Bleeding an Insurgency to Death

The most meaningful quote I know of about the value of historical study is “The lessons of history are that nobody learns the lessons of history.” Some may write this off as just cynicism, but unfortunately, “history repeats itself,” and we have seen this all too often. There is 3,400 years of documented military history, and this rather extensive data base of material is often ignored; and when it is accessed, often it is to grab an example or two that supports whatever pre-conceived notion that the user already has. It is a discipline that has been poorly used and often abused. Part of our interest in quantified historical analysis is that we want to study the norms, not the exceptions; not the odd case or two, but what are the overall pattern and trends. Sometimes I think the norms get lost in all the interesting and insightful case studies.

Anyhow, there was a posting in another blog that my fellow blogger, Dr. Woodford, brought to my attention that included the formula 30,000 – 25,000 = 30,000. The link to his post is below:

http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2016/01/07/how-many-bombs-did-the-united-states-drop-in-2015/#

Mr. Zenko says in part:

The problem with this “kill-em’-all with airstrikes” rule, is that it is not working. Pentagon officials claim that at least 25,000 Islamic State fighters have been killed (an anonymous official said 23,000 in November, while on Wednesday, Warren added “about 2,500” more were killed in December.) Remarkably, they also claim that alongside the 25,000 fighters killed, only 6 civilians have “likely” been killed in the seventeen-month air campaign. At the same time, officials admit that the size of the group has remained wholly unchanged. In 2014, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated the size of the Islamic State to be between 20,000 and 31,000 fighters, while on Wednesday, Warren again repeated the 30,000 estimate. To summarize the anti-Islamic State bombing calculus: 30,000 – 25,000 = 30,000.

This post brings back a few memories of our work on Iraq in 2004-2006. If you note in my book America’s Modern Wars there is an entire chapter on “Estimating Insurgent Strength” (pages 115-120). Part of our concern, which we briefly documented on page 116, was that the officially release estimated of insurgent strength remained at 5,000 forever. It was a constant figure, no matter how nasty the situation got. We really did not believe it. Then, when everything fell apart and the insurgents grabbed Mosul (sound familiar?), the estimate was revised upwards to 20,000. This was better, but it still seemed too low to us, especially as the U.S. was claiming something like 12,000 insurgents killed a year. Needless to say, if they were killing 60% of the insurgents a year, this was an insurgency that was going to quickly be bled to death. As we now know with a decade of hindsight, this did not happen.

This was the reason for section in my book called “Bleeding an Insurgency to Death (pages 156-158). Needless to say, something was wrong with the math somewhere, and our own estimate of insurgent strength was something like 60,000 (see page 116). As Mr. Zenko’s blog post points out, something remains wrong with the math in the air war against ISIL.

Share this:
Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
...
Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
...
His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
...
Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

Articles: 1554

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *