Category Insurgency & Counterinsurgency

The Islamic State is in Retreat

[Photo deleted at the request of AFP]

An interesting article today in the Washington Post (photo from Huffington Post):

The Islamic State is in Retreat

A few lines caught my attention:

  1. “The U.S. military estimated earlier this year that the Islamic State had lost 40 percent of the territory it controlled at its peak in 2014.”
  2. “Shadadi was going to be a major six-week operation….Instead, they completely collapsed.”
  3. “We could probably liberate Mosul tomorrow…”
  4. “…troops encountered little resistance, overrunning five mostly empty villages ahead of retreating militant fighters.”
  5. “…it is starting to become possible to foresee the group’s ultimate defeat, said Knights, who thinks that could come by the end of next year.”

Of course, by establishing an “Islamic State,” a guerilla movement has now developed a conventional mission to hold territory. This allows us to develop a more conventional war against them. There may still be a guerilla movement to deal with after the Islamic State has been reduced.

 

 

Sortie Counts

-1x-1 (2)

OK…..so U.S. has flown more than 55,000 sorties since August 2014 (actually we started our first air missions on 8 August…so almost 19 months).

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-16/u-s-bombing-of-islamic-state-fell-to-8-month-low-in-february?cmpid=yhoo.headline

Russian flew 9,000 sorties in 5 1/2 months (see two posts below).

55,000/19 = 2,895 sorties a month

9,000/5.5 = 1,636 sorties a month

 

 

Left Behind

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Nice article in the Economist:

http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21694996-putin-appears-turn-hard-power-diplomacy-russians-show-their-hand

The interesting point is that they give stats as to what they are leaving behind (have no idea how they know this):

The first is that Russia is not pulling out its forces completely. It will retain its naval presence in Tartus; at least a dozen fast jets will continue to fly from its air base near Latakia; about 1,000 military advisers and special forces will stay; and the recently-installed S-400 air defence system covering the north-west of the country will also be kept in place. Should the fragile “cessation of hostilities” that Russia and America brokered last month fall apart, it can re-escalate very quickly. But for now, Russia can cut the $3m a day cost of its military operation, while preserving much of the leverage it has bought.

Not sure how they got the price tag either. Very cheap compared to U.S. deployments (which usually are in the billions). Maybe we can contract them.

Short and Sweet

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 It would be nice to have short, quick, sharp interventions. Basically, go into a troubled country, kick tail, and then leave shortly thereafter with everything resolved. Sort of like we did in Libya in 2011; or that peacekeeping mission in Lebanon in 1982-1984 that was effectively ended by the barracks bombing that killed 241 Marines; or the brief humanitarian mission to Somalia 1992-1994 that generated the book and movie Black Hawk Down; or the 1991 Gulf War; or one-year deployment to Bosnia in 1995; or any number of short and sweet interventions that were not always so sweet and short.

Obviously the real “short and sweet” list is pretty short. Panama 1989, Grenada 1984 and….and….and…… Most commitments either take much longer that that (like Bosnia), or the conflict continues rattling on long after we left (pretty much the rest of the cases mentioned in the first paragraph), and sometimes they require us to re-engage or they mutate in ways we did not expect (for example: Libya and Somalia). Getting in, kicking tail, taking names, and getting out sounds like a great idea. Just doesn’t work out that way very often.

Russia is now wrapping up its 5 ½ month commitment in Syria. It was not that big, maybe 3,000 to 6,000 uniformed personnel, plus aircraft. Still, this mission was unique in many ways. It was really the first case of Russia doing an intervention away from its immediate borders (and pretty much one of the few cases of the Soviet Union doing one also). Neither Russia nor the Soviet Union had ever played far from home, if you ignore the communist international, world wide revolutionary movements and a few dozen missiles sent to Cuba. Still, Russia/Soviet Union had rarely actually committed conventional forces into combat in a country that is not connected to it by border. Even their failed war in Afghanistan (1979-1989) was connected by a border. They were part of the Kosovo peacekeeping forces. But besides that, Syria is the only case I can think of in the last 100 years of a Russian or Soviet ground invention in a country not connected by a border.

They are now withdrawing (so they claim). Syria is the location of the only Russian military bases outside their country, so obviously some forces are remaining.

