On Swarming

I'm just as surprised as Andrew Kravetz that Somalian pirates would once again mistakenly attack a US Navy warship--this time the frigate USS Nicholas--with predictable results. While Combined Task Force 150 is fortunate to be squaring off against an opponent which, for the time being, seems to prefer to eliminate itself from the gene pool, that's not to say that all opponents will be so foolhardy. And they might not look too different from the pirates in the Gulf of Aden...

The US Naval Institute once again tackles the threat from "swarming", essentially network-centric warfare upon the high seas (FP Online has more). The idea gained popularity in the wake of the Millennium Challenge 2002 wargames, when retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper "decimated" the US Navy (see Adam Elkus' Red Team Journal for much more on the subject here and here).

In 2002, Gen. Van Riper was charged with playing the "Red" force--the enemy in a training exercise--in a computer simulation. The US--the "Blue" force--would be invading a "fictional" country in the Middle East *cough*Iraq*cough*. Van Riper sought to exploit the weaknesses in the US military's doctrine and equipment. Among Van Riper's bag of tricks was an anti-shipping force comprised of small boats, civilian aircraft, and portable anti-ship missiles (such as the Chinese-made C802, which struck the Israeli warship INS Hanit). Although taking massive casualties and using suicide attacks, the "Red" Navy was able to sink a large portion of the US fleet. The US military, presumably upset with the outcome, "re-floated" the fleet and continued with the exercise.

Fast-forward to the present-day. Iran is purchasing several speedboats, and already possesses anti-ship missiles like the C802 (it was assumed that the C802 that struck the Hanit was supplied by Iran). Could a navy such as this pose a threat?

"Springbored" at the US Naval Institute seems to think not. He notes that modern-day helicopters can make quick work of a speedboat attack--witness the success of the US Army's OH-58D Kiowa Warrior during Operation Prime Chance.

Still, it's worth mentioning that the success of the Hezbollah attack against the INS Hanit was a result of gross complacency on the part of the Israeli Navy. The crew ignored warnings of Hezbollah anti-ship missiles, turned the ship's defensive systems off, and lowered their guard as they ate dinner that evening. Perhaps Iran could capitalize on complacency by hiding ships among merchant traffic, and attacking during poor weather--when helicopters would be unlikely to take off or land.

It's certainly a dangerous option, and the US Navy would do well to take measures to prevent such an attack.

Ed. Note: I deleted a portion of this blog entry where I misinterpreted Sprinbored's post. I pray he doesn't track me down with a C802 :)

Upcoming Writing Contest

You may see operations slow down over the next few weeks here at Wings Over Iraq. I'll be putting together an article to submit to the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs regarding the Lebanon War of 2006.

Bonus: The gentleman in charge of this project is a friend of the one and only Boss Mongo.

What's in a Name?

In the 1967 James Bond parody movie, Casino Royale, a number of the British agents decide to re-name themselves "James Bond" in an attempt to confuse the enemy. To that end, we have David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen and even Ursula Andress all playing characters who have changed their names to "James Bond". It sounds like a ridiculous plot point--after all, who would be confused simply by giving a whole bunch of agents similar names?

Most of you should be raising your hand right now.

(H/T SWJ's daily roundup) Today's New York Times ran an interesting article regarding the confusion even within the major policy think-tanks regarding the vast number of groups in Afghanistan who refer to themselves as the "Taliban". (As the author notes, "Taliban" is not so much a proper noun as it is a word for "students" in Arabic). Note that the points the author makes about the all-encompassing term "Taliban" can also be applied to the all-encompassing term "al Qaeda" (e.g., al Qaeda, al Qaeda in Iraq, etc). Take a look:

[A]s it devises a new Afghanistan policy, the Obama administration confronts a complex geopolitical puzzle: two embattled governments, in Afghanistan and Pakistan; numerous militias aligned with overlapping Islamist factions; and hidden in the factions’ midst, the foe that brought the United States to the region eight years ago, Al Qaeda.

But at the core of the tangle are the two Taliban movements, Afghan and Pakistani. They share an ideology and a dominant Pashtun ethnicity, but they have such different histories, structures and goals that the common name may be more misleading than illuminating, some regional specialists say.

“The fact that they have the same name causes all kinds of confusion,” said Gilles Dorronsoro, a French scholar of South Asia currently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

This week, Mr. Dorronsoro said, as the Pakistani Armybegan a major offensive against the Pakistani Taliban, many Americans thought incorrectly that the assault was against the Afghan Taliban, the force that is causing Washington to consider sending more troops to Afghanistan...

...“To be honest, the Taliban commanders and groups on the ground in Afghanistan couldn’t care less what’s happening to their Pakistani brothers across the border,” said Mr. Strick van Linschoten, who has interviewed many current and former members of the Afghan Taliban.

In fact, the recent attacks of the Pakistani Taliban against Pakistan’s government, military and police, in anticipation of the army’s current campaign into the Pakistani Taliban’s base in South Waziristan, may have strained relations with the Afghan Taliban, saidRichard Barrett, a former British intelligence officer who tracks Al Qaeda and the Taliban for the United Nations.

The Afghan Taliban have always had a close relationship with Pakistani intelligence agencies, Mr. Barrett said recently. “They don’t like the way that the Pakistan Taliban has been fighting the Pakistan government and causing a whole load of problems there,” he said...

...Before 9/11, the Afghan Taliban hosted Osama bin Laden and the other leaders of Al Qaeda, but the groups are now separated geographically, their leaders under pressure from intensive manhunts. On jihadist Web sites, analysts have detected recent tensions between Al Qaeda, whose proclaimed goals are global, and the Afghan Taliban, which have recently claimed that their interests lie solely in Afghanistan.

Mr. Dorronsoro, the French scholar, said the Afghan Taliban were a “genuine national movement” incorporating not only a broad network of fighters, but also a shadow government-in-waiting in many provinces.

By comparison, he said, the Pakistani Taliban were a far looser coalition, united mainly by their enmity toward the Pakistani government. They emerged formally only in 2007 as a separate force led by Baitullah Mehsud under the name Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or Students’ Movement of Pakistan....

...Polls show that Americans, frustrated by the United States’ supposed allies and confused by the conflict, are losing their fervor for the fight. “The complexity of all this is hard enough for experts to understand,” said Paul R. Pillar, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst now at Georgetown University. “It’s not surprising if it baffles a lot of ordinary people.”

I've made this analogy before, although I stole it from my Middle Eastern history professor some ten years ago, but it's worth making again: the vast number of groups with similar-sounding names but vastly different agendas bears a striking similarity to the various Palestinian liberation groups in Monty Python and the Life of Bryan (all COINdinistas should probably find that link amusing).

As David Kilcullen points out in The Accidental Guerrilla, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are hybrid wars--fights against multiple insurgent groups, numerous terror networks, various competing sectarian and tribal groups, criminal syndicates, and so forth. This is common among many "small wars". Indeed, during the Hejaz War of 1916, Lawrence could not convince many of the Arab groups to join together to fight the Turks. Rather, he was able to get one tribe to lay an explosive device on the railway on one day of the week, then another tribe to mount a small attack somewhere on another day of the week, and so forth. It drove the Turks mad, as they were unable to discern any larger pattern to the operation. As Lawrence quipped, "maximum disorder was our equilibrium".

Small Wars are increasingly frustrating for the populations of Western countries. In addition to the factors frequently cited--namely, the length of time needed to conduct a successful counterinsurgency--the complexity of these operations is sometimes too much for the public to comprehend. In conventional wars, we find it easy to follow the success or failure of our forces. In many ways, it resembles a game of football--we watch our forces move increasingly closer to the "goal line", we face lines of battle which are generally similar to our own, and there's clearly defined "good guys" and "bad guys". Insurgencies and hybrid wars, on the other hand, are difficult to relate to--there are often many enemies, their numbers can grow or dwindle at will, they remain hidden and seek battle on their own terms, and success is difficult, if not impossible, to measure.

But this is the future of warfare--it's increasingly confusing, complex and muddled. And that's why we need to train leaders capable of dealing with these environments.

