Red Team Journal » Current Issues

Review: Red Teams and Counterterrorism Training

Adam Elkus — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 22:02:01 +0000

Having discussed red-teaming with RTJ Advisory Board member Robert Bunker and his colleague (and my frequent co-author) John P. Sullivan frequently, I was very interested in seeing Bunker’s new book with Stephen Sloan, Red Teams and Counterterrorism Training. While Red Teams and Counterterrorism Training is a heavily technical book, it is not a simple ‘how-to’ guide about simulation. It’s also a work of theory about challenges of the present and future.
      Sloan and Bunker’s point of departure is Sloan’s late Cold War terrorism classic, Simulating Terrorism, which set the research–and practice–agenda for simulating terrorist incidents. While the basic logic of terrorism remains the same, the grammar has shifted towards a much more tactically violent style of enemy whose goal is, to flip the 1970s maxim, to kill a lot of people rather than gain their attention. As such, simulation need to shift towards a different model rooted around everything from the low end of the “active shooter” to the high-end of small-unit operations and multiple attackers. As the title indicates, the book concerns both simulation and red-teaming. A major challenge–especially in a time of declining budgets–is creating a realistic and valid simulation on the law enforcement level. Bunker and Sloan are mindful of this, and trend towards pragmatic training measures. The sections on red-teaming draw on innovations from theater (Roberta Sloan, a professor of theater, contributes a chapter on role-playing in red-teaming).
      A common theme that runs through the book is the tradeoff between realism (characterized, at the farthest end–by free-play) and real-world constraints involved in managing simulations and navigating the ultimately complicated bureaucratic and community politics involved in law enforcement simulations. These constraints function as a kind of gravitational force that drags on the realism of the simulation. The use of red-teaming injects a measure of contingency and nonlinearity into the simulation that is often lacking. Hence the importance of Roberta Sloan’s emphasis on improvisation while remaining within the overall framework of the scenario.
      Also interesting is Bunker’s speculations on future terrorism and low-intensity challenges (much of which are familiar to those who have followed his writings over the last two decades) and his concrete definition of the Terrorist Attack Cycle. The book is targeted towards law-enforcement, but the principles are scalable to any DOD group concerned with counterterrorrism. Perhaps most interesting for the reader is Sloan and Bunker’s writings about the “emotional divide’ involved in mirror-image training. Truly “becoming the enemy” is a draining and often emotionally challenging process. Sloan and Bunker write about the necessity for immersion, but also stress that while the unorthodox often make the best red-team members, they also must be credible and posses useful skills. The book is mainly targeted towards the tactical level–which is suitable for its intended audience–although there is some operational-level coverage. Given that the complexity of such simulations dwarfs the need for most law enforcement, such a focus is appropriate.
      Red-teaming is uniquely suited to CT challenges. While red-teaming is a useful tool in all forms of conflict, terrorists operate from worldviews and combat frameworks that are largely foreign to the professional soldier or police officer. Bunker and Sloan’s book skillfully updates Simulating Terrorism for a new era.

Red Teaming and Policy

Adam Elkus — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:09:11 +0000

Red teaming, by its very nature, can be antagonistic to policy. The purpose of a red team is to challenge official TTPs, plans, and estimates. So it is no surprise that a red team report by Jeremy Bordin on the growing distrust between Afghan soldiers and NATO is causing such a stirrup.

The killings of American soldiers by Afghan troops are turning into a “rapidly growing systemic threat” that could undermine the entire war effort, according to a classified military study.The study by Jeffrey Bordin, a political and behavioral scientist working for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, warns that the magnitude of the killings “may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern history.” Based on interviews with some 600 Afghan troops, the report concludes that there is a dangerous “crisis of trust” between Afghan forces and American soldiers that is being ignored by top commanders. …Mr. Bordin and other similar researchers, part of a so-called Red Team within the military, are tasked with finding weaknesses and shortcomings that the enemy may exploit.

Red teaming is not a search for a worst-case scenario, but rather a look at the role of assumptions. Some assumptions can prove to be valid if accurately defended. Others are not.
One red team study I’d like to see on Afghanistan would be on the feasibility of the emerging “Biden-plus” consensus. While the flaws of the current policy have been detailed, I have yet to see a substantial look at the assumptions of the lighter footprint model.

