October 23, 2005
Posted in Strategy at 17:25 by Graham King
Political violence, terrorism, military operations other than war (MOOTW), low-intensity conflict, people’s war, revolutionary warfare, war of national liberation, guerrilla war, partisan war, warfare in the enemy’s rear, imperial policing or small wars. Whatever it is called, the principal difference between irregular and conventional war is that the latter involves adversaries more or less symmetric in equipment, training and doctrine. In an irregular war, the adversaries are asymmetric in capabilities and the weaker side, usually a sub-state group, attempts to bring about political change by organizing and fighting more effectively than its stronger adversary.
Terrorism is sometimes distinguished from irregular warfare in that irregular warfare is an attempt to bring about political change by force of arms. Terrorism does not result in political change on its own, but is undertaken to provoke a response. Terrorism differs from other forms of violence in that the acts committed are coloured by their political nature. Hijacking, remote bombing and assassination are criminal acts in a civil society, but when conducted in the name of a political cause which generates domestic or international sympathy their legal status generates more debate.
Irregular warfare is characterized by the mobilization of a significant proportion or the population to support the insurgent movement. Coups, by contrast, are not a form or irregular warfare because they are revolutions conducted by a small elite against the government.
Subverting the system
In the words of Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1937, better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’): Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain. An irregular warfare campaign achieves success by gaining an advantage over its adversaries in the four dimensions of time, space, legitimacy, and support.
Time is the most important element required for the successful conclusion of an insurgent or terrorist campaign. In almost every successful case, campaigns are measured in decades not years. The Tamil Tiger of Eelam have been fighting for political autonomy within Sri Lanka for over 28 years. The Cuban revolution (1957-9) is notable for how fast it achieved success; few states however are as corrupt, inept, and fragile as the Batista regime was in the late 1950s.
Endless struggle without an obvious victory eventually leads to the exhaustion, collapse or withdrawal of the enemy. Time is required for an insurgent force to demonstrate its legitimacy to the local population, which builds internal and external support. Wider popular support allows the insurgents to raise a superior army.
Space allows irregulars to decide where and when to fight. Defenders against sedition cannot be everywhere at once without spreading their forces too thinly and inviting attack from locally superior guerilla forces. An advantage in space (particularly the presence of difficult terrain) will provide insurgents with safe areas and bases from which to consolidate and expand their efforts.
Insurgents can use terrain which favors the lightly armed and mobile against the heavy, slow moving and often road-bound government forces. The Afghan Mujahaddin guerrillas used mountainous terrain against Soviet forces (and are presumably doing the same against American forces at the time I write this). The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces used jungle and swamp areas to shelter them from US and South Vietnamese overwhelming firepower. Chechen guerrillas used buildings and narrow roads in Grozny against Russian forces.
Support: Few insurgent or terrorist campaigns succeed without some form of support. There is only so much equipment they can manufacture or capture. They must look after their casualties and replenish their supplies. They must constantly update their intelligence on the whereabouts and activities of government forces. They have to train new recruits. Support can come from domestic (internal) and international (external) sympathizers.
Internal support is essential to the survival of an uprising. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (1928-1967) failed to ferment revolt in Bolivia (a struggle in which led him to his death) mainly because the local communist party was hostile to outside interference and the peasants were indifferent to his message. Mao Zedong (1893-1976) described the guerilla as the ‘fish’ that swam in the ‘sea’ of popular support. Without the sea the fish will die.
External support can be material, in the form of money, weapons, training or cross-border sanctuaries. External support can also be moral, in the form of political recognition and lobbying. States usually harbor or support terrorist groups for reasons of political expediency and to suit policy goals, as opposed to genuine sympathy for the cause espoused by the insurgents. External states will support insurgents if they seem them as fighting a proxy war on their behalf; the United States and the Soviet Union fought each other in Afghanistan and Vietnam with one side supporting a proxy. Supporting irregulars allows two powerful states to wage a limited war for limited purposes without the risk of nuclear war or conventional escalation.
Legitimacy: The moral superiority of the guerrillas is a cornerstone of all irregular and terrorist theory. Insurgents derive supports from the people and they often cultivate their relationship with them. Mao outlined a ‘code of conduct’ for the guerrillas. Che Guevara insisted that the peasants understand that the guerrillas were as much social reformers as they were protectors of the people.
Peasants who co-operate with insurgents often face harsh retaliation from the government, but this often drives people into the arms of the insurgents by legitimizing their cause. Government brutality also allows insurgents to act as the avengers of the people. Insurgents themselves often behave like government troops towards elements of the local population displaying an unwillingness to help; Mao remarked that acts of terror may be necessary to convince the population of the occupational hazards of working for the government and to show that the government no longer protects them.
