The Unpredictability of War and Force Structure (Stratfor)

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.

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.

"It not that I don't agree with you on the war and what it means, it's just that the proportionality is out of whack here...I thought you were joking!"

How much is one American life worth to you? One little girl on one of those planes? To me she's worth at least a million towel-heads.

"So let's see... damascus ...what 2 million?
Ryadh ... a mil?
Islamabad ..maybe 1.5 mil?
Etc, ect... "

It's a start.

"So now we have p.o.'d and scared *hitless everyone else in the world"

You mean...just like now, except we've really done something. Better to be feared than loved. They hate us already; let's teach them FEAR. All these barbarians understand and acknowlege is force--overwhelming, inexorable, terrifying force. Time to use some.

Maybe OBL is still alive , for sure AQ will be more active, coalesece ALL the islamic groups, Europe, China, against us. Dumb. Unnecessary."

Wrong. It would rock them on their heels; buy us time; teach them they're messing with the WRONG group of people. Their centers of finance and political support (except France) would be GONE. Heck, let's nuke France while we're at it.

"What we must do is basically take charge of the media and consumer culture in key countries, iraq and afganistan for a start...encourage free thinking, philosophic questioning of mohammed's works, encourage brave and well funded missinaries to travel there, and work...provide finacial inducements and tax breaks to convert or renounce islam...of course we must rush to provide a correct material infrastructure to support this program, and I now doubt that either political party would go along with the costs."

Now I think you're joking. You must be nuts if you think this will keep them from releasing Smallpox in Chicago or a dirty bomb in Seattle...

--Boris

See the last paragraph of post 19.

While I wouldn't have gone for major cities first, I think we'd be looking at a whole different situation now and in the years to come if two or three glass-lined craters had appearred in the mountains of Afghanistan while we were still putting out fires at the WTC site. Another one or two at the locations of know terrorists training camps in Syria, et al would have sent a much stronger message than "we will now proceed to provide you with close range targets in thin skinned armored vehicles for the next decade."

Thanks for the ping. One problem is that politicians always look at domestic political ramifications of their moves first and foremost. It seems that it was decided that it would be politically smart to try and fight this war on the cheap and on the sly. There have been plans for reshaping all the Arab nations, indeed the very culture itself. Though it is known to us who watch the theoreticians it is not common public knowledge. For example when I said to an average someone we had plans for Syria he thought I was nuts and wondered where I got such a notion. The country is not prepared for new wars, costly and protracted occupations nor guerilla warfare and the administration has only itself to blame for that. The play safe political strategy may come back to haunt them at election time.

The cutting edge of the Army is the 33 brigade or regimental size infantry, armor, and cavalry units in the active component (full-timers versus the Nat Guard & Army Reserve). 16 of those are deployed in combat zones--Iraq or Afghanistan or the Horn of Africa. 2 are in Korea. 4 have just returned from combat in the last month or so. 9 are scheduled to deploy to a combat zone sometime in the next 1-12 months. One does not appear to be apportioned and the other will be going through Stryker transition. That's all 33.

The National Guard is handling the Balkans and the Sinai and will continue to do so plus mobilize and send some more of their enhanced (most ready) brigades to Iraq. The major portions of 2 of them have already gone.

Some keep saying to send the units in Germany. Well, they've either already gone or are on their way. The 2d Infantry Division brigades in Korea are considered operationally deployed; i.e. they are located in their wartime theater and will not be deployed away from there.

Bottom line--the Army is too small. And too many people say we don't have enough money or people to make the Army as big as it needs to be. Well, the Department of the Army has the smallest budget in the DOD. While congress & big corporations love the Air Force and Navy because that is where the pork is, if both those services took a 5% cut in $ & people, the Army could afford 2 more active duty divisions and the net cost to DOD would be zero. Even with those cuts, our Air Force and Navy would both still be by far the biggest in the world. And the U.S. Army would still be 3d or 4th in the world, but much better able to handle its missions.

To win decisively, you must win on the ground, but that is where we are the least strong and there is very clearly an excess of capacity in our Navy and our Air Force. Time to shift the resources to match our strategic needs instead of congress's re-election needs.

There is a very good book titled "The Soldier and the State" written in the 1950s by Samuel Huntington (not the Clash of Civilizations guy) that talks about how the Navy is the branch of service of the "elites" both in the US and Britain (both seafaring nations).

Because of that the Navy seems more glamorous and has a higher prestige. Just think about those Presidents since WWII with a Navy background-Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Bush-some of whom came from very wealthy families as opposed to Army Presidents-Truman, Ike and Reagan-all of whom came from more humble origins (Al Gore would have been an exception to this I guess).

Everything you said was true, but I think there is something to the idea that the Army is just not very high profile.

BTW, I used to be in 30th Brigade (one of the enhanced-we used to say enchanted-brigades coming over here next year). They are good guys with lots of former active duty troops (Camp Lejeune and Bragg are both in the part of NC where the 30th is located), but they will need a good long train up before they are mission capable.

I like this article. He has it exactly right. And it is unsettling. How can the admin increase force size before 2004?

The article is superb.

The time to mobilize was October 2001.

When Bush spoke to Congress on 9-16-01, they would have given him anything. He didn't ask for much.

When you declare war on a serious enemy, you damn well better be able to back it up, including all forseeable contingencies.

There are many potential contingencies that we cannot deal with.

If, for example, a heavy occupation of Arabia and Pakistan should be required, instead of buying the world a Coke, what then would we do?

I think we need an army of ten million, control of the borders, and an end to globalization until we can dictate terms to the enemy.

The horrible part of this is that if Bush falls, he will fall to the left (and thus to our enemies).

Bush needs to be the man that spoke to us from atop the rubble in New York. That man has vanished.

I've worked with the 27th Brigade in New York and the 53d from Florida--much of which is in Iraq now. You're right, they're great guys, just need enough time for a good train-up after mobilization.

But the other thing to understand with those guys is that they are in the Guard because they are patriots who are willing to do it part-time with occasional long term call-ups. If they wanted to do it full time they'd be in the Regular Army, but the shortages in the Regular Army means the National Guard units are being treated more and more like the regular Army with back-to-back deployments, etc. After a while, people are going to say that's enuf & get out.

Activate all the Guard Brigades and Divisions and you would probably have about 24 or 25 total (I think California, Pennsylvania and Texas have entire divisions, while a lot of other states have good sized brigades). A lot of those would have to be plussed up though, so you'd need to take a lot of the remaining reservists in certain specialties and transfer them over.

The question is then what would you do for support elements at Corps level and higher?

The question is, what's the plan to man this war through to victory?

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