On Tactics, page 19
The United States has failed this test twice so far in the twenty-first century. Identification of the political control of the civilian population as an important center of gravity came too late, after the expenditure of far too much blood; any blood spilled in the pursuit of a fallacious strategy is too much. Even once it was identified, American military doctrine shows little understanding of why it is so, and persists in explaining counterinsurgency as somehow uniquely political. This betrays a dangerous misunderstanding both of insurgencies and of conventional state-on-state war, as if the latter is apolitical. The continued conflation of the tactical center of gravity with the strategic is not just semantics: troops pay for such mistakes with their lives.
APPENDIX D
Conventional vs. Guerilla Warfare
A battle is won by him who is firmly resolved to win it.
—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
While the rest of this work leans heavily on examples drawn from conventional tactics instead of guerrilla or irregular tactics, it should be obvious that within this tactical system the difference is not very useful.1 Irregular tactics are just tactics with a preference for maneuver, tempo, deception, and surprise in order to compensate for a lack of firepower, mass, and shock. Whether the tactician is a uniformed soldier or a farmer turned fighter, he will use what tactics he can to achieve victory.
Where the difference is important, though, is at the strategic level as the strategy will have profound effects on the tactics chosen. Since strategy can only be secured through the use of tactics, the nature of that strategy will determine what form those tactics will take. This is important because the conventional versus irregular divide is confusing for military forces. In the words of Hew Strachan, “The binary vision of war has the effect of pulling armed forces apart, not providing coherence.”2 Most leaders of professional military forces believe that they must choose to train for either conventional war or train for irregular war. This is a false choice; they must train to be tactically proficient and then examine the strategic environment for what tactics will be necessary. Flexibility and adaptability are the keys to success because tactical principles remain the same whether the combatants are professional forces or part-time guerrillas, even though every military force will emphasize different principles based on that force’s particular strengths and weaknesses. The binary vision of war is a relic of past theories. This phenomenon was, unsurprisingly, detected by a young Carl von Clausewitz who taught Prussian war academy students that skirmishers and conventional troops would need to use each other’s methods.3 This predicted convergence is now long-established fact and only theory has lagged behind.
This appendix will explore the real difference between conventional and irregular warfare by drawing out the differences at the strategic level that guide the tactics employed, thus building on the conclusion that tactics are not materially different at the bayonet level.4 It will do so through a serious of dichotomous views of different forms of strategy: the offense-defense paradigm of Carl von Clausewitz, the annihilation-exhaustion paradigm of Hans Delbrück, and the sequential-cumulative paradigm of J. C. Wylie. There are other views, but these three pairs effectively highlight the differences between conventional and irregular combatants at the strategic level. Of course, none of these pairs is mutually exclusive. Each exists on a spectrum; I use them here simply as analytical devices.
Clausewitz: Strategic Offense vs. Strategic Defense
At both the strategic and tactical levels, Clausewitz saw a dichotomy between the offense and the defense.5 He mostly associated offense with invasion of another country and defense with ejecting such an invasion. In the context of insurgency/counterinsurgency, however, the two opposites do not neatly map onto counterinsurgent or insurgent. Third-party counterinsurgents are clearly on the strategic offensive, but the beleaguered indigenous government might be on the strategic defensive. They have a negative aim (preserve political power) but also a positive one (gain control that has been lost due to the existence of an insurgency). Insurgents have a positive aim (political control of the country or area in dispute) but typically enjoy the benefits of the strategic defense: local knowledge and support. Conversely, insurgents also have a negative aim: the preservation of their ability to affect the political situation with violence or the threat thereof. Additionally, the insurgency gains benefit from the passage of time because their existence reduces the legitimacy of the counterinsurgent: in Clausewitz’s words, “He reaps where he did not sow.”6 It is useful for our purposes, then, to place the counterinsurgents on the strategic offensive and the insurgents on the strategic defensive even though both combatants exhibit the traits of both opposites.
The benefits gained by the insurgents from the strategic defense are myriad. Firstly, the defense is the stronger form of war, granting a resiliency belied by the insurgents’ typically low potential combat power. Insurgents also gain strategic currency not only by their own actions but by the action or inaction of the counterinsurgents. For example, the insurgency in Iraq gained benefit from the release of pictures of U.S. soldiers abusing detainees in Abu Ghraib Prison. Clausewitz also described the benefits gained from the population: “Every kind of friction is reduced, and every source of supply is nearer and more abundant.”7
Meanwhile, the counterinsurgents seem more hamstrung than emboldened by the difficulties of the strategic offensive. The point of culmination is the main threat: “This culminating point of victory is bound to recur in every future war in which the destruction of the enemy cannot be the military aim.”8 Since an insurgency can rarely be defeated by the complete attrition of all of its adherents, the counterinsurgents will at some time reach a point beyond which they cannot invest enough resources to achieve a decision. Time works against the counterinsurgent both in the sense that it is a limited resource and the passing of time benefits the insurgent rather than his opponent.
