Mystics & Statistics

Economics of Warfare 7

Examining the seventh 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, which starts by discussing the “Dirty War Index”, remains focused on civilian casualties. He presents on slide 4 the “Dirty War Index” (DWI), which is actually something we could have used for our insurgency work.

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%207.pdf

We did something very similar in pages 88-92 in the section on “Use of Firepower” in America’s Modern Wars. On page 89 we have a chart with three columns tracking civilians casualties. They are 1) (civilians killed)/(CI/INS killed); 2) civilians killed/insurgents killed; and 3) total civilians killed/100,000 population. We only have data for nine cases (nine insurgencies). The first two formulations are ratios but the same data could be used to calculate an ersatz DWI. We then discussed the problem with Irish Loyalists Militias on pages 89-90 (using the exact same data as Dr. Spagat used on slide 6) and then we looked at 35 insurgencies compared to 1) rules of engagements, 2) civilians killed/insurgents kills, and 3) total civilians killed/100,00 population (pages 90-91). Our conclusions were (page 92):

In general, there does seem to be a pattern where insurgencies win more often if the number of civilians killed compared to the number of insurgents killed is greater than 10, but there is no statistical support for such an assumption.

This was a case where we needed to do a lot more work, but never got back to it (read: defense budget cuts and sequestration).

Slides 5 and 6 of Dr. Spagat’s lecture are worth looking at. You will note that in Colombia that while the guerrillas and government forces were responsible for their share of civilian casualties, it was the paramilitaries who were doing a lot of the bloodletting. Government ties to some of these paramilitaries have been an issue. As Dr. Spagat puts it (slide 7) “Their relationship with government forces is murky and controversial.” Slide 6 is from Northern Ireland. Again the “Loyalist Paramilities” are the worst offenders. Probably good policy to keep the Shiite militias out of Mosul.

On slide 10, Dr. Spagat switches from the rather depressing discussion of civilian casualties (which is a subject that needs to be discussed and analyzed more than it has) to a discussing of the “Benefits of Peace.” Because of the nature of our customers, we haven’t done a lot of work on peace…not that we don’t want to. He ends up looking at housing prices in Northern Ireland. Slide 13 has the total killings in Northern Ireland by quarter, although only from 1983 and on. The war was far more bloody in the early 1970s and the violence declined notably after that. The figures on slide 14 catches my attention because at one point in our insurgency studies we also looked at distribution of casualties by region in Northern Ireland, compared to Vietnam and compared to two other wars. We noted at the time that unequal distribution of casualties by geography was at a similar ratio between Northern Ireland and Vietnam. We did not go any further with this effort, because we needed a whole lot more cases and we could not see a pattern with what we had examined (and it took a lot of time). This effort was discussed in our report on terrain (Report I-12: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub3.htm) but I am pretty sure I left it out of my book.

Anyhow, Figure 15 shows housing prices in Northern Ireland. Not particularly surprising, peace is good for housing prices. You probably could have guessed that without a statistical analysis. The rest of the slides just go into more depth on the statistics behind this (slides 17-19). Then there is a discussion on “sampling rare events” (slides 20-29). Note the mention of bootstrapping on slide 29: Bootstrapping_(statistics)

Iraqi Time

Nothing earthshaking here, but I just liked the article for its quote: “In terms of timeline, we’re on Iraqi time, this is going to take some time.”

Article is here: general-sees-islamic-states-capability-waning

A few highlights:

  1. ISIL is starting to run out of resources in the third month of the campaign.
  2. Second phase of the campaign started last week after a month of deadlock and is making slow progress.
  3. “They’ve got a finite amount of resource that are on the eastern side and the fact that their capability is waning indicates that those resources are starting to dwindle.”
  4. “…the Mosul campaign was on track, but ‘in terms of timeline, we’re on Iraqi time. This is going to take some time.'”

Anyhow, still not sure how ISIL is going to manage to pull anything positive out of this effort. With over 100,000 troops with air support, it is hard to imagine that the coalition is not going to take Mosul in the near future.

 

Mosul and ISF Combat Effectiveness

The situation in Mosul, 16-19 December 2016 (Institute for the Study of War)

After a period of “operational refit,” Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) waging battle with Daesh fighters for control of the city of Mosul launched a new phase of their advance on 29 December. The initial phase of the assault, which began on 17 October 2016, ground to a halt due to strong Daesh resistance and heavy casualties among the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service (CTS) troops spearheading the operation.

