This Kind of War...

The Department of Defense has released its latest budget, and there is much discussion about it inside and outside the Obama administration. Some military planners are looking at the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war as an example of the type of war we might or might not have to fight in the future. Having focused for so long on counterinsurgency warfare over the past decade, the Israeli Defense Forces appeared inept at fighting a Hezbollah that had suddenly transformed itself into a more conventional force.

This is a long-running argument within the Pentagon, going back at least to the Kennedy administration and his genius of the day, Robert S. McNamara. Kennedy began to see the need for armed forces capable of fighting much smaller, less technologically advanced insurgencies . However, most of our military academies train future leaders of our armed forces in conventional warfare, meaning large engagements ruled by maneuver, non-nuclear weapons, lightning speed, targeted destruction of particular targets, and clearly defined geographic or military objectives.

I think I'm safe in saying that most of the Pentagon brass prefers conventional warfare. Why? For the very reasons that the American public didn't like Vietnam or the Iraq or Afghanistan insurgencies: as William Wallace's father said in Braveheart, "We don't need to defeat them, just fight them." And that's as true now as it was for the Athenians when they invaded Sicily during the Pelopponesian War. A long, drawn-out insurgency by a small force can win against a large, advanced, superior force far from home if:

1. They can continue to inflict slow, small, but steady casualties that increase uneasiness and weaken the political will of the society or government which sent the occupying force.
2. They can "blend in" with or enjoy the support of the local populace, making every "local" a potential target. Being on guard can wear down the morale of any force.
3. They are willing to engage in tactics that are "dirty" according to traditional military doctrines (kidnapping, using civilians as shields, etc.), forcing the occupier to engage in similar behavior--something traditional militaries find extremely distasteful, as the officer corps particularly is driven by a sense of honor that "dirty" tactics tend to sully.

Insurgency warfare is highly localized, situational, and culture-based. Conventional warfare covers more ground, is general and theoretical in its outlook, and is very much rule-based (that's why we have the Geneva Conventions, among other things, to limit the types of damage, targets, or weapons advanced nations use in war).

As a favorite saying of military types goes, "The great thing is not to lose your nerve," and insurgency is a slow drag on the morale of any military force until they learn how to separate the insurgents from their local hideouts and sources of supply, as General David Petraeus was able to do in Iraq.

So how does all this military thinking affect the budget? Well, eventually you have to look into your crystal ball and guess what your biggest and most likely threats are going to be in the next year, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, and beyond. Then you have to train and equip your forces according to who you think you'll have to fight. Expect to fight a lot more insurgency wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, and you have one military. Expect to hold off the Chinese Communists from invading Taiwan or North Korea from invading South Korea, and you'll have a different military. Expect your biggest threats to be technological from a variety of sources (cyberspace, low-Earth orbit, ballistic missiles), and you'll have yet another military. You could, of course, split the money three ways, giving all three types of warfare short shrift, but preparing you for every contingency. Or you throw all your money into one or two things and hope for the best.

Of course everyone bases their estimates of what to do on the wars we've fought in the past--which makes sense, to some degree--we do learn from history, but sometimes too well. (The movie Tora! Tora! Tora! is an excellent case in point.) The split-things-three-ways doctrine--the one we've followed on the cheap since the end of the Cold War--calls for us to be able to fight two regional wars at once, with some surge ability to handle smaller engagements, as needed. But we haven't been fighting regional conflicts. No one will take us on in a straight fight, because those who do get their collective butts kicked. That's a good ability and reputation to have, but if our enemies know they can't kick our butts in an open fight, they'll switch to unconventional tactics. We can go unconventional, too, but then we lose that ability to intimidate through our more conventional tactics.

