Incrementalism

This is a tale of two frogs, and how they were boiled. One of them was dropped directly into a pot of boiling water. The shock to its system stopped its heart and it died immediately. The second was dropped into a pot of cold water, that was slowly brought to a boil. While that was happening, the frog learned to swim, grew water wings, built a boat, and survived.

Incrementalism doesn’t work. We found that out in VietNam. We forgot it in time for Putin’s war on Ukraine.

A common problem amongst people who don’t understand how interactive systems work is the failure to account for the ways the system responds to their actions. If Coke spends 10% more on advertising and takes 10% of market share away from Pepsi, that doesn’t mean that doubling their advertising budget will drive Pepsi out of business, because Pepsi will just increase their own spending. In warfare, this is the meaning of the term The enemy gets a vote.

In VietNam, we started with a small ground contingent and limited air support inside the country, gradually ratcheting up to multiple ground divisions and a massive air campaign across four countries. This happened over a period of years. While we were doing that, the Viet-Cong and North Vietnamese were improving their ground and air forces, as well as dispersing their logistics system. The famed Ho-Chi-Minh Trail, for example, was actually a network of roads, tracks, and creek bottoms. By the end of the war, you could travel on a road,  under the canopy, the whole way. In 1965 there were a handful of SA-2 SAM sites around Hanoi. By 1968 there were over 200 across the country.

We are seeing the same thing happening in Ukraine. If the West had given Ukraine ATACMS, HIMARS, Bradley IFVs, and Stormshadow in the summer of 2022, does anyone doubt that the Russians would have been driven out of Crimea and the southern Kherson region by now?

Given most of the last half of 2022 and the first half of 2023 to prepare, the Russians have done what they excel at — preparing a defensive battlefield for a major armor battle. In particular, the Russians had time to place millions of mines, up to five mines per ten square feet, bogging down the Ukrainian armored advance. Without air superiority and with limited minefield breaching equipment, the summer offensive ground to a halt and became a war of attrition. As a result, with the defeat of the summer offensive, Russia sees no need to either change its goals or negotiate for peace. In fact, it seems to be more dedicated to moving beyond Ukraine, into NATO territory.

One of the reasons given for the laggardly delivery of new weapons to Ukraine is the fear that such actions might cross some sort of red line, that will cause Putin to go nuclear. This is not like strategic nuclear deterrence, where both sides know that a strike on the other’s homeland will inevitably result in a counterstrike. Instead, it is our estimate of the enemy leader’s mental state, something that is traditionally very difficult to do. So we have essentially deterred ourselves. Meanwhile, we have seen Ukraine, time and again, cross these supposed red lines with impunity.

Because of the dilatory nature of Western support, the job ahead will be more difficult and more costly, but we know that Ukraine can win if we provide the support. As Winston Churchill said Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

 

 

Memories of my youth: Frank E. Petersen, USMC

Frank E. Petersen was the first black aviator in the US Marine Corps, and the senior aviator in both the USMC and the USN. When I knew him, in 1968-69, he was the Deputy Director of the I Corps Direct Air Support Center in Da Nang, Vietnam. I-DASC was responsible for controlling all the tactical air support missions in the northern third of Vietnam. He was a LtCol and I was a new 2dLt. Presenting the morning Intelligence briefing to him was always interesting. He had good questions, most of which I had no answers for. He died in 2015, from lung cancer. As I recall, most of the senior officers of the day smoked heavily (cockpits actually had ashtrays).

Last December the US Navy took delivery on an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG-121), and DDG-121 was commissioned in May, 2022.

Afghanistan

Graveyard of Empires
Guy Body, New Zealand Herald

Well. It seems that Afghanistan has fallen apart faster than anyone predicted, with dire results for the inhabitants. I started writing this four days ago, and the situation is changing faster than I can type. I’m at around 1,200 words right now, which seems like a good stopping place.

Even when taking a long view, most people forget that, as former DIO Pat Lang has said, Afghanistan is really a geographical expression rather than a country. It is, and always has been a:

blank space on the map, a space filled with hostile tribesmen and religious fanatics.  This blank space was given the dubious status of a state in the international system of states because the Russians and the British wanted to establish a buffer entity between the Tsar’s empire and the Raj.

The many languages — and some of the dialects — are mutually unintelligible, the two major religious sects are as hostile as Reformation era Protestants and Catholics, and the only thing the local tribes hate more than each other is the central government.