For the new offensive, the CTS was reinforced with additional Iraqi Army ground units, as well as an armored element of the Federal Police. Additional U.S. combat forces and advisors have also been moved closer to the front lines in support.

Although possessing an enormous manpower advantage over the Daesh defenders, ISF had managed to secure only one-quarter of the city in two months of combat. This is likely due to the fact that the only ISF elements that have demonstrated any offensive combat effectiveness have been the CTS and the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, or Hash’d al Shaabi) Iraqi Shi’a militia mobilized by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in 2014. PMF brigades hold the western outskirts of the city, but thus far have been restrained from entering it for fear of provoking sectarian violence with the mostly Sunni residents.

Daesh defenders, believed to number only from 3,000-5,000 at the outset of the battle, have had the luxury of fighting against only one axis of advance and within urban terrain filled with trapped civilians, which they have used as human shields. They mounted a particularly effective counterattack against the CTS using vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), which halted the initial offensive in mid-December. ISF casualties appear to be concentrated in the elite 1st Special Operations Brigade (the so-called “Golden Division”) of the CTS. An unnamed Pentagon source was quoted as stating that the Golden Division’s maneuver battalions had incurred “upwards of 50 percent casualties,” which, if sustained, would have rendered it combative ineffective in less than a month.

The Iraqi government has come to rely on the Golden Division to generate reliable offensive combat power. It spearheaded the attacks that recovered Tikrit, Ramadi, and Fallujah earlier in the year. Originally formed in 2004 as the non-sectarian Iraqi Special Operations Forces brigade, the Golden Division was amalgamated into the CTS in 2007 along with specialized counterterrorism and national police elements. Although intended for irregular warfare, the CTS appears to be the only Iraqi military force capable of effective conventional offensive combat operations, likely due to higher level of combat effectiveness relative to the rest of the ISF, as well as its interoperability with U.S. and Coalition supporting forces.

Historically, the Iraqi Army has not demonstrated a high level of overall combat effectiveness. Trevor Dupuy’s analysis of the performance of the various combatants in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War ranked the Iraqi Army behind that of the Israelis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Syrians. He estimated the Israelis to have a 3.43 to 1.00 combat effectiveness advantage over the Iraqis in 1973. Dupuy credited the Iraqis with improved effectiveness following the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War in his pre-war estimate of the outcome of the 1990-91 Gulf War. This turned out to be erroneous; overestimation of Iraqi combat effectiveness in part led Dupuy to predict a higher casualty rate for U.S. forces than actually occurred. The ineffective performance of the Iraqi Army in 2003 should have not surprised anyone.

The relative success of the CTS can be seen as either indicative of the general failure of the decade-long U.S. effort to rebuild an effective Iraqi military establishment, or as an exemplary success of the U.S. Special Operations Forces model for training and operating with indigenous military forces. Or both.

Economics of Warfare 6

Examining the sixth 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/

In this lecture, Dr. Spagat works from three existing database from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (run by a group in Sweden). We were aware of these when we were doing our work on insurgencies, but never tapped them. We probably would have at some point, if the work had continued.

Anyhow, Dr. Spagat continues with his analysis of civilian casualties in conflict. We certainly could have done something useful with his Civilian Targeting Index (CTI — defined on slide 3) and looking at whether it effected the outcome of an insurgency. Slide 4 is worth noting, as is slide 8.

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%206.pdf

On slide 6 is his four “key take-home” points. They are:

  1. “First, the majority (61%) of all formally organized actors in armed conflict during 2002-2007 refrained from killing civilians in deliberate, direct targeting…”
  2. “Second, actors were more likely to have carried out some degree of civilian targeting (CTI > 0), as opposed to none (CTI = 0), if they participated in armed conflict for three or more years rather than for one year….”
  3. “Third, among actors that targeted civilians (there were 88 of them), those that engaged in great scales of armed conflict concentrated less of their lethal behavior into civilian targeting and more into involvement with battle fatalities…”
  4. “Fourth, an actor’s likelihood and degree of targeting civilians was unaffected by whether it was a state or a non-state group.”

Now, granted this is a snap-shot of only five years, but it is one with more than 88 cases in it, but it is still interesting to note. None of the work we did support nor contradicts any of these results.

Slides 9 to 13 is a discussion of logistic regression and linear regression, which is something that I think everyone should understand, but won’t be surprised if our readers choose to skip it. There are some interesting (as always) Slides are pages 14, 16, 17 and 21. In fact, slide 21 is a pretty good to use in an argument with someone who thinks things are only getting worse. It is worth your while to look at it.

