Category Insurgency & Counterinsurgency

Sending More Troops to Afghanistan

Well, the head of the U.S. Central Command General Joseph Votel says that we need more troops in Afghanistan: Afghanistan-require-more-troops

This is not a particularly surprising statement. We currently have 8,400 there. This does not include U.S. contractors, U.S. police trainers and such, which still have a reduced presence there. I wonder what the proposed level will be. Last month the U.S. Afghanistan commander General John Nicholson said several thousand more troops were needed.

Anyhow, this is not a surprising conclusion. See America’s Modern Wars, in particular the chapter on Afghanistan; although the focus of our analysis was the number of troops required to fight an insurgency, vice the number of foreign trainers needed to support the indigenous troops fighting an insurgency.

I am guessing as both Nicholson and Votel have said it that it is now administration policy.

1979 to present

We try to stay away from politics in this blog, which is hard to do when discussing national security policy. Still, there are enough political and opinion piece websites and blogs out there, that we do not wish to add to the noise! This article by Major Danny Sjursen borders on the edge of being overtly political but I found it very interesting regardless: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165261

I have not read his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge but I did invest parts of two chapters in my book, America’s Modern Wars, discussing the surge in Iraq and its later adaptation to Afghanistan. His book will also be added to my growing reading list (right now I am struggling with getting the final edits to War by Numbers completed on time…and should not be blogging at all).

Anyhow, I do like his theme that U.S. involvement and policies in the Middle East fundamentally started shifted with the events on 1979. I think it is a useful timeline.

 

Troop Increase in Afghanistan?

Nicely prepared article that just reinforces my last post on the subject: Trump Mulls US Troop Surge in Afghanistan

  1. 8,400 U.S. troops and 4,900 from 38 other NATO countries.
  2. 57.2% of the countries 407 districts are under Afghan government control (and it used to be better).
  3. In 2010, the US/NATO peak strength was 130,000

We await a decision, but expect that it will be to increase U.S. troops levels (and keep on keeping on).

Stalemate in Afghanistan

By the way, there is a still a war going on in Afghanistan, by most accounts, it is not going that well; and we probably need to increase our troop levels. On Thursday General John Nicholson, commanding general of NATO forces in Afghanistan, told congress “I believe we are in a stalemate.”: nato-shortfall-troops-afghanistan-us-general

Also: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/u-general-calls-more-troops-003147055.html

And: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/02/09/top-us-general-says-afghanistan-war-at-stalemate-more-troops-needed.html

I have no reason to quibble with that assessment. Victory is certainly not just around the corner.

Some data from these articles:

  1. NATO has 13,300 troops in Afghanstan, about half of them American (8,400)
  2. Afghan losses in the first ten months of 2016 were 6,785 killed, an increase of a third over 2015.
  3. There were 11,500 civilians killed or injured in 2016, the most since the UN began keeping records in 2009 (nearly 3,500 killed and nearly 8,000 wounded).
  4. Afghan government forces control no more than two-thirds of national territory (60% according to another article).
  5. “We have roughly a two-to-one ratio of contractors to soldiers,” said Nicholson.
    1. So, this works out to be 17,000 contractors, 8,400 American troops and 4,900 other NATO troops.
  6. Cost of the 16 year war so far: around 2,000 American lives and $117 billion.

Needless to say, General Johnson has recommended that we increase troop levels there. He has asked for several thousand more. We did have around 100,000 troops there in 2011, now we have less than 10,000.

Timeline for Mosul and Raqqa

OK, we now have a new timeline for the taking of Mosul (and Raqqa): us-commander-mosul-raqqa-retaken-6-months

A few highlights:

  1. 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.”
  2. Fight for the western half of Mosul to begin in days.
  3. “But on the ground inside Mosul, Iraqi troops said as they neared the Tigris, IS fighters launched few car bombs and largely fled their advances—unlike the heavy resistance they faced in the first few weeks of combat inside the city.”
  4. “ISIL morphing into an insurgent threat, that’s the future,” Townsend said.
  5. Concerning Raqqa: “What we would expect is that within the next few weeks the city will be nearly completely isolated….”

Anyhow……keep waiting for the point when ISIL realizes that an insurgency can’t hold ground forever against a conventional force and decides to go back to being an guerrilla force. This offensive is taking a very long time.

