Mystics & Statistics

Used Kursk Books

Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka: Amazon.com is selling off its used copies of the Kursk book at $118.80. This is the first time I have seen them selling the book for below $200. They have eight “used-acceptable” books at 118.80. Another seller has a “used-acceptable” for $114.82. Amazon.com has six “used-good” for $120.04, seven “used-very good” for $121.28, and three “used-like new” for $122.51.

Kind of mystified how Amazon.com ended up with 24 used books.

Secretary of the Army, take 3

On 19 July 2017 Mark Thomas Esper was nominated to be the new Secretary of the Army. This is the third nomination for this position, as the first two nominees, Vincent Viola and Mark E. Green, withdrew. Not sure when Congress will review and approve this nomination. I am guessing it won’t happen in September. The acting Secretary of the Army is Ryan McCarthy (approved as Undersecretary of the Army in August 2017).

Mr. Esper’s background:

  1. Graduate of USMA (West Point) in 1986 with a BS in Engineering.
  2. Masters degree from Harvard in 1995.
  3. PhD from GWU in 2008.
  4. Served as in infantry officer with the 101st Airborne Division during the Gulf War (1990-1991).
  5. Over ten years of active duty (1986-1996?). I gather still in the Army Reserve as a Lt. Colonel.
  6. Chief of Staff of the Heritage Foundation, 1996-1998.
  7. Senior staffer for Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, 1998-2002.
  8. Policy Director House Armed Services Committee, 2001-2202.
  9. Deputy Assistance Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy, 2002-2004.
  10. Director of National Security Affairs for U.S. Senate, 2004-2006.
  11. Executive Vice President at Aerospace Industries Association, 2006-2007.
  12. National Policy Director for Senator Fred Thompson’s 2008 Presidential campaign, 2007-2008.
  13. Executive Vice President of the Global Intellectual Property Center, and Vice President for Europe and Eurasia at U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2008-2010.
  14. Vice President of Government Relations at Raytheon, 2010 to present.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Esper

Human Factors In Warfare: Diminishing Returns In Combat

[Jan Spousta; Wikimedia Commons]

One of the basic problems facing military commanders at all levels is deciding how to allocate available forces to accomplish desired objectives. A guiding concept in this sort of decision-making is economy of force, one of the fundamental and enduring principles of war. As defined in the 1954 edition of U.S. Army Field Manual FM 100-5, Field Service Regulations, Operations (which Trevor Dupuy believed contained the best listing of the principles):

Economy of Force

Minimum essential means must be employed at points other than that of decision. To devote means to unnecessary secondary efforts or to employ excessive means on required secondary efforts is to violate the principle of both mass and the objective. Limited attacks, the defensive, deception, or even retrograde action are used in noncritical areas to achieve mass in the critical area.

How do leaders determine the appropriate means for accomplishing a particular mission? The risk of failing to assign too few forces to a critical task is self-evident, but is it possible to allocate too many? Determining the appropriate means in battle has historically involved subjective calculations by commanders and their staff advisors of the relative combat power of friendly and enemy forces. Most often, it entails a rudimentary numerical comparison of numbers of troops and weapons and estimates of the influence of environmental and operational factors. An exemplar of this is the so-called “3-1 rule,” which holds that an attacking force must achieve a three to one superiority in order to defeat a defending force.

Through detailed analysis of combat data from World War II and the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, Dupuy determined that combat appears subject to a law of diminishing returns and that it is indeed possible to over-allocate forces to a mission.[1] By comparing the theoretical outcomes of combat engagements with the actual results, Dupuy discovered that a force with a combat power advantage greater than double that of its adversary seldom achieved proportionally better results than a 2-1 advantage. A combat power superiority of 3 or 4 to 1 rarely yielded additional benefit when measured in terms of casualty rates, ground gained or lost, and mission accomplishment.

Dupuy also found that attackers sometimes gained marginal benefits from combat power advantages greater than 2-1, though less proportionally and economically than the numbers of forces would suggest. Defenders, however, received no benefit at all from a combat power advantage beyond 2-1.

