Images of RAND wargames from a 1958 edition of Life magazine. [C3I Magazine]
A friend tipped me off to RAND Corporation‘s “Events @ RAND” podcast series on iTunes, specifically a recent installment titled “The Serious Role of Gaming at RAND.” David Shlapak, senior international research analyst and co-director of the RAND Center for Gaming, gives an overview of RAND’s history and experiences using gaming and simulations for a variety of tasks, including analysis and policy-making.
Shlapak and Michael Johnson touched off a major debate last year after publishing an analysis of the military balance in the Baltic states, based on a series of analytical wargames. Shlapak’s discussion of the effort and the ensuing question and answer session are of interest to both those new to gaming and simulation, as well as wargaming old timers. Much recommended.
By the way, in between all the other rather dramatic news, there is still a battle raging in Mosul. Now, the Iraqi’s are claiming it will be over in days (before 26 May): http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39882257
The statement was made on the 10th, and it is now the 20th.
Not the fastest offensive we have seen. For example, the Germans arrived on the outskirts of Stalingrad in August 1942, had taken most of the city by the end of November, and were still there, surrounded and starving, in February 1943.
It stated that U.S. commander in Iraq, U.S. Army Lt. General Stephan Townsend, said “within the next six months I think we’ll see both (the Mosul and Raqqa campaigns) conclude.”
So, are we still on track to take Raqqa by the end of July?
Raytheon’s new Long-Range Precision Fires missile is deployed from a mobile launcher in this artist’s rendering. The new missile will allow the Army to fire two munitions from a single weapons pod, making it cost-effective and doubling the existing capacity. [Raytheon]
The active component of the Army currently consists of three corps, 10 divisions, 16 armored/Stryker brigade combat teams (BCTs), 15 light infantry BCTs, 12 combat aviation brigades, four fires brigades, three battlefield surveillance brigades, one engineer brigade, one Ranger brigade, five Special Forces groups, and a special operations aviation regiment.
U.S. Army Major Nathan A. Jennings and Lt. Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret.) have each proposed alternative force structure concepts designed to maximize the Army’s effectiveness for combined arms combat.
Jennings’s Realignment Model
Jennings’s concept flows directly from the precepts that MDB is being currently developed upon.
Designed to maximize diverse elements of joint, interorganizational and multinational power to create temporary windows of advantage against complex enemy systems, the Army’s incorporation of [MDB] should be accompanied by optimization of its order of battle to excel against integrated fire and maneuver networks.
To that end, he calls for organizing U.S. Army units into three types of divisions: penetration, exploitation and stabilization.
Empowering joint dynamism begins with creating highly mobile and survivable divisions designed to penetrate complex defenses that increasingly challenge aerial access. These “recon-strike” elements would combine armored and Stryker BCTs; special operations forces; engineers; and multifaceted air defense, indirect, joint, cyber, electromagnetic and informational fires to dislocate and disintegrate adversary defenses across theater depth. As argued by Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, then-director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, they could “fight their way through long-range weapons fire and gain physical contact with hard-to-find opponents” while striking “from unexpected directions with multiple forms of firepower.”
Exploitation divisions would employ more balanced capabilities to destroy enemy concentrations, clear contested zones and seize key terrain. Comprising a variety of light, airborne, motorized and mechanized infantry BCTs with modest armor and engineer support—all empowered by destructive kinetic, electronic and virtual fires—these commands would attack through windows of opportunity created by deep strikes to overmatch paralyzed defenders. While penetrating formations would rapidly bridge air and land component efforts, their more versatile and flexible exploitation counterparts would allow joint commands to decisively shatter adversary warfighting capabilities through intensive fire and maneuver.
The third type of division would be made up of elements trained to consolidate gains in order to set the conditions for a sustainable, stable environment, as required by Army doctrine. The command’s multifaceted brigades could include tailored civil affairs, informational, combat advisory, military police, light infantry, aviation and special operations elements in partnership with joint, interdepartmental, non-governmental and coalition personnel. These stabilization divisions would be equipped to independently follow penetration and exploitation forces to secure expanding frontages, manage population and resource disruptions, negotiate political turbulence, and support the re-establishment of legitimate security forces and governance.