Red Team Journal, Thirteen Years On

Mark Mateski — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:06:38 +0000

When I launched Red Team Journal in 1997, the U.S. military was still savoring its Desert Storm victory. The largely self-congratulatory concept of the revolution in military affairs dominated U.S. military thought, and no “peer” competitor was anticipated for many years. 1997 also marked an increasingly mad rush toward the dot-com bust of 2000. Even Chicken Little was feeling safe and making money.
      Back then, we needed red teaming to remind us that our forces were not invincible, that not every dot-com wonder would make it big, and that clever and determined bad guys still planned to do us harm.
      Thirteen years later, we are (or should be) greatly humbled. We all remember the events of 9/11, but it’s becoming difficult to ignore our eroding financial position, our fractured polity, and the success our adversaries enjoy in eluding and circumventing our military forces. Today, Chicken Little frets about a dystopian future in which the United States is broken and broke.
      We no longer need red teaming to remind us we’re mortal; we know we are. Today we need red teaming to remind us we’re neither as rich nor as smart as we think we are.
      For decades, we’ve thrown money at our problems. We’ve funded a space race, a war on poverty, a Cold War, several hot wars, a savings and loan bailout, a war on terror, and—in the last couple of years—a series of crisis bailouts presumably designed to preserve our economy from imminent ruin. Throwing money is our default strategy. When it works, we congratulate ourselves on our smarts. When it doesn’t work, we throw more money at the problem and then congratulate ourselves on our smarts. Whatever the nature of the next emergency, expect our policymakers to at least try to throw money at it.
      Unfortunately, the more money we throw, the less it’s worth. In fact, we’ve thrown so much recently that we’re now in a bind. We’d be foolish to believe that our national security spending can continue to expand indefinitely at the post-2001 rate. We’d also be foolish to dismiss out of hand the more alarming scenarios involving long-term financial blight.
      What does this mean for U.S. policymakers?
      They desperately need better strategy—not necessarily grand strategy; merely smart strategy would do. This need exists regardless of how the future unfolds. If we sink deeper into the current economic mess, smart strategy will be indispensible. If we return to a position of unchallenged prosperity soon—as unlikely as that may be—smart strategy will still be indispensible. Our default strategy has made us very predictable, and our strategic skills have atrophied.
      In a perfect world, policymakers would recognize the need and act swiftly to answer it. They would search out contrary points of view, expose their plans and policies to robust red teaming, and honestly consider the results. They would adopt a red teaming frame of mind and constantly seek to improve their red teaming methods and skills. Smart strategy would emerge, and the U.S. strategic position would no longer hinge exclusively on a fading, debt-ridden economy.
      It will never happen, of course, which means that we can expect a very interesting and bumpy ride for the next few years. It also means I’ll be able to revise and repost this paper on RTJ’s twenty-sixth anniversary. Wherever Chicken Little is then, I sincerely hope she isn’t waiting for us with a smug “I-told-you-so.”

Winning as Its Own Justification

Adam Elkus — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:02:30 +0000

The idea that one should study warfare and national security history, theory, and “science” in order to make instruments of national security more effective is so accepted within government and the military that is banal. In academia, it is substantially more controversial. Without giving into stereotypes of “tenured radicals” that are less valid today (a time of heightened cooperation between academics and the government on national security), it is eminently justifiable to point out that the intimate connection between government and academia fostered during World War II and the early years of the Cold War is a thing of the past. Moreover, the idea that the study of warfare in order to make one’s nation more effective at the winning of military operations, campaigns, and wars is vastly more controversial today than it has been in the past. However, it shouldn’t be–and enabling one’s forces to win is a noble goal for research and analysis.
      Due to the sometimes hysterical nature of this subject, it is wise to tread lightly. Perhaps the best place to start is the problem of War Studies (the integrated field comprising international relations, military history, military science, and related social science fields) in America and its quest to justify its relevance. As academia became more specialized, history in turn began moving away from the study of pivotal events to the look at large-scale societal forces (Fernand Braudel’s work for example), and some scholars became actively hostile to government and the military, fields such as military and diplomatic history suffered. By the time the Cold War was done, War Studies had to make a desperate plea for its own relevance as the smaller field of Strategic Studies began to be seen by some as obsolescent.
      War Studies scholars made three main arguments to save the field. First, they argued that war was central to the human experience and one cannot understand it purely through social history–combat history and theory is needed. Second, knowledge of war enables a better democracy because citizens need information about how to decide basic matters of national security. Finally, combat history and theory does not equate to a desire for war. These were all good arguments, even if many in the intended audience were not impressed by references to Thucydides or Clausewitz. Each argument can stand on its own as a valid reason for studying conflict. However, winning also matters and provides its own justification. Why?
      Unless one is a complete pacifist, they will agree that force has a utility–even if it is a severely circumscribed one. In order for the use of force to be effective, a nation’s army and other organs of national security must be effective. Study of history and theory is one of the major sources of military effectiveness–especially since the last major war against an conventional opponent that inflicted serious operational defeats on an American force was during the Korean War. It is better to learn from other people’s mistakes (if you can) rather than your own. This is true whether one is waging a desperate defense of their homeland or an expeditionary conflict abroad. Operational excellence is a social good that is just as legitimate as any other real-world application of academic knowledge. While people may fervently disagree about the use of force, there are few who would deny its basic utility under some circumstances.
      This is not an excuse to ignore the policy dimension, as a poor policy essentially ruins everything that flows from it. It is also not an excuse for history and research that tells policymaker what they want to hear regardless of the political, strategic, or moral consequences. But history and theory that not only illuminates and explains an important issue in War Studies but also has the added benefit of providing some level of assistance to making American military forces more operationally or tactically effective should be seen as commendable. The idea that one’s research should benefit those disadvantaged by society is commonly accepted in academia. But since the utility of force is universally accepted by people of most political persuasions (even if there is little commonality about how it should be used), it is difficult to see why the idea that one’s research should also make force more effective is not as commonly accepted as other academic interventions.