Starting on slide 22 to the end (slide 34), Dr. Spagat takes on counter-arguments developed as a result of examining World Health Surveys (WHS), which is a point worth noting. Lots of people like to throw around figures. These figures are not always very accurate.

Anyhow, these lectures are great to flip through, and if you actually carefully (and painfully) read through them, it is probably a better use of your time than most things you will do this week.

U.S. Relations with Russia

Suspect the basic nature of U.S. relations with Russia is going to be a issue for while. Note that in early December 27 Senators (12 Republicans and 15 Democrats) sent a letter to Trump: “The senators urged Trump to maintain sanctions against Russia “until key provisions of the Minsk Agreement are met,” and, notably, urges providing “defensive lethal assistance” to Ukraine.”

Link: 27-senators-12-republicans-statement-trump-ukraine-russia

Republican Senator John McCain spent this New Years in Kiev: us-ukraine-crisis-McCain

Earlier this week he was in the Baltic States (which are members of NATO).

The Senate is split 52-48 (Republican/Democrat). It takes only a handful of Republican senators working with the Democrats to influence, modify or overturn something they disagree with that the incoming administration would do. Trump, has indicated a more favorable position relative to Russia, as have several of his advisors like Flynn (nominated National Security Advisor) and Tillerson (nominated Secretary of State). This could end up generating an interesting (perhaps behind the scenes) tug-of-war between the President and Congress over our Russian policy. And then there is also the Russian hacking allegations.

…

P.S. A few more quotes from the early December letter written by 27 Senators:

Almost three years after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and military aggression in eastern Ukraine, daily ceasefire violations along the line of contact make a mockery of the Minsk Agreement and demonstrate that this conflict in the heart of Europe is far from over. 

Quite simply, Russia has launched a military land-grab in Ukraine that is unprecedented in modern European history. These actions in Crimea and other areas of eastern Ukraine dangerously upend well-established diplomatic, legal, and security norms that the United States and its NATO allies painstakingly built over decades.

Demographics of Israel and Palestine

  1. Population of Israel: 8,585,500 (2015)
    1. Jewish population: 6,119,000 (75%)
    2. Arab population: 1,688,600 (21%)
    3. Others: 349,700 (4%)
      1. This includes around 140,000 Druze
    4. Note: This equals 8,157,300 as data is from 2013 (I think).
    5. Annual growth rate: 2.0%
      1. Growth rate of Jewish population: 1.7%
      2. Growth rate of Arab population: 2.2%
    6. So Jewish population is around 8,585,500 times .75 = 6,439,125?
  2. Population of West Bank: 2,862,485
    1. Growth rate: 2.59%
    2. In 2014 population was 83% Arab, 17% Israeli Jewish and other
      1. 80-85% Muslim, 1 – 2.5% Christian, 12-14% Jewish.
    3. Jewish population is included in the Israeli figures
    4. So 2,862,485 x .83 = 2,375,863 Arabs?
  3. Population of Gaza Strip: 1,819,982
    1. Growth rate: 3.41%
    2. 98-99% Muslim, 0.7% Christian
  4. Population of East Jerusalem: (192,800)
  5. Total Palestinian Arab Population: 4,192,845 or greater (see below)

1. Total Jewish population in Israel and Palestine: 6,439,125

2. Total Arab population in Israel and Palestine: 5,884,445 or more

    A. Around 6.08 in 2014 according to Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics

    B. Around 6.2 million according to Israeli statistics

 

This is all drawn from two Wikipedia articles:

  1. Demographics_of_Israel

  2. Demographics_of_the_Palestinian_territories

  3. I will let you all sort out the details…as I am sure I made an error somewhere

Anyhow, the main point is in the areas of Israel, West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip there are over 6 million Jews and a little over 6 million Arabs (of which 1.7 million are Israeli Arabs). At some point in the near future (2020 according to one article I saw), Israeli and Palestinian Arabs will outnumber Israeli Jews across the area of Israel and Palestine. Right now there are effectively three states covering this area: Israel, Palestinian Authority (West Bank) and Gaza (under Hamas).

Top Defense Priorities

As of 1 December, according to a memo from the Trump transition team, the top defense priorities were (only four listed):

1) Develop a strategy to defeat/destroy ISIS,

2) Build a strong defense [Eliminate caps from Budget Control Act; improve force strength/size/readiness],

3) Develop a comprehensive USG cyberstrategy,

4) Find greater efficiencies [pursue/build on ‘great work’ led by DSD Work; open to new ideas from the Department].

