Category China

Measuring the Effects of Combat in Cities, Phase III – part 2

U.S. Army troops in Hue, South Vietnam monitor the streets below during the Tet Offensive, 1968. [Bettmann/CORBIS]

Another part of our Phase III effort was to look at post-World War II cases. This is, by its nature, invariably one-sided data. Maybe at some point we will get the Chinese, North Koreans, Vietnamese, Syrians, etc. to open up their archives to us researchers, but, except for possibly Vietnam, I don’t think that is going to happen any time in the near future. So, we ended up building our post-World War II cases primarily from U.S. data.

We added 10 engagements from the Inchon/Seoul operation in 1950. For Vietnam we added  65 division-level urban engagements from the Tet Offensive in 1968 and 57 division-level non-urban engagements. We also added 56 battalion-level urban engagements from the Tet Offensive (all in Hue). We had 14 division-level urban engagements and 65 division-level non-urban engagements from various contingencies and conventional operations from 1944 to 2003. This included ELAS Insurgency, Arab-Isreali Wars, Panama, Mogadishu, the 1991 Gulf War and Baghdad in 2003. We also added 9 battalion-level urban cases, mostly from Beirut 1982-1984.

To add it all up this was:

                                                 Urban       Non-urban

Phase I (ETO)                              46              91

Phase II (Kharkov/Kursk)             51              65

Phase III (Manila/PTO)                53              41

Post-WWII – Division-level           89            123

Post-WWII – Battalion-level          65               0

                                                   ——-         ——

Total cases                                 304           319

This is a lot of cases for comparisons.

Just to show how they match up (from page 28 of the report):

Attackers in Division-Level Engagements:

Urban

PTO Kor Tet Oth ETO EF (Ger Atk) EF (Sov Atk)
Avg Str/day 12,099 28,304 6,294 10,903 34,601 17,080 17,001
Avg Cas 78 30 94 254 178 86 371
Avg Cas/day 78 30 39 59 169 86 371
Avg % Loss/day 0.63 0.71 0.78 0.56 0.50 0.49 1.95
Wgt % Loss/day 0.65 0.71 0.62 0.54 0.49 0.50 2.18

 

Non-urban

PTO Tet Oth ETO EF (Ger Atk) EF (Sov Atk)
Avg Str/day 17,445 13,232 18,991 21,060 27,083 27,044
Avg Cas 663 44 377 469 276 761
Avg Cas/day 221 22 191 237 206 653
Avg % Loss/day 0.83 0.19 1.56 1.09 1.00 2.39
Wgt % Loss/day 1.27 0.17 1.01 1.13 0.76 2.41

I will pick up more on the Phase III effort in a subsequent posting (a part 3 to this series). These charts are also on page 238 of War by Numbers.

 

P.S. The blog the image was taken from (it is a collection of pictures taken from the fighting in Hue): https://vulep-photo.blogspot.com/2013/01/hue-1968-tet-mau-than_3410.html

 

Future Conventional Warfare Scenarios

What are the U.S. Armed Forces’ potential conventional warfare missions?  Is conventional warfare gone, leaving the U.S. Army conducting special ops, training, coordinating air and drone strikes, providing counterinsurgency support, and generally just kicking down doors?

Well, there are still a few potential conventional warfare scenarios out there, even if they have a low probability of occurring:

  1. Korea: We still have the majority of the 2nd Infantry Division deployed in Korea as a reserve force for the Republic of Korea (ROK) Army. If a war blows up in Korea, then we are immediately right in the middle of a conventional war. It is 1950 all over again. Amid all the “fire and fury” type comments, I do consider this to be a low odds of occurring. Still, it is one conventional warfare mission that has existed since 1950 and does not appear to be going away.
  2. Taiwan: I don’t think China is going to invade Taiwan (their third largest trading partner), but stranger things have happened. I believe we are informally committed to defend Taiwan if this happens. We have no ground troops there.
  3. Ukraine: We have no commitment to defend Ukraine. On the other hand, if Russia rolls across the border with tanks and is heading towards Kiev, then we may decide we need to intervene. Exactly with what forces we would use is a question, but this is potentially a mission in the future. I don’t think it is likely. If Russia was going to conduct a conventional invasion of  Ukraine, it would have done so in 2014.
  4. Baltic States: On the other hand, we do have a commitment to defend the three Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia). They are members of NATO. Right now, with the forces currently in place, a Russian conventional invasion would sweep over these three countries in a matter of days. Then what? The U.S. would be challenged to be able to quickly move a single armored or mechanized division there, let alone the several divisions it would probably take to re-claim them. We currently are not defending them and do not have the ability to quickly re-take them. That said, the odds of Russia doing this is very, very close to zero, because they do end up in a war with 29 nations. This is probably not the best use of their time.
  5. Belarus: On the other hand, I don’t rule out tanks rolling into Belarus at some point in the future. Lukashenko, the Belarus dictator, is 63 years old, and these guys don’t live forever. Once he is gone, will Belorus undergo a calm transition of power to a new president (for life)….or does Russia take this opportunity to reclaim Belarus? Unlike Ukraine, there is not a strong nationalist group that is clearly ready to fight off any Russian invaders. If Russia did decide to take Belarus (probably making sure they were invited, like they were in Afghanistan in 1979), is there anything we could do about it? How concerned would we be about it?
  6. Georgia: Russian already had a five day war with Georgia in 2008. Russia probably could have overrun Georgia if they wanted to. They probably can now. It is a very small country and geographically isolated from NATO. I don’t rule out it becoming a battlefield in the future. Not sure what the United States could do about it.
  7. Iran: While I don’t think that the U.S. will ever invade Iran, I would have said the same thing about Iraq in 2000. Of course, Iran is a country with a population more more than twice that of Iraq. Invading Iraq in 2003 led to lots of long-term complications. Invading Iran might get even more difficult.
  8. The mission not yet named: The last 30 years are notable in that the United States has been dragged into three major wars rather suddenly. At the beginning of 1990, I don’t recall any defense analyst saying the United States was about to enter into a war with Iraq for the sake of saving Kuwait (who we had no alliance with). Yet, less than a year later, this is exactly what we did, and it was done with a large conventional force of nine deployed U.S. divisions. In 2000, I don’t recall too many defense analysts saying that we would soon be invading Afghanistan and Iraq. These missions came rather suddenly. So, one must always assume that there is a possible conventional mission at any time in any place. It has happened twice in the last 30 years. These are hard to plan for and to structure forces for, yet there is clearly a need for a mobile conventional force just in case.

Anyhow, that list appears to cover the possible conventional warfare missions for the United States right now. The one with the highest probability of occurring is “the mission not yet named.” There are many other flash points in the world, but most of them are not ones that would attract American conventional ground forces. Still, as shown by Kuwait in 1990 and Iraq in 2003, we can end up involved in a conventional conflict with very little notice. This is a far cry from the days of the Cold War when the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were lined up along the border of Germany. The future ain’t what it used to be, to borrow a quote.

Korean War Story

My father was a forward observer in Korea. In 1953, him and another U.S. soldier were camped out in a foxhole between the lines. It was nighttime and they were making dinner.

The U.S. command had requested that its soldiers should try to capture some Chinese soldiers. As added incentive, the people who captured one would get a three-day pass to Japan. This was a pretty good incentive for those living out in the field. So the two foxhole buddies were sitting making dinner and of course talking about what they would do on their three-day pass to Japan, assuming they could capture a Chinese soldier.

Suddenly, a Chinese soldier stuck his head over the rim of the foxhole. They saw him, yelled “There is one” and immediately leaped for him. The poor Chinese soldier took off running. They ran for a mile or two through the “no mans land” between the lines (which would became the DMZ) and eventually the two larger American’s were able to run him down and capture him.

Now, they were in the middle of the (soon be called) DMZ, in the middle of the night, dragging along a captured Chinese soldier, and not quite sure where their foxhole was. Furthermore, in their haste to get him, they forgot to grab their guns. For the two unarmed Americans dragging a Chinese prisoner through the dark, it was a very long and tense walk back to their foxhole.