Globalization, Strategic Distance, and Policy

Adam Elkus — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 02:42:55 +0000

It is a tenet of modern strategic theory and practice that globalization has made local problems international. An ethnic revolt, tyrannical dictator, environmental disaster, or criminal gang’s operations in a distant land can have repercussions in Miami, Los Angeles, or New York. The problem is that these analyses start by stating a threat and then proceed to strategies for dealing with them. Rather, we ought to begin to think about our policy.
      There is a rich literature on globalization and security, ranging from Thomas Friedman’s popular canon to academic studies. The common element of these works is a pervasive sense that globalization has shrunk the strategic distance states once enjoyed and the protection that comes with it. This is the source of Friedman’s famous and influential concept of the “flat” world. In policy, prominent post-9/11 strategy documents such as the successive National Security Strategies of 2002, 2006, and 2010 also have generalized discourses on global threats.
      The strategic literature on globalization is correct in its estimation of the evolved forms of interdependency in today’s world. The problem, however, is that not all threats are worthy of American attention and many of them are beyond our ability to influence. Adding to this prioritization problem is a pervasive sense that we are more exposed to globalized danger than ever before.
      Regardless of the accuracy of the globalization literature and its impact on security studies, today’s rhetoric often obscures a mundane truth: the world is always changing. The rise and fall of empires, shifts in economic mode of production, and disruptive social and political changes tend to produce conflict. Winners, losers, or those who erroneously perceive themselves as such come to blows. Some conflicts cannot be settled by peaceable means and boil over into conventional or irregular warfare. It is the role of policy to interpret these changes and formulate a response that strategy can in turn implement.
      The topic that preoccupies today’s security theorists is the fusion of internal security threats with global issues such as terrorism and global insurgency. Security thinkers conceptualize a wild global “frontier” of failed states, criminal gangs, and undergoverned zones, and a “homeland” potentially under risk from the power projection of non-state forces. To many, the September 11 attacks are a reminder that the two cannot be meaningfully separated in policy debate. The stated aim of contemporary security policy either pacify, mitigate, or co-opt the threat to the “homeland” from the global frontier.
      However, the link between the global “frontier” and the homeland is still largely a matter of debate. The famous Bruce Hoffman-Marc Sageman discussion over “al-Qaeda Central” vs. “Leaderless Jihad” is a case in point. Are terrorists abroad in ungoverned spaces still the primary threat, or is the domestic threat of radicalization more plausible?
      Frontier threats and internal threats also demand different methods, capabilities, and logics. Warfare along the frontier has always been a haven for maverick personalities and rarefied skillsets, whereas internal security challenges in both democratic and authoritarian societies are usually a bureaucratic police and paramilitary affair. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the police, not Central Intelligence Agency drone fleets, handle domestic terrorism. In contrast, we have become largely reliant on a high-tech variation on the British military’s “air control” operational concept to strike at the Taliban across the Afghan-Pakistani border.
      To add to the confusion, the “frontier” and the “homeland” are not exclusively binary categories. It is ironic that we employ the rhetoric of globalization in security debate without accepting what Friedman meant when he talks of a “flat” world: the blurring of political, cultural, and economic boundaries. So how might we sort out this confusion? There is, of course, strategy—and we have debated strategy, grand or otherwise, extensively since the end of the Cold War.
      The most foundational issue, from a Clausewitzian perspective, is to determine the policy. Strategy (and its subsidiary operational and tactical mechanisms) is an artificial mechanism to accomplish the policy. Criticism of the drone warfare, for example, rarely examines how it flows from the strategic consequences of the overall policy of committing strategic landpower to Afghanistan. One of the consequences of the way we have configured our present Afghan policy is that we lack a viable means of suppressing enemy operations across the border. The drones are a tactical stopgap measure, and criticism of them must acknowledge the policy straitjacket that we have inserted ourselves in regarding Pakistan and the Taliban.
      How might we come to a better policy? Perhaps it might involve asking a series of questions. How much risk is the American public willing to tolerate from the frontier in return for reduced involvement? What is the nature of the connection between the frontier and the homeland? What should the role of force—“repetitive raiding” perhaps—be in the managing frontier threats? And most importantly, what threat do “frontier” threats pose to the fundamentals of American national security?
      A policy to set priorities about frontier and internal security threats does not have to be static, uniform, or set in stone. But it should meaningfully delineate a hierarchy of threats and possible responses. History shows us that we will always worry about the global frontier. Disruptions arising from change are a constant of the global strategic environment. But a meaningful policy will differentiate which threats are important, what tools should be employed to deal with them, and what limits we have on our ability to influence and mitigate them.

Chuck Norris Tactics: The 70s-80s Revolution in Counterterrorism Tactics and Operations