Jennings did not specify how these divisions would be organized, how many of each type he would propose, or the mix of non-divisional elements. They are essentially a reorganization of current branch and unit types.
Proposing separate penetration and exploitation forces hearkens back to the earliest concepts of tank warfare in Germany and the Soviet Union, which envisioned infantry divisions creating breaches in enemy defenses, through which armored divisions would be sent to attack rear areas and maneuver at the operational level. Though in Jennings’s construction, the role of infantry and armor would be reversed.
Jennings’s envisioned force also preserves the capability for conducting wide area security operations in the stabilization divisions. However, since the stabilization divisions would likely constitute only a fraction of the overall force, this would be a net reduction in capability, as all of the current general purpose force units are (theoretically) capable of conducting wide area security. Jennings’s penetration and exploitation divisions would presumably possess more limited capability for this mission.
Macgregor’s Transformation Model
While Jenning’s proposed force structure can be seen as evolutionary, Macgregor’s is much more radically innovative. His transformation concept focuses almost exclusively on optimizing U.S. ground forces to wage combined arms maneuver warfare. Macgregor’s ideas stemmed from his experiences in the 1991 Gulf War and he has developed and expanded on them continuously since then. Although predating MDB, Macgregor’s concepts clearly influenced the thinking behind it and are easily compatible with it.
The heart of Macgregor’s proposal are modular, independent, all arms/all effects, brigade-sized combat groups that emphasize four primary capabilities: maneuver (mobile armored firepower for positional advantage), strike (stand-off attack systems), ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) and sustainment (logistics). These modular groups would be the Army’s contribution to cross-domain, corps-level joint task forces, which is how he—and increasingly the rest of the U.S. armed forces—sees the U.S. military waging combat in the future.
Macgregor’s envisioned force structure adds his Reconnaissance Strike Group (RSG) to armored, mechanized infantry, and airborne/air-assault light infantry units. These would total 26 brigade-sized groups, down from the current 31 BCTs, with a ratio of 16 RSG/armored groups to 10 mechanized/airborne infantry.
Macgregor would also downsize the number of manned rotary wing combat aviation elements from 12 to four mostly be replacing them with drones integrated into the independent strike groups and into the strike battalions in the maneuver groups.
He would add other new unit types as well, including theater missile defense groups, C41I groups, and chem-bio warfare groups.
Macgregor’s proposed force structure would also constitute a net savings in overall manpower, mainly by cutting out division-level headquarters and pushing sustainment elements down to the individual groups.
Evolution or Revolution?
While both propose significant changes from the current organization, Jennings’s model is more conservative than Macgregor’s. Jennings would keep the division and BCT as the primary operational units, while Macgregor would cut and replace them altogether. Jennings clearly was influenced by Macgregor’s “strike-reconnaissance” concept in his proposal for penetration divisions. His description of them is very close to the way Macgregor defines his RSGs.
The biggest difference is that Jennings’s force would still retain some capacity to conduct wide area security operations, whether it be in conventional or irregular warfare circumstances. Macgregor has been vocal about his belief that the U.S. should avoid large-scale counterinsurgency or stabilization commitments as a matter of policy. He has also called into question the survivability of light infantry on future combined arms battlefields.
Even should the U.S. commit itself to optimizing its force structure for MDB, it is unclear at this point whether it would look like what Jennings or Macgregor propose. Like most military organizations, the U.S. Army is not known for its willingness to adopt radical change. The future Army force structure is likely to resemble its current form for some time, unless the harsh teachings of future combat experience dictate otherwise.
Not only was their economy dropping, but not surprising, they were running significant budget deficits ($21 billion in 2016, or 3% of GDP) and their cash reserves were running low (National Wealth Fund had $72.71 billion as of September 2016). Much of this decline was driven by the price of oil and secondarily, by the limited sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union (and the counter-sanctions issued by Russia). These sanctions are still in place and the price of oil is not something the Russians have control over. I don’t see the sanctions being lifted anytime soon, so Russian economic growth is dependent as the price of oil staying stable or moving up. Putin is up for re-election to his fourth term in March 2018 for a six-year term, so a stable economy would be helpful, although few doubt the outcome of the election. Growth after a recession can sometimes be strong, for example the U.S. economy grew at 2.5% in 2010 after 18 months negative growth. The Russian recovery at 0.5% is a little anemic.
