual and mass tragedy, the corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, the egomania of commanders, betrayal, perversity, self-sacrifice, unbelievable sadism and unpredictable compassion.”

    The historical lessons of World War II are far too often transmuted and echoed through the experiences of the Cold War and the War on Terror. While a narrative of the U.S. grappling with ideologically-extreme foes provides a satisfying continuity to the past three quarters of a century, the historical lessons most often drawn from WWII often seem simplistic in the extreme.

    There is the perpetual invocation of Pearl Harbor, without adequate consideration for the diplomatic and domestic political maneuvering, sanctions, and U.S. policy decisions, and Japanese provocations and reactions, which preceded war’s outbreak (December 7th was, as Gaddis has noted, hardly a surprise in the way 9/11 was). There is the even more frequent agonizing over Munich, appeasement and the importance of prevention, without regard for the diplomatic issues, the military unpreparedness for launching an efficacious attack on Germany, or the possibility that an unpopular and hastily-conceived war might have brought pro-Axis or anti-war politicians greater influence by peaceful means in their home countries.

    What is rarely invoked in public policy discourse is equally telling. The avoidance or ignorance of how the European theater of the war, in brute material and human terms, was actually won is politically and rhetorically understandable but historically incomprehensible. The messy deals and compromises of interwar and World War II era are uncomfortable, but potentially illuminating to those who seek to put “the study of dilemmas” into practice in ways the good war narrative, useful for polemical nostalgia, can never be.

    The myriad difficulties of waging World War II that Fritz earlier outlined culminated in human tragedy and moral compromise, which challenges both the simple label of the “good war,” and for today, demands we scrutinize our contemporary context rather than reinforcing the whitewashed symbols and credos of the mythologized past. In recognizing the complexity of World War II, we not only refine our historical understanding, but also recognize relevance of its lessons at the highest levels of strategy, policy, and politics without resort to tired clichés.

    strategic history

  • Dependable Expendables?
    October 8, 2012 | Posted by dtrombly - 6:16am | 0 Comments

    While cheap precision weapons, supposedly expendable drones, and invulnerable standoff fires continue to fascinate publics and intrigue policy makers, we should be careful before subsuming these developments into a coming “new way of war.” As a recent RAND study points out, in a comparison between reusable platforms (think strategic bombers and strike aircraft) and expendable weapons (think cruise missiles), expendable weapons become less cost-effective during prolonged conflict. As Thomas Hamilton explains:

    The conflict duration at which exclusive reliance on expendable platforms becomes prohibitive depends on a number of assumptions about the cost, availability, and  utilization rates of weapon systems, but for any realistic possibilities, expendable platforms become costly for conflicts persisting on the order of ten days.

    Of course, no war uses purely expendable weapons, and no expendable weapon is purely expendable – weapons such as the TLAM are incredibly dependent on the presence of naval vessels which costs enormous sums and must be made to stick around for a long while. But the limitations of expendable weapons have important implications for thinking about future warfare.

    For example, despite the proliferation of cheap precision-guided munitions, as my co-blogger pointed out in a recent post, these payloads are still extremely dependent upon reliable platforms to deliver them. The greatest recent advances have not been in expendable long-range weapons (U.S. efforts to develop hypersonic weapons and Prompt Global Strike munitions have been marred with difficulty lately), but with small, inexpensive missiles or bombs that tactical attack aircraft can carry. Colombia’s Super Tucanos and America’s relatively small Predator and Reaper drones are so feared by their insurgent targets because precision weapons, when loaded on such platforms, allow for sortie generations to attack insurgent groups and other irregulars that were too mobile and dispersed to target before.

    When the U.S. chooses to conduct combat operations in countries such as Kosovo and Libya, strategic bombers must still make an appearance alongside expendable weapons such as TLAMs. Strategic bombers played a significant role in target servicing over Kosovo, and B-1s had record-breaking persistence during their deployment in Afghanistan. But reusable platforms are aging, expensive, and save for B-2s, very dependent on SEAD sorties to clear the way for their operation.