Adam Elkus — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 23:05:27 +0000

As campy is it is (especially in light of Chuck Norris’ general canon), the trailer linked above represents one of decision-makers’ worst national security nightmares during the 1960s to the early 1980s: a hijacking and hostages scenario. What UCLA’s David Rapaport calls the “New Left Wave” of paramilitary terrorism featured a number of groups, ranging from highly competent state-supported terrorists with military training and tactical skill to disjointed student radicals playing Che with pipe bombs and poorly written “radical manifestos.” Many groups were somewhat in between. It is sometimes difficult to recognize it in today’s threat environment, but the state’s tactical and operational response to the New Left Wave’s tactical challenge is one of the great success stories in national security policy.
      There were essentially three paramilitary terrorist tactical scenarios: the spree killing (like the 1972 Lod Airport Massacre), the high-profile ground hostage situation (the 1972 Munich games), and the airplane hijacking (which was merely an airborne variant of the ground hijacking). Unlike today’s terrorists, the New Left Wave (and some elements of Rapaport’s Anti-Colonial Wave) did not generally want to die and tended to disdain ostentatious displays of brutality. They were prepared to die, certainly, and also relied (like previous terrorists) on massacre and targeted killings. But their desire to be seen as legitimate (Yasir Arafat’s grandstanding in front of the UN being a prominent example) acted as something of a constraint. State backing also constrained them to a degree that al-Qaeda or other Salafist groups would never accept today.
      So the New Left terrorists aimed to use calculated amounts of force to create extended situations that would draw politicians into the “terrorist trap,” a protracted and humiliating media-rich hostage situation that would allow them to extract policy concessions or gain more attention or legitimacy to their cause from international well-wishers. A well-played incident could also drive more recruits to their cause and demonstrate more viability to a state backer. For the more radical groups, a paramilitary massacre served the same function that the Mumbai incident did today in attempting to weaken the will of an adversary policymaker.
      From a tactical perspective, the aspiring terrorist trying to create a protracted situation must be able to use a combination of human shields (hostages), early warning (vigorous patrolling, watching the TV for clues of a police assault), fortification (various kinds of booby traps and barriers), firepower (infantry weaponry), deception/information operations, and trickery (outwitting the on-site incident commander, the negotiator, and their superiors) to prolong the situation as long as possible and exit to a friendly territory. The risks were high, as terrorists usually do not survive armed assaults by police or military special units. They are either all killed in the takeover or summarily executed afterwards. And if the terrorist survived the commando assault, he or she faced a lifetime in jail.
      Terrorists were able to succeed because of the state’s tactical and operational deficits. On the tactical side, specialized police and military units that could handle a delicate and complex hostage situation were far and few between. What was more common was for line units to be employed in that role without specialized training. The results were usually bloody. Even successes like the end of the 1979 Mecca Takeover were far more gory than they had to be. Operationally, incident command as well as the linkage between the tactical employment of police and military on the ground and the national security decisionmaking at the top was faulty as well. To boot, passive security could have prevented many hijackings and hostage scenarios.
      Airline hijackings presented an operational challenge of an entirely different magnitude. Because foreign flights had weaker security and a closer distance to “safe” territory, terrorists would commandeer a plane, land it and protract the situation, and then fly it to a Soviet-backed state once they had extracted value out of the tactical situation. Local police and military units usually were not up to the challenge of the situation. The “Entebbe” scenario was the worst of all, as Western forces would have to deploy directly into hostile territory to raid the plane. Nevertheless, airplane hijackings–with the exception of 9/11–were pretty much a thing of the past by the late 80s, and paramilitary attacks and hostage incidents as a whole disappeared from the developed world. Why?
      Passive security, such as better on-site security and international law enforcement cooperation helped dramatically raise the costs of hijacking and hostage incidents. Beginning in the 1970s, specialized law enforcement and military units also developed that were capable of handling complex hostage scenarios (for a complete account, see Tailon’s monograph on tactical units). These adaptive units were capable not only of domestic counterterrorist response but international deployment very far afield–which enabled them to handle incidents that locals could not. Counterterrorism units also benefited from international cooperation in forward basing, on-site advice and collaboration, and a collaborative doctrinal and training environment that allowed American, German, Israeli, French, and other tactical pioneers to benefit from each others’ bitter experiences. While Entebbe stands out as a “magic bullet” operation, a better example of a resolved tactical situation was the German GSG-9′s wildly successful 1977 Mogadishu operation against the Red Army Faction hijackers aboard Lufthansa Flight 181.
      Operational incident command also improved, as agencies such as the FBI developed doctrine and TTPs for the overall visualization and command of hostage incidents. This is especially true in regards to forward-deployed counterterrorism missions. The logistical and planning inherent in the resolution of an Entebbe-type situation is nothing short of breathtaking, and it required near-perfect operational coordination to carry out. We shouldn’t go so far as to say that military and police forces have it down to a science, but it is indisputable that a doctrinal and functional evolution did occur. Today’s popular culture (the fanciful Delta Force as well as Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six novels) reflects a public expectation of tactical and operational competence that audiences in the aftermath of the Munich Olympics disaster would have derided as pure fantasy.
      This tactical evolution, however, probably doesn’t extend beyond terrorist hostage incidents. The state’s advantage over terrorists is the ability to employ all of its power in a focused manner (police and military counterterrorism units) on a vastly weaker force in a way that negates the terrorists’ asymmetric advantages. Although this is vastly more difficult in a foreign setting (Mogadishu) than domestically, a friendly host nation operating environment goes a long way towards making Mogadishu-like missions possible. Foreign missions against “rogue states” holding hostages still pose extremely difficult problems. The failures of Operation Eagle Claw (1980), the Son Tay Raid (1970), and the Mayaguez Incident (1975) are all instructive. For a good sense of these problems, CT Kamp’s Air and Space Power Journal article on Eagle Claw is a must-read.
      A foreign hostage rescue operation in a denied environment against a hostile conventional state force involves the suppression of enemy conventional and irregular forces (land and air defenses), sterling intelligence, a strong (as per McRaven’s principles of special operations) seizure of initial relative advantage from the enemy, high demands on training and rehearsals, sound joint operational command, extremely good deception and information operations, very painstaking logistical planning concerning entry and extraction, and cooperation with neighboring states. This is something of an oversimplification, but it would take a book to go through all of the complex factors in planning for this type of mission. The enemy’s ability to frustrate complex plans is also greatly improved, as are the potentials for the plan to break down over a single point of failure. Entebbe, was, in many respects, a fluke that is unlikely to be repeated again. Despite the immense advances in counterterrorism tactics and operations as well as the overall growth in special operations in the West, foreign hostage rescue operations in denied environments against rogue states are likely to remain the “final frontier” for operatives and planners.

