Dunlap is right, but does his point matter?

For my readers who don't feel like reading through the recent essays written by Air Force Major General Charles J. Dunlap, I can summarize his point in two sentences:

Advocates of traditional counterinsurgency doctrine argue that air power is not as effective as ground presence when fighting an insurgency. They are wrong because ground troops can cause just as much collateral damage to the local population.

He's right to a certain degree. Ground troops can easily harm just as many civilians as a pilot in an F-18. If you abstracted Dunlap's logic to its furthest extent, ground forces should actually be causing the preponderance of civilian casualties because there are more of them and operate closest to them. I'm even willing to accept that statement on its face value.

The only problem with Dunlap's argument is that it is missing one key element: The objective of counterinsurgency is to establish and maintain public order, not merely fight off insurgents. Just read this statement:

Consider, for instance, this astonishing statement from a ISAF spokesman: “I am assured by uniformed colleagues in NATO that there is a marginal difference to the potential for civilian casualties between using a 500lb bomb and a 2,000lb bomb."

If military people really believe that there is only a “marginal” difference between a 500 lbs. bomb and a 2,000 lbs. bomb, then the depth of misinformation is truly disturbing. Accordingly, my article will examine the technologies and processes that operate today to limit collateral damage from air-delivered munitions.

What does collateral damage matter when you accidentally bomb a wedding? Or someone's home? Does an Iraqi care whether the Air Force dropped a one-ton bomb in his neighborhood or is a quarter-ton okay?

Setting aside accidents and collateral damage, how would General Dunlap feel if bombs rained down on his hometown at random intervals? Does he think he could live a normal under such conditions?

The key to winning a counterinsurgency is understand both the military and the social dimensions of the conflict. An aircraft can attack insurgents, drop leaflets and provide humanitarian relief, but it can't establish trusting relationships with the locals, gather intelligence, or ensure basic order like ground troops can.

Unless the Air Force is willing to get out of its collective cockpit and spend some serious time working with the locals, it will never be flexible enough to play anything more than a supporting role in stability operations.

So why Azerbaijian and does it matter?

I imagine that by now, most of my readers have had a chance to read Noah Shachtman's piece on FCS and Azerbaijan. For those who have not, I will summarize: As part of the Operational Requirements Document used to justify the efficacy of Future Combat Systems, the Army prepared a summary mission profile for a hypothetical set of missions. These hypothetical missions just happen to take place in the oil-rich former Soviet state and now Republic of Azerbaijan.

At this point, some of my readers are probably asking themselves: "Azerbaijan, is that like where Borat goes for summer vacation or something? Why did the Army pick that place?" To be certain, Azerbaijan wasn't selected for political reasons. Azerbaijan isn't exactly the most democratic ex-Soviet state, but the government of President Ilham Aliyev is pretty friendly with the United States. Plus, the U.S oil firm Unocal (now part of Chevron) also owns about a 9% stake in the $3.6 billion Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.

Azerbaijan may be a friend, but is one of the roughest and most volatile neighborhoods in the world. The Azeris and the Armenians fight over Nagorno-Karabakh, the Georgians and the Russians fight over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and the Armenians and the Turks fight over whether the Ottoman Empire committed genocide against ethnic Armenians in 1915-1917 (I am definitely not going to wade into that one). To top that off, all of this strife crammed into a small mountainous region sandwiched between Iran and Chechnya. Sometimes I'm surprised that countries stopped bickering long enough to allow the 1776 kilometer Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline get off the drawing board.

Small, U.S.-friendly, oil-producing state locked in a far-off, volatile region of the world. Doesn't that sound like another country in the Near East, one that we've successfully liberated before? Kuwait perhaps?

In my view, Azerbaijan was picked because its size, terrain, and political environment fit the assumptions that shape FCS. They picked a relatively small country to accentuate the ability of a single FCS Brigade Combat Team to rapidly achieve "decisive maneuver" against a larger opposing force in 48-60 hours. Azerbaijan is also a relatively remote, mountainous area bordered by few U.S. allies. This reflects the Army's emphasis on performing combat operations on short notice and without pre-positioned equipment. Finally, there is the potential (however remote) that the Army may be called upon to one day liberate the Azeris from an encroaching neighbor. Remind anyone of an incredibly successful "left-hook" the Army pulled off a little more than 15 years ago?