And even as President Obama calls for the nations of the world to reduce or restrict their inventories of nuclear weapons, other nations continue to build them, like North Korea and Iran. (As one Indian ambassador noted about the lessons of the first Gulf War, "Never fight the United States if you do not have nuclear weapons.") We also still have forces in the field making slow but steady progress in Iraq, and more forces moving into Afghanistan to repeat the Petraeus Doctrine there. And we have China, with its huge, though still technologically lagging conventional forces, looking to control East Asia; the People's Republic also has staged several high-profile cyber-attacks on the Pentagon's computer systems. We have North Korea threatening our allies Japan and South Korea with nuclear weapons plus ballistic missiles. We have an authoritarian Russia blackmailing its neighbors by controlling the flow of oil into Europe. We have a politically unstable Pakistan making deals with al-Qaeda and the Taliban on one border and supporting terrorist attacks on Hindu India on another border. Both Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons. And we have humanitarian crises like Darfur, which seem to call for something we've never had to develop before: anti-genocide forces.

So what sort of military do we need to cope with all these potential crises or battlegrounds? It all depends on how we define our vital interests and how far we're willing to go to protect them. This is why the President's views on foreign affairs matter.

Presentation Review: Travis Taylor

Travis Taylor, Ph.D. (with about 5 other degrees) gave a return performance at HAL5's monthly meeting this evening. I say a return performance because he was presenting on his book, Introduction to Planetary Defense. Here's the review I wrote back in December 2006:

*

The Aliens Are Coming
(No, Really!)

Bart Leahy

On July 6, the HAL5 Society gathered at the Huntsville-Madison County Library to hear Travis Taylor, Ph.D. (University of Alabama-Huntsville) explain why humanity needs to take the threat of alien invasion seriously. Taylor did not speak of conspiracies or UFOs, but rather about the military realities of an invasion from beyond the solar system and what we could feasibly do about it.

The book he wrote with three others, An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion, actually grew out of a study he and his colleagues were conducting in connection with the War on Terror, particularly the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Within the lifetime of most Americans, he pointed out, we have been the dominant power in the world, so we aren’t used to thinking like the underdog. Right now, the only way Americans could become an underdog is if we were subjected to an alien invasion. This background—plus the authors’ experiences with the military—results in a very composed military assessment of possible alien invaders. To Taylor, this is no joking matter.

Taylor’s book begins by getting the audience to take the alien threat seriously. Two theoretical “equations” have developed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) community and have been used to explain why we haven’t heard from, much less been invaded by, aliens. The first, “Drake’s Equation,” was developed by SETI co-founder Frank Drake to describe the potential for finding life in the galaxy.

When Drake first presented his equation in 1961, we had not yet detected planets around any other stars. Today, we have detected planets around over 150 stars; they almost seem common. Given what we know today, Taylor estimated that there are potentially around 340 extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy capable of detecting Earth’s civilization, close to Drake’s original guess of 1,000.

Taylor then took on the “Fermi Paradox,” wherein noted atomic physicist Enrico Fermi asked “Where are they [aliens]?” Fermi assumed that life tends to expand at an exponential rate and that if other civilizations existed, they would long since have overrun the Earth looking for living space. Taylor insisted that “Fermi’s paradox is just stupid.” Fermi was a physicist, he explained, and used a physics equation. However, biological systems tend to expand up to a certain point and then level off rather than on an exponential curve. Thus it is possible that civilizations have existed, but died off before we ever contacted them.

Using Gaussian Variable Statistics (the more formal name for the mathematics that produce the “bell curve”) Taylor anticipated that civilizations would have a “mid range” of both technology and hostile intent, with extremes at both ends. The civilizations that would concern us are the ones on the higher end of the curve for both technology and hostility.

Taylor applied military assessments of mass (of men and equipment) and “force multipliers” to a potential invasion. For instance, if the aliens wore shields able to withstand any bullet or carried guns that never missed, one of their soldiers might equal five humans. Taylor showed charts depicting the attrition rate in various scenarios, based on varying levels of troops and force multipliers.