To give a more personal idea of what the whole region is like, some decades ago, when you could still do such things without getting kidnapped, a geologist did some field work in Pakistan, in the aptly-named Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the Afghan/Pakistan border. As described to me the procedure, if you wanted to go to a certain location there, was that you would go to a local army post and the army would provide an escort. The escort was a native of that location and you were essentially his guest, so no one would kill you. If you wanted to go to the next valley over, you couldn’t just cross the mountain. You had to go back down to the army post and get a new escort. Afghanistan is like that, only without the army control.

The Taliban are a group of Pashtun religious fanatics, many of whom the US trained in guerilla warfare so that they could bog down the Soviets. They believe in the strict application of Sharia law, a particularly conservative reading of the Koran. Think of what the US would be like if a hardline evangelical Baptist cult created a strict Biblical dictatorship here. Using their US knowledge, their combat experience, and leftover Soviet equipment, they overran the country. By themselves, then and now, they were never a threat to the US homeland. All they ever wanted to do was be left alone, so that they could pray their prayers and enslave their women.

We went into Afghanistan for a good reason —  the Taliban government was  providing refuge to various terrorist groups, including Al Qaida, and the Saudi leaders of Al Qaida planned and organized the 9/11 attacks from there. So we went in, kicked their butts, and installed a new, more amenable government. At that point, in late 2001, the Taliban said they’d be willing to stop fighting. We refused, for no good reason, and the war went on for another two decades.

War, as Clausewitz says, is a continuation of policy by other means. Since WWII all our wars have been wars of choice. Nobody has attacked us or an ally. Nobody has invaded. We went to war to achieve some Presidential policy. And it turns out that we are exceedingly bad at wars of choice. We’ve won exactly two of these — Kuwait and Korea, and Korea only counts if you accept that “victory” meant pushing North Korean troops out of South Korea, restoring the status quo ante. Note that the two we won were traditional wars, battalions fighting battalions as they say. The others were the hearts and minds sort of conflicts, which can only be won by politics, or which can’t be won at all, at least not by an outside invader. Other commenters have noted this so I won’t dwell on the topic, but the three big ones — Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — all have a similar dynamic, and were all lost the same way.

Vietnam

Afghanistan

In every one of those conflicts, we took the US Army (the best traditional combat force in the world), and applied them to a task that was totally unsuited to their ethos, training, and equipment. In the best if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail tradition, we applied our hammer to a problem better suited to a putty knife. Art, perhaps, or maybe window glazing. At best what was required in Afghanistan was nation-building, and the Army doesn’t do nation building.

When you came in here, didn’t you have a plan for getting out?

Our two victories in these wars of choice were predicated upon knowing what victory meant. In each we had a specific end goal — drive the North out of the South, drive Iraq out of Kuwait. In the case of Kuwait, then CJCS Colin Powell, established the Powell Doctrine, and he and other senior generals (Vietnam veterans all) told President Bush that they would not support the war unless we had answers to the eight questions. The most important of these was, essentially, how will we know when we’ve won? In Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, nobody tried to answer that question, or the answers changed with every change of circumstance.

Overall, nothing has changed after twenty years of war. The Afghan national forces were not able to keep the Taliban from taking power in 1996, and they are obviously not capable of that now. But if we had pulled out in 2006 or 2011 or 2016, the results would have been the same. American intervention put off the inevitable for twenty years, at the cost of not quite one American life per day. 

In the end, the effective defense of a country is in the hands of its people. A foreign power cannot defend it, except against another foreign power. Here, the threat to Afghanistan was internal. These were Afghan citizens (whatever that means, see above) fighting other Afghan citizens, ones with a totally different view of what Afghanistan should be. The Afghan national army folded because its soldiers did not believe in the fight. The Afghan people acquiesced to the takeover because they did not believe in the alternatives. The Afghan governing hierarchy, from the local police to the President, made it impossible to believe, because they operated a kleptocracy that treated its citizens as sheep to be shorn.  The Taliban cannot have gotten as far as they did unless some significant portion of the population agreed with them.

So what happens now? Internationally, there will be winners and losers. But the Taliban itself is an inward-looking movement that likely poses no threat to the international order. They have agreed to not support terrorist groups, and may well stick with that agreement — what little access to outside goods and services they need will come easier if they do. There will be a settling of scores, and many non-Talibs will die. Afghan women will lose all the rights they have had for the last twenty years and many will be forced to marry some incel Taliban fighter. The chaos at Kabul airport (which looks surprisingly similar to DaNang airbase at the end of the Vietnam war) will last for a week. The press will have a field day for another six months or a year.

And then Afghanistan will sink back into the obscurity it so richly deserves.

