War on the Cheap

War is brutal, unforgiving and recurring. No Americans except for the 3,000 dead soldiers have seen the end of today’s Iraq war. Yet even though war occurs with (disturbing) frequency, leaders still fail to grasp two hard truths: 1.) more troops win more wars, and 2.) more technology will augment troops, not replace them.

1.) More troops, not less

People have a hard time understanding large numbers. In Vietnam, Defense Secretary McNamara was famous for wanting body counts, ostensibly in the name of attrition against North Vietnamese forces to the point where they could no longer fight. Today, news reports from Iraq and Afghanistan eagerly report numbers of insurgents killed, as if some tangible aggregate number of enemy was being reduced with each felled terrorist. This is problematic.

It is virtually impossible to kill the enemy fast enough for complete attrition. In Iraq alone, approximately 385,000 males will turn the age of 18 this year (a similar number will turn 17 and 16 respectively). Approximately 256,000 Syrian males will have their 18^th birthdays this year, as will 660,000 Iranian males, and some 38,000 Palestinian males (see the CIA Factbook and "Palestinian People" on Wikipedia for age demographics). Were America to go to war with Iran, looking simply at attrition rates America would have to kill 660,000 Iranian soldiers in one year just to keep the number of fighting-age Iranians from growing. That is nearly 2,000 combat kills per day.

Clearly the above is a simplification. Yet the point should be clear that counting kills is a fanciful game of misdirection. Unfortunately, America’s move towards a smaller, more mobile army subtly pays heed to this philosophy of enemy kills rather than enemy coercion. The small army hopes that by mere attrition of enemy forces the enemy will capitulate. But the smaller army is solely reactionary, and cannot hope to raise the costs of resistance to terrorist forces. “Small and mobile” overlooks the hard costs that the enemy is willing to sustain to reach his goals (autonomy, religious rule, new territory, etc.). Currently, to envision America’s forces in Iraq, imagine a small brigade of well-equip firefighters, racing around a vast wilderness trying to fight a thousand different brushfires at once.

More troops per square mile, even if the troops are less mobile, can raise the immediate cost of resistance to terrorist forces in a specific area (by making their goals too costly). The cost of resistance must be raised to exceed the enemy’s value of obtaining his goals. Without proper ground-force size, enemy forces can identify locales where troop-strength is weak and can concentrate their activity in these regions, less likely to be disrupted. There must be overwhelming friendly troop concentration in the area of attention; splotch and blotter strategies are short-sighted and flawed.

Obviously, these lessons are now painfully apparent to the American military planners regarding Iraq. But these lessons often must be relearned, and that is costly.

2.) Technology the (un)replacement

It seems appetizing, due to a public distaste for war, to reduce the size of infantry forces. Leaders need to resist this pressure, because humans are better at identifying enemy forces (especially guerilla ones) than machines due to a superior adaptability and sensory platform. Bombs, once a cutting-edge technology, destroy more things than they need to. Cruise-missiles, a newer advancement, are still fired from distant platforms and insurgent targets are often gone before the missile arrives at its destination. Enemy forces learn to conceal their weapons and fighting positions, strategies in Iraq that render bombs and missiles less effective because of fear of collateral damage, incorrect target-identification and the time-lag between target identification and target destruction.

It seems difficult for leaders to learn the value of a large ground-force element. Israel this summer embarrassingly attempted to cripple Hezbollah via air power, a strategy doomed to failure due to the time-lag element of air weapons-platforms, the difficulty with target-identification, the risk of collateral damage and the guerrilla-like strategies employed by Hezbollah (blending with and living on the local population, and primarily using rudimentary weapons).

The airplane is an interesting analogy when discussing the substitution of technology for infantry. The aircraft was introduced as a cutting-edge fighting vehicle in World War I, hailed as humane replacement for the bloody trenches that marred the western front. Battles would be fought and won in air; armies would be superfluous. In 1939, after Hitler invaded Western Europe, western tacticians concluded that a strategic bombing campaign would coerce Germany to surrender. This didn't work; although 300,000 German civilians were killed and over 1 million rendered homeless, and despite attacks on factories, rail yards and oil fields, the German war economy actually peaked between the end of 1944 and 1945 and the German morale did not “break.” Instead, industrial production was spread out, substitute products were found for "necessities" (German engineers nearly eliminated ball bearings from plane designs), and Hitler's oil supplies were only eliminated after ground forces captured the Romanian oil fields, despite numerous bombing attempts to put them out of action. Successful bombing operations only occurred mainly in conjunction with friendly ground forces, like strafing enemy troops, bombing rear-area supply networks, and destroying front-line communications and transportation hubs to impair enemy troop movement.




The Serbian engagement of 1999 is another interesting example. It took the United States, along with its NATO allies 78 days to force a very limited conditional agreement on a small, third-world country (Yugoslavia). Over 1,000 F-16s, F-18s, F117 stealth fighters and B2 stealth bombers didn't have the overpowering effect despite just a couple B2 bombers having a net worth of more than Yugoslavia's GDP. These expensive platforms are often described as making “war on the cheap,” in reference to the value saved in human lives. The lack of proper conflict resolution, leading to future conflict, is always overlooked in these calculations. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that the reality of war’s expense will ever be learned soon, despite America’s failures in Iraq.