Two human factors contributed to this apparent force limitation, Dupuy believed, Clausewitzian friction and breakpoints. As described in a previous post, friction accumulates on the battlefield through the innumerable human interactions between soldiers, degrading combat performance. This phenomenon increases as the number of soldiers increases.

A breakpoint represents a change of combat posture by a unit on the battlefield, for example, from attack to defense, or from defense to withdrawal. A voluntary breakpoint occurs due to mission accomplishment or a commander’s order. An involuntary breakpoint happens when a unit spontaneously ceases an attack, withdraws without orders, or breaks and routs. Involuntary breakpoints occur for a variety of reasons (though contrary to popular wisdom, seldom due to casualties). Soldiers are not automatons and will rarely fight to the death.

As Dupuy summarized,

It is obvious that the law of diminishing returns applies to combat. The old military adage that the greater the superiority the better, is not necessarily true. In the interests of economy of force, it appears to be unnecessary, and not really cost-effective, to build up a combat power superiority greater than two-to-one. (Note that this is not the same as a numerical superiority of two-to-one.)[2] Of course, to take advantage of this phenomenon, it is essential that a commander be satisfied that he has a reliable basis for calculating relative combat power. This requires an ability to understand and use “combat multipliers” with greater precision than permitted by U.S. Army doctrine today.[3] [Emphasis added.]

NOTES

[1] This section is drawn from Trevor N. Dupuy, Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat (New York: Paragon House, 1987), Chapter 11.

[2] This relates to Dupuy’s foundational conception of combat power, which is clearly defined and explained in Understanding War, Chapter 8.

[3] Dupuy, Understanding War, p. 139.

Economics of Warfare 20

Finally, we have reached the last of Michael Spagats’ Economics of Warfare lectures. I first starting blogging about these back on December 22, 2016. If you have not read his lecutres, I strongly encourage you to do so. It is very nice primer on what studies are out there on the nature of insurgencies and terrorism.

 

This is the twentieth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

This lecture continues the discussion of terrorism, looking at whether poverty or poor education causes terrorism. The conventional wisdom, supported by a book by Alan Krueger, is that they do not. The lecture presents four studies. Of those, one study (Krueger) makes the argument that they do not (see pages 4-5), while three of the studies (Enders and Hoover, de Mesquita, and Benmelech) find a limited association (see pages 6-14, 15 and page 21 ). Some of these other three studies have to work pretty hard to make their point. One is left to conclude that while poverty may have some impact on degree of terrorism and recruitment of terrorists, it is probably not the main or determining factor. We probably need to look elsewhere for the root causes.

The link to his lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2020.pdf

 

“So Fricking Stupid”: Muddling Through Strategic Insolvency

As I have mentioned before, the United States faces a crisis of “strategic insolvency” with regard to the imbalance between its foreign and military policy commitments and the resources it has allocated to meet them. Rather than addressing the problem directly, the nation’s political leadership appears to be opting to “muddle through” instead by maintaining the policy and budgetary status quo. A case in point is the 2017 Fiscal Year budget, which should have been approved last year. Instead Congress passed a series of continuing resolutions (CRs) that keeps funding at existing levels while its members try to come to an agreement.

That part is not working out so well. Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), earlier this week warned that the congressional budget process is headed for “a complete meltdown” in December, Sidney J. Freedberg, Jr. reported in Defense One. The likely outcome, according to Smith, will be another year-long CR in place of a budget. Smith vented that this would constitute “borderline legislative malpractice, particularly for the Department of Defense.”

Smith finds himself in bipartisan agreement with HASC chairman Mac Thornberry and Senate Armed Services chairman John McCain that ongoing CRs and the restrictions of sequestration have contributed to training and maintenance shortfalls that resulted in multiple accidents—including two U.S. Navy ship collisions—that have killed 42 American servicemembers this summer.