They did get their three-day pass to Japan.

 

Note: This is a story told to me by my father many years ago. It was not written down and I have never checked the veracity of it. I have no doubt that it is mostly true, but one cannot rule out a little exaggeration for the sake of a good yarn. We do not know what became of the Chinese soldier.

Korean War Records

Not much to say about captured records in the Korea War as I have never checked on them. I assume there must be some taken from North Korean and Chinese units and they are files away somewhere. My father did capture a Chinese soldier during the Korean War.

Oddly enough, there not been much done in the world of quantitative analysis on the Korea War outside of the work that ORO (Operations Research Office) did in the 1950s. We have never done any significant work on the Korean War. In the late 1980s we did explore conducting some analysis of Korean War battalion-level combat. As part of that effort Trevor Dupuy and I went over to the National Archives at Suitland and pulled up some U.S. Army Korea War records. They appeared to be quite complete. There were a couple of French infantry battalions attached to the U.S. Division and we appear to have good strength and loss data for them also.

Later, in 1989, Trevor Dupuy arranged with China to conduct a joint research project. It was funded by OSD Net Assessment (Andy Marshall). Trevor Dupuy really wanted to do some two-sided analysis of combat with the Chinese Army in Korea, but apparently getting access to the Chinese Army records was still too sensitive at that point. So, instead, they arranged to do a joint research contract on a more general and less sensitive theme like perceptions of each sides intentions during the Korean War. But then in June 1989 the Chinese government rolled over the student protestors in Tiananmen Square with tanks. That ended all joint research projects for many years.

We never got back to trying to conduct a joint research project on combat with China. Instead in 1993, we started a research project on Kursk using Russia records.

Trevor Dupuy did mention that the Chinese informally told him that the United States often overestimated the size of the Chinese forces they were facing, and often underestimated the casualties the Chinese took. I have no idea how valid that is.

 

Anyhow, this is an extended discussion of captured records originally inspired by this post:

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents

Oil Prices Dropping

By the way, the price of oil is dropping:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/05/01/oil-inches-down-on-china-economy-worries.html

I gather the reasons are because of a slow down of demand in China (which is interesting in and of itself) and Libyan oil returning to the market (which is a good sign). Brent Crude is now getting near $50 a barrel, whereas several weeks ago it was at $58.

This, of course, has a big impact in countries like Russia, where oil is a major percent of the government budget (ruble is at 57 to a dollar today) and Venezuela, which is currently in turmoil.

 

Chinese Economy

Economic slowdowns get my attention. Latest article from CNBC at China: China’s Economy Doesn’t Look so Wonderful

Article discusses money reserves and other issues, but the major points are:

  1. “She estimates that about $65 to $70 billion leaves the country every month, including more than $80 billion in January alone.”
  2. “The eventual deflating of China’s property market is a constant concern for those worried about a sharp slowdown in the world’s second-largest economy.”
  3. According to peerform reviews, they did manage to get the word “inscrutable” put into an article on China (“That means more loans were issued by unregulated financial institutions, or the shadow banking system—a growing and largely inscrutable area of China’s financial system.”)
  4.  “China reported growth of 6.7 percent in 2016, the slowest in 26 years.”
  5. “Most economists outside China doubt the credibility of its growth announcements.”
  6. “That said, China watchers are generally confident in Beijing’s ability to prevent a sharp economic slowdown…”

South China Sea

The South China Sea has moved front-and-center as a major issue (along with the one China policy): prevent-china-taking-over-territory

Just a few notes:

  1. Tillerson’s statement on Jan. 11 during confirmation hearings was “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.”
  2. Presidential spokesman Sean Spicer said yesterday “The U.S. is going to make sure that we protect our interests there.”
  3. And from the article: “Aides have said that Trump plans a major naval build-up in East Asia to counter China’s rise.”

Not sure what the “clear signal” is and how confrontational this will be. Right now, it is just talk. But, does this mean that the Trump administration is intending to expand the navy?