Taylor did not seem to hold out a lot of hope for human survival except through sheer attrition—meaning that we could win, but only by slowly killing off the enemy and destroying its equipment while growing our own forces as much as possible. For instance, if the aliens built a spacecraft capable of traveling across vast stretches of space at near-light speed, that spacecraft must have a hull capable of absorbing large amounts of kinetic energy. Any soldier wearing armor made of such material would be impenetrable to the most powerful nuclear weapons ever built. And, of course, using such weapons would have a terrible impact on our home world. He suggested that the United States continue developing exotic weapons, including orbiting nuclear weapons and powered armor, like in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Even then, weapons still might not be enough.

Otherwise, individual survivors will need to depend on their wits in the wilderness, as it is a safe bet that the aliens could drop asteroids on any city or into the ocean. To that end, Taylor recommended that the audience become acquainted with survival skills through books and the Internet.

Some audience members questioned whether any human countermeasures could be concealed from truly advanced aliens, either because of tapping into the Internet or through congressional leaks. Taylor seemed confident that, when push comes to shove, “we can still keep some secrets.” I suspect that many aspiring science fiction writers—including me—will read his work hoping to “get it right” when they write the next big alien invasion thriller.

Bart Leahy is a long-time NSS member and recent addition to the HAL5 family, as he now works as a technical writer for NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

*

So what was different about this evening's talk? Well, for starters, Taylor was able to get through more of his presentation (he still has too many slides for a 1.5-hour program). Last time he got hung up on the probabilities of finding aliens and didn't get into the military aspects of his book. What interested me were some of the texts and sites he referenced, including:

• Travis's own new book on rocket engineering: Introduction to Rocket Science and Engineering.
• The Lotka-Volterra logistics curve.
• [Frederick] Lanchester's Laws on war.
• Microbiology growth curves.
• How to Make War, by James F. Dunnigan
• Michael Crichton, "Aliens Caused Global Warming"
• Kardashev Scale
• Brilliant Pebbles
• Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL)
• Sukhoi Su-25 Flying Tank
• Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (MTHEL)
• Gedanken (thought) experiment

These are just some of the items Taylor touched on this evening. The guy is seriously smart. Some of the items above relate to means of defending ourselves; others are theories that explain the potential presence of aliens and how they might act in war. Taylor provides a lot of food for thought, and he opens up a very different perspective on the likelihood of encountering aliens, whether they're friendly or not, and how we might fight them if they get here. Right now, if they were to show up tomorrow, we're in big trouble, and we need to get prepared. And, as an extra bonus, the tools we develop to consider such an invasion would advance the state of our military technology to address problems here on Earth. They might come in peace, but if they don't shouldn't we be prepared? Travis Taylor makes a good case for it.

Book Review: Strategy

Following closely upon my reading of The First World War by John Keegan, I decided to read B(asil) H. Liddell Hart's book, Strategy. Hart, an English army captain, was a military historian and strategist who had a great influence upon the military campaigns of Germany and the Allies during World War II.

World War I demonstrated the problematic nature of direct assault upon one's enemies, especially in the era of automatic weapons and industrialized warfare--in short, if you're an attacker, and you aim for the direct approach in going for your target, you make it easier for the enemy to defend against you and cut you to pieces because he knows exactly what you want and where you're going, and so can concentrate all of his forces in that one particular spot.

Here's how Hart puts it in his preface:

When...I first came to perceive the superiority of the indirect over the direct approach, I was looking merely for light upon strategy. With deepened reflection, however I began to realize that the indirect approach had a much wider application--that it was a law of life in all spheres: a truth of philosophy. Its fulfillment was seen to be a key to the practical achievement in dealing with any problem where the human factor predominates, and a conflict of wills tends to spring from an underlying concern for interests. In all such cases, the direct assault of new ideas provokes a stubborn resistance, thus intensifying the difficulty of producing a change of outlook. Conversion is achieved more easily and rapidly by unsuspected infiltration of a different idea or by an argument that turns the flank of instinctive opposition.