As Freedberg explained,

What’s the budget train wreck, according to Smith? The strong Republican majority in the House has passed a defense bill that goes $72 billion over the maximum allowed by the 2011 Budget Control Act. That would trigger the automatic cuts called sequestration unless the BCA is amended, as it has been in the past. But the slim GOP majority in the Senate needs Democratic votes to amend the BCA, and the Dems won’t deal unless non-defense spending rises as much as defense – which is anathema to Republican hardliners in the House.

“Do you understand just how fricking stupid that is?” a clearly frustrated Smith asked rhetorically. A possible alternative would be to shift the extra defense spending into Overseas Contingency Operation funding, which is not subject to the BCA, as has been done before. Smith derided this option as “a fiscal sleight of hand [that] would be bad governance and ‘hypocritical.’”

Just as politics have gridlocked budget negotiations, so to it prevents flexibility in managing the existing defense budget. Smith believes a lot of money could be freed up by closing domestic military bases deemed unnecessary by the Defense Department and canceling some controversial nuclear weapons programs, but such choices would be politically contentious, to say the least.

The fundamental problem may be simpler: no one knows how much money is really needed to properly fund current strategic plans.

One briefer from the Pentagon’s influential and secretive Office of Net Assessment told Smith that “we do not have the money to fund the strategy that we put in place in 2012,” the congressman recalled. “And I said, ‘how much would you need?’…. He had no idea.”

And the muddling through continues.

The Pros And Cons Of Shooting Down North Korean Ballistic Missile Tests

Two THAAD interceptors and a Standard-Missile 3 Block IA missile were launched resulting in the intercept of two near-simultaneous medium-range ballistic missile targets during designated Flight Test Operational-01 (FTO-01) on September 10, 2013 in the vicinity of the U.S. Army Kwajalein Atoll/ Reagan Test Site and surrounding areas in the western Pacific. The test demonstrated the ability of the Aegis BMD and THAAD weapon systems to function in a layered defense architecture. Photos taken by Missile Defense Agency. (Photo Credit: Missile Defense Agency)

On 3 September, North Korea tested what it claimed to be a thermonuclear warhead which can be mounted on a ballistic missile. While analysts debate whether the device detonated actually was a deliverable thermonuclear bomb, it is clear that the regime of Kim Jong Un is making progress in developing the capability to strike the United States and its regional allies with nuclear weapons.

Is there anything that can be done to halt North Korea weapons development and mitigate its threatening behavior? At the moment, there appear to be few policy options, and each of them carries significant risk.

  1. Launch a preemptive military strike.
  2. Enlist or coerce China into reigning in North Korea’s adventurism.
  3. Accept the fact that North Korea is now the ninth nuclear power in the world—with the capability to strike the U.S. and its regional allies with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles—and adopt the Cold War approach of containing it militarily and limiting its nuclear arsenal through negotiation.

Would attempting to shoot down forthcoming North Korean ballistic missile test launches be a viable policy alternative for the U.S. and its allies? Geof Clark proposed this option in a recent post:

I would argue that the U.S. use the United Nations as a forum to define the parameters for any possible North Korean missile launch that should be intercepted with allied BMD [ballistic missile defense] assets If, for example, a North Korean missile looks likely to hit close to Tokyo, based upon the trajectory identified by Aegis ships at sea, then BMD should shoot it down. By making our rules of engagement public, this would provide a clear signal to China and Russia that the U.S. and its allies intend to use their BMD capabilities (and potentially learn from any failures) against live enemy missiles, but also temper the risk of escalation into any further missile volleys between any parties.

A number of commentators questioned why the U.S. or Japan elected not to attempt to intercept North Korea’s 29 August ballistic missile test that flew directly over Japanese territory. A variety of technical and political issues were cited as justification for restraint. The U.S. and Japan resorted to the usual mix of condemnation and calls for further economic sanctions.

What are the arguments for and against a policy of intercepting North Korean missile tests?

