Quantity Does Not Have A Quality of its Own...

...but it sure can be helpful.  Last night, at CNAS's talk and reception for David Kilcullen's new book (hereafter to be referred to as "COIN Prom"), I had a fascinating conversation with a foreign officer who said something to the effect that Americans never do anything small* because we have the ability to go big, which can make us impatient; by contrast, smaller European, ISAF, etc forces have to be deliberate and think everything through painfully, since they lack that sort of cushion. 

(After hashing this thought over with a naval officer also involved in the conversation, we amended to "unless it's really, really expensive. Then, the smaller, the better." Whoever said that sarcasm was dead?)

 

And though certainly we don't have enough forces in the Army, or the civilian agencies, to tackle our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly or as effectively as we'd like, it's still nonetheless true that we do have a lot more flexibility than many of our allies. 

I think that's true, but that also got me to thinking about how in some sense, there's a genius to using large forces more effectively than small forces alone. Military leaders often get a bad rap in historical accounts for being too attrition-focused; this is frankly probably a historiographic legacy of World War I, and then Vietnam two generations of scholars later. Outside of Napoleon's use of brigades, people rarely talk about the organizational genius that it takes to effectively employ large forces and direct them effectively in battle.

Put it another way, there's an unexamined genius involved in using America's military might to result in increasing returns to scale, rather than constant or decreasing returns.  

After all, coordinating that many forces can be well-nigh paralyzing; you might argue that McClellan faced exactly such a problem during the Civil War, while Grant used his massive manpower advantage to seek battle more frequently, even if at first he met with mixed results. 

Similar results obtain in more modern wars; after all, the obvious call in the invasion of Baghdad in 2003 was to surround the city and then slowly work in, using overwhelming firepower, not the genius finesse move of sprinting a force deep inside the city to capture Baghdad's airport, and backing it up with air power, etc, in a pincer move. Or Schwartzpkof's great wheel in the desert, etc, etc, you can insert your own examples here. 

But what does this mean for COIN? After all, we talk about flooding the zone, and minimum required troop ratios of 20 troops per thousand inhabitants, but what are the radical variations on that not only require, but take fullest advantage of having a lot of troops and materiel? (The "Surge" is not an acceptable answer, since it was a response to having too few people; the Baghdad "Anaconda"** strategy might be heading in that direction.)

This is the sort of idea that I'm going to poke at for a while.

*On behalf of all military history fans everywhere, may I beg for a moratorium on using "Anaconda" as the name of military strategies for at least a few years? We get it, it's good and evocative. But it's been used twice since 2001 alone!