Examining the sixteenth 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 also addresses climate change. In effect, it is looking at the impact of droughts on civil war incidence. The first part of the lecture focuses on a study done by Coutteneir and Soubeyran. It is also a cross-country analysis.
The thing that caught my attention was that they choose to exclude the anti-colonial wars and “internationalized wars:” (slide 2). These are a significant number of cases, although I can understand their reasons for doing so. Certainly the drivers behind these wars was much more the local climate conditions. So, they start by removing the cases that they know are not driven by climate change.
Now, when I originally did the Iraq Casualty Estimate (see Chapter One of America’s Modern Wars) I had a significant number of these “colonial wars of national liberation” in my data set, mostly dating from the 1950s and 1960s. As I was briefing the results of my estimates inside the Army and DOD community in early 2005, this suddenly became an issue. I think one person inside an organization glommed onto this issue as a way of obviating my results. I ended up going over to give the brief in DOD and was notified that they had been informed that my results were biased by having too many “colonial wars of national liberation” in my data set. Not exactly sure how having “colonial wars of national liberation” in my data set biased my estimate of casualties and duration in an Iraq insurgency, but this was the argument they were making. So for my briefing, I did my original briefing, and then added a little addendum that addressed my results if I took out the dozen or so cases of “colonial wars of national liberation.” It did not change my results. This was a fairly embarrassing exercise in that I think that person in question wanted to dismiss my results because they either did not believe them, it violated his cosmology, or the higher ups in DOD had already decided that we would not be facing a major guerilla war. Never really knew what the reasoning was. It is alluded to in my book on page 28.
Anyhow, there are valid reasons I believe for leaving out “colonial wars of national liberation” from this climate change test, but I do not believe there was for my Iraq Casualty Estimate.
With those cases left out, Couttenier and Soubeyran do come up with a fairly consistent and positive relationship between drought and internal armed conflict (slide 2 – 3)
The next part addresses a paper by Hsiang et al. (paper is linked on slide 4). It discussed El Nino. Having lived in California in the 1980s, El Nino is something very familiar to me (as are earthquakes), but Dr. Spagat provides a nice explanation of it on slides 4-5 for his British students. The advantage of looking at El Nino (hotter and dryer periods) and La Nina (colder and wetter periods) is that you again get sort of the side-by-side laboratory effect that social scientists have to struggle to find.
His next series of slides gets into the nuts and bolts of the study, but they ended up tracking “Annual Conflict Risk” (ACR) which is 2% for countries weakly affected by these weather patterns, 3% for countries affected by La Nina (cool and wet) and 6% for countries affected by El Nino (warm and dry). See slide 15.
The next slides examine the studies in more depth, with Dr. Spagat making the statement on slide 23 that “Ultimately, though, I feel that we need some convincing case studies linking ENSO with armed conflict in specific times and places for the Hsiao et al. work to be fully convincing.”
I have been late to the rodeo in bringing attention to the wonderful War Stories podcast’s season ending episode. It culminated the first season’s arc covering the history of armored warfare by looking forward at possible directions for the development of future tanks. Adin Dobkin and Angry Staff Officer bring their usual mix of military insight and humor to bear on a fascinating topic.
They conclude by speculating that future tanks will glide over the ground rather than drive or roll over it. This leads them to turn their dials up to 11 in an bonus interseason episode devoted to the decline of armored vehicles in the Star Wars movies. You will find this mix of sci-fi nerdiness and the theory and practice of armored warfare nowhere else.
It reminds me of a meeting we had in late 2000 with Walt Hollis, Deputy Under Secretary of the Army (Operations Research). He started the meeting by telling us that something like “Every now and then, someone seems to want to bring back the light tank.” He then went on to explain that these requirements are being pushed from the top (meaning by the Chief of Staff of the Army) and they should probably have a study done on the subject. He then asked us to do such an effort.