Contrast: Starship Troopers, Airmobility, and Light Infantry

Adam Elkus — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:31:32 +0000

I am something of a science fiction fan. I love things having to do with giant robots, artificial intelligence, aliens, etc. And as I’ve written with Crispin Burke, science fiction can be an interesting lens to look at present defense debates. One of the more interesting contemporary examples of this is Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers.
      Starship Troopers featured highly mobile infantry in powered armor that vastly increased their tactical range. The opening scene of the novel features an drop over an alien city. It was a very glamorous image, and it’s been ripped off many times in science fiction. As a vision of the future, it ignored the the very mixed results of World War II airborne forces (the German disaster at Crete and the “Bridge Too Far” being prominent examples). Around the same time, the concept of airmobility took hold in the Army. As Tolson notes in his history of airmobility, the concept originated during the days of the Pentomic era, when the nuclear battlefield was thought to make extreme dispersion a necessity. Airmobility offered the opportunity to rapidly disperse and mass forces as well as overcome the tactical mobility problems of roads and difficult terrain. Some more enthusiastic proponents thought it would banish geography altogether. In Vietnam, airmobility offered a means of overcoming many of the logistical difficulties of the jungle conflict as well as moving fast enough to attack more nimble NVA and Vietcong.
      In practice, however, airmobility proved to have flaws as well. J.W. Barton observes that once out of the helicopter, the troops became tied to the landing zones, leaving the initiative to the opponent. Because the troops were often traveling too lightly to survive without an aerial line of communication, the insertion zones had to be guarded. Paddy Griffith noted in his book on tactical history that prepatory fire alerted NVA, and the problem of finding safe LZs led US troops to land far from the point of contact–thus defeating the point of airmobility as lightly armed soldiers slogged far on foot. This is not to say that the concept was not useful–Tolson has ample documentation of successes in his monograph. But it was not the revolutionary tactical method that some proponents claimed. Chaim Herzog’s history of the 1973 war also underscores the high losses of Egyptian commandos attempting airmobile tactics against the IDF.
      The relative success of old-fashioned, Iranian dismounted light infantry in the Iran-Iraq war provides an interesting contrast. Although the Iranian ground forces suffered immense logistical and command and control (C2) difficulties and fought with outdated equipment and an almost complete lack of air support and small amounts of armor, they eventually became a fearsome adversary for the better-equipped and more professionalized Iraqi ground forces. In an Infantry article on dismounted Iranian ground forces, Sgt. Ben Wilson recounts instance after instance of Iranians successfully employing a combination of human wave tactics and infiltration to defeat less mobile and tactically unimaginative Iraqi units. One vignette is telling:

“While launching a diversionary attack north of Basra, Iran launched a commando raid using Basij frogmen, boats and pontoon bridges to cross the Shatt Al Arab and take the Al Faw peninsula. Their attack took advantage of darkness and rain and totally surprised the Iraqi defenders, many of whom fled their posts. The Iranians quickly established a bridge head and reinforced the peninsula. They dispersed their defenses and dug in quickly. They made all troop and supply movements at night to prevent the Iraqis from acquiring artillery targets. This attack provided one of the greatest demonstrations of the Iranians’ potential in light infantry attacks in difficult terrain.”

Of course, Iranians also suffered some major blunders. Their human wave tactics were often horribly uncoordinated, and whenever they fought in open ground on Iraqi territory they suffered tremendously. Not to mention the fact that their overall strategy was based on a revolutionary fervor often divorced from reality, and their operational art proved extremely lackluster. But the Iranian employment of light infantry was one of the bright spots in a conflict that was mostly a spectacle of needless slaughter.
These two vignettes are not intended to be scientific–Vietnam and the Iran-Iraq War are two drastically different conflicts with very little in common. Nor did Starship Troopers have anything to do with the planning of the airmobility concept. But the glamor of the powered armor in Heinlein’s novel, the reality of airmobile employment in Vietnam, and the resilience of light infantry in the Iran-Iraq war is part and parcel of one of the recurring themes here–the difficulty of prediction and the uneven development of technological, doctrinal, and strategic trends. Plus, now you have an excuse to go back and watch the hilariously bad 1997 movie version of Starship Troopers. Now, if I can only think of an idea for a post on Pitch Black.