    One concern frequently leveled against armed drones is that they make wars easier, because they are inexpensive, and since they are remotely piloted, morally expendable too. Of course, if drones made war easier to conduct, they would hardly be the first system to enhance the margin of superiority of the U.S. over its opponent. But how credible of a claim is expendability, and how much does the low price of blood and treasure in drones shift the paradigm for warfare? Not so much, it should seem.

    While there is no blood price to shooting down a drone, the cost is still hefty, and it comes atop a high accident rate. It is telling the U.S. secures permission or acquiescence from countries such as Pakistan and Yemen when it flies armed drones, and in the case of Libya, waited out the destruction of its air defenses by conventional means. If completely expendable Tomahawk missiles do not drastically reduce costs of prolonged strike operations, armed drones, which are fundamentally reusable platforms by nature, are even less likely to do so.

    Another question this study suggests is how the U.S. and its allies will keep up with the logistical costs of future conflicts. Even the relatively low-intensity period of sustained strikes in Libya early on taxed the resources of NATO allies. Campaigns such as Iraq required 800 cruise missiles, and Syria might take up to 700. While standoff expendable systems such as the TLAM and ALCMs allowed NATO countries to support U.S. counterparts in the way Europe’s lack of strategic bombing capability cannot, ultimately it is America’s vastly superior stocks and financial resources for warfighting that allow it to conduct such sustained bombardments.

    Preventing the overstrain of that logistical chain is increasingly important, and ultimately, it will severely limit the ability to treat remotely piloted systems as expendable assets like cruise missiles, and ensure a continued role for larger and costlier platforms in the vein of B-2s, F-16CJs, and EA-18Gs that help make operating environments safe for drones fulfilling the strike roles of their manned counterparts.

    Similarly, the pervasive role of dispersal and deception in countering U.S. fire superiority demands the persistence of ISR assets that standoff expendable systems simply cannot provide on their own. Though “shoot and scoot” weapons are becoming more advanced, putting enough of them into a theater at a reasonable price requires reusable platforms if only to defend non-expendable C3I and ISR assets.

    The logistical challenges of keeping future offshore warfare cheap will likely pose a significant problem in future conflicts. As the fiscal sinews of American war power weaken, maintaining meeting voluminous sortie generation demands will get more challenging, even cheaper PGMs will remain largely dependent on a host of platforms to find, fix, and finish targets, while expendable standoff munitions, let alone exepndable UAVs, will be unable to take a central role in conflicts of longer duration. While covert wars and conflicts such as Libya seem within U.S. limits, even prolonged periods of high-intensity strikes will ensure that the “old way” of air warfare will remain quite persistent.

    Air Power, Drones

  • Reinventing Landpower
    October 3, 2012 | Posted by aelkus - 9:48am | 5 Comments

    Let's face it: American landpower is in crisis. As blogfather Andrew Exum pointed out in a January column, without a dominant adversary or geographical template (the Soviet Union, Central Europe) landpower's case is getting harder to make. The counterinsurgency era provided a breather, but not necessarily a solution. It was common not too long to ago to see a flood of books and articles making the case that the Army had innovated towards a form of war (counterinsurgency) that would dominate the future of conflict. However, as Exum observes, this ignored the fact that Army/Marine counterinsurgency in Iraq was a contingent innovation designed to help the US through a war that many COIN thinkers regarded as a mistake. In 2012, the American defense landscape has moved away from large-scale stability operations and privileged air-sea battle, foreign internal defense, and unconventional warfare scenarios. None of these seem, at first glance, to be particularly promising for the big battalions.

    Some predict that the "man on the scene with the gun" will be replaced by the culturally sensitive special operative, cyberwarrior, or Predator pilot. Afghanistan in 2001-2002 and Libya last year is often trotted out to support this thesis. Certainly US airpower and Gulf Cooperation Council unconventional warfare units saved the Libyan rebels from defeat and gave them the support and organization necessary to win. But holes in the narrative emerge when we consider that the decisive weight was Libyan ground forces. Similarly, the success of the "Afghan Model" in 2002 should be properly credited to the Northern Alliance's Afghans. Moreover, relying on airpower and special operations forces as the US main effort also had costs. The fact that the US cannot diplomatically operate in a Libya whose citizens and government are ostensibly pro-American or even properly investigate the Benghazi consulate attacks speaks volumes about the problems of confusing reliance on ground proxies with actual political control. Granted, these costs are small compared to large-scale ground engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they still complicate the now-trendy vision of indirect warfare.