 

Economics of Warfare 12

Examining the twelfth 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 paper continues with discussion of the studies done by Fearon and Laitin (lecture 11, slide 5) and Collier and Hoeffler (lecture 11, slide 15) on civil wars. The lecture basically goes through and tests or challenges their papers in two areas: 1) ability to predict, and 2) causality.

Warning: This lecture may cause you to lose confidence in multi-variant regression models.

I already had. If you go to my book America’s Modern Wars, in Chapter 6 (pages 63-69) I propose a two-variable model of insurgency success or failure. I then tested the model back to the cases I used to make up the model and the model predicted the correct result in 53 out of 68 cases used (77.9%). The model predicted incorrectly in 15 cases, or over 20% of the time. Now, if I was at a blackjack table in Vegas, I would be pretty damn happy to predict the outcome of game almost 80% of the time. The problem I had is that I could not find a clear third variable. I could easily explain away why 7 of the 15 cases were incorrectly predicted, although they were for a variety of reasons; but I could not easily explain why the other 8 cases were incorrectly predicted. In three of the cases the model predicted a red win (insurgents won) when the blue side won (the counterinsurgents); and in four of the cases the model predicted a blue win when the red side won (page 67). There was clearly a third, fourth or fifth variable in play here, but I could never figure out exactly what it was, and it was probably multiple variables. This was the next step and would have been pursued further if we could have obtained further funding.

Of course, we could have just added three or more additional variables to the model and this would have certainly improved the fit….but what are we really doing? This is the point where I begin to loose confidence in adding more variables, so I choose not to.

Getting back to Dr. Spagat’s lecture, one person analyzed the two papers by Fearon and Laitin (called FL) and Collier and Hoeffler (called CH) as to their predictive value. They were not very good at prediction, and sometimes gave false predictions (slide 6). Note that the “false positives” outnumbered the correct predictions for the Collier and Hoeffler model.

On slide 10, Dr. Spagat shows the variables used in each model and how much each variable impacts the results. You will note that one to three variables in each model provide far more explanatory value than the rest of the variables. GDP sort of stands out in both models, although one uses GDP while the other uses GDP growth, which are very different values. There are also some odd variables in there (for example using “squared commodity dependence” in addition to using “commodity dependence” in one model).

Dr. Spagat then goes into the issue of causality, ending up with a discussion on rainfall. Unfortunately, the real world is more complex than the models. A regression model assumes that the inputs are “independent” variables and the output is a “dependent” variable. Yet, in the real world, there can be another variable out there that is influencing both the “independent” and the “dependent” variable. Also, the alleged “dependent” variable can sometimes influence the independent variables. This he discusses in slide 12 (“This is, while it is true that low or negative growth might cause conflict is also true that conflict might cause low or negative growth.”).

Note that Dr. Spagat does address using different measurements of variables in slide 22 (rainfall levels vice growth rates in rainfall). This is an issue. Does one use an independent variable with an clear value (like a GDP figure) or does one use the change in the value of the variable over time as the measure (like percent change in GDP)?

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2012.pdf

 

The Yemen Raid

Hard to ignore this one. According to White House reports 14 members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) were killed. We lost one person, three  four injured and a $70 million Osprey. There were 10, 15, or 16 civilians killed. According to one report there were a total of 30 people killed (14 + 16 = 30?).

A few news reports:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/civilians-likely-killed-us-raid-yemen-pentagon-014654537.html

This article provides the figures of 16 civilians killed (8 women and 8 children)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/us-military-probing-more-possible-civilian-deaths-in-yemen-raid_us_5892bf5de4b0af07cb6b8930?

This article provides the estimate of 30 people killed at the site, including 10 civilians. It also say at least 15 civilians killed, according to U.S. military officials. “The military officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said “a brutal firefight” killed Owens and at least 15 Yemeni women and children.” It also notes that “Some of the women were firing at the U.S. force, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis told reporters.”

Also:

U.S. military officials….said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced Al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.

One of the three U.S. officials said on-the-ground surveillance of the compound was “minimal, at best.”

“The decision was made—to leave it to the incoming administration, partly in the hope that more and better intelligence could be collected,” that official said.

There were two Osprey’s used in the raid. One suffered engine failure (remember Operation Eagle Claw: Operation_Eagle_Claw).