(Additional Reading: See "On the Psychology of Military Incompetence", which has some great passages dedicated to military leaders' aversion to ambiguous situations)

UAVs in Hybrid War

While counterinsurgency is an important skill for the US military, the future may lie in "hybrid wars", which is a term Secretary of Defense Robert Gates uses to describe conflict which combines conventional and unconventional warfare. In our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have yet to see conflicts of this nature, with these environments looking more like classic counterinsurgency environments and ethnic civil wars.

However, the 2006 Israeli incursion into Lebanon gave us a glimpse of what this "hybrid war" might look like. One of the interesting features of this conflict was that Hezbollah was able to assemble a rudimentary air force, consisting of unmanned aerial vehicles provided by Iran. Unmanned aerial vehicles, of course, have been in use for decades. UAVs were first used during the First World War, serving as target drones to train pilots in gunnery skills. In the 1930s, radio-controlled planes became inexpensive enough to become a hobby, with companies such as the RadioPlane Company producing several models. RadioPlane, like many American industries during the Second World War, began to manufacture war material after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. They produced some 15,000 target drones, which were designated the RadioPlane OQ-2.

During the Second World War, most of these target drones were manufactured by women, as most men were drafted into military service. It was then that a young brunette employee at RadioPlane, involved in manufacturing radio-controlled drones, was photographed by an American journalist. The employee was an aspiring model named Norma Jeane, who later changed her hair color to blonde and her name to Marilyn Monroe. (This actually has nothing to do with my narrative on Hybrid War and UAVs. I just learned this about five minutes ago and thought it was interesting trivia.)

Advances in technology during the Second World War gave rise to the German V-1 "Buzz Bomb", which was a jet-propelled unmanned vehicle, although we might more correctly classify this as a "cruise missile". The US military, which began to pick up on jet technology after the war, operated a number of jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicles, to include the Firebee UAV, which was used in Vietnam as a reconnaissance platform.

GPS, computer, and communication technology, coupled with the relative simplicity of constructing lightweight unmanned vehicles—which are essentially little more than remote controlled airplanes used by hobbyists—have led to a mass proliferation of UAVs. UAVs can range from hand-thrown vehicles, such as the Raven UAV, to the monstrous Global Hawk, which is capable of reaching nearly any location on Earth from the United States.

In fact, as David Axe at War is Boring points out, describing a hand-thrown UAV as a modified toy isn't too far from the truth. Today, Axe ran a special on a Chinese UAV which appears to actually be a child's toy--the Chinese UAV even has a little tiny cockpit. Isn't that cute? I will laugh if there's actually a little tiny action figure inside of it. I know I'd be putting a Wedge Antilles figure in the cockpit, but that's just me.

Anyway, with the ease of manufacturing UAVs, it's a safe bet that we will certainly them used against us in the future. And the way to counter them isn't with SLAMRAAMs or F-22 Raptors. Although the jury is still out on what is the best way to counter enemy tactical UAVs.

Note: By the way, just to let everyone know where I stand on the F-22—contrary to many of the claims made in the last few days about not needing the F-22 at all, the fact that the airframes in our fighter fleet are falling apart due to age is enough evidence that we at least need some new aircraft. And based on the disturbing fact that in recent exercises, Russian-made Su-30s of the Indian Air Force have proven to be at least the equal of our F-15s and F-16s, we still need at least a few F-22s. 187 F-22s should do nicely—though not 600 like some in the Air Force would want. As Axe often astutely points out, we should have a balanced Air Force with enough tankers, attack planes and decent new fighters to do the job—not a handful of expensive wunderwaffen.

Curse You, Small Wars Journal!

I am nearing completion of an article for Small Wars Journal regarding "hybrid war". I thought to myself that, yes, this article looked quite original and would make for excellent discussion at SWJ.

Then, as I do a little research into Hybrid War, I see that Mr. Frank G. Hoffman from the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies has pretty much said everything I wanted to say and more--and did it far more eloquently than I could.

Fuck.

I basically wanted to make the following points:

• That "hybrid wars" are not necessarily new
• That "hybrid wars" are taking place in an environment of decreased state power and greater access to weapons technology by non-state actors, and as a counter to conventional Western-style military strength.
  
