Firepower

Abstract: SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS is going on inside the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Over the past 2 years, senior leaders have been calling for something unusual and unexpected--cultural knowledge of the adversary. In July 2004, retired Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr., wrote an article for the Naval War College's Proceedings magazine that opposed the commonly held view within the U.S. military that success in war is best achieved by overwhelming technological advantage. Scales argues that the type of conflict we are now witnessing in Iraq requires "an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation." (1) In October 2004, Arthur Cebrowski, Director of the Office of Force Transformation, concluded that "knowledge of one's enemy and his culture and society may be more important than knowledge of his order of battle." (2) In November 2004, the Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored the Adversary Cultural Knowledge and National Security Conference, the first major DOD conference on the social sciences since 1962. Why has cultural knowledge suddenly become such an imperative? Primarily because traditional methods of warfighting have proven inadequate in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. technology, training, and doctrine designed to counter the Soviet threat are not designed for low-intensity counterinsurgency operations where civilians mingle freely with combatants in complex urban terrain. The major combat operations that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime were relatively simple because they required the U.S. military to do what it does best--conduct maneuver warfare in flat terrain using overwhelming firepower with air support. However, since the end of the "hot" phase of the war, coalition forces have been fighting a complex war against an enemy they do not understand. The insurgents' organizational structure is not military, but tribal. Their tactics are not conventional, but asymmetrical. Their weapons are not tanks and fighter planes, but improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They do not abide by the Geneva Conventions, nor do they appear to have any informal rules of engagement. Countering the insurgency in Iraq requires cultural and social knowledge of the adversary. Yet, none of the elements of U.S. national power--diplomatic, military, intelligence, or economic--explicitly take adversary culture into account in the formation or execution of policy. This cultural knowledge gap has a simple cause--the almost total absence of anthropology within the national-security establishment. Once called "the handmaiden of colonialism," anthropology has had a long, fruitful relationship with various elements of national power, which ended suddenly following the Vietnam War. The strange story of anthropology's birth as a warfighting discipline, and its sudden plunge into the abyss of postmodernism, is intertwined with the U.S. failure in Vietnam. The curious and conspicuous lack of anthropology in the national-security arena since the Vietnam War has had grave consequences for countering the insurgency in Iraq, particularly because political policy and military operations based on partial and incomplete cultural knowledge are often worse than none at all. A Lack of Cultural Awareness In a conflict between symmetric adversaries, where both are evenly matched and using similar technology, understanding the adversary's culture is largely irrelevant. The Cold War, for all its complexity, pitted two powers of European heritage against each other. In a counterinsurgency operation against a non-Western adversary, however, culture matters. U.S. Department of the Army Field Manual (FM) (interim) 3-07.22, Counterinsurgency Operations, defines insurgency as an "organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through use of subversion and armed conflict. It is a protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken government control and legitimacy while increasing insurgent control. …

Abstract: How can a small group of soldiers attack a numerically superior force in an entrenched position and hope to succeed? It may sound impossible, but this is what special operations is all about. Bill McRaven commands a team of SEALs, the U.S. Navy's elite special operations force. Accomplishing the seemingly impossible is the day-to-day business of McRaven and his SEALs and other special operators such as Green Berets, Britain's Special Air Service and Russia's Spetznaz. In SPEC OPS you learn the secrets of the trade: get on target fast and maintain relative superiority throughout the area of vulnerability. It worked for the Germans who clobbered the Belgians at Fort Eben Emael before they knew what hit them. It worked for the Israelis who dropped in at Entebbe and executed the perfect prisoner rescue. Special operations forces are able to beat the odds because their preparation, firepower, speed on target, and moral commitment give them the ultimate edge over their opponents. When you fight like this you almost can't lose.

Abstract: This study uses discontinuities in US strategies employed during the Vietnam War to estimate their causal impacts It identifies the effects of bombing by exploiting rounding thresholds in an algorithm used to target air strikes Bombing increased the military and political activities of the communist insurgency, weakened local governance, and reduced non-communist civic engagement The study also exploits a spatial discontinuity across neighboring military regions, which pursued different counterinsurgency strategies A strategy emphasizing overwhelming firepower plausibly increased insurgent attacks and worsened attitudes towards the US and South Vietnamese government, relative to a hearts and minds oriented approach

Abstract: : Fourth Generation War (4GW) emerged in the late 1980s, but has become popular due to recent twists in the war in Iraq and terrorist attacks worldwide. Despite reinventing itself several times, the theory has several fundamental flaws that need to be exposed before they can cause harm to U.S. operational and strategic thinking. A critique of 4GW is both fortuitous and important because it also provides us an opportunity to attack other unfounded assumptions that could influence U.S. strategy and military doctrine. In brief, the theory holds that warfare has evolved through four generations: (1) the use of massed manpower, (2) firepower, (3) maneuver, and now (4) an evolved form of insurgency that employs all available networks -- political, economic, social, military -- to convince an opponent's decision makers that their strategic goals are unachievable. The notion of 4GW first appeared in the late 1980s as a vague sort of "out of the box" thinking, and it entertained every popular conjecture about future warfare. However, instead of examining the way terrorists belonging to Hamas or Hezbollah actually behave, it misleadingly pushed the storm-trooper ideal as the terrorist of tomorrow. Instead of looking at the probability that such terrorists would improvise with respect to the weapons they used -- box cutters, aircraft, and improvised explosive devices -- it posited high-tech "wonder" weapons. The theory of 4GW reinvented itself once again after September 11, 2001 (9/11), when its proponents claimed that Al Qaeda was waging a 4GW against the United States. Rather than thinking critically about future warfare, the theory's proponents became more concerned with demonstrating that they had predicted the future. What we are really seeing in the war on terror is how globalization has given terrorist groups greater mobility and access worldwide. We would do well to abandon the theory of 4GW altogether, since it sheds very little, if any, light on this phenomenon.