Analytical Assumptions for Iraq; Part 3

My previous two posts analyzed the major internal actors, their maximal goal sets and the basic interactive dynamic in Iraq. I barely mentioned military strategy except to illustrate some potential blocking maneuvers to deny an opponent their desired political, economic, and military objectives. This post will address some simple heuristics for military analysis that I use. I will first start with general statements and then discuss counterinsurgency.

I am a firm believer that military actions and war are an extension of politics. This means that tactical excellence in pursuit of a nebulous and ill-defined goal will not produce positive long-term results. Tactical mediocrity in pursuit of a clear political objective can produce positive results. As I stated in the second section of this series, I believe that the United States has, at best, a muddied strategic objective, so individual and small group bravery, courage, and dedication will not meaningfully impact the eventual outcomes that we will see in Iraq.

War is a frighteningly complex human system of systems. The side(s) with a faster and more accurate OODA loop reduces their own errors, and forces their opponents to commit more errors of omission and commission. OODA looping is the process of Observing, Orientating, Deciding and Acting and then Observing the new state of reality. Every individual and organization engages in this loop, although some organizations/individuals can process through an iteration of this loop faster and more accurately than others. As this process continues a successful OODA looper will create a greater variety of potential action and option space for his decision process, while a slow or inaccurate looper will see his option space diminish.

The easiest way to expedite your own loop is to collect better information more quickly, while the best way of diminishing your opponent’s decision process is to restrict their information or to add in false information.

Equipment and firepower mean far less than the individual, motivation and organization. War is ultimately a human event. All else being equal, well-motivated and well-trained troops will beat poorly motivated and well-trained troops, and they will dominate poorly motivated and poorly trained troops. Motivation derives from several different sources; loyalty to an abstract ideal such as the national good, a commitment to protecting friends, family and clan, a desire to look good to your buddies in your squad or platoon, and a desire to stay alive.

Analyzing individual actions and newspaper stories produces marginal value unless information is provided that allows one to analyze the supporting structures of the units and individuals involved in an action. For instance, we know that there is frequent and heavy combat in Ramadi for instance, and has been for the past three years. We know that this combat has produced a significant tally of dead Sunni Arab fighters, but the takeaway is that the Sunni Arab insurgencies have the ability to take casualties, regenerate their units, motivate their fighters and chip away at the US freedom to maneuver and patrol. The trend here is more important than most single actions. I am interested in the breaks in trend.

Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency warfare is an extraordinarily difficult form of warfare. The objective is long term, the information loops are fragile and potentially unreliable, and the traditional elements of successful high intensity maneuver warfare tend to work against successful counterinsurgency warfare.

There are two great general problems with counterinsurgency warfare. The first is that it is almost always easier to create disorder than it is to create order. Counterinsurgency warfare seeks to create a general milieu of stability while the insurgent force only has to deny the counterinsurgent force this stability. The counterinsurgent force has to be able to make the credible promise that it can provide basic security, basic public goods and a reliable and credible system of grievance resolution that is perceived to fair. The insurgent group just has to break this promise. For instance, one of the public goods that counterinsurgent forces are expected to provide is access to electricity. Electrical distribution is a soft, linear, brittle target set where a single point of failure results in a broken promise. The insurgent force just has to cut the line from the power plant to the local substation, while the counterinsurgent force has to protect the power plant, protect every single foot of the transmission line, protect the substation, and finally protect the neighborhood distribution system so that the potential supporter’s refrigerator can work.

The second great problem is an information gathering, analyzing and dissemination problem. Insurgents operate within a population that in most instances the insurgent looks, sounds, and acts like except for when they are carrying out attacks. Identifying friendly individuals from neutral individuals and then from hostile but non-shooting at you individuals and finally identifying actual insurgents and their direct logistic support systems is a pain in the ass in the best of times.

The classical solution to this problem is a variant upon the protected relocation, strategic hamlet, and area barriers strategies. These are all the same category of solution to the information sorting problem, and the new Petreaus counter-insurgency doctrine [big PDF] as well as the “oil-spot” counter-insurgency strategy are extensions of these concepts. The idea is to move a population to a government control area, flood that area with counterinsurgent forces, seek and destroy active insurgents, and then provide the population in this area with a variety of public goods and services while isolating the latent insurgents within the population from their external support network and denying exterior insurgents of that populations support. Rinse, and repeat until the remaining insurgents either convert themselves back into non-insurgents or are forced to concentrate and fight main-force battles where all the traditional firepower and organizational advantages of the counter-insurgent force can come into play.

This basic strategy has as exemplar success of the Malaysian Emergency where the British Empire over the course of twelve years defeated an ethnic Chinese insurgency in Malaysia. Even in this stellar example of success, a massive number of Imperial and Malaysian counter-insurgents and a long period of time was required to defeat a small, distinctive minority insurgency that faced majority group opposition. Furthermore, the other successes have also tended to occur in societies whose dominant form of socio-economic organization is rural subsistence agriculture.

Iraq is an urban nation and it is a modern nation. These two basic facts massively complicate any solution set. The public goods that a modern nation state is expected to provide are complex goods such as electricity, public health, fuel, and economic vitality at a level above basic subsistence. These goods cannot be effectively provided under the current technological matrix unless a subpopulation is connected to the rest of society. John Robb at Global Guerrillas has done an amazing job of chronicling this portion of the problem set for Iraq and the future.

A last complication that has rendered useless most traditional counterinsurgency theory is that there is no single insurgency in Iraq. Instead there are multiple active and potential insurgencies; the nationalist Sunni Arab insurgency, the ex-Ba’athist insurgency, the Al-Quaeda in Iraq insurgency, a Sadrist anti-occupation insurgency in Basra against Great Britain, a potential Sadrist insurgency in both Sadr City and against the US supply lines running from Kuwait to Baghdad International Airport. Additionally there are sectarian battles going on that are not insurgencies.

All of these separate fights have forced individuals, families, neighborhoods, clans and tribes to make loyalty choices that highly impact their chances of survival and success further down the abstraction chain than loyalty to the concept of a single, unified, non-sectarian Iraqi nation state. This devolution of loyalty towards primary loyalties directly impacts the type and quality of information that US forces receive, and also impacts the motivation of individual Iraqis and Iraqi military units to fight and follow US orders.