We decided to examine the effectiveness of lighter-weight armor based upon real-world experience in six possible scenarios:
Conventional conflicts against an armor supported or armor heavy force.
Emergency insertions against an armor support or armor heavy force.
Conventional conflict against a primarily infantry force (as one might encounter in sub-Saharan Africa).
Emergency insertion against a primarily infantry force.
A small to medium insurgency (includes an insurgency that develops during a peacekeeping operation).
A peacekeeping operation or similar Operation Other Than War (OOTW) that has some potential for violence.
Anyhow, I am not going to summarize the report here as that would take too long. I did draft up a chapter on it for inclusion in War by Numbers, but decided to leave it out as it did not fit into the “theory testing” theme of the book. Instead, I am holding it for one of my next books, Future American Wars.
The interesting aspect of the report is that we were at a meeting in 2001 at an Army OR outfit that was reviewing our report, and they told us that the main point of action they drew from the report was that we needed to make sure our armor vehicles were better protected against mines. As our report looked at the type of tank losses being suffered in the insurgencies and OOTWs, there were a lot of vehicles being lost to mines. Apparently they had not fully realized this (and Iraq did not occur until 2003).
Wells and Schairer came up with the basic design for the B-52 over one weekend in 1948, drawing upon advanced concepts developed by Nazi Germany during World War II. The first prototype flew in 1952.
Six days after that first B-52 flight, the two pitched an idea to the Boeing board for a jet-powered passenger aircraft, which they would get the U.S. government pay to develop by marketing it as a military tanker for the B-52. This program would yield the KC-135 and the civilian Boeing 707 airliner. The first KC-135 flew in 1956.
Although seeking replacements, the Air Force is planning on keeping both the B-52 and KC-135 in service past 2050, when both airframes will be over 100 years old. Boeing won a contract to replace the KC-135 in 2011, but its new tanker is woefully late and over budget.
The 76 B-52s have a 70% readiness rate due to their relative simplicity to maintain and the Air Force is about to approve $4 billion in new engines to keep them flying.
Continuing with the fifteenth 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 addresses the impact of global warming on armed conflict over time. My previous post on the subject concerned a cross-country analysis of the impact of temperature on civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa that was not very convincing, even though it made the rather shocking claim that: “Burke et al. go on to predict 393,000 excess battle deaths caused by climate change…” (my bolding).
Probably the most interesting aspect of the presentation was when Dr. Spagat’s TA used the model to make predictions from the period 2003-2013 and also tested the model with the temperature variable removed from the model. Dr. Spagat’s conclusion was (slide 22) “…They mean that temperature is not very useful for predicting civil war….”
Then starting slide 23, the presentation looks at an effort by O’Loughlin et al. to look the impact of temperature and precipitation not by cross-country analysis, but by looking at local variations. They divided up East Africa into grid that are about 100 by 100 kilometers. They then measured it to a dependent variable that was the number of violent incidents. They then tested it using a “negative binomial regression model” (another methodology I have no experience using). They ran five different simple models, of which only one produced a statistically significant measure, and it was negative (meaning more rain = less violence). A sixth model he ran (“GAM splines”) did provide some fits by using different sized deviations and fitting a smoothed curve to these estimates (I really haven’t take the time to figure out what he did). The end result was that this last model provided some indication that:
Wet weather reduce violent incidents
Large warn deviations (unusually warm weather) increase violent incidents.
All the papers discussed are in the Dr. Spagat’s slides, so you can see the original. Just to grab a few quotes from the O’Loughlin paper:
“Recent studies concerning the possible relationship between climate trends and the risks of violent conflict have yielded contradictory results….”
“Sweeping generalizations have undermined a genuine understanding of any climate–conflict link, whereas cumulative results from the numerous studies of individual communities are difficult to summarize.”