The most powerful method of legitimizing a struggle is to link military operations with a justifiable political end. Causes vary but self-determination has been the most pervasive and successful. The UN Charter and the UN High Commission for Human Rights both affirm peoples right of self-determination, which made it difficult for nations such as Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal to retain possession of their overseas colonies in the face of native insurgents claiming the right to self-governance.
Protecting the system
The three dimensions of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism are location, isolation and eradication.
Location: The most important part of any counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism campaign is recognizing that the threat exists. The earlier the government detects and reacts to an insurgency the greater its chance of success. The problem is distinguishing between lawful and unlawful forms of discontent, and reacting at exactly the right time. Restricting guaranteed rights and freedoms every time a bomb is detonated will undermine the legitimacy of the government. Waiting too long to uphold the rule of law, however, will give the insurgents or terrorists the time to build a robust organizational infrastructure that will be much harder to defeat.
Upholding the rule of law is crucial if states are to preserve the legitimacy of their cause and maintain the moral high ground over insurgents or terrorists. Methods to gather intelligence and counter terrorism must be as unobtrusive as possible.
Once an irregular threat has been identified various civil and military agencies must localize the it while co-ordinating their efforts. The must identify safe houses, group members, and sources of supply. This can be a daunting task given the small size, stealth and secrecy of subversive organizations.
Isolation: Once identified insurgents and terrorists must be isolated from their bases of support. They must be isolated physically from internal support by either moving local population into easier to defend areas (‘strategic hamlets’ in the Vietnam conflict), or more usually by curfews, prohibited areas, aggressive patrolling and ‘cordon and search’ operations. These measure seek to limit the mobility and range of the insurgents. They must also be isolated from their external sources of supply by a combination of diplomatic pressure and military measures (wire barriers, guard houses and patrols were used in the Algeria 1954-62 conflict).
Equally important as physical isolation, the most powerful asset of the insurgents, their political message, must be defused. Widely held grievances that foster a potent source of recruitment and support must be mitigated by the government. The onus if on representatives of the state to prove that they are morally superior to the guerrillas and terrorists and will provide for the needs of their citizens, including responding to the sources of disgruntlement that led to armed insurrection in the first place. The local population’s ‘hearts and minds’ must be won and citizens convinced that the state’s fight is their fight.
Eradication: Eradication involves the physical destruction of the insurgents or terrorists. The priority here is destroying the insurgents safe havens. The necessary ratio of government forces to irregulars is often cited as 10:1, with particular emphasis on the use of specialized units such as special forces units (which are the closest military unit to an insurgent force, a role in which they often operate behind enemy lines).
Passive ways to eradicate insurgents include promises of amnesty (the South Vietnam ‘Open Arms’ program), cash incentives for weapons and information, and engaging and supporting the moderate factions of the insurgency in an attempt to convince them to start talking and stop fighting.
Strong political will on the part of a government is require to defeat an insurgency. It is a gradual process of attrition that takes a significant investment in time and resources. If the underlying causes of discontent are not also resolved the struggle often resurfaces later in a different form.
Posted in Strategy at 17:24 by Graham King
The term sea power covers the control of international trade and commerce, the operation of navies in war, and the use of navies as instruments of diplomacy, deterrence, and political influence in peacetime. The importance of a navy rests on its ability to affect events on land and to control use of the sea. Armies control territory, whereas navies control access; to territory, international movement, and trade.
Unlike the concept of land and air power which are generally defined only in military terms sea power can never quite be separated from its geo-economic purposes. Over 90 percent of international trade by weight and volume travels by water. The majority of the world’s major cities and urban population lie within 200 kilometres of a coastline.
Sea power is seen as essential to globalization. A global navy alows a nation commited to global trade to guarantee the free use of trade routes. If international trade is secure from threats to its disruption, trade can expand.
Sea control and sea denial involve struggles over the use of sea lines of communication (or commerce). These are the world’s trade routes and routes for military movement at sea. The world’s geography affords three strategic choke points: The Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Arabian Gulf through which much of the world’s oil supply passes; the Straits of Malacca in south-east Asia, and the Panama Canal.
The only global sea power today is the United States of America. All other sea-faring nations concentrate on being local or regional sea powers, controlling their littoral region and maintaing a small expeditionary force which can be sent to areas of strategic interest when needed.
Posted in Strategy at 17:23 by Graham King
A maritime blockade, strategic bombing or guerilla warfare are coercive techniques to achieve a particular objective. By bring about economic ruin, large scale destruction, or a campaign or terror, aggressors seek to induce their opponent to give them their objective. Land warfare, by contrast, obtains objectives by seizing them directly; it is brute force.
The First World War
The First World War was the first war to be fought since the industrial revolution. This brought huge changes in the size and firepower of armies. For example in 1812 Napoleon’s Grande Armee numbered 600 000, and each soldier had time to fire two musket bullets before an approaching unit closed to bayonet range. By 1912 the French army had 1.6 Million troops, yet was only the third largest in Europe. Each soldier could fire two hundred bullets before the attacker closed to bayonet range. Bayonet charges became suicidal and tactics had to be altered dramatically.
The Boer War (1899-1902) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) had provided early experience of this new type of war, and two decisive tactics emerged almost immediately; the use of cover and concealment to reduce attackers exposure while advancing, and suppressive fire to keep the defenders heads down while the attackers were exposed.
These two tactics were difficult to execute. The first required the massed line attacks to be replaced by small groups making short dashes between areas of cover. This put more distance between leaders and led which made it hard for officers to keep their troops moving. The second required good infantry (advancing) / artillery (providing the covering fire) co-ordination. If the covering artillery barrage fell short or continued too long it would hit their own troops; if it fell long or stopped too early it wouldn’t be effective.
These problems prevented decisive victories in the early days of the First World War, and the troops rapidly became bogged down in trench warfare. Artillery could destroy trench defenses outright, and it became the dominant arm of the army. Massive preparatory artillery barrages would destroy the opposing trenches, and the infantry would simply move in, mop up the dazed survivors, and take over.
The scale of artillery bombardment was unprecedented. For example, the ten-day Allied bombardment around Messines in July 1917 dropped 1200 tons of explosives on every mile of German defenses. These attacks were successful and ground was taken, but proved much harder to hold. The week long preparatory barrages alerted the opposition as to where the attack would take place. They would mass reserves and artillery just behind the front line, and attack their own front positions as soon as they had been taken, forcing the enemy to retreat. It proved impossible to advance beyond the reach of artillery. This was called ‘war on a tether’.
Over the course of the long trench stalemate both sides eventually overcame the technical and tactical problems of a combined arms approach. They limited artillery barrages in time so as not to alert the enemy, and replaced the massed infantry charge with several small well trained units armed with portable light machine guns and grenades. The Germans developed these tactics first, using them at Caporetto on the Italian front in November 1917.
The Second World War
The inter-war period brought mechanization – tanks, trucks, aircraft and radio communications. These had all featured in the First World War, but not in any significant role. Out of 414 tanks starting at Cambrai on 8th August 1918, only 145 were running on the second day. The physical hardship and unreliable technology meant that after a day of fighting neither men nor machines were much use. Aircraft were too light to carry a payload and were mostly reserved for reconnaissance or counter-reconnaissance. Wireless sets had been too bulky and low powered.
Most Allied strategists saw the tank as key to future wars, and envisaged them as the navy of the land, operating independently. The Germans by contrast were the most conservative. They developed the Panzer division, a combined arms formation of tightly co-ordinated tanks, infantry, artillery and engineers. They combined movement, use of cover, and suppressive fire to overcome defenses in an all-arms assault.
The civil-military tension in France produced a short service unskilled conscript army unable to master the combined arms tactics developed in the last stage of the First World War. England’s class-conscious officer corps ostracized the skilled technicians they needed for in an effective mechanized army, and many of them moved on to civilian jobs. In the Soviet Union ruthless political purges stripped the army of its competent officers.
The hard lessons of 1917-18 has taught defenders to thin their troops, extend their defenses into great depth, and keep much of their force in reserve. Although this yielded ground initially it forced attackers to fight the decisive battle deep within enemy territory after an advance of thousands of yards which would of frayed their combined arms co-ordination. It also gave defenders more time to prepare for the battle. Yet at the start of the 1939 hostilities French and Russian defenses were shallow and forward focused; this made them easier for an inexperienced officer corps to command, but also easier for the German Panzer divisions to punch through.
As a result the opening period of the Second World War was marked by a series of German ‘blitzkrieg’ victories. By 1941 the Allies re-learnt the importance of deep elastic defenses, integrated fire and movement, and combined arms, and slowly started re-gaining ground.