My main concern with the Azerbaijan scenarios is that they highlight a fundamental flaw of FCS. This billion-dollar force recapitalization project is focused on refining existing capabilities at a time when the Army needs to develop entirely new capabilities. To me, being able to successfully conduct stability operations campaign the day after a 72 hour blitzkrieg is worth far more than shaving that blitzkrieg down to 48 hours. Does the Army honestly expect a brigade of 4000 troops trained and equipped for maneuver warfare against a modern opposing army to manage 8 million people spread over a country the size of Maine? We have multiple brigades in Baghdad (a city of 7 million) and they can't even keep the peace without support from the Iraqi military.

At the very least, one would hope that as soon as images of the National Carpet Museum in Baku being looted by anonymous brigands are splashed across CNN the hypothetical Secretary of Defense overseeing one of these imagined combat operations would have something more conciliatory to say than 'Stuff happens.'

I'm not saying the Army doesn't need to recapitalize the force and I'm not exactly opposed to the idea of network-centric warfare either. I'm just arguing that the Army's vision of the future force is shackled by a set of overly narrow assumptions about what kind of wars it will fight. As Colin Gray asked in a great monograph published by the Army War College back in 2005, if the Army is putting all of its development dollars into FCS, is FCS robust enough to counter the broadest set of future war scenarios? In terms of fighting a major urban counterinsurgency campaign (Iraq) or managing a fractured, poor state (Afghanistan), I think the evidence is pointing towards 'no.'

MRAP and EFPs

USAToday picks up on a key weakness of the military's new vehicular Ing'enue: The MRAP cannot stand up to explosively-formed penetrators (EFPs):

But the armor on those vehicles cannot stop the newest bomb to emerge, known as an explosively formed penetrator (EFP). The Pentagon plans to replace virtually all Humvees with MRAPs to provide better protection against roadside bombs, responsible for most casualties in Iraq.

The document, dated Jan. 13, is called an urgent universal need statement. The statements are written by field commanders in all services, who want commercially available solutions to battlefield problems.

Since MRAPs are so much safer against traditional roadside bombs, the document says, Iraqi insurgents' use of EFPs "can be expected to increase significantly."

As a result, the Marine commanders in Iraq who wrote the statement asked for more armor to be added to the new vehicles.

Armor performance information is pretty sensitive even when it is not classified, so I have waited until enough details surface in public before broaching the issue. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise consider that an EFP managed to penetrate the thick skin of a British Challenger 2 tank. If an EFP can go through a 60-ton tank encased in Chobham armor, what are the chances that the 15-ton MRAP's rolled steel would perform any better?

The MRAP's V-shaped hull design is really meant to deflect the energy of an explosion and not the EFP's focused blast. With enough armor, the hull curvature might deflect them in some situations, but the Marines shouldn't get their hopes up because EFPs have been known to resist even reactive armor.

I'm still not willing to dismiss the MRAP entirely because forcing the insurgents to use more EFPs could reduce causalities. Imagine that you are trying to pierce a 2-liter bottle of soda locked in a refrigerator and the only tools available were a ballista and a 18th Century cannon. The ballista's arrow would probably have enough force to go all the way through the fridge, but its damage would be highly localized. Heck, you might even miss the two-liter entirely.

Using the cannon is a different story. A cannonball might not pierce the fridge, but it would implode (or "spall") the fridge door, potentially destroying everything inside. Adding armor to the fridge would help you resist the cannonball's more distributed impact, but it would provide less protection against the ballista's bolt.

This may play out in Iraq in the same way. An EFP may injure one or even two passengers in an MRAP, but the rest of the crew would be relatively safe. Its not a perfect solution, but then again, are there any perfect solutions in war?

I agree with Ralph Peters (Quick, take a picture!)