• That "hybrid wars" can be viewed as a tactical phenomenon (a merging of conventional and unconventional conflict), or as a strategic phenomenon (multiple types of conflict in the same area--such as counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, and counter-insurgency in Afghanistan)

Mr. Hoffman made these points far more eloquently, and provided a fascinating read. This article is well worth a look.

Focus: Ever think you came up with something original, only to find out that someone already did it before, and much better than you did?

Light Posting for the next week or so...

I've been putting off composing something for Small Wars Journal, and I'd like to finish it sometime in the next week. I won't go too far into the topic but I will admit that, yes, I am jumping on the "hybrid war" bandwagon.

Until then, it's Wednesday, so enjoy a little dancing stormtrooper to get you through the mid-week blues:

Romani ite domum!

Sic Semper Tyrannis wrote a good entry today, highlighting an all-too-familiar aspect of hybrid warfare. SST notes that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq are simple counter-insurgency environments (like Malaya and Vietnam).

Iraq was, and is a struggle against multiple insurgencies, numerous ethnic groups vying for power, and a number of terror networks--all of whom may hate America, but they may hate each other more than they hate us. Similarly, the Taliban and other networks in Afghanistan compete with al Qaeda in many respects.

In Iraq we blundered around for several years more or less assuming that the Sunni Arab fighters who opposed us in arms were a monolith. The smart people and cognoscenti on the ground knew better than that, but the "system" as a whole did not.

In 2006, the US government finally "got the idea" that there were many groups and that a lot of them had been senselessly alienated by the policies of the Bush Administration. That was sorted out in what the neocons like to "shorthand" as the "surge" and things have been on the mend in Iraq ever since. May the Sunni/Shia divide erupt once again in the context of US withdrawal? Certainly, especially if the US is so foolish as to think that its recent Sunni friends will accept abandonment.

Now we are facing up to the issues of tribal and Islamic resistance in Afghanistan and Pakistan to governments and ultimately to the anti-terrorist goals of the United States. Are we as invincibly ignorant with regard to the panoply of forces and groups in these places as we were in Iraq? Are we? Let us think more fully, more in the way of the people who live in these places.

The assumption that the Afghanistan-Pakistan problem set is one monolihic object is stupid and wrong. Let us do better than that this time.

I'll never forget one of the best history classes I took in college--The Modern Middle East. During that class, our professor noted that the many of the terror networks which arose in Israel during the 1960s resembled the movie "Monty Python and the Life of Bryan"--during which many similarly named terror networks, (i.e., "The People's Front for the Liberaton of Judea", "The Popular Front for the Liberation of Judea", "The Popular Peoples' Front for the Liberation of Judea", "Free Judea Now", etc.) fought each other almost as much as they fought the Romans in Palestine. Indeed, Monty Python is the most brilliant act ever.

"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

"Compound War", "Hybrid War", whatever

So I've wondered what I'm going to publish in Small Wars Journal next. I figure that Boss Mongo gave me some good inspiration in suggesting that I write something about the "compound war" waged by T.E. Lawrence's guerrilla operation in Arabia in conjunction with General Edmund Allenby's proto-blitzkrieg war waged in what is now Jordan, Israel and Syria. The combination of conventional war, unconventional war and a host of other factors leads to that incredibly popular term, "hybrid war". (I swear, this term is more popular than Megan Fox. Speaking of which, time to add a picture...)

Hybrid War: Afghanistan Style

In the Small Wars community, we discuss the term "hybrid war" quite a bit. In the context of Afghanistan, I would (and I'm stealing this from David Kilcullen) define it as an operating environment in which NATO forces are forced to simultaneously fight three separate types of war simultaneously.