But, Syria remains Syria. It is a country of 18 million people that is only around 13% Shia (primarily Alawite). Up until the civil war started five years ago, the Alawite minority ruled the country under Bashar Assad. It is around 10% Christian (which were sometimes allied with their fellow minority, the Alawites), 3% Druze, 9% Kurds (Sunni) and 60% Sunni Arab (and no…these numbers don’t add up to 100%). Of course, having an Alawite minority over the top of the Sunni majority pretty much guaranteed that there would eventually be a conflict. Now the Russia intervention has bolstered the Alawites. Hard to imagine if Russia actually pulls out, how the bolstered Alawites maintain their current position.

Still, perhaps Russia has given Assad and the Alawites enough breathing space for them to now stand on their own. This has not been the case in a number of past interventions (U.S. in Vietnam, USSR in Afghanistan, U.S. in Iraq).

Walls

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Walls are all the rage now. According to various articles, Ukraine is planning on building a wall along its border with Russia. This is some 1200 miles and costs $200 million. It is not a wall, it is a actually a 2 meter (7 foot) tall fence, with a tank ditch 6 meters wide and 2-3 meters deep.

See:

http://www.rferl.org/contentinfographics/the-great-wall-of-ukraine/27573891.html

https://www.rt.com/news/258837-ukraine-fence-russian-border/

http://uatoday.tv/politics/lsquo-great-wall-of-ukraine-rsquo-russian-border-fortification-less-than-10-built-478829.html

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/27/the-great-wall-of-ukraine.html

(Note: The Daily Beast article may not link).

We actually did do a chapter on the effectiveness of border barriers in America’s Modern Wars (Chapter Ten: Sanctuaries, Border Barriers and Population Resettlement). In our 83 examples there were 13 in which the counterinsurgency force utilized border barriers. Thus, barriers were present in approximately 16% of our cases.

  1. Indochina War (1946-1954)
  2. Algerian War (1954-1962)
  3. Vietnam II (1961-1964)
  4. Vietnam War (1965-1973)
  5. Namibia (1966-1989)
  6. Rhodesia II (1972-1979)
  7. Polisario Rebellion (1973-1991)
  8. Cambodia (1978-1989)
  9. USSR in Afghanistan (1979-1989)
  10. Kashmir (1988 – present)
  11. Second Intifada (2000-2005)
  12. Hamas War (2006)
  13. Hezbollah War (2006)

We conducted a statistical analysis of the relationship between outcome and the presence or absence of border barriers among the 83-case MISS dataset using Fisher’s Exact Test (see below).

 

Outcome by Presence/Absence of Border Barriers
Outcome Yes No Total
Blue 2 40 42
Gray 2 9 11
Red 9 21 30
Total 13 70 83

 

When we test the hypothesis about a nonrandom relationship between insurgency outcome and the border barriers factor in the two-by-three table above using Fisher’s Exact Test, the p-value is 0.0090. The data suggest strong evidence that the two factors may be associated.

We also tested the more specific hypothesis that the odds of a Blue outcome are different in the absence vs. the presence of border barriers by ignoring the gray observations in the testing procedure. The p-value from the Fisher’s Exact Test is 0.0045 in this case, which can be considered strong evidence in support of this hypothesis.

Thus, it appears that the tests confirm that border barriers have not been significant in combating insurgencies, based on the outcome. This is not unexpected, although it could perhaps be considered counterintuitive. Overall, the insurgents won 69% of the time when there was a border barrier vice 30% of the time when there was not one. We suspect that there is another factor in play here (for example: border barriers are usually built in response to large, intractable insurgencies).

Third-Party Insurgencies

Not a whole lot of analytical work has been done on third-party insurgencies. A third-party insurgency is a conflict where an external state or trans-national organization played a major role in initiating, sustaining, bringing to victory, or otherwise supporting a rebellion or insurgency. Kind of like what is going on in Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine.