The Vietnam War demonstrates this dynamic. The United States seemed to be on the strategic offense: they were invested in a country far from their borders with deployed military force. The aim, however, was negative: preserve South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression and internal communist insurgents, thus stopping the spread of communism. Additionally, the United States willfully renounced the typical initiative and tools of the strategic offense. Ground combat troops never invaded North Vietnam for fear that China or Russia would be drawn farther into the war. The curious strategic choices of the United States thus stripped the strategic offense of its major benefit, decisiveness, while retaining its greatest weakness, the point of culmination. Unsurprisingly, the North Vietnamese exploited this fact and, despite a massive advantage in tactical action that favored the U.S. military, the United States withdrew.
Hans Delbrück: Attrition vs. Annihilation
In the History of the Art of War, Hans Delbrück also divided military strategy into a dichotomy: Niederwerfungsstrategie and Ermattungsstrategie. Niederwerfungsstrategie, or annihilation, was described as a strategy in which the “sole aim is decisive battle.”9 It is typified by Napoleon’s methods: find the enemy force and destroy it, preferably in a single large battle. Ermattungsstrategie, or exhaustion, is its opposite: focused on outlasting the enemy through economy of force and the gradual accumulation of small tactical actions. Exhaustion is classically illustrated by the strategy proposed by Fabius where Rome would avoid fighting a large battle with Hannibal’s army and instead focus on eating away at his outposts. Battles still occur, but one combatant avoids exposing the entirety of, or a preponderance of, his forces to destruction by the enemy’s forces.
An exhaustion strategy puts a premium on economy of force, preserving your combat power while slowly reducing the combat power of your opponent. This in turns drives tactical actors to place a premium on dispersion, ambuscades, hit-and-run attacks, camouflage, and choosing smaller enemy forces to target. A strategy of annihilation, on the other hand, encourages rolling the die on large-scale battles where the enemy army might be destroyed entirely.
The best exemplar of Delbrück’s dichotomy is Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Napoleon stuck with his strength: annihilation. The Russians, quite accidentally, chose a strategy of exhaustion. General Kutozov avoided large-scale battle when possible, and even Borodino was defensive in nature. Lacking the chance to destroy the enemy army, Napoleon tried the next best target: Moscow. Exhaustion, through lack of supplies, forced Napoleon to abandon Moscow; the combination of the Russian winter and irregular Cossack attacks drove home the point. Napoleon’s attrition strategy had achieved its objectives: win a large battle and seize Moscow. But in pursuing his strategy Napoleon failed to contest the exhaustive strategy of the Russians. He overextended his already weak supply lines and expended his combat power to achieve goals in a game the Russians were not playing. It is important to note that while Russia pursued a strategy of exhaustion, it was not entirely irregular in nature. Their strategy drove a tactical scheme that was more defensive and economical, but the Russian army still used so-called conventional tactics, especially at Borodino.
J. C. Wylie: Sequential vs. Cumulative
While Clausewitz viewed strategies as differentiated by aim and Delbrück by method, Rear Adm. J. C. Wylie saw a dichotomy based on time. In Military Strategy, Wylie described a sequential strategy as, “a series of discrete steps or actions, with each of this series of actions growing naturally out of, and dependent on, the one that preceded it.” Tactical actions are planned in a systematic manner from beginning to end. A cumulative strategy, however, does not utilize a planned process but rather uses disconnected tactical actions that eventually overwhelm the opponent’s will. “The entire pattern is made up of a collection of lesser actions, but these lesser or individual actions are not sequentially interdependent. Each individual one is no more than a single statistic, an isolated plus or minus, in arriving at the final result.”10
In this case as well, it is easy to see how the strategy drives the tactical pattern. A sequential strategy virtually requires centralized planning, command, and control while a cumulative strategy is best executed by military forces operating in a decentralized manner. Large-scale battles are not necessary for a combatant pursuing a cumulative strategy and thus are not worth the risk of concentrating combat power. Conventional militaries, with their strict hierarchical command-and-control structures and prescriptive, doctrinal planning processes, are ill-equipped to comprehend, much less combat, a cumulative strategy. In Lukas Milevski’s words, “The linear logic of sequential strategy collapses in the face of cumulative strategy.”11 On the other hand, a disparate collection of loosely allied insurgent groups—such as the insurgency in Afghanistan—cannot help but execute a cumulative strategy, and is ideally structured to do so.
The insurgency in Afghanistan is composed of a patchwork of groups ranging from local strongmen simply seeking to maintain local autonomy, to criminal organizations, to the actual Taliban forces that include wings in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Other insurgent organizations like the Haqqani Network and Hizb-i-Islami Gulbudden have a loose alliance of convenience with the Taliban. Additionally, there remains a residual al Qaeda presence.12 All of these disparate groups are weakly united by an opposition to the Coalition and the government in Kabul and a desire to achieve political power of their own. This situation nearly requires a cumulative strategy because the various units rarely if ever coordinate their tactical actions. Even if each group is following its own sequential strategy, it will be the cumulative effect of those various efforts that the Coalition must oppose. The cumulative strategy of the opposition will achieve decisive effects only if the will of the Coalition to continue to invest blood and treasure in the government of Afghanistan. Therefore, profligate spending on additional troops, equipment, and nearly unlimited flows of money into various development projects only hastened the approach of a tipping point for the Coalition’s will. Such investment would make sense for a sequential strategy, but in this case it also supports the strategy of the enemy.