Pros:

  1. The main argument in favor of this is that it could change the narrative with North Korea, which goes like this: Kim’s government stages some provocation and the U.S. and its allies respond with outraged rhetoric, diplomatic moves to further isolate Kim’s regime, and the imposition of a new round of economic sanctions  It is hard to see how much more isolated North Korea can be made, however, and  the vast majority of its trade is with a benevolent China across a porous border. This story has played out repeatedly, yet nothing really changes. Shooting down North Korea’s missile tests could change this stale narrative by preventing it from conducting provocations without consequence.
  2. It would send a strong message to North Korea.
  3. It is not out of line with the provocations North Korea has done over the years (for example: sinking a South Korean patrol boat in 2002).
  4. It is a step short of a preemptive strike by the U.S. and its allies.
  5. It could stall North Korean missile development (especially the ballistic cap, which the North Koreans still have not developed).
  6. It could provide the basis for negotiations.
  7. It is a credible threat (unlike threatening trade sanctions against China to coerce it into restraining North Korea).
  8. It would embarrass Kim’s government by demonstrating that its threats are no longer effective.

Cons:

  1. Which missile tests would be shot down? The U.S. has already declared that any North Korean missile that appears to be targeted at the territory of the U.S. or its allies would be engaged by BMDs and considered an act of war. (The determination that the 29 August test was not aimed at friendly territory was a major factor in the decision not to engage it.) The Trump administration has repeatedly warned the North Koreans of a massive military response to any perceived attack.
    1. Intercepting a North Korean test flying over Japan or into international waters would likely be interpreted by Kim’s regime as a deliberate escalation of the conflict. Such an act would probably extinguish what some have seen as signals from North Korea of a willingness to engage in diplomatic talks, and could precipitate counter-provocations in what is already a highly tense stand-off.
    2. Some have speculated that the North Koreans may attempt to launch a ballistic missile carrying what many believe to be a recently-tested thermonuclear warhead. The consequences of an attempt to intercept such a test would inevitably be dire.
    3. What about targeting North Korean short-range ballistic missiles, or long-range missile tested at short ranges? Intercepting these tests would pose formidable technical challenges for U.S. and allied BMD systems. The risk of failed intercepts would increase and the level of provocation to the North Koreans would be very high.
  2. China might interpret an attempted intercept as a violation of North Korean sovereignty. Although the Chinese have expressed frustration with North Korea’s behavior, it remains a Chinese client state. While certainly provocative, North Korea’s missile tests over Japan are not a clear cut violation of international law. China remains committed to defending North Korea against foreign threats. Intercepting an allegedly “peaceful” ballistic missile test could easily bring China to North Korea’s overt assistance. This would run contrary to the Trump administration’s avowed policy of enlisting the Chinese to restrain Kim’s government and raises the potential for a direct U.S/China confrontation.
  3. It is not at all clear that key U.S. allies South Korea and Japan would support a policy of intercepting North Korean missile tests not aimed at their territory. The U.S. needs permission from these countries to deploy its theater BMD systems within range of North Korean missiles. South Korea is already ambivalent about hosting U.S. BMDs and Japan has indicated that it will maintain its own policy regarding intercepting potential threats. An aggressive U.S. policy could risk damaging or splitting the alliance.
  4. A vow to intercept North Korean missile tests would place enormous pressure on U.S. and allied BMDs to perform effectively, a capability that remains highly uncertain. While theater BMDs have performed better in tests than the U.S. intercontinental Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, it is unlikely they can intercept every potential target. Any weaknesses demonstrated by theater BMD increases the political effectiveness of North Korea’s putative ballistic missile capability. The current ambiguity works in the favor of the U.S. and its allies. Dispelling the uncertainty would be a high price to pay in any circumstance but defense of U.S. or allied territory.
  5. It is not evident that suppressing North Korean missile tests at this point would have a significant impact on its capabilities. North Korea has already demonstrated that its ballistic missiles work well enough to pose a clear threat to the U.S. and its allies. Further testing would only refine existing technology to reduce the probability of technical failures.

Like the other available policy options, this one too carries a mix of potential benefits and risky downsides. The consequences of attempting to implement it cannot be completely foreseen. What does seem clear is that the existing approach does not seem to have worked. Successfully resolving a problem like North Korea is likely to take time, patience, and no small amount of imagination.

 

Status of Books

War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat: For some reason, Amazon.com does not have a Kindle edition available at the moment (I recall that they did). I have talked to the publisher and they are looking into it. The paperback edition is for sale on Amazon.com and of course, University of Nebraska Press. I have heard that some people overseas have gotten copies, but other people are having a problem. I also have the publisher looking into that. There is one 5-star review of the book on Amazon.com. I don’t know the reviewer (meaning it is not a planted review).

Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka: The book has been selling at a consistent rate this year, and at that rate, it will be out of stock in the second half of 2018. If you are thinking about getting it, you probably don’t want to tarry too long. There are currently no plans for a re-print.

America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam: I do consider this the most significant of my three books, and of course, it is the one with the worse sales. I guess the study and analysis of insurgencies is passé, as we have done such a great job of winning these type of wars.

 

Recent Academic Research On Counterinsurgency

An understanding of the people and culture of the host country is an important aspect of counterinsurgency. Here, 1st Lt. Jeff Harris (center) and Capt. Robert Erdman explain to Sheik Ishmael Kaleel Gomar Al Dulayani what was found in houses belonging to members of his tribe during a cordon and search mission in Hawr Rajab, Baghdad, Nov. 29, 2006. The Soldiers are from Troop A, 1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment. (Photo Credit: Staff Sgt. Sean A. Foley)

As the United States’ ongoing decade and a half long involvement in Afghanistan remains largely recessed from the public mind, the once-intense debate over counterinsurgency warfare has cooled as well. Interest stirred mildly recently as the Trump administration rejected a proposal to turn the war over to contractors and elected to slightly increase the U.S. troop presence there. The administration’s stated policy does not appear to differ significantly from that that proceeded it.

The public debate, such as it was, occasioned two excellent articles addressing Afghanistan policy and relevant recent academic scholarship on counterinsurgency, one by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub in the New York Times, and the other by Patrick Burke in War is Boring.

Fisher and Taub addressed the question of the seeming intractability of the Afghan war. “There is a reason that Afghanistan’s conflict, then and now, so defies solutions,” they wrote. “Its combination of state collapse, civil conflict, ethnic disintegration and multisided intervention has locked it in a self-perpetuating cycle that may be simply beyond outside resolution.”

The article weaves together findings of studies on these topics by Ken Menkhaus; Romain Malejacq; Dipali Mukhopadhyay; and Jason Lyall, Graeme Blair, and Kosuke Imai. Fisher and Taub concluded on the pessimistic note that bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan may be on a generational time scale.

Burke looked at a more specific aspect of counterinsurgency, the relationship between civilian casualties and counterinsurgent success of failure. Separating insurgents from the civilian population is one of the central conundrums of counterinsurgency, referred to as the “identification problem.” Burke noted that the current U.S. military doctrine holds that “excessive civilian casualties will cripple counterinsurgency operations, possibly to the point of failure.” This notion rests on the prevailing assumption that civilians have agency, that they can choose between supporting insurgents or counterinsurgents, and that reducing civilian deaths and “winning hearts and minds” is the path to counterinsurgency success.

Burke surveyed work by Matthew Adam Kocher, Thomas B Pepinsky, and Stathis N. Kalyvas; Luke Condra and Jacob Shapiro; Lyall, Blair and Imai, Christopher Day and William Reno; Lee J.M. Seymour; Paul Staniland; and Fotini Christia. The picture portrayed in this research indicates that there is no clear, direct relationship between civilian casualties and counterinsurgent success. While civilians do hold non-combatant deaths against counterinsurgents, the relevance of blame can depend greatly on whether the losses were inflicted by locals for foreigners. In some cases, counterinsurgent brutality helped them succeed or had little influence on the outcome. In others, decisions made by insurgent leaders had more influence over civilian choices than civilian casualties.

