Posted on 09/30/2003 3:35:57 PM PDT by 91B
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
29 September 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
The Unpredictability of War and Force Structure
Summary
In the United States' open-ended war against al Qaeda and militant Islam, two factors are driving up requirements for the size of the U.S. military. One is the unpredictability surrounding the number of theaters in which this war will be waged in the next two years, and the second is the type of warfare in which the United States is compelled to engage, which can swallow up huge numbers of troops in defensive operations. However, for several reasons, U.S. defense personnel policies have not yet adjusted to this reality.
Analysis
Prior to the beginning of the Iraq campaign, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked how long the war would last. His response was both wise and true: He said that he didn't know, because the enemy got to vote. Much of the discussion about the length, cost and requirements of U.S. military operations in Iraq should be answered the same way -- there is no answer because the other side gets to vote. The Iraqi command decided to abandon conventional warfare and shift to guerrilla warfare. It is as unreasonable to ask how long this will last and how much it will cost as it would have been to ask Abraham Lincoln in 1862 when the Civil War would end and how much it would cost. It is an unanswerable question.
War is extremely predictable, with 20-20 hindsight. It is easy to say now that the Soviets would defeat the Germans in World War II. All of us know now that the North Vietnamese had the advantage in Vietnam. We all know now that the Normandy invasion would work. That's the easy part of military analysis; predicting the future is the hard part. It is possible to glimpse the outlines of the general forces that are engaged and to measure their relative strength, but the finer the granularity sought, the harder prediction is. The only certainty to be found is that all wars end eventually, and that the war you are fighting is only occasionally the war you expected to fight.
No one, therefore, knows the course of the U.S.-militant Islamist war. The CIA has produced no secret papers nor uncovered any hidden plans in the caves of Afghanistan that reveal the truth. War is about the difference between plans and events: Nothing goes according to plan, partly because of unexpected failures among the planners and partly because the enemy gets a vote. Carl von Clausewitz, the father of modern military theory, had a word for that: friction. The friction of war creates an ever-widening gap between plans and reality.
That means that the first and most important principle of military planning is to plan for the worst. No general was ever condemned for winning a war with too many troops. Many generals - - and political leaders -- are reviled for not using enough troops. Sometimes the manpower is simply not available; demographics limit the number of troops available. But the lowest ring of the military inferno must be reserved for leaders who take a nation to war, having access to massive force but choosing to mobilize the least numbers they think they can get by with, rather than leaving a healthy -- even unreasonable -- margin to make up for the friction of war. Calibrating force to expected requirements is almost always going to lead to disaster, because as we all know, everything comes in late and over-budget.
Washington is engaged with the question of what constitutes sufficient force structure. As one might imagine, the debate cuts to the heart of everything the United States is doing; the availability of force will determine the success or failure of its war. And here, it appears to us, the administration has chosen a radical course -- one of maintaining a narrow margin of error on force structure, based on plans that do not necessarily take into account that al Qaeda gets to vote.
Last week, while speaking at the National Defense University, Rumsfeld repeated his conviction that the United States had deployed sufficient force in Iraq and that with additional deployments it would be able to contain the situation there. Last week, U.S. officials announced the mobilization of additional reserve and National Guard units for 18 months of duty.
The reality is this: The United States went to war on Sept. 11, 2001, and since that date, it has not increased the aggregate size of its armed forces in any strategically significant way. It has raised the effectively available force by reaching into its reserve and National Guard units. That short-term solution has served well for the first two years of the war. However, deployment requirements tend to increase over the course of a war, so the needs in the first year were relatively light and increased progressively as additional theaters of operation were added.
The problem with this structure of forces is simple. People can choose to leave the military and its reserve and National Guard components -- and they will. Following extensive deployments, or anticipating such deployments, many will leave the active force as their terms expire or leave the reserve components when they can. In order to replace these forces, the pipeline should be full of recruits. This is not World War II. The requirements for all specialties, including combat arms, will not be filled by basic training and a quick advanced course. Even in the simplest specialties, it will take nearly a year to develop the required expertise -- not just to be deployed, but to be deployed and effective. For more complex specialties, the timeline lengthens.
U.S. leaders appear to be giving some attention to maintaining the force at its current size, although we think the expectations on retention in all components are optimistic. But even if they are dead on, the loss of personnel will be most devastating among field-grade officers and senior noncommissioned officers -- who form the backbone of the military. These are men and women in their 30s and 40s who have families and mortgages -- none of which might survive the stress of a manpower plan designed in a way that imposes maximum unpredictability and disruption on mature lives. The net result is that the military might keep its current size but become thin-waisted: lots of young people, lots of gray hair, not nearly enough in between.
The problem, however, is that keeping the force stable is not enough by a long shot. The United States is involved in two significant conflicts, in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is also operating in smaller deployments throughout and on the periphery of the Islamic world. Added to this are immediate and potential requirements for homeland security, should al Qaeda strike again, as the U.S. government consistently predicts is likely. When these requirements are added up and compared to the kind of force planning and expectations that were being discussed prior to Sept. 11, it is obvious that the U.S. force is at its limit, even assuming that the complexities of reserve units weren't added to the mix.
The strategic problem is that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the demands on the current force represent the maximum. The force level is decided by the administration; the force requirement is decided by a committee composed of senior Pentagon officials, Congress and al Qaeda. And on this committee, al Qaeda has the decisive vote.
Al Qaeda's strategy is to expand the conflict as broadly as possible. It wants to disperse U.S. forces, but it also wants U.S. forces to intrude as deeply into the Islamic world as possible in order to trigger an uprising not only against the United States, but also against governments allied with the United States. There is a simple-minded answer to this, which is to refuse to intervene. The flaw in that answer is that it would serve al Qaeda's purpose just as well, by proving that the United States is weak and vulnerable. Intervention carries the same cost as non-intervention, but with the upside that it might produce victories.
Therefore, the United States cannot easily decline combat when it is offered. Al Qaeda intends to offer as much combat as possible. From the Philippines to Morocco, from central Asia to central Africa, the scope -- if not the tempo -- of operations remains in al Qaeda's hands. Should Indonesia blow sky high or Egypt destabilize, both of which are obviously among al Qaeda's hopes, U.S. forces will be required to respond.
There is another aspect to this. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is engaged in guerrilla wars. The force required to combat a guerrilla army is not determined by the size of the guerrilla forces, but rather by defensive requirements. A very small guerrilla force can menace a large number of targets, even if it cannot hit them all. Those targets must be protected for military or political reasons. Pacification cannot take place when the population is exposed to guerrilla forces at the will of the guerrillas. A narrow defensive posture, as has been adopted in Afghanistan, cedes pacification. In Iraq, where ceding pacification is not a political option, the size of the force is determined not by the enemy's force, but by the target set that must be protected.
Two factors, therefore, are driving up requirements for the size of the U.S. armed forces. First, no one can define the number of theaters in which the United States will be deployed over the next two years. Second, the type of warfare in which the United States is compelled to engage after the initial assault is carried out is a force hog: It can swallow up huge numbers of troops in duties that are both necessary and parasitic -- such as patrolling 15 bridges, none of which might ever be attacked during the war, but all of which must be defended.
Rumsfeld's reassurances that there are enough forces in Iraq miss the key question: Are there enough troops available and in the pipeline to deal with unexpected events in two years? Iraq might be under control by then, or it might not. Rumsfeld doesn't know that, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi doesn't, Osama bin Laden doesn't. No one knows whether that is true. Nor does anyone know whether the United States will be engaged in three or four other theaters of operations by that time. It is certainly al Qaeda's intention to make that happen, and so far al Qaeda's record in drawing the United States into difficult situations should not be discounted.
The problem is that on the one hand, the Defense Department is in the process of running off critically needed troops with unpredictable and spasmodic call-ups. Second, the number of men and women in the training pipeline has not taken a quantum leap forward in the course of the war. The United States is engaged in a global war, but its personnel policies have not adjusted to that reality. This is the first major war in American history that has not included a large expansion of the armed forces.
There are a number of reasons for this. At the beginning of the war, the administration envisioned it as a primarily covert war involving special forces and some air power. Officials did not see this war as a division-level conflict. They were wrong. They did not count on their enemy's ability to resort to effective guerrilla warfare. They did not expect the old manpower hog to raise its ugly head. In general, Rumsfeld believed that technology could substitute for manpower, and that large conventional formations were not necessary. He was right in every case but one: large-scale guerrilla warfare. Or more precisely, the one thing the United States didn't want to be involved in is the one thing the enemy dealt up. When you think about it, that makes sense.
The assumption on which this war began was that there was ample U.S. force structure for the requirements. At this point, that is true only if one assumes there are no further surprises pending. Since this war has been all about surprises, any force structure built on that assumption is completely irresponsible.
We suspect that Rumsfeld and his people are aware of this issue. The problem is that the Bush administration is in an election year, and increasing the force by 50 percent or doubling it is not something officials want to do now. It cannot be done by conscription. Not only are the mechanisms for large-scale conscriptions missing, but a conscript army is the last thing needed: The U.S. military requires a level of technical proficiency and commitment that draftees don't bring to bear.
To keep the force at its current size, Congress must allocate a large amount of money for personnel retention. A father of three with a mortgage payment based on his civilian income cannot live on military pay. Military pay must not be permitted to rise; it must be forced to soar. This is not only to retain the current force size but to increase it. In addition to bringing in raw recruits and training them, this also means, as in World War II, bringing back trained personnel who have left the service and -- something the military will gag over -- bringing in trained professionals from outside, directly into the chain of command and not just as civilian employees.