 

Article is here: trump-administrations-top-defense-priorities

Now, I believe #1 is already being done…except maybe for the emphasis on “defeat/destroy.” “Contain, disrupt and reduce” may be more viable consideration. Pretty hard to “defeat and destroy” a guerilla movement that spans across multiple countries and continents. It will also take a decade or two (or more). It is kind of like “defeating and destroying” the anarchist movement or the communist movement a hundred years ago.

“Finding greater efficiencies” is an effort that many administrations have pursued. Traditionally there has been no significant impact from these efforts, although it is hard to argue that they don’t need to be done. I suspect it will be hard to fundamentally improve the system without significant changes in the civil service system, addressing means and methods of government management, and addressing the oversight of government programs by uniformed personnel. It may also require the restructuring of the contractors. Like any truly challenging problem, there are multiple aspects to addressing this.

I might also have a few other things on my top defense priorities list.

Economics of Warfare 5

Examining the fifth 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 is about regressions and logistics regressions. Now, I think everyone should take a econometrics course….but just a warning, this is all pretty dry stuff. So, if you choose to skip it, don’t blame you.

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%205.pdf

On the other hand, what he is discussing is using regression models to analyze the nature of the civilian casualties, including in the Rwandan genocide. This gets a little hard to discuss. On slide 11, you can learn that in the Kibuye Prefecture in 1994 there were 31,117 people killed by machete, 9,779 killed by clubs and 442 burned alive. Not exactly relaxing reading.

Slide 20 tracks Israeli and Palestinian deaths from 2000-2005, which is a lot less.

Anyhow, Dr. Spagat’s work often focuses on civilian casualties. These are often a significant part of warfare, even if we don’t particularly like to address it. For example,. the United States lost over 4,000 troops in Iraq 2003-2011. Iraq lost over 150,000 people during that time. The same pattern for Vietnam, where the United States lost over 58,000 people in what was the third bloodiest war in our history. Vietnam lost one to two million people !

I did attempt to address civilian casualties in our insurgency work. It is also addressed in my book America’s Modern Wars in Chapter 9 “Rules of Engagement and Measurements of Brutality” and Chapter 15 “The Burden of War.” I am not sure that this attention to civilian casualties was fully appreciated by our DOD customers, but it was there because sadly, it is always a significant part of warfare. Tragically, sometimes so is genocide, as recently demonstrated by ISIL. Dr. Spagat, in a course on the “Economics of Warfare,” is quite correct to focus on civilian casualties.

P.S. I have been informed by Dr. Spagat that he still has another ten lectures to post up on his blog.

 

Year Two

By the way, the blog is now a year old, with our first posts having been made on December 27, 2015. In this last year we made 259 posts and received 104 comments that we posted.

Going forward, we would like to tell you about all the new great new things we are going to do with the blog, but in fact, right now we have no plans to do anything different. Our focus is going to remain on quantitative analysis of warfare, we are going to avoid being a daily news blog (because they are several blogs that already do this and also it takes a lot of time), and we will continue to discuss whatever strikes our fancy. We do try to stay away from politics, but there is a point when it crosses over with policy, so hard to avoid entirely.

The one thing that is missing is “guest bloggers.” We only had one such blog post this last year. We hope to have a few more this year, but have not aggressively sought it out. We would like to invite any of our erudite readers out there to contact us if they have something they feel is worth posting.

This blog is supposed to be a “not to interfere” effort, in that we have various writing, marketing and analytical efforts on-going, and the blog is not supposed to subtract any significant time from those efforts. These other efforts are our primary focus. This blog is something that we are supposed to be doing in our “quiet moments.”

Anyhow, wish you all a happy New Year and hope that 2017 will be a good year for you all.

Fresh Advance in Mosul

By the way, there is still a war going on in Iraq, and it is going slowly. The Iraqi’s actually made a good timely advance up to the city, isolated the city, entered east Mosul….and then things have slow down…considerably….immeasurably: Fresh Advance in Mosul

To summarize:

  1. They have 1/4 of Mosul.
  2. They will start advancing again in a couple of days.
  3. Americans will be deployed in the city and with the units.
  4. It was a planned “operational refit” (should I take this statement at face value?)
  5. “A heavily armoured unit of several thousand federal police was redeployed from the southern outskirts two weeks ago to reinforce the eastern front after army units advised by the Americans suffered heavy losses in an Islamic State counter-attack.”
  6. Three U.S. servicemen have been killed in northern Iraq in the past 15 months.
  7. The article states that there are up to 1.5 million people still in Mosul. This is higher than some other estimates I have seen.