We did do a little work to examine if the level of outside support results in insurgent victory. It was been the perception of the number of counterinsurgent theorists that significant outside support is important for an insurgent victory. Our analysis, based upon an examination of 89 cases was that it was in fact, not a primary driver of insurgent success. To provide a table from page 79 of America’s Modern Wars:

Outcome by Type of Outside Support
Outcome Primarily Indigenous Some Considerable Not Applicable Total
Blue 11 20 9 2 42
Gray 5 6 0 0 11
Red 7 18 5 0 30
Total 23 44 14 2 83

This table compares the amount of outside support (primarily indigenous, some, and considerable) to the outcome (blue = counterinsurgent victory, red = insurgency victory, and gray = outcome is not a clear victory for either side). Outcome compared to type of outside support produced no discernable pattern. The counterinsurgents or intervening force tended to win more often then not, no matter what the degree of outside support was for the insurgency. Our statistical test indicated that there was no correlation here.

There was no correlation whether we tested to our entire dataset of 83 cases, limited the test to only those 62 cases that were clearly insurgencies (did not include the peacekeeping operations and interventions in our larger dataset), or only those 36 case that were insurgencies against outside intervening forces. If there was a consistent trend in this data, it was that insurgencies with considerable outside support lost more often than insurgencies that were primarily indigenous. This is counterintuitive, but it made of cases that include almost every major and not-so-major insurgency since World War II. But there appears to be little correlation between the degree of outside support for an insurgency and the outcome of the insurgency.

Of course, the purpose of the third-party insurgency may not be to obtain clear victory, but for lesser political purposes, including disrupting an opponent or forcing concessions from them.

We May Not Be Interested in COIN, but COIN is Interested in Us

Photo By United States Mint, Smithsonian Institution [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Photo By United States Mint, Smithsonian Institution [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Is the United States Army turning its back on the experience it gained in Iraq and Afghanistan? Retired Brigadier General Robert Scales fears so. After recounting his personal experience with the U.S. Army’s neglect of counterinsurgency lessons following the Vietnam War, Scales sees the pattern repeating itself.

The Army as an institution loves the image of the big war: swift maneuver, tanks, heavy artillery, armed helicopters overhead, mounds of logistics support. The nitty-gritty of working with indigenous personnel to common ends, small unit patrols in civilian-infested cities, quick clashes against faceless enemies that fade back into the populace — not so much. Lessons will fade, and those who earned their PhDs in small wars will be passed over and left by the wayside.

U.S. Army War College professor Andrew Hill found the same neglect in the recent report of the National Commission on the Future of the Army, in which any reference to stability operations “is barely discernable.” As Scales put it, “here is the problem with that approach: The ability to win the big one is vital, but so is the ability to win the small wars. We paid a price for forgetting what we learned in Vietnam. I hope succeeding generations do not have to pay again.”

The U.S. government appears to be repeating the pattern insofar as its support for basic research on insurgency and counterinsurgency. During the early years of the Vietnam conflict, the U.S. government invested significant resources to support research and analysis efforts. This led to some very interesting and promising lines of inquiry by organizations such as the Special Operations Research Office, and scholars like Ted Gurr and Ivo and Rosalind Feierabend, among others. However, as Chris Lawrence recently pointed out, this funding was cut by the end of the 1960s, years before the war ended. After, the fruits of this initial research was published in the early 1970s, further research on the subject slowed considerably.

The emergence of insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan led to another round of research and analysis funding by the U.S. government in the mid-2000s. This resulted in renewed interest in the foundations built during the 1960s, as well as new analytical work of considerable promise. Despite the fact that these conflicts remain unresolved, this resourcing dried up once more by 2009 and government sponsored basic research has once more ground to a crawl. As Chris has explained, this boom-or-bust approach also carries a cost:

The problem lies in that the government (or at least the parts that I dealt with) sometimes has the attention span of a two-year-old. Not only that, it also has the need for instant gratification, very much like a two-year-old. Practically, what that means is that projects that can answer an immediate question get funding (like the Bosnia and Iraq casualty estimates). Larger research efforts that will produce an answer or a product in two to three years can also get funding. On the other hand, projects that produce a preliminary answer in two to three years and then need several more years of funding to refine, check, correct and develop that work, tend to die. This has happened repeatedly. The analytical community is littered with many clever, well thought out reports that look to be good starts. What is missing is a complete body of analysis on a subject. [America’s Modern Wars, 295]

The ambivalent conduct and outcomes of the recent counterinsurgencies generated hotly contested debates that remain unresolved. This is at least partly due to a lack of a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of insurgency and counterinsurgency. This state of affairs appears to be a matter of choice.