The first three parts of the book uncover examples of successful indirect warfare throughout European history, starting with the Greeks, and moving forward to World War II. For instance, the conquest of Sparta by the Theban general Epaminondas is covered, as is the overall military work of Alexander the Great. One of the most interesting and entertaining sections is the history of the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius. Belisarius managed to achieve many victories under less-than-ideal conditions, for example, when the Emperor Justinian deprived him of reinforcements for fear that the general might become too popular or a political rival, or on more than one occasion when he was outnumbered, but still managed to overcome his enemies. One of the few times Belisarius lost was when he allowed himself to be persuaded by his officers to attack the enemy directly.

Unlike Victor Davis Hanson, a civilian, Hart is more concerned with describing strategic or tactical victories and is not so concerned with the particular moral codes advanced by said victories. For instance, Hart offers up his admiration for Hitler's strategic and tactical insights--which are obvious, given his initial successess, while Hanson is more concerned about the victory of "the good."

One thing that was curious to me, as a civilian, was Hart's de-emphasis on battle per se. This differs from Clausewitz, one of the great European theorists of war, who believed the primary canon of military doctrine was "the destruction of the enemy's main forces on the battlefield." Instead, as part of his indirect approach, Hart's idea is that "the true aim is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this."

Hart also addresses matters of "grand strategy," which is the bigger picture of national policy, of which military force is but a part. He describes the aim of war as simply "to attain a better peace," meaning your nation ends up in a better situation (however you care to define it) after the war than you were before it. This view of grand strategy includes such no-duh ideas as not wearing yourself out so badly from war that you're unable to enjoy the peace once the war is concluded. Another bright idea Hart advances is not engaging in acts of war so egregious that they are bound to backfire on you once the peace is settled. He cites as one example the "strategic" bombing of civilian targets like Tokyo and Dresden, which did not necessarily advance the Allies' cause, break the will of the enemy, or leave the devastated populations in a state of civilization after the conflict.

Hart was writing in the midst of the Cold War, but his views on strategy are as relevant today as they were then. For instance, he devotes a chapter to "guerilla war," which is for all practical purposes what we've been fighting in Iraq for the last five years. Hart seems to have been particularly interested in this aspect of warfare, as he was friends with T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), and Lawrence's tactics were taught and spread throughout the world by Winston Churchill as a means of combatting the Axis. Hart's comments are prophetic for our own times:

[T]he prospects and progress of a guerrilla movement depend on the attitude of the people in the area where the struggle takes place--on their willingness to aid it by providing information and supplies to the guerrillas by withholding information from the occupying force while helping to hide the guerrillas.

Since 2003, the U.S. military had to overcome the willingness of the Iraqis to hide and support the insurgents. New tactics, plus "the surge," have done much to reduce violence in that country. When the population trusts the "occupying force" more than the insurgents, the insurgency crumbles.

So who is the "audience" for Hart's work? I would recommend it--though I doubt he'd read it--to Barack Obama or any other incoming U.S. President. Generals, of course, should read it, as should the officer corps, and perhaps NCOs and the whole frickin' army, so they know what their leaders are getting them into. Hart offers direct advice for the military man in clear, non-bureaucratese sentences. For instance,

In general, the nearer to the force [a cut in the enemy's communications] is made, the more immediate the effect; the nearer to the base, the greater the effect...while a stroke close in rear of the enemy force may have more effect on the minds of the enemy troops, a stroke far back tends to have more effect on the mind of the enemy commander.

There are also a couple of appendices regarding the Allied campaign in North Africa during World War II and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 that would probably be of practical benefit to the battlefield commander. Even if al-Qaeda's leaders have not read Hart's work, it's clear that they've grasped the essence of his "indirect approach," as may be seen by the recent attacks in Mumbai. It is equally clear that al-Qaeda suffers serious losses when they engage in direct attacks, as they have done in Iraq. It remains to be seen who will win the long war between the West and fundamentalist Islamism. If the West is to win and remain true to its military and political traditions, it will have to give Strategy more serious thought.