The UK Guardian is more direct: http://theweek.com/speedreads/677442/trumps-disastrous-first-military-strike-previously-been-rejected-by-Obama

[Colonel John] Thomas said he did not know why the prior administration did not authorize the operation, but said the Obama administration had effectively exercised a “pocket veto” over it.

A former official said the operation had been reviewed several times, but the underlying intelligence was not judged strong enough to justify the risks, and the case was left to the incoming Trump administration to make it own judgment.”

Colonel Thomas is the Central Command spokesman:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-acknowledges-civilian-deaths-in-trump-authorized-yemen-raid/2017/02/01/e1f56c3c-e8e0-11e6-80c2-30e57e57e05d_story.html?utm_campaign=pubexchange&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=huffingtonpost.com&utm_term=.76e64d7a6149

Anyhow, I think people will be talking about this one for a while.

 

Country Size

This is a continuation of my previous post: Economics of Warfare 11. It is based upon a review of Michael Spagat’s lecture: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2011.pdf

The Fearon and Laitin study on the “Determinants of Civil War Onset” (link to paper on slide 5) had eight factors that influenced that chance of a new civil war (they are listed on slides 8 and 10). One of them is “population (positive effect)”. This is summarized by Michael Spagat as “more people, more chances for war.” The Collier and Hoeffler paper came to similar conclusions on this (link to paper on slide 15). As Michael Spagat summarizes it “Population size is still positive and significant” (slide 16). And then there is a third paper by Hegre and Sambanis (like to paper on slide 23) that states that “country size (population and territory) is positively associated with civil war onset” (slide 24).

Now when we did our insurgency studies we also saw the same thing as it related to winning or losing an insurgency. It show up in our Iraq Casualty Estimate (see America’s Modern Wars, Chapter 1) and in subsequent analysis. Quite simply, insurgencies in large countries were often successful. For example, when we looked at all 10 insurgencies with foreign intervention where the indigenous population was greater than 9 million, the insurgents won 80% of the time (see page 47). In our original Iraq estimate for the cases we had, we found the insurgencies won 71% of the time in large countries (290,079-2,381,740 square kilometers…14 cases); 100% of the time in populous countries (population of 9,529,000 or higher…7 cases); and 78% of time in countries with a large border (which is probably related to country size). This is on pages 17-18.

Apparently size matters when it comes to violence. I am not sure of the cause-and-effect here. Obviously, there are many other factors at play. The Symbonese Liberation Army (SLA)…the people who kidnapped Patty Hearst…were a small urban insurgency operating in a large populous country (the United States). It fizzled quickly. So, it certainly does not mean any insurgency in any large place is an issue. But, there does seem to be some correlation here that continues to haunt analysis of insurgencies and the onset of civil war (which are two different subjects, but somewhat related).

Economics of Warfare 11

Examining the eleventh 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 discusses analysis of cross-country datasets, correlations, and then discussed some problems with statistical testing in general. This is worth reading carefully in its entirety.

The datasets they are discussing in the first slides I assume are from the “correlates of war” (COW) dataset, a publically available data set that many in academia have used. We have never used it. When we created the MISS (Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets…now called DISS), we built them entirely from our own research.

He then looks at two different studies on the probability of conflict, one done by Fearon and Laitin (slide 5) and the other done by Collier and Hoeffler (slide 15). Even though they are based upon the same data, they produced somewhat different results (all, of course, to 90% or 95% confidence intervals). He summarizes the conclusions of the Fearon and Laitin study on slides 8 and 10 and the conclusions to the Collier and Hoeffler study on slides 16 and 18. It is worth comparing the differences.

Throughout this paper, he starts giving warnings about the problems with this analysis. First he discusses “story lines” on slides 12 – 14. This is important. One you have a correlation….then most people are clever enough to be able to explain why such a correlation exists, be it right or wrong.

But the part of the lecture that hit home with me starts with the statement that “These reported results may just have come out out that way by luck or chance.” (slide 20). The cartoon on slide 22 makes the point. Basically, if you test 20 different things, even if they are completely irrelevant, even to a 95% confidence interval; then with average luck you will get at least one correlation! Test enough things, and you will get a correlation. By the same token, add enough variables to your regression model and you will get a fit.

