John Arquilla: War Is More Than Just a Numbers Game ... Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan
[John Arquilla is a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he has taught in the special operations curriculum since 1993.]
If you want to understand the American way of war, just look at a newspaper. Not the first section with all the world news. Go instead to the sports section, where you’ll find everything about every sport explained in a blizzard of statistics. Winning and losing are reckoned in things like numbers of service aces, yards per carry, and slugging percentages. Indeed, winning managers and coaches are routinely lauded for their aptitude at parsing all this data.
And war is being boiled down to numbers, too, because this is a simple way to express a complex reality in a manner that appeals to American pragmatism. So we are told things have gotten better in Iraq because we sent in more troops last year, while the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated because of having too few soldiers there.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In Iraq, violence fell for two main reasons: 1) Al Qaeda over-reached in Anbar, alienating Sunnis and making them susceptible to dealing with us; and 2) We shifted some troops off of large operating bases to a dispersed network of small outposts, enabling us to deter violence or respond much more swiftly to it. I had been lobbying since 2004 for the adoption of this “outpost and outreach” strategy (see the discussion in Chapter 7 of my new book, Worst Enemy). It was great to see the immediate impact — a sharp drop in violence — of these changes.
And we didn’t need 30,000 extra troops to do either thing. This is obvious in the case of negotiating with the insurgents — all that was needed in this instance was a willingness to deal with them. As to the outposts, the generals – and Senator McCain – will argue that they needed more troops in order to establish them. But the truth is that even now, with over 100 platoon-sized (i.e., 40-50 soldiers) outposts sprinkled around Iraq, about 90% of our forces remain laagered in on big operating bases. There have always been plenty of resources available for putting some 5,000+ troops in outposts. And even with the surge ended, there are plenty enough troops even to expand the network. In fact, the outpost network in Iraq could be sustained or enlarged even if we draw down sharply the number of forces on the big bases.
In Afghanistan, the story is similar. Those who say we never had enough troops there — a chorus that includes Senator Obama — miss the point that levels of violence there were very low for the first five years of our occupation. Indeed, we didn’t go over 10,000 troops in country until 2006. This hardly supports the idea that we have never had enough troops there.
And now that we have over 50,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, the violence is flaring — in a few areas. Why? The reason is that the Taliban have generated much sympathy with the Pashtuns, who feel disenfranchised by the current government. The more troops we pour in, the more targets we’ll create for disgruntled tribesmen. A better solution would be to negotiate with the Pashtuns in ways that empower them, and to move US and NATO forces in country away from larger bases to an outpost network. Almost the same as in Iraq, except that the outpost network in this case will be more rurally based.
For those who still see greater numbers as the key to victory, let me just remind us all that the military mantra in Vietnam was the call for ever more troops. Well in excess of half a million soldiers at one point. And yet the situation continued to worsen. No, numbers are not the answer in irregular warfare.
Perhaps, if we can move the public discourse beyond the notion of “surges” of forces, we can prod our presidential candidates to talk about the concepts of operations and negotiations they might employ as commander-in-chief. Then, at last, we would all have to look beyond the sports pages to understand American strategy.
Read entire article at Britannica Blog
If you want to understand the American way of war, just look at a newspaper. Not the first section with all the world news. Go instead to the sports section, where you’ll find everything about every sport explained in a blizzard of statistics. Winning and losing are reckoned in things like numbers of service aces, yards per carry, and slugging percentages. Indeed, winning managers and coaches are routinely lauded for their aptitude at parsing all this data.
And war is being boiled down to numbers, too, because this is a simple way to express a complex reality in a manner that appeals to American pragmatism. So we are told things have gotten better in Iraq because we sent in more troops last year, while the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated because of having too few soldiers there.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In Iraq, violence fell for two main reasons: 1) Al Qaeda over-reached in Anbar, alienating Sunnis and making them susceptible to dealing with us; and 2) We shifted some troops off of large operating bases to a dispersed network of small outposts, enabling us to deter violence or respond much more swiftly to it. I had been lobbying since 2004 for the adoption of this “outpost and outreach” strategy (see the discussion in Chapter 7 of my new book, Worst Enemy). It was great to see the immediate impact — a sharp drop in violence — of these changes.
And we didn’t need 30,000 extra troops to do either thing. This is obvious in the case of negotiating with the insurgents — all that was needed in this instance was a willingness to deal with them. As to the outposts, the generals – and Senator McCain – will argue that they needed more troops in order to establish them. But the truth is that even now, with over 100 platoon-sized (i.e., 40-50 soldiers) outposts sprinkled around Iraq, about 90% of our forces remain laagered in on big operating bases. There have always been plenty of resources available for putting some 5,000+ troops in outposts. And even with the surge ended, there are plenty enough troops even to expand the network. In fact, the outpost network in Iraq could be sustained or enlarged even if we draw down sharply the number of forces on the big bases.
In Afghanistan, the story is similar. Those who say we never had enough troops there — a chorus that includes Senator Obama — miss the point that levels of violence there were very low for the first five years of our occupation. Indeed, we didn’t go over 10,000 troops in country until 2006. This hardly supports the idea that we have never had enough troops there.
And now that we have over 50,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, the violence is flaring — in a few areas. Why? The reason is that the Taliban have generated much sympathy with the Pashtuns, who feel disenfranchised by the current government. The more troops we pour in, the more targets we’ll create for disgruntled tribesmen. A better solution would be to negotiate with the Pashtuns in ways that empower them, and to move US and NATO forces in country away from larger bases to an outpost network. Almost the same as in Iraq, except that the outpost network in this case will be more rurally based.
For those who still see greater numbers as the key to victory, let me just remind us all that the military mantra in Vietnam was the call for ever more troops. Well in excess of half a million soldiers at one point. And yet the situation continued to worsen. No, numbers are not the answer in irregular warfare.
Perhaps, if we can move the public discourse beyond the notion of “surges” of forces, we can prod our presidential candidates to talk about the concepts of operations and negotiations they might employ as commander-in-chief. Then, at last, we would all have to look beyond the sports pages to understand American strategy.