Afghanistan and the American Military

The Washington Post has just published what is being touted as the Afghan War’s Pentagon Papers. Like the Papers, this report was originally a summary of what had gone before, and like the Papers, it constitutes a damning indictment of American political and military leadership. Here is a somewhat shorter summary.

The actual facts are not particularly new. Much of this has been buried in plain sight in official reporting for years now. Some of this echos what Middle East expert Pat Lang said last September (quoting things he has said and repeated, for years).

What is new is that it’s our first clear admission in official documents of our failures in nation-building. It’s also our first clear statement of how our government lied to the public. They lied, and they exposed a pathological predilection for governmental lying that extends well beyond Afghanistan. War on drugs? Poisoned water? Airline safety? We’ve been lied to about all of them. The list could go on, but let’s get back to the topic at hand. We’re talking about Afghanistan, and our failures there.

Essentially, we went into that country without a clear goal, without any idea of how we would know when we’d won. And since we didn’t have a goal, we couldn’t have a path, either to a goal or to a way out. This wasn’t Land in Normandy and march all the way to Berlin. This was more like, yes, Vietnam, and our failures in Afghanistan, just like our failures in Vietnam, tell us much about the culture of our military and political leadership.

Just over a year ago there was a flurry of essays published by the Modern War Institute at West Point, arguing over what was needed in a general officer. One said optimism. One said cynicism. Another said realism. The examples they quote were, for the most part, situations where we had a clear goal, and ultimately won. They all miss the point.

They miss the point, because they are trapped by the modern American military culture that says, as in football, winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. An officer doesn’t get promoted for failing. An officer gets promoted by achieving the goal, no matter how limited the resources they are given. As one recent article said, a Navy Captain who refuses to take his ship to sea because the crew isn’t ready will be quickly replaced someone who will take her out. This is how you get promoted. Also collisions and groundings. A general who says that we can’t do the job without three times the troop strength, will be replaced by someone willing to charge in and make it work, even if it won’t

In 1990, in the run-up to the first Gulf War, Colin Powell, Vietnam veteran and CJCS, set forth the conditions under which the US would conduct military operations. Essentially he, and the rest of the senior military leadership (also Vietnam veterans) were laying out what it would take to get military leadership backing for a war. Essentially, they said that they would not support a war that did not have clear, limited goals.

Unfortunately, most of our modern wars, sorry, conflicts, have been goal-free.

You would have thought that we would have learned our lesson from Vietnam — a war that burned up a generation of American youth, that crippled the Great Society, and absolutely destroyed the US space program. Oh yeah, and pretty much trashed the US military, as well. You would have thought that we would have learned from the Russian experience in Afghanistan, which broke the Soviet Army, and ultimately the Soviet Union.

Optimism, cynicism, and realism aside, what we need are generals with moral courage. Ones who will not only say “We need three times the number of troops you are talking about,” but who will follow that up with “and if you are not prepared to provide them, then here’s my resignation.” We don’t have those kind of generals, because we actively suppress those who would do that. There’s the story about an Army Captain who was arguing with his general about something and who finally said “Sir, did you make General by being a yes-man?” The general thought a minute and said “Captain, no I didn’t, but that’s how I made Major.” And the fact is, that if he was a yes-man in all the years prior to making Major, there’s no way he’d be any different the rest of the way to General.

So, the lessons learned from Afghanistan are:

1. You can’t win a war if you don’t know why you’re fighting
2. You can’t trust either the US government or the military leadership when it comes to reporting lack of success, and
3. The current military mindset will not help us win any wars in the immediate future.

 

History Repeats

Last week in Afghanistan:

Soldiers conducted a thorough search of several compounds, and discovered approximately 250 pounds of HME material, eight Russian-made hand grenades, two 82mm mortar rounds, blasting caps and detonation cord, handguns, and other explosive device components. Two suspected insurgents at the scene were detained for further questioning by coalition forces.
The Afghan and coalition forces also found an underground bunker that was well-hidden in a pomegranate field, and believed to be a bed-down location for insurgents or a storage area for weapons. The bunker and its connecting tunnel to a compound were both destroyed by explosives.

Forty-five years ago this week, in VietNam:

On September 11, 1966, the battalion command group (1st Bn, 5th Infantry, Bobcats) moved to XT 637211. Company A conducted an S&D operation, destroying bunker and tunnel complexes. At 1205 hours two WIAs were sustained from small arms fire. At 1220 hrs a 105mm artillery round was command detonated against an APC wounding 3 Bobcats. Company B conducted an S&D operation, destroying bunkers and tunnel complexes and munitions. 3 APCs detonated mines with no casualties.

But, this time, it’s different.