    Douglas Ollivant has also soundly observed that we cannot assume that special operations forces will be a salve for every security challenge we face. Some scenarios will simply be too big for SOF to handle alone. Even in the US does not seek to reconstruct collapsing states, securing weapons of mass destruction and leadership targets in the aftermath of an implosion of Syria, North Korea, Libya, or any number of other states would be demanding tasks that special operations would have difficulty handling by themselves. Some sanctuary-raiding missions would require larger ground forces. Others may simply lend themselves better to general purpose forces. Recent African success waging combined land-amphibious operations in Somalia suggests that land forces executing amphibious raiding in Africa could inflict substantial damage on pirates and other foes. In other situations we may not be able to rely on proxies to do the job for us, either because of a principal-agent mismatch or lack of capability. Finally, SOF and airpower in recent conflicts also depend implicitly on the enemy lacking the ability to threaten the bases and supply networks that sustain them with ground power, commando forces, or long-range weapons.  Should Afghanistan’s government lose substantial amounts of territory or collapse outright after US withdrawal, the basing arrangements upon which we base our proxy warfighting would be threatened.

    Still, the question remains: how to rebrand landpower? The Army War College's Antulio Echevarria II has a great piece at the Strategic Studies Institute taking on the challenge. In the past, Echevarria has written about how the United States lacks a "way of war" but instead had developed a "way of battle" oriented around destroying enemy armies. Destroying armies is necessary but not sufficient for decisive victory. In a new compilation of case studies on the subject of hybrid warfare edited by Williamson Murray and Peter Mansoor, there are copious examples of strategic misfortunes induced by conflation of Napoleonic victory with actual defeat of the enemy. Eliminating the bulk of French forces in 1871 forced the Prussians to contend with makeshift armies and partisans. The US' inability to manage the challenge of fighting insurgents, partisans, and main force units simultaneously played a strong role in its defeat in Vietnam. And in Korea today the US and South Korea will contend with North Korean main forces, special operations groups, and paramilitary networks in any ground scenario.

    We've argued for a while as to what to call these conflicts, from Fourth Generation Warfare to various forms of "complex" irregular war. But the bottom line is that future conflicts will involve the need to gain control over populations, whether the opponent is a positional force, guerrillas, or both. Echevarria offers a way out of the morass:

    Some will want to argue that Landpower's raison d'être is to defeat an opponent's ground forces. However, if more than 2 centuries of military operations are any guide, America's political leaders will see that as only “mission half accomplished.” The Indian wars, the Philippine insurrection, the Banana wars, World Wars I and II, the interventions in Asia and Latin America, the Balkans, the Middle East, and many other areas suggest that Landpower is generally employed not only to defeat an opponent's ground forces, and the quicker the better, but also to establish and maintain control over people and places thereafter. This is what Landpower brings to the table that Airpower and Seapower cannot. The idea is, again, to extend the reach of policy.

    Echevarria is not saying the role of landpower should be to build states. The conflation of defeating one's opponents with governing them has been one of the most destructive trends in recent national security policy. Echevarria addresses this head-on. In contrast to the stereotypical idea of an American way of war based around unlimited political objectives, Echevarria argues that Presidents have often sought to only use as much force as appropriate. Even in eras of total war, we have always considered conserving our own resources. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of fighting Germany in World War II, and US did not completely completely mobilize its resources for the task. Even during the Cold War, the US never adopted a "garrison state" mode akin to the Soviet total warfare state. 

    Adopting a holistic definition of landpower allows the Army and Marines to market themselves for a range of missions while still building a core set of skills oriented around offense, defense, and stability and support operations. This would certainly preserve all of the experiential gains of the last ten years in fighting insurgents, guerrillas, and illicit networks, but not limit the military to believing that one strategy should guide response. Indeed, it would also emphasize the productive use of land forces in situations short of war for shaping operations and rapid response. Finally, this conception of landpower would be a good basis for integrating landpower with cyberpower and special operations warfare. The Landpower Group currently examining the future of the concept is fruitfully looking at that intersection, as well as landpower’s adaptation to other emerging security challenges.