The Shadow of Limited War

Adam Elkus — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 05:18:43 +0000

One of the biggest hot-button issues in strategy today is limited war. The degree of restraint and the amount of force that can be employed without jeopardizing the mission is both an ethical and operational controversy in counterinsurgency theory and practice. There’s also a growing frustration over the way that the West has been constrained in utilizing force against irregulars and rogue states that do not play by the rules. Shelby Steele’s June 21 op-ed, “The Surrender of the West” typifies a certain kind of reaction to this feeling of futility. The problem, however, is that we have been living in an era of what might broadly can be called “limited warfare” for over sixty years. And this limit may be structural.
      To be sure, talk of “limits” are relative. Clausewitz instructs us that the concept of “absolute war” exists mostly in theory. And even wars fought under limitations or limited political objectives can be horribly destructive. In 1991, we fought a (somewhat unsuccessful) battle of annihilation against the Iraqi Army that while failing to completely eliminate Saddam Hussein’s forces certainly devastated them and routed them. And the “clear” phase of the Surge was, by all accounts, rougher than many imagine. But there is a common thread going back from the beginning of the Cold War of steadily increasing limitations on action.
      In the 1930s, Basil Liddell-Hart moved from writing about infantry tactics and maneuver operational theory to strategy. The doctrine of “limited liability” and the idea of the offshore-based “British Way in Warfare,” coupled with Liddell-Hart’s endorsement of strategic bombing theory, created the prototypes for a number of contemporary doctrines–containment, today’s “over-the-horizon” strike, and the idea of “limited warfare.” They did not really catch on (with the notable exception of British intellectuals) and were followed by the most destructive conflict in human history. But Azar Gat argues (convincingly) that these doctrines really set the stage for how a certain faction of military and civilian intellectuals perceived the next stage of strategic history. Especially since nuclear weapons created an powerful set of external limitations.
      From the 1950s onwards, an entire science of “limited warfare” sprang up, devoted to figuring out how the West could accomplish its objectives short of general war with the Soviet Union and China. In short, squeezing the maximum of strategic effect from a calculated minimum of force. These questions were very serious. How does one calculate the relative value, say, of the defense of a small island chain off the coast of Taiwan in the 1950s, as Thomas Schelling did in Arms and Influence? How does one defend against a calculated campaign of state-supported terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and political subversion, as Western states did from the 1950s up to the late 80s? It is here that the whole concept of the “War of Ideas” originated, and the bare bones of modern irregular warfare theory sprung up.
      Limited warfare, from the beginning, frustrated the military. McArthur’s jeremiad against Truman was based on Truman’s refusal to let him expand the theater of war into China. The postwar military consensus critique of Vietnam, as embodied in the tremendously influential book On Strategy, argued that the United States erred in not taking the fight to Hanoi directly. And today, as Crispin Burke notes, there is a distinct body of military literature that seems to take a similar tack about the modern “Long War.” The main debate about strategy in Afghanistan is about different forms of limited warfare–a counterinsurgency campaign that does not cross over the border into the Pakistani sanctuary vs. a stripped down “limited liability” approach that Basil Liddell-Hart might have heartily approved of.
      That being said, limited warfare also not just structural–it is, to take a Constructivist approach, a way the West views the use of force. As I’ve noted in my last post, the embedded liberalism in how many intellectuals perceive international relations acts as a self-imposed set of limitations in the employment of force. Israel, for example, which tends to have a drastically different strategic culture than most in the West, does not play by these limitations and now finds itself somewhat isolated as a result. The fact these limitations–both structural and self-imposed– exist is a source of great consternation for many defense intellectuals, who rage over the existence of a situation in which terrorists and insurgents escape criticism while nation-states who fight them are put under a microscope. The problem, however, will not go away.
      For a variety of reasons (nuclear weapons, the economy, the UN, interdependence, etc), limited wars are likely to continue. This doesn’t mean that limited wars will not be harsh or intense–the 1973 Yom Kippur War featured some of the most intense tank warfare since Kursk, after all. But what could have been a ruinous defeat of the Egyptian-Syrian alliance was capped off by the intervention of the Soviet Union and a UN-imposed ceasefire. Moreover, the West has made a cultural choice that it wants to live in a world of “liberty under law.” In the long run, this may or may not be the correct grand strategy–the debate in international relations theory never ends. But this choice has been culturally made, and perhaps as early as 1919 with Wilson’s vision of a harmonious world.
      So strategists ought to start thinking, as their forefathers did, about how force might employed under these constraints to achieve our objectives. We can start by re-examining the canon of limited war theory and history, and extracting the nuggets while discarding the duds. We can also, in our taxonomy of future war debate, abandon the dichotomy between Soviet Operational Maneuver Groups (OMGs) streaming through the Fulda Gap and light infantry chasing bandits in the jungle. Limited wars range from counterterrorism actions to large-scale conventional wars like the Indian campaign in modern-day Bangladesh. We ought to study the Israelis’ great Sinai campaign in 1956 as intently as we study the British in Malaya or the French in Algeria.
      That being said, the time of limited war we are living in may be an epoch that is soon to pass, as Victor Davis Hanson suggests. We ought to carefully consider whether or not our assumptions about limited war are presentism projected into the future. Napoleonic warfare, for example, did not conform to the outlines of 18th century warfare, and we might be making the same mistake as those who predicted the political-military arrangements of that period would last into the future. But since no one has a crystal ball, the record of the last 60 years provides ample data for consideration about the future.