Economics of Warfare 9

Examining the ninth 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 opens with a discussion on government bond markets and World War II. As a military historian, this is not an approach I ever considered. Slide 3 is interesting. There is a noticeable decline in French government bond prices in the months leading up to May 1940 (the month the Germans actually invaded France). There is then a rather abrupt break in the graph.

Starting with slide 5 Dr. Spagat goes into a discussion of Angola and Jonas Savimbi (just to refresh your memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Savimbi). The interesting result is that (slide 19), the end of the Savimbi rebellion (as determined by the date of his death) “…was bad for the diamond companies operating in Angola”….and interestingly enough (slide 23): “An important conclusion from the study is that it might be wrong to assume that businesses operating in war-torn countries and the government officials in these countries are all automatically in favor of pace. Influential actors may actually benefit economically from the continuation of a war.”

Dr. Spagat these switches to the ETA and the Basque Independence Movement in Spain (slide 24). This was a very small movement (see slide 25). The conclusion (slide 33) is that “…terrorism has been costly for the Basque region of Spain.”

Then Dr. Spagat switches gears to comparing European economic growth to Chinese economic growth (slide 34) over the course of around 1800 years. This is using Angus Maddison’s figures, which was an effort to measure the world economy by country over the course of history. I just happen to have a copy of his book, The World Economy, sitting on my desk. Strongly recommend everyone own a copy. Anyhow, the discussion from slide 35-38 addresses a hypothesis by Voightlander and Voth (their paper is linked on slide 35) that “They claim that Europe had a lot more wars than China did and that this actually explains why Europe grew more than China.” I am not sure I buy into this suggestion, and am I not sure that Dr. Spagat does either, but it is an interesting viewpoint.

Anyhow, not sure what the main takeaway is from all this, but it is damn interesting.

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%209.pdf

 

Pivot to Russia?

This is an interesting article on the U.S. deliberately pivoting from China to Russia: 45-years-ago-kissinger-envisioned-a-pivot-to-russia-will-trump-make-it-happen?

I am not sure I buy into any of it !!!…..but it got my attention.

The argument:
  1. 45 years ago Kissinger told Nixon that the next president would have to pivot towards Russia in 20 years.
  2. In effect, he envisioned the United States playing a balance of power role between China and Russia, moving back and forth between the two.
  3. Is this what Trump is doing with his recent negative comments on China and positive comments on Russia?
Factiods that got my attention:
  1. “As a means to block the spread of Soviet influence in Southeast Asia, Carter administration officials approved of the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, which occurred shortly after Deng Xiaoping concluded the first trip of a Chinese leader to the United States in January 1979.” …..Really?
  2. “China’s economy was once a fraction of the Soviet economy; now it’s about five times larger.” …….it is always useful to look at GDP.

Questions II

Back on November 9 I made a long post about what our foreign and defense policies might be in the new administration. At the time, I really did not know, so I threw out a range of options on 14 different issues. That post is here: Questions

We now have a team nominated, although there are more positions to fill. It consists of:

Secretary of State: Rex Tillerson (head of Exxon)
Secretary of Defense: James Mattis (retired Marine Corps general)
National Security Advisor: Michael T. Flynn (retired Army Lt. General)
    Deputy National Security Advisor: K.T. McFarland (Fox News commentator)
Ambassador to the United Nations: Nikki Haley (Governor of South Carolina).
    This is apparently a cabinet-level position.
Secretary of Commerce: Wilbur Ross (businessman)
Homeland Security: John F. Kelly (retired Marine Corps General)

 

All these require confirmation by the senate except for the National Security Advisor (Flynn) and his Deputy (McFarland).

Anyhow, I am not sure I have answers to any of the 14 questions I posed. In fact, the only one that has been publicly discussed (#12) I whiffed on and provided no options. It simply read: “12. And then there is East Asia (China, the two Koreas, Taiwan, Japan, Philippines, etc.).”

I gather China is going to be a central issue in the Trump administration from the start. Not sure how much impact this will have on national security. Will it primarily be an argument over trade?