This is done all the time and I did discuss it in America’s Modern Wars, page 73-75 on a study done by CAA (Center for Army Analysis) in 2009 using our MISS. As I note in the book they identified 34 variables and then built a regression model based upon 11 of them and then boiled the final model down to four: 1) Number of Red Factions, 2) Counterinsurgent per Insurgent Ratio (Peak), 3) Counterinsurgent Developed Nation and 4) Political Concept. As their model was based on force ratio and political concept, it was similar to my regression model, except they added two more variables to the model. The problem is that one of those variables, “Number of Red Factions,” should not have been added. As I note in my book “In our original research we did not systematically and rigorously establish a count of factions for insurgency…. It should not have been used as a variable without further research.”

To continue from my book: “My fear it that this variable (“number of factions”) worked in their regression model because it was helping to shape the curve even though there is not a clear cause-and-effect relationship here. Also, because of the methodology they choose, which was establishing variables based upon statistical significance, as opposed to there being a solid theoretical basis for it, then I believe that statistically there should be around two ‘false’ correlations among those 11 variables.”

I end up concluding: “My natural tendency as a modeler was to make sure I had clearly identified cause-and-effect relationships before I moved forward. That is why my approach starts simply (two variables) and moves forward from there. It is also why I independently examined each possible variable in some depth. In addition, I reviewed and examined a range of theorists before proceeding (see Chapter Seventeen). I have had the experience of dumping lots of variables into a regression model, and lo-and-behold, something fits. It is important to make sure you have clearly established cause-and-effect.”

Anyhow, what Dr. Spagat warns of on slide 22 is what some people are actually doing. It is not a mistake made by grad students, but a mistake that a professional DOD analytical organization has done.

Enough preaching; the link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2011.pdf

 

Economics of Warfare 10

Examining the tenth 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 starts with a discussion of coups and assassinations, specifically focusing on a study of “CIA-supported coups.” There are five of them: Iran (1953), Chile (1973), Guatemala (1954), Congo (DRC) (1960) and Cuba (1961). All of these are over 40 years ago.  The chart on page 4, listing some of our nefarious operations is worth a glance. I find it curious that “Project Camelot” is listed, which was simply a research project done being done by the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) that got bad press. A timeline for the five coups are provided on slide 6. Of course, being economists, they tie all these events to stock prices. Still, it is worth looking at slide 8, discussing some points related to the Guatemala coup, as is the following slide, listing expropriated companies. They then look at the effects of secret coup authorizations on stock returns (hey, I thought they were secret !!!). The kicker is slide 16 “The results suggest that US foreign policy was operating as a tool of a handful of private companies and the individuals involved were profiteering off their influence on the US government.” Having never really analyzed this issue myself, I am hesitant to comment on it.

On slide 17 they switch to a study on assassinations. On slide 19 it is stated they came up with 298 assassination attempts since 1875 (to 2002) of which 59 were successful and 47 were not “serious attempts.” So, 23.5% of serious attempts succeed? How many times did they try to assassinate French president Charles De Gualle? Oh, and 55% of them were done by gun, 31% by explosive device (slide 20). Guns succeeded 31% of time, while explosive devices only succeeded 7% of the time. The “other category,” which apparently includes “stoning” succeeded 44% of the time! Slide 23 provides assassination attempts (and successes) over time, with World War II (1939-1945) being a particularly peaceful period of time (as far as assassinations go). The presentation then goes into a long discussion on the impact of assassinations on war, with their conclusions presented on slide 33. Basically it is 1) “There is some evidence that having a successful assassination attempt rather than a failed one increase the probability that an intense war will end.” and 2) “There is evidence that having a successful assassination attempt rather than a failed one increases the probability that a moderate war will turn into an intense war.” So….might work for you, might work against you?

In my book America’s Modern Wars, we do briefly discuss decapitating insurgencies (page 151-153). We also did not come up with a clear answer. We only had about dozen cases to look at, and of the four we examined in depth, in all cases the insurgency still won. Our conclusions were (page 153): “Now this is not to say we should not go after insurgent leadership when we have the chance. We obviously should. But, it is to stress that you should be careful about giving ‘decapitation’ too much importance as a strategic answer to your counterinsurgent problem.” and “Still, if you have the means to try decapitation, it is important to do so in such a way that you do not kill civilians or give them propaganda tools that they can use. In the end, if you are losing the propaganda war while you are trying to decapitate, then you are working against yourself.”  

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2010.pdf