The US COIN Debate: A Second Look

Adam Elkus — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:34:34 +0000

Watching the counterinsurgency debate, I can’t help but observe two dueling strawmen. Critics of American COIN see it as armed nation-building and deride population-centric COIN as ahistorical and invalid. Some proponents of COIN respond to these criticisms by portraying the current mode of COIN as superior to a supposed alternative rooted in brutality towards the civilian population and “search and destroy” missions. In reality, however, there is no real practical difference between “enemy-centric” and “population-centric” COIN. Since COIN is a mission that matches military force against military force, it will by necessity focus on the enemy as the primary object, since it is the opponent’s presence that is causing the direct problem (as opposed to root one) that military force seeks to solve. It seems that the American COIN debate’s complications originate from factors outside of purely COIN theory and doctrine.
      Everyone by now has memorized the Clausewitzian idea that war is a continuation of political intercourse (policy + politics), with the added element of violence. “Politics” here generally means the distribution of power among human beings. So the Clausewitzian idea of forcing our will upon the opponent means using force to develop power over people. In regular warfare this generally is accomplished through the destruction or neutralization of the opponent’s field army and the occupation of his territory. Irregular warfare is generally different from this because the process of employing force involves the civilian population, which is not previously too great of a factor in the clash of modern armies. Seen in this light, COIN is an operational methodology that involves the use of force to suppress an armed uprising. Power over people is exerted through a combination of violence, coercion, and suasion. It involves the addressing of root causes, to be sure, but that is not the primary element. And if one examines the history of over 100+ years of organized COIN theory (starting with imperial policing classics) you see a number of military thinkers looking at the problems of using military force against irregulars and the problem of the civilian population. So why the bitter debate and the political complications?
      There are a number of factors, however, that have tremendously complicated American COIN. First, there is the matter of postcolonialism. Since the 1950s, a basic presumption in world opinion and international law is that outside powers have no right to rule over foreign populations whose lands have been acquired through force of arms. Of course, there are still states that do so and will not be compelled by any international body to relinquish their holdings. But as a basic norm, it is as passe as suits with elbow patches. However, world opinion does seem to accept the largely nonviolent post-Cold War science of “nation-building” by blue helmets and international development agencies, which enjoys wide legitimacy even if parts of the process do have similarities to colonial practice.
      Second, there is the growth of a large body of thinking over the last fifteen years in human rights theory and practice, what might broadly be called development, aid, peace studies, and peacekeeping. These concepts form a coherent whole that is broadly liberal and emancipatory in nature and has been embedded very deeply into the structure of how the West thinks about international relations and security. At times, its proponents can also mistake it for defined law with universal application across the ages, when it is really a set of of norms that evolved in the West from the immediate postwar period to the present. It might also be observed that these concepts mesh at least in spirit with the broadly Wilsonian way of thinking about America in the world that seems perennially popular, unlike realism and its cousins. What these related practices in peace studies, development, and international human rights law all share is a worldview that makes war–outside of narrowly transcribed limits–illegal because its destructive and coercive elements stand in opposition to liberal thought. Much like some of the idealists of the 1920s, this antipathy for warfare expands beyond just war theory and the laws of war to try to banish war itself through a broadly liberal set of policies, norms, and regulations.
      So what does all of these things add up to? You get doctrine whose basic purpose–the use of armed force to cement political control over populations by killing or neutralizing irregulars–is broadly unpalatable to a non-military Western audience. It smacks too much of colonial practice, and it offends an audience that has come to see the role of international political-military intervention as linked with nation-building, the “responsibility to protect” against massacre and genocide, and blue helmets (or regional forces) providing security duties against minor bandits. Because the broadly liberal ideology of Western elites is uncomfortable on a basic level with the use of force that does not fit carefully transcribed boundaries, COIN cannot be called what it really is: war. European nations’ discomfort with the basic use of force is a feature, not a bug, of this problem. The fact that we cannot talk honestly about war profoundly distorts our public discussion of COIN.
      It is from this collective cognitive dissonance that the mythical dichotomy of “liberal” COIN rooted in cups of tea, CERP money, and road-building projects standing in opposition to harsh collective punishment and “search and destroy” missions of “Roman COIN” emerges. Killing or neutralizing the enemy is the stuff of war itself, and organized COIN science is just an modern update of classical methods of eliminating armed insurgent groups and cementing political control over the population. Like anything else in war, it is harsh but cannot be reasonably called inherently brutal or evil. As stated before, the difference between enemy-centric and population-centric COIN is greatly exaggerated. COIN is neither “Mr. Rodgers” nor “Darth Vader.” It is a complex mixture of force, suasion, and coercion. Does it involve addressing the population’s grievances? Certainly. But one cannot put little girls in school in Kandahar or hand out bags of grain in Mogadishu without destroying or neutralizing the opponent–hence the involvement of soldiers instead of policemen.
      Having an honest discussion of COIN means recognizing that it is a form of warfare, and that war cannot be liberalized (or made more “conservative”–it’s purpose is not to validate political ideologies). The second is that warfare and force are basic tools of statecraft and will remain so no matter what a NGO or a bureaucrat in New York thinks. Once we get past the dichotomy of “Mr. Rodgers” vs. “Darth Vader” forms of COIN we can begin to discuss with more precision whether our usage of force is the best method of achieving our larger objectives.