While the collective conclusions of the studies surveyed by Fisher, Taub and Burke proved inconclusive, the results certainly warrant deep reconsideration of the central assumptions underpinning prevailing U.S. political and military thinking about counterinsurgency. The articles and studies cited above provide plenty of food for thought.

Combat Readiness And The U.S. Army’s “Identity Crisis”

Servicemen of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team (standing) train Ukrainian National Guard members during a joint military exercise called “Fearless Guardian 2015,” at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center near the western village of Starychy, Ukraine, on May 7, 2015. [Newsweek]

Last week, Wesley Morgan reported in POLITICO about an internal readiness study recently conducted by the U.S. Army 173rd Airborne Infantry Brigade Combat Team. As U.S. European Command’s only airborne unit, the 173rd Airborne Brigade has been participating in exercises in the Baltic States and the Ukraine since 2014 to demonstrate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) resolve to counter potential Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.

The experience the brigade gained working with Baltic and particularly Ukrainian military units that had engaged with Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian Separatist forces has been sobering. Colonel Gregory Anderson, the 173rd Airborne Brigade commander, commissioned the study as a result. “The lessons we learned from our Ukrainian partners were substantial. It was a real eye-opener on the absolute need to look at ourselves critically,” he told POLITICO.

The study candidly assessed that the 173rd Airborne Brigade currently lacked “essential capabilities needed to accomplish its mission effectively and with decisive speed” against near-peer adversaries or sophisticated non-state actors. Among the capability gaps the study cited were

  • The lack of air defense and electronic warfare units and over-reliance on satellite communications and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) navigation systems;
  • simple countermeasures such as camouflage nets to hide vehicles from enemy helicopters or drones are “hard-to-find luxuries for tactical units”;
  • the urgent need to replace up-armored Humvees with the forthcoming Ground Mobility Vehicle, a much lighter-weight, more mobile truck; and
  • the likewise urgent need to field the projected Mobile Protected Firepower armored vehicle companies the U.S. Army is planning to add to each infantry brigade combat team.

The report also stressed the vulnerability of the brigade to demonstrated Russian electronic warfare capabilities, which would likely deprive it of GPS navigation and targeting and satellite communications in combat. While the brigade has been purchasing electronic warfare gear of its own from over-the-counter suppliers, it would need additional specialized personnel to use the equipment.

As analyst Adrian Bonenberger commented, “The report is framed as being about the 173rd, but it’s really about more than the 173rd. It’s about what the Army needs to do… If Russia uses electronic warfare to jam the brigade’s artillery, and its anti-tank weapons can’t penetrate any of the Russian armor, and they’re able to confuse and disrupt and quickly overwhelm those paratroopers, we could be in for a long war.”

While the report is a wake-up call with regard to the combat readiness in the short-term, it also pointedly demonstrates the complexity of the strategic “identity crisis” that faces the U.S. Army in general. Many of the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s current challenges can be traced directly to the previous decade and a half of deployments conducting wide area security missions during counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The brigade’s perceived shortcomings for combined arms maneuver missions are either logical adaptations to the demands of counterinsurgency warfare or capabilities that atrophied through disuse.

The Army’s specific lack of readiness to wage combined arms maneuver warfare against potential peer or near-peer opponents in Europe can be remedied given time and resourcing in the short-term. This will not solve the long-term strategic conundrum the Army faces in needing to be prepared to fight conventional and irregular conflicts at the same time, however. Unless the U.S. is willing to 1) increase defense spending to balance force structure to the demands of foreign and military policy objectives, or 2) realign foreign and military policy goals with the available force structure, it will have to resort to patching up short-term readiness issues as best as possible and continue to muddle through. Given the current state of U.S. domestic politics, muddling through will likely be the default option unless or until the consequences of doing so force a change.