Thinking out of the box is something Washington always talks about but usually does by putting a box of corn flakes on top of their heads. That's all right in peacetime -- but this is war, and war is a matter of life and death. In the end, this is the problem: While American men and women fight and die on foreign land, the Pentagon's personnel officers are acting like this is peacetime. The fault lies with a series of unexpected events and Rumsfeld's tendency to behave as if nothing comes as a surprise.
The defense secretary needs to understand that in war, being surprised is not a failure -- it is the natural commission. The measure of a good command is not that one anticipates everything, but that one quickly adjusts and responds to the unexpected. No one expected this type of guerrilla war in Iraq, although perhaps in retrospect, everyone should have. But it is here, and next year will bring even more surprises. The Army speaks of "A Force of One." We prefer "The Force Ready for the Unexpected." The current U.S. force is not.
In Iraq, our ground troop shortages meant we couldn't secure the military bases and munitions dumps & key infrastructure & put the hammer down in Tikrit & Fallujah from the get go. So the bad guys easily re-grouped, got their supplies, attained some early successes & have been given the opportunity to plan, rehearse, and adapt.
In both cases, if we hit with all we had at the beginning, there would have been no chance to adapt & re-group & get away & realize--hey! we can take the Americans!
We will win--but it will take longer than it should have & cost more lives & $ because we had a SECDEF who doesn't understand land warfare and doesn't listen to those who do.
I like the approach we're taking. Keeping it to what's needed, trying to get other nations to get in and help us out. Right now, al Qaeda and the Ba'athists might view the lack of a UNSC resolution about Iraq as an inducement to attack and further fracture what support Bush has. We get more foreign troops in there, scale our numbers down, it starts getting harder for al Qaeda (and whoever else) to attack an American. Then al Qaeda has to ask itself- how many more nations do I want to piss off by killing their soldiers? How many of my assets do I want to devote to Iraq (if I'm bin Laden) when American involvement is growing smaller, not larger?
The author doesn't mention Pakistan. That nation is going to come into the mix sooner or later as well. How do we target al Qaeda in Pakistan? You just know the Pentagon is cooking up something and that they also have some sort of contingency plan on stand-by in case it goes tits-up there and the fundies take Musharraf down.
The author does mention the elections and this is good. Al Qaeda gets a vote in the war and they certainly get a vote in the elections. I look for them to watch the political situation on the ground in America very closely. If they believe Bush is vulnerable to losing- they will try to cue their attacks in such a way as to help Clark or Dean or whoever Bush is facing come next November. Not such a big attack that everybody rallies around the Chief again but withering attacks. A steady stream of casualties for the American media and democrats to pontificate over. The democrats are, after all, more or less al Qaeda's best friend in America.
The President needs to have Iraq looking presentable come next year. Maybe not 100% ready to walk baby democracy, but at least with its hair combed, the dirt washed from behind the ears and able to sit still in polite company...
That bear repeating my screaming eagle friend. I am posting from Camp As Saliyah in beautiful Doha, Qatar. Yourself?
On 9/12/01 we should have nuked them all.
Then we could have begun the leisurely work of assassinating every terrorist left.
--Boris
Oh absolutely. That was one good point I agreed with in the article. For what it's worth, I didn't disagree with the overall gist of the article. I simply lean more towards the size force we have in Iraq. If the commanders on the ground said they wanted another division, I would totally support that. At the end of the day, they know what they need. But I also see the bigger strategic angle STRATFOR is getting at. It's not so much about whether we can maintain in Afghanistan and Iraq but what else can we handle now if it comes up?
Bush and Rummy are stuck with some pretty ugly political realities. I think the plan to get more foreign troops in place- particularly Turkish and Russian troops will have a positive impact on this equation in our favor. I'd really like to see the Turks (who are mostly Sunnis) patrolling around the Sunni areas.
It seems to me it's a lot easier to defend a border than to govern as conquerors within a hostile society. That's the logic behind the Israeli proposals of "transfer". That's what's motivated population transfers in the past.
It also imposes an enormous penalty on the losers.
For starters, the capital cities of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya.
For dessert, North Korea.
We are at war--in case you missed 9/11/01. We nuked Japan on the basis of far less provocation.
Pearl Harbor was a military base not on US soil and those killed were mostly military people. The WTC was on our soil and targeted women, children and other non-combatants.
We are at war. Get this through your head. The war is for the survival of Western civilization against barbarism. The enemy has declared the terms of the conflict: there are no innocents, no non-combatants. Very well; now we understand the rules...let us act on them.
--Boris
I'll see your bump and raise you a bump.
It's my personal belief that Rumsfeld is trapped in a world of his own making. He's a stubborn (it's not too strong a word) proponent of a limited OOB - whether for philosophical or political reasons - and yet is pushing a long term strategy which requires just the opposite, all the while writing checks on on overdrawn reserve component account. When those drafts (pun intended) reach the bank, there's gonna be hell to pay.
The more I consider it, the more I believe we missed a window of opportunity in the months after 9-11 to take a radically different approach which we're going to be wearily regretting in the years to come.
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