This, of course, harkens back to my first observations over a decade ago when I saw the CNA study that was predicting increased wars, violence and problems (and perhaps increased U.S. intervention) as a result of climate change. Again….we really do not know if this is the case. Added to that, some of the areas that may be most affected by climate change are the areas that the United States are not likely to get heavily involved in (read: Sub-Sahara Africa). So, while climate change may be a very real problem, it may not have a huge impact on our defense policy and planning in the next couple of decades outside of the Arctic (and the Arctic is a whole separate discussion). We should be careful not to assume a significant cause-and-effect (climate change = many more wars) when there is not strong evidence to do so.
Moving onto the fifteenth 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 addresses the impact of global warming on armed conflict over time. If you happen to be one of those who believes that global warming is pseudo-science/a scientific hoax/an excuse to troll for research $$$/an invention of Al Gore/a liberal plot/a religion/a Chinese plot/obviously false because it was cold yesterday/and so forth…..then probably best to stop reading. On the other hand, we have done some proposals on measuring the impact of climate change on violence and consider this a legitimate area of study. Our attention was drawn to the subject over a decade ago when a CNA (Center for Naval Analysis) paper came out that postulated that global warming could result in more violence. This conclusion does not appear to have been based upon any analysis of data, just the assumption that as things get worse (in the environment) then things are going to get worse (with armed conflict). Of course, going back to Feierabend & Feierabend (and I do go back to them a lot)….poorer counties had less political violence than developing countries. Therefore, it does not necessarily follow that worse environmental and economics conditions results in more violence. The effect may be the reverse, which is that declining conditions may actually result in a reduction of violence. We really don’t know. Trying to examine these effects analytically was the gist of my proposals on the subject, but sequestration happened and budget for anything seemed to disappear.
So….first two sentences of Dr. Spagat’s slides are
“There is a strong scientific consensus that the Earth is getting warmer over time.”
“It is reasonable to imagine that a side effect of global warming could be an increase in armed conflict over time.”
Slide 2 looks at possible channels that could lead to conflict
Dwindling food supply
Dwindling water supply
Sea Level changes causing migration.
On slide 3 he then addresses a study by Burke and others that attempt to address these concerns using a cross-country regression approach and linear probability model.
On slide 5 the results are summarized as “…an increase of 1 degree centigrade for a particularly country in a particular year is associated with a 0.0447 increase in the probability of there being an ongoing civil war….”
and on slide 11 as: “This means that Burke et al. predict that 15.8-17.1% of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2030 will suffer from big civil wars rather than the 11% that would occur without the warming climate.”
and on slide 16 as: “Burke et al. go on to predict 393,000 excess battle deaths caused by climate change…” (my bolding). Dr. Spagat then examines this number in the next two slides. It doesn’t sound like he fully accepts it.
Now, Burke based his study on the period from 1981-2002. One of Dr. Spagat’s TAs then used the model to make predictions from the period 2003-2013. There is nothing like trying to use a model to predict the past. It sort of shows whether it really works or not. This was the reasoning because the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base and the Kursk Data Base that we did (they were model validation data bases). It is related in concept to what I did in America’s Modern War, pages 65-68 when I tested my logistics probability model back to the 68 cases used to create the model and tried to figure out for each case why the model was predicting wrong. Once you have a model, there are lots of things to test it to in the past. If you can’t predict the past, you may not be able to predict the future.
Anyhow, the results are on slide 19 and summarized in slide 20 as
“There are 414 “no war” predictions…A war actually happens in 11 out of these 414 cases.”
“There are 37 predictions of “war”. War actually happens in 7 out of these 37 cases.”
Not sure I am any smarter at this point, but I am certainly amused.
His final point is “The Burke et al. model seems to be of some use in predicting wars although it seems have a general tendency to predict war too often.”
And then Dr. Spagat TA test how important the temperature variable is for making these predictions, so takes the temperature variable out of the model !!! This produces a table (slide 21) that is almost identical to his original table. The impact of removing the temperature from the model is that it produced five more false positives (predicted wars that did not happen). I am even more amused.
Spagat’s conclusion (slide 22) is “…They mean that temperature is not very useful for predicting civil war….”