Strategic Symmetry and Asymmetry
The above examples and explanations are all asymmetrical. One side chooses a strategic style while the other side chooses the defensive. The perceived asymmetry in tactics—the asymmetric warfare idea that is simply a rebranded version of guerrilla warfare—is not the important characteristic. Rather, it is the asymmetry in the chosen strategy that produces a situation of strategic asymmetry. In this situation, it seems that neither side can gain a decision through active means. The stronger side cannot go on the offense and annihilate a specific target and the weaker side cannot concentrate enough force without giving the opponent what it desperately wants. Nor does it need to. The decision only passively occurs when one side taps out or withers away into irrelevance. The better term for this situation might be parallel strategies: Never the two shall meet but one line will run out before the other. The question, posed by proponents of asymmetric warfare, of how to fight asymmetric opponents is nonsensical. You outlast an opponent who is pursuing a strategy vastly different from yours. Or, perhaps, you change strategy to beat the enemy at his own game. Rather than waste time, energy, blood, and treasure pursuing a strategy that fails to address the strategy of your opponent, invest that effort in meeting him on the only field of competition open to him. The answer, then, to the question of how to beat an opponent who has chosen to pursue a strategy asymmetric to yours is to move perpendicularly rather than in parallel. A comprehensive strategy to asphyxiate the opponent is one option13 but, as Milevski identified, opposing cumulative strategies produce long stalemates.14 In this case, the strategist should match his opponent’s cumulative strategy to conserve resources until an opportunity presents itself for a sequential, offensive strategy to succeed. This was Washington’s genius: his pursuit of one strategy until an opportunity presented itself that demanded a decisive shift to another. He pursued a strategy that preserved the Continental Army as much as possible while avoiding its annihilation. Washington kept the Continental Army on the defense as long as he had to and sent Nathaniel Green south to execute an exhaustive campaign against Cornwallis. Once Cornwallis was exhausted enough to be pinned down at Yorktown, Washington turned on a dime to an offensive strategy of annihilation, marching south to force Cornwallis’ surrender. The tactics at any given time—Washington’s retreats, Greene’s hit-and-run campaign, and finally Washington’s march south—were determined by the strategy of the moment. Washington, of course, inspired Mao Zedong who proposed that insurgent armies should use a cumulative strategy until they are strong enough for a sequential strategy.15
Unfortunately, there is sometimes little the strategist can do to change the strategic dynamics involved. An enemy that chooses a cumulative and exhaustive strategy usually does so because he has no other choice and if he enjoys the benefits of the strategic defense there is little he can do to change it. Rather, the strategist confronted by such an enemy should follow the prescriptions of two of the masters: Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. Sun Tzu said, “What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.”16 And Clausewitz said, “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.”17 The strategist must understand the nature of the war he is in and then he must address the enemy’s strategy within that framework. Addressing the enemy’s tactics is insufficient. If the strategist recognizes that he is confronted with an enemy that seeks to outlast, outmaneuver, and out-survive him until his will is depleted, he will shy away from becoming overextended. He will choose his own strategy that preserves blood and treasure rather than spending it in a wanton manner trying to bribe the populace. But, like Washington, he will remain ready to seize opportunities.
APPENDIX E
Training and Education
What could not be practiced could not be executed in battle.
—Capt. Wayne P. Hughes Jr., USN (Ret.)
A tactical system like the one presented in this work is only one part of victory in battle. In every case a clever tactical plan must be executed on the ground by people, and it is the quality of those people in terms of their ability to perform in the chaos and sting of battle that determines whether that victory will become reality or remain aspirational. The training of the troops who will fight the battle is in fact so important that one could say that battles are not won on the battlefield, but rather in training.
From the Spartan agoge to Parris Island and Ranger School today, military forces have prided themselves on the toughness of their training. The physical and mental difficulty is indeed important, and provides a rite of passage that fosters future cohesion and devotion to the organization. Another aspect of effective training programs is the inculcation of habits of thought and ways of thinking in the minds of recruits. Such values can last an entire career. The values that kept the Spartan hoplites from leaving the pass at Thermopylae were implanted in Sparta during the agoge. Although most boot camps are predicated on training recruits to instantly follow orders, there is also usually an element of the training meant to foster the initiative and on-the-spot innovation that is becoming more and more important in warfare. For instance, Marine Corps recruits are thrust into leadership positions and presented with basic tactical problems during the Crucible, the culminating event of Marine Corps boot camp. Training courses for officers lean much more heavily on these types of events. This is typically where the principles of war are introduced.
In my own experience, however, little is taught about the principles of war. Recruits are just expected to memorize whatever list is fashionable at the time and sometimes even additional principles for offense and defense. It is a little too much for a harried recruit to understand, especially without any context whatsoever. A common system of tactical theory like the one in this book can be taught in just a few minutes, but can be used as a common reference system for recruits, small unit leaders, and generals alike, will alleviate this problem.