I only read the Armed Forces Journal when one has been left sitting in the lobby to my office for a week or two, so J. Sigger gets a big hat tip for calling Ralph "The Hearts and Minds Myth" Peters's latest commentary to my attention. I normally find myself at odds with Mr. Peters on topics of counterinsurgency to professional military education to politics in general (I'm much closer to Tony Corn on those subjects). His "Killing with Kindness" piece wins big points with me though because it 1) knocks on Future Combat Systems and 2) highlights the poverty of Bush policy in Iraq. Here are some choice passages:

The problem here isn't the FCS, which shows great potential — as long as the Army doesn't fall into the Air Force practice of promising more than any system ever could deliver. The troubling aspect is the instinctive political correctness of the goofball counterinsurgency video (which undoubtedly cost the taxpayer as much as a good indie film, whether funded directly by the Army or by a contractor who wrote it off as a business expense). What's the fundamental purpose of FCS? One would assume it's intended to kill our enemies and destroy their ability to carry on the fight while shattering their will. That would justify the cost. But a single Special Forces A-Team could do everything in that counterinsurgency video more dependably, with a much smaller footprint and $100 billion cheaper. Has the Army forgotten what war is? (The No. 1 complaint I now hear from officers in Iraq is about "green-zone generals" who have no idea what the streets outside their bubble are like — our military leaders are beginning to sound uncomfortably like World War I's "chateaux generals.") Is the always-dutiful, ever-unimaginative Army signing up for the Air Force's claim that technology can win the wars of the future without disturbing our enemy's beauty sleep? Do the Army's senior leaders now believe in the myth of bloodless war? Hasn't Iraq taught them anything?

I may grind an axe or two about some of my least favorite members of Army leadership, but I have nothing against General Cartwright. The guy is great manager and incredibly perceptive, which is probably why he ended up with reigns of FCS. I'm afraid the problem is that FCS is just too big of a beast for a two-star to lead. There are just too many players involved in this proposed complete recapitalization of the U.S. Army. It needs more direct involvement from all aspects of the Army secretariat and rigorous scrutiny from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and his Inspector-General. As Peters points out from the wildly unrealistic videos churned out by FCS's media consultants, it has become all edge and no substance. The Army has defended FCS for the last five years by overpromising on its potential capabilities. Got an transnation terrorist problem? FCS will let a luck President peer through the gunsight of a sniper who has Osama in his sights. Insurgency ruining your war plans? FCS's all-knowing web of information and communcations has those troublemakers on lockdown. Nevermind the fact that some of the FCS components currently in the field aren't getting rave reviews from its enlist and junior officer users. Or that some its pie-in-the-sky concepts, such as the recently doomed Land Warrior, aren't even popular as technology demonstrators. A new fleet of overweight, under armored, tracked vehicles will cure all of the current Army's ailments. Pardon my skepticism, but I bet we'd get a better return on investment by giving each combat soldier a cell phone, a GPS tracker, a PDA, a decent kevlar vest and a year's worth of language training (focusing on Arabic, French and Dari - leave Chinese to the Navy). As Krulak was getting at in his soliloquy about the "The Strategic Corporal," a soldier's best weapon is not the gun in his/her hands, but the grey stuff between his/her ears. This brings me to the second bit about Peter's article that I really appreciated:

The Army's knee-jerk, politically correct reaction to any suggestion that evil men need to be killed so that the innocent might prosper is the disingenuous statement that "you can't just kill everybody," as if the only alternative to uniformed pacifism is genocide. Anyway, our enemies are perfectly willing to try to "kill everybody" until they reach their goals. In material terms, we remain by far the most powerful military on earth. In terms of strength of will or intellectual integrity, our enemies put us to shame. The terrorists are honest about their goals. We mumble platitudes and send our soldiers off to face more improvised explosive devices. [snip] We've come a long, long way — downhill — since then-Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood wrote, almost a century ago, that "The purpose of an army is to fight." According to that goofball here's-why-we-need-FCS video and the draft of the counterinsurgency manual, the purpose of an army is to put Band-Aids on boo-boos. Let's all hope that the promised revisions to the manual will inject some intellectual integrity and sobriety — but, frankly, some is all we can hope for. Although the draft manual mentions the importance of understanding foreign cultures, it carefully avoids religion, which is the fundamental determinant of any culture: Men and women are what they believe. [snip] The apostle of an Islamo-fascist insurgency needs only to activate a disposition that already exists in a potential recruit, to portray the faith as under threat or betrayed and call the faithful to arms. And then you've got trouble in Kabul River City. Religious believers aren't blank slates but potential sleeper-agents, every one. It's virtually impossible to convince a man or woman anywhere that his or her religion is wrong. And, in the end, it comes down to what men are willing to die for: Faith tops the list, followed by blood ties as a close second. Ideology is way down the list and dropping. You might convert a weary guerrilla in Latin America from Marxism to democracy and capitalism (or, at least, to narco-trafficking), but you can't persuade an Arab to become Persian, or a Kurd to become Arab. Religious and ethnic insurgencies — which often overlap — are fundamentally different from and far tougher to defeat than ideological movements. Ideology is kid's stuff. Blood and belief are the real things.

