Continuing with the nineteenth and second to last 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, a subject we often deliberately avoid. We actually don’t even have a category for terrorism on the blog, in part because I consider it a tool of an insurgency, not a separate form of warfare.
On the first slide is a paper on the determinants of media attention for terrorist attacks. This is a significant subject as terrorism does rely on media attention to make their points. If there was no coverage……then the terrorist act would be relatively ineffective. The purpose of terrorism is not to kill people, it is to attract attention. Modern international terrorism started with the Palestinian Black September attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, which turned the Palestinian issue from a Middle East concern into an issue that now garnered world wide attention.
Anyhow, the lecture starts with a paper by Michael Jetter, which is linked to on page 1 (one of the very nice things about this lecture series is that all the various papers he discusses are linked in the lecture…providing a extensive collection of interesting and useful papers to read). The question is “…why do some attacks generate more coverage than others do?” The answer is on slides 10 and 12, but the short answer is: attacks in wealthier countries, countries that trade with the U.S., that are closer to the U.S. get more coverage (in the New York Times).
Not sure how really meaningful this is except to note that obviously, terrorist attacks in Canada are going to get a lot more attention in the U.S. newspapers than terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka.
It probably does not come as a surprise to most who read this blog that I am not favorably disposed to the presidency of Vladimir Putin. I found the following article in the Christian Science Monitor to be interesting: What is Stirring Russia’s Youth to Rally Around Alexei Navalny
Just a couple of quotes from the article that caught my eye:
Mikhail Aralov: “In our country the population is called ‘the people.’ when in fact we are citizens. ‘The people’ need bread and circuses, but citizens need civil institutions.”
Dmitry Zabelin: “I am tired of corruption, the state of human rights, and all the hypocrisy that you see every day. I’m very worried about how Putin is trying to restore the Soviet Union; Russia should be trying to become a Western country and part of the world.”
The article is based upon the first DIA report on the Russia/Soviet military that they have published since 1991. I have not read the report but note that the article states: “The DIA report, however, has been criticized by some for being too hawkish, just like previous DIA reports on the Soviet Union.” I have not reviewed the DIA report and don’t have the ability to really do so properly, but I do remember well their old reports in the 1980s, and they were certainly “too hawkish.” They clearly overemphasized Soviet strengths and ignored many of their weaknesses. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
More to the point, we engaged one of the Soviet armed countries, Iraq, in the Gulf War in 1991; and we had a chance to review their military in the 1990s (something which I have some knowledge of). I have never seen a systematic analysis of what the defense and intelligence analysts were saying in the 1980s compared to what they were able to see in the 1990s, but there is an interesting story there about our misperceptions and failures to understand the Soviet military.
A military force that is surprised is severely disrupted, and its fighting capability is severely degraded. Surprise is usually achieved by the side that has the initiative, and that is attacking. However, it can be achieved by a defending force. The most common example of defensive surprise is the ambush.
Perhaps the best example of surprise achieved by a defender was that which Hannibal gained over the Romans at the Battle of Cannae, 216 BC, in which the Romans were surprised by the unexpected defensive maneuver of the Carthaginians. This permitted the outnumbered force, aided by the multiplying effect of surprise, to achieve a double envelopment of their numerically stronger force.
It has been hypothesized, and the hypothesis rather conclusively substantiated, that surprise can be quantified in terms of the enhanced mobility (quantifiable) which surprise provides to the surprising force, by the reduced vulnerability (quantifiable) of the surpriser, and the increased vulnerability (quantifiable) of the side that is surprised.
Linked here is the blog for a company that specializes in “data science & predictive analytics:” Elderresearch
It is run by Dr. John Elder, someone who I have known for more decades than I care to admit. We have not had much intersection in our respective businesses, although I did talk to him in 2007 about the use of classification trees when we were doing work on insurgencies. This work is summarized in my book America’s Modern Wars. In particular we were using them in our Task 12 report: Examining the Geographic Aspects of an Insurgency, dated 4 February 2008. We did both a logistic regression and several classification trees looking at terrain and its effects on insurgencies. I ended up getting a three page paper from John where he independently ran his own logistic regression from our data and ended up with results similar to ours. It was a useful (and free) confirmation of what we were looking at.
I generally was not happy with the results I was getting from these comparison and there was clearly some factors far more significant than terrain that was driving the results of these conflicts. This is what lead us to look at force ratios and insurgent cause. Somewhere between the first and final draft of the book, I did delete the classification trees from the book.