After the initial success of the Panzer divisions, tanks did not prove decisive. Operating alone they are loud, hard to hide, and have great difficulty seeing concealed targets. Dug-in anti-tank guns or infantry with short-range portable anti-tank weapons can wait for a tank to pass and attack its vulnerable flank and rear. Infantry were needed to act as their eyes and ears and artillery to provide high volume suppressive fire during extended operations. Tanks proved most successful in open country once defenses were breached, or for close situations were artillery fire had too high a risk of hitting friendly forces.
The 1973 Arab-Israeli war
In the 1956 and 1967 conflicts against Arab opponents, Israel’s limited mechanized forces had produced results disproportionate to their strength. This convinced senior Israeli leaders to focus almost exclusively on mechanized units, neglecting infantry and artillery. As they were to discover however, their previous successes, particularly 1967, had been mostly due to the poor performance of Egyptian troops. In the 1967-73 years Egypt taught its infantry to defend against tank charges by concealing their positions, standing fast, and hit their targets.
In October 1973 the Egyptians caught Israel off-guard, crossed the Suez canal, overwhelmed the unprepared garrison of the ‘Bar Lev Line’, advanced four kilometers into the Sinai and dug in. Israel quickly counter-attacked, impaling a series of unsupported tank charges on the Egyptian defense and losing almost three full brigades.
Faced with a failure of their pre-war tactics and almost no infantry, the Israelis improvised a combined arms style. A few tanks would move forward cautiously to draw fire from the Egyptian infantry’s portable wire-guided missiles, while other tanks in over-watch positions would look for the puff of smoke signalling the missile launch and fire on that position. Meanwhile the forward tank sought cover and maneuvered evasively. These new techniques eventually allowed the Israelis to break through Egyptian defenses, were the war was rapidly won.
The 1991 Gulf War
Between the 17th January and 28th February 1991, a US led coalition destroyed a defending Iraqi army of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, thousands of armored vehicles and tens of thousands of artillery pieces, for the loss of only 240 attackers. This represented less than one fatality in 3000 soldiers, an incredibly low coalition casualty rate.
In August 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait. Over the next five months a US-led coalition gathered forces in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Persian Gulf. On the 17th January they launched a six week air campaign, rapidly gaining control of the air and destroying the air defense and large parts of Iraq’s command and control network. This gave them uncontested air supremacy for almost a month of bombing attacks. On the 24th February two divisions of US marines attacking from the center and left, and two corps on the extreme right flank, rapidly defeated the Iraqi ground forces. The war was halted on 28th February, just 42 days after it started, and only four days after the start of the ground offensive.
This unprecedented success is attributable to a combination of superior coalition technology and flawed Iraqi tactics. New information gathering, precision guidance and air defense suppression technologies were all used by the coalition for the first time or in a newly mature form, and not used by the opposition. The Iraqis tactical flaws were the usual combination of poor combined arms co-ordination, inability to integrate manoeuvre and suppressive fire, and poor exploitation of cover and concealment.
The Iraqi conscript infantry was neither skilled nor motivated and even the Republican Guard were remarkably unskilled. Fighting positions for tanks and troops were haphazardly prepared. For example many Republican Guard armored vehicles were left perched on the desert surface behind loose sand berms which offered neither concealment (they were the only prominent feature on the flat desert landscape) nor cover (piled sand cannot stop 120mm depleted uranium shells). US tanks crews, by constrast, dug fighting positions as ramps which conceal the entire vehicle below ground until the weapon is to be fired. This way they cannot be seen by thermal sights and are not vulnerable to enemy fire (even 120mm DU).
Further Iraqi tactical mistakes include counterattacks launched by armoured vehicles advancing in the open without accompanying fire support; poor marksmanship; and little regard to equipment maintenance. The were not the first to make such mistakes. The technical demands of modern war are exacting, but as technology becomes more sophisticated the consequences of such errors become greater.
The coalition attackers had all-weather, day/night thermal tank sights, stabilized 120mm guns effective on the first shot at 3 kilometres, attack helicopters with 5 kilometre range missiles, and aircraft armed with precision guided missiles and complete command of the sky. Against such weapons tactical slip-ups became very lethal very quickly to a very large number of defenders.
Since 1900 there has been a continuous, rapid growth in the reach, lethality, speed and information-gathering potential of armies. Military strategy has developed and repeatedly proved a key set of tactics: combined arms, tight integration of movement and suppressive fire, aggressive use of cover and concealment, and defensive depth and reserves. Technology punishes tactical mistakes with increasing severity. Technological change in land warfare can thus be thought of as a wedge, driving apart the real military capability of armies that can, from those that cannot, implement the complex canon of orthodox modern tactics and doctrine.
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