Although Peters's agonizing about the unique qualities of religiously-motivated Arab insurgency smacks of Orientalism (I could write a whole post on that subject alone), he does make some great points. To those I would like to add a few of my own: 1. If you can't bring yourself to go "all the way" when fighting a counterinsurgency (i.e. go as far as depopulating entire towns and countrysides, Callwellian-style) then go home. Half measures just make the insurgents more powerful at the expense of blood and treasure. The all-volunteer force has performed miracles in the past, but there are just some things beyond its capacity. 2. Relying wholely on the local leaders willing to take bribes only attracts the corrupt. I thought we learned that one in Vietnam, but apparently not. Sometimes the most reliable and effective leaders are on the other side, meaning political concessions are the only currency they will accept. 3. The "touchy-feely" approach to counterinsurgency outlined in the Army's new counterinsurgency manual works for about the first 3-6 months of an occupation. First impressions are usually etched in the stone of culture consciousness. 4. If you have to "pick a winner" in Iraq, you have lost. Go home. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

Return to Mogadishu and the Japan-Iran connection

The only thing surprising about Ethiopia's campaign to unseat the Islamic Courts Union and install the Transition Federal Government of Somalia is how rapid their advance to Mogadishu has been. I'm pretty surprised that the ICU forces have continued to use the tactics of a conventional army so late into the conflict. It probably would have been smarter for Somali Islamists to have switched to dispersed geurrilla tactics after Ethopian troops crossed the border in serious numbers to reinforce Baidoa back on December 8th. The ICU is just too poorly armed to successfully use conventional tactics against the relatively well-heeled Ethiopian military. As the last paragraphs of the article on the conflict from today's Post suggests:

Witnesses reported seeing a large number of foreign fighters in the convoys heading south. Islamic movement leaders had called on foreign Muslims to join their "holy war" against Ethiopia, which has a majority Christian population. Hundreds were believed to have answered the call. Residents told the AP that Islamic leader Hassan Dahir Aweys had arrived in the frontline town of Jilib, 65 miles north of Kismayo, earlier Thursday with hundreds of fighters aboard 45 pickup trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns. Islamic fighters have gone door to door in Kismayo recruiting children as young as 12 to make a last stand on behalf of the Islamic movement, according to a U.N. report citing the families of boys taken to Jilib.

Pressing local children into service is an act of desparate act of a group looking towards martyrdom, not one preparing for an insurgency. Did they learn nothing from the defeat and subsequent rebirth of the Taliban in Afghanistan? Massing militiamen just creates larger targets for Ethiopia's Russian-made attack helicopters. For those interested in the Japanese angle on the current flap over Iran's nuclear program, I would definitely suggest giving Michael Penn's "Oil and Power: The Rise and Fall of the Japan-Iran Partnership in Azadegan" a read. Its a quick read covering Japan's involvement in the exploration of Iran's Azadagen oil field and it provides a solid description of how Japan was caught between the bellicose stubbornness of the Bush and Ahmadinejad administrations. Thankfully the Japanese managed to back away from their investments without incurring huge losses, but things did get interesting - at one point the Iranians suggested the Japanese provide technical cooperation to the Iranian nuclear program as a way ensuring it is peaceful.