I gather some of Elder Research’s work is based upon classification trees. Most of his work is commercial. They do have a new blog, but with only one blog post so far in there “defense and intelligence” category. It addresses the third off-set strategy: defense-and-intelligence
Soldiers, of the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, tactically move a Stryker over the Mojave Desert during Decisive Action Rotation 15-10 at the National Training Center on Fort Irwin, Calif., Sept. 24, 2015. The Stryker and other ground combat vehicles are undergoing a number of upgrades, according to officials. (Photo Credit: Sgt. William Howard)
Since the Stryker’s introduction in 2002, SBCTs have participated successfully in U.S. expeditionary operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, validating for many the usefulness of Shinseki’s original medium-weight armor concept. However, changes in the strategic landscape and advances in technology and operational doctrine by potential adversaries are calling the medium armor concept back into question.
Medium armor faces the same conundrum that currently confronts the U.S. Army in general: should it optimize to conduct wide area security operations (which is the most likely type of future conflict) or combined arms maneuver (the most dangerous potential future conflict), or should it continue to hedge against strategic uncertainty by fielding a balanced, general purpose force which does a tolerable job of both, as it does now?
The Problem
In the current edition of Military Review, U.S. Army Captain Matthew D. Allgeyer presents an interesting critique of the Army’s existing medium-weight armor concept. He asserts that it is “is suffering from a lack of direction and focus…” Several improvements for the Stryker have been proposed based on perceptions of evolving Russian military capabilities, namely “a modern heavy-force threat supported by aviation assets.” The problem, according to Allgeyer, is that
The SBCT community wants all the positive aspects of a light force: lower cost, a small tooth-to-tail ratio, greater operational-level speed, etc. But, it also wants the ability to confront a heavy-armored force on its own terms without having to adopt the cost, support, and deployment time required by an armored force. Since these two ideas are mutuality exclusive, we have been forced to adopt a piecemeal response to shortcomings identified during training and training center rotations.
Even if the currently proposed improvements are adopted however, Allgeyer argues that updated Strykers would only provide the U.S. with a medium weight armor capability analogous to the 1960’s era Soviet motor-rifle regiment, a doctrinal step backward.
Allgeyer identifies the SBCT’s biggest weaknesses as a lack of firepower capable of successfully engaging enemy heavy armor and the absence of an organic air defense capability. Neither of these is a problem in wide area security missions such as peacekeeping or counterinsurgency, where deployability and mobility are priority considerations. However, both shortcomings are critical disadvantages in combined arms maneuver scenarios, particularly against Russian or Russian-equipped opposing forces.
Potential Solutions
These observations are not new. A 2001 TDI study of the historical effectiveness of lighter-weight armor pointed out its vulnerability to heavy armored forces, but also its utility in stability and contingency operations. The Russians long ago addressed these issues with their Bronetransporter (BTR)-equipped motor-rifle regiments by adding organic tank battalions to them, incorporating air defense platoons in each battalion, and upgunning the BTRs with 30mm cannons and anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs).
The U.S. Army has similar solutions available. It has already sought to add 30mm cannons and TOW-2 ATGMs to the Styker. The Mobile Protected Firepower program that will provide a company of light-weight armored vehicles with high-caliber cannons to each infantry brigade combat team could easily be expanded to add a company or battalion of such vehicles to the SBCT. No proposals exist for improving air defense capabilities, but this too could be addressed.
Allgeyer agrees with the need for these improvements, but he is dissatisfied with the Army “simply reinventing on its own the wheel Russia made a long time ago.” His proposed “solution is a radical restructuring of thought around the Stryker concept.” He advocates ditching the term “Stryker” in favor of the more generic “medium armor” to encourage doctrinal thinking about the concept instead of the platform. Medium armor advocates should accept the need for a combined arms solution to engaging adversary heavy forces and incorporate more joint training into their mission-essential task lists. The Army should also do a better job of analyzing foreign medium armor platforms and doctrine to see what may be appropriate for U.S. adoption.
Allgeyer’s proposals are certainly worthy, but they may not add up to the radical restructuring he seeks. Even if adopted, they are not likely to change the fundamental characteristics of medium armor that make it more suitable to the wide area security mission than to combined arms maneuver. Optimizing it for one mission will invariably make it less useful for the other. Whether or not this is a wise choice is also the same question the Army must ponder with regard to its overall strategic mission.
This thing took forever. The offensive started on 17 October. They entered the city on 1 November. It then took 251 days to take the city (over 8 months). This is one of the interesting challenges of urban warfare, it takes 15 days to get to the city and 251 days to take it. As we noted in our three urban warfare studies (and in two chapters in War by Numbers), operations outside of the urban area go so much faster than in the urban areas. The end result is that most urban warfare eventually turns into a giant mop-up operation.
I notice there has been a renewed interest in urban warfare, especially with discussions of fighting in mega-cities. I am not sure that everyone involved in these efforts grasp that these fights are not occurring at the point of the spearhead, but are indeed often a mop-up operation, regardless of the size of the city.
Mosul is in ruins. It is certainly one of the largest cities that ever had an extended urban fight in it. It is larger than Stalingrad.
So…does anyone have some good casualty figures for this fight?