    To return to Echevarria's original point, an new conception of the American way of war would emphasize not only the armies of the opponents but the social and political contexts that generate them. It would privilege Carl von Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomini but also leave room for John Arquilla. However, such a conception would require forces built around around combat. In the last ten years American soldiers have hunted down the enemy and engaged in the close fight in some of the most physically demanding regions of the Earth. And historically there is nothing soft about small war, whether chasing down Pancho Villa overland in Mexico or fighting dug-in al-Qaeda units on the mountains during Operation Anaconda.  To recognize this is not to denigrate the importance of cultural knowledge or persuasion, but it is to point out that everything else rests on the ability to threaten or violently coerce. Combat could occur anywhere, as daring attacks against American rear areas and supply columns have proved over the last ten years. As William F. Owen observed, expansive political objectives must be purchased by operations that grant control. Otherwise, the enemy always has the ability to spoil the plan.

    This vision of landpower would not necessarily be a call for large land forces on the model of 1917-1991. Rather, it would be a use of landpower familiar to policymakers throughout most of American history: boots on the ground to give America a say in what happens in unstable regions of interest to American national security, protect American diplomats and commercial interests from the predations of states and sub-state groups, and attack non-state organizations that threaten American lives. If framed that way, landpower could remain a competitive advantage even if scaled down.

    landpower, Strategy

  • Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
    October 1, 2012 | Posted by aelkus - 1:49am | 5 Comments

    With some apologies to AC/DC, the latest Economist has an interesting story on increasingly cheaper and deadlier conventional weapons. Systems are coming online that can engage more targets at a lowered cost, ranging from rockets to more advanced unmanned systems: 

    An early sign of this change came in March, with the deployment in Afghanistan of the APKWS II (Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System) made by BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman. The APKWS II is a smart version of the old-fashioned 70mm (2.75-inch) rocket, which has been used by America’s armed forces since 1948. It is also cheap, as guided missiles go, costing $18,000 a shot. The APKWS II is loaded and fired in the same way (pictured above) as its unguided predecessors, from the same 19-round pods, making its use straightforward. The difference is that it can strike with an accuracy of one metre because it has been fitted with a laser-seeking head which follows a beam pointed at the target by the missile’s operators. This controls a set of fins that can steer the missile to its destination. Standard practice with unguided 70mm missiles is to use as many as two pods’ worth (ie, 38 rockets, at $1,000 a round) to blanket a target. That means the APKWS II comes in at less than half the cost per kill. It also means that many more targets can be attacked on a single mission.

    The story goes into similar standoff engagement systems, but doesn't examine the flipside: the increasing diffusion of precision-strike capabilities able to target US forces and infrastructure. Thomas Mahnken and others chronicling the "maturing revolution in military affairs" have predicted that the biggest problems will lie in protecting fixed infrastructure. Bases, ports, logistics nodes, and other immobile and inflexible targets will be vulnerable. Indeed, greater US investment in long-range strike systems in the Pacific also likely portend a shift from deterrence by denial to deterrence by punishment. 

    Camp Bastion demonstrated the low-tech side of dangers to US bases overseas, which in the near term may be more likely than any standoff assault. Holding American bases at risk in the Persian Gulf, for example, may raise the cost of US action but also is likely to trigger a devastating military response. Iran's preferred method of proxy warfare and state terrorism is considerably more below-the-radar and thus more politically difficult to counter.

    There are also interesting political implications of cheap precision-strike weapons to consider. Paul Bracken predicted in 1999 that Asian armies were shifting away from land-based, infantry-heavy peasant armies to organizations that place higher prestige on long-range strike, ballistic missile units, and unconventional weapons. The political effects of these new long-range weapons varied, as Bracken predicted some states would use their weapons to increase their freedom of action in the international system. Others would use them to empower certain groups of national elites, like Iran's Pasdaran. The rise of Hezbollah actually is a case in point of a sub-state actor generating political effects from its collection of indirect fire platforms. It exerts some measure of international influence it would not otherwise have from its ability to punish Israel's strategic rear and can market itself as a defender of Lebanon's national interest with its anti-tank standoff weapons. Hezbollah is unlikely to be the last sub-state actor to exploit access to indirect fire weapons in the same way.

    precision-strike, Strategy

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