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! 

Your Daily Read

1. A very Agrarian-Studies-esque argument that Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution developed crops that were ideal for the type of farming conducted by confiscatory landlords, but that small farmers don't get nearly the same yields. Calling all Jim Scott fans....

2. Andrew Exum on how CT and COIN policies can be usefully combined. Builds effectively on what CNAS has already written to say some new and interesting things. 

The Intifada Problem

Andrew Exum writes in a recent post that 

Now why do I mention this? Because I'm sticking to my guns -- how you behave tactically has strategic effects on the modern battlefield. My central thesis, I believe, is correct -- whether you're talking about the U.S. military, the IDF, or any other Western military:

Relatively recently, a consensus has emerged stateside that well-drafted rules of engagement are A Good Thing, and protecting the population is A Better Thing. Those are broad, broad statements that have to be applied differently to different circumstances. But the central issue at play here is this: How do we assess those circumstances? How do we predict when populations will rise up in response to any particular deadly incident*? 

This is THE central hard problem political scientists and military strategists don't have an answer to. The First Intifada was triggered (not caused, but triggered) in part by a traffic accident. Both the PLO and Hamas were caught utterly flat-footed by the uprising, as was the IDF equally. The IDF thought it had the population pretty well in hand; West Bank Palestinians were at that point employed in fairly large numbers in Israeli cities,** they had decently-managed checkpoints, the PLO was in exile. 

Yet a series of small incidents triggered a massive amount of violence, and then escalation in response by the IDF. No particular change in ROE would have prevented it, and no particular predictor could have told you when violence was going to flare up. 

We know generalities about how violence versus respect matters once civil wars orinsurgencies are underway and there is a high pace of operations; telling US soldiers in Iraq to "First, do no harm" was a good call. But the majority of IDF interactions with Palestinians are at checkpoints, raids on houses, clashes at settlements, NOT high-intensity warfare. And I'm really skeptical that we have any clear idea about what the right tactics are to produce the strategic outcomes we desire in low-intensity operations and peacekeeping. 

(Crossposted to the Abu Muqawama comment thread)

*Phrase made intentionally broad not to just cover killings that violate the laws of war, but lawful warfare, accident, etc, etc, etc. 

**General disclaimer from now until eternity: If you look hard enough in this part of the world, you'll find a way to turn territorial terminology here into a statement of some political craziness. I almost certainly don't believe whatever you'd read the tea leaves to ascribe to me.

Your Daily Read

1. Taliban parasitism of NSP funds in Afghanistan

2. Center for American Progress weighs in on Afghanistan

3. Lyall and Wilson argue that mechanized armies lack the COIN knowledge acquired by foraging

Your Daily Read

1. FM 3-24.2, "Tactics in Counterinsurgency."

2. Why "carrots and sticks" is a metaphor that harms public diplomacy