Anti-Access and Power Projection: Tactical Sketches

Adam Elkus — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 09:16:41 +0000

To expand and simplify some of the issues I raised in the last post, I want to explore in greater depth the idea of OPFOR conventional high-end asymmetric challenges. The point raised in many discussions of anti-access and denial challenges by “hybrid” threats is that conventional tactical challenges and defeats by a state or non-state OPFOR is more likely due to technology diffusion. But what would happen after tactical setbacks? What strategic effect would these have? The implicit idea, it seems, is that a tactical challenge of a modern “Task Force Smith” would result in strategic deterrence of the West. We can explore some of the problems with this in several tactical sketches.
      First, let’s take the by-now classic OPFOR victory, the setup of Lt. Gen (ret) Van Riper’s tactical surprise in Millennium Challenge 2002 and expand it to a generic scenario. There is a political crisis in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, with brutal political violence going on in the capitol, a port mega-city. The United States decides to intervene and sends a force (let’s say a Marine Air-Ground Task Force) to coerce a faction into compliance. The faction leader skillfully utilizes a series of conventional and irregular assets to surprise and attrit the MAGTF through swarming tactics the way Van Riper conducted the naval battle in MC2002. In our scenario we now have two possible options. The President, humiliated by this military disaster and harried by political opponents, might withdraw forces from theater. More likely is a populist call for revenge as well as the very real strategic issue of not permitting a non-state force to humiliate the United States in a force-on-force engagement. After a drawn-out, and bloody air-land battle the Marines kill a good deal of the faction’s fighters, destroy the port mega-city, and a drone vaporizes the faction leader as he tries to escape the killing ground through an underground tunnel system.
      Next, let’s take an internal scenario. In a Western country, an advanced narco-gang composed of a combination of militia, turf “shooters,” and mercenaries with extensive military experience combine to create a “no-go” zone in a “feral city.” The narco-group is networked and is capable of carrying out complex operations, and is armed with heavy infantry weaponry capable of engaging ground and air vehicles and dominating even SWAT firepower. When the police attempt to enforce order in the “no-go” zone the narco-group executes several bloody ambushes and complex assaults, Mexican-style. After an initial shock, the civil authorities call in paramilitaries and a National Guard unit. Block by block, the narcos are rooted out and killed as the state unleashes its full force in the confined space of the “no-go” zone. Militia, however fanatical, in the end do not stand up to trained, well-armed, and disciplined soldiers with all-arms support and superior numbers.
      In both cases there are more casualties than we are used to and a heavy amount of collateral damage. But the strategy of the faction and the narco-gang both is conditional on the assumption that state forces will give up after suffering tactical setbacks. Given that we have not suffered a major tactical loss since Korea (although we did suffer from tactical attrition in the mainforce war in Vietnam against the North Vietnamese conventional forces in jungle combat) it is difficult to envision a Kasserine Pass or Task Force Smith type scenario–and this accounts for some of the shock of the idea of the “anti-access” and conventional OPFOR challenge. But if we had been stymied by a foe capable of employing medium or advanced weapons against us would we really back down? It seems more likely that a conventional setback would trigger a more vigorous response.
      Now let’s take a look at a different tactical scenario. A Western state is forced to directly intervene in a proxy war in order to prop up a doddering client. The OPFOR, enjoying backing of a neighboring regional power, a cross-border sanctuary, and difficult terrain that provides cover from mass, artillery, and airpower, decides on a strategy of attrition. Utilizing conventional forces that make skillful use of existing assets to build an open-source combined arms force, they attrit the intervening force. They suffer retaliation and heavy losses, but use the terrain and their own mobility to evade destruction. Eventually, the public decides that the high cost and lack of strategic decision is intolerable. The Western force is either heavily drawn down or withdrawn completely. While the OPFOR may have been bled tactically, it is not something that they cannot eventually recover from.
      The difference between the three tactical scenarios is that in the first two the insurgent force made the assumption that it could win solely through annihilation-i.e a tactical blow with strategic consequences. This would supposedly turn the public against the government. But casualty aversion of this sort is a myth often spread by Occidentalists. In the American context, the public is not casualty averse as long as results are obtained. In the latter scenario, cobbled together from a mixture of Lebanon 2006 and Vietnam’s mainforce war, the OPFOR uses a strategy of attrition to convince the public that the costs of peripheral warfare are too high. This, combined with the inability to achieve strategic decision, results in a loss of political will. The problem with anti-access scenarios is that they seem to be based more on the idea of strategic paralysis or annihilation than attrition–which is where the danger really lies.
      For the past ten years, discussion of asymmetric threats usually is predicated on the assumption that they win through skillful political maneuver, as in the Flotilla incident. Another idea is that they frustrate the political designs of a third-party COIN force through political subversion, terror tactics, and popular mobilization. In neither scheme is the idea of a conventional challenge raised, so the recent discussion about conventional tactical challenges is welcome because it recognizes the potential shift in power to minor state and non-state groups. But we should recognize that if these groups are to maximize their tactical value it would not be through a couple of MC2002 set-piece battles but a drawn-out process of conventional attrition. The shock of a MC2002 battle, especially when the intervening power is politically determined, would be at best momentary. Preventing access is not enough in and of itself–raising the human and material costs to the intervening power through slow and ongoing destruction is more important.