Counter-Terrorism: There's good news and bad news in the fight against terrorism. The bad news first—the fight on terrorism has cost the US considerably in terms of money and diplomatic power. The good news is that it's cost al Qaeda considerably as well, particularly in terms of their ability to plan and execute larger attacks. Now, granted, I guess there's more bad news in the fact that there are quite a few other takfiri organizations in the world (LET from Mumbai being one), but al Qaeda is the big one, for certain, so that's at least some more good news. Kings of War ran a recent article which discusses the blow that operations in Afghanistan have dealt to al Qaeda. It also mentions that, just as the US was naïve in believing that it would spark a revolution in democracy all over the Middle East, so did al Qaeda miscalculate in believing that they could spark regional jihad against the United States. PS—al Qaeda, when your adherents blow themselves up in the middle of wedding parties in moderate Arab states, you tend not to attract that many people to your cause. If the US and NATO need a central focus, attacking al Qaeda and tracking their sources of income and their ability to recruit fighters—to included accidental guerillas—is critical.

Counter-Narcotics: The Washington Post ran an article today which compared counter-insurgency/counter-narcotics in Colombia with CI/CT in Afghanistan. Foremost among the parallels drawn between the two nations is that eradication efforts do little to hurt narco-terrorists. If anything, eradication efforts simply affect the impoverished farmers who, let's face it, make more money selling coca or opium than they would selling coffee beans. For those of you who've ever seen rural Latin America or Afghanistan, you can probably see why so many farmers turn to drugs. Not to mention—I always wondered what would happen if the pharmaceutical companies attempted to buy some of the opium from Afghan farmers to use in morphine/codeine.

Counter-Insurgency: Here's the biggie. It's common to lump al Qaeda and the Taliban into the same group, but they're not. Al Qaeda is primarily composed of foreign Arab fighters, who are not concerned with controlling Afghanistan's government. The Taliban are local Afghans who are concerned with controlling Afghanistan's government—and they've largely attempted to divorce themselves from al Qaeda in recent years. While al Qaeda represents a massive threat to American national security, the Taliban do not. They are a brutal people, to be certain. In recent months, the Taliban have resorted to spraying acid in the faces of girls attempting to go to school. America has a responsibility to protect its national interests, hence a "Global War on Terrorism". It would certainly be noble to protect girls going to school in Afghanistan, but the US doesn't have the resources right now to single-handedly wage a "Global War on All People in the World who are Not Nice". Not to mention, when you consider that Hamid Karzai's government is supporting a man's right to rape his wife, and also recently jailed a man for life for forwarding an article via e-mail which suggested that, maybe, women have rights, you'll notice that there are a LOT of not-so-nice people all over Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most illiterate and war-torn countries on the face of the Earth. And apparently, the rest of NATO has noticed this.

Moment of self-reflection: After looking at Hamid Karzai, I have to admit that we, as Americans, are really, really, really bad at choosing our friends in foreign governments.

Definition, please

Kings of War recently posted an interesting article regarding North Korea's research into Hybrid War. Yes, the last bastion of the supposedly linear battlefield may indeed be going away, as the article discusses North Korea's attempts to build a guerilla force to resist ROK/US invasion after watching the activities of Taliban/Iraqi insurgents and Hezbollah.

Kings of War describes North Korea's attempts to build a force designed for simultaneous guerilla and conventional conflict as a "hybrid" war. But some have described the simultaneous use of conventional and guerilla force as "compound war" (much as Lawrence and Allenby worked together to defeat the Turks in the First World War). This type of "hybrid war" differs from the hybrid war scenario put forth by David Kilcullen when discussing conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. There, he refers to hybrid war in those regions as a simultaneous counter-narcotic/counter-insurgency/counter-terror/counter-sectartian conflict war.

Which leads me to believe that "hybrid war" really isn't a form of war. It's a way of looking at conflict. These forces--insurgency, terrorism, civil war, have always been a source of violence in any society. Our current vision of state-on-state war on an open battlefield is a relatively recent invention, dating back to the creation of nations around the time of Napoleon (First Generation Warfare). With nation-states gradually declining in their monopoly on the application of violence, it is only natural that state-on-state conflict will decline, giving rise to multiple forms of conflict in any given area.

That is the value of the concept of hybrid war--acknowledging the decline of state-on-state violence and the resurgence of these sources of small wars which have plagued great powers for thousands of years.

The new project needs to happen

Yes, after seeing three articles on Small Wars Journal in just as many days, (entitled "Thoughts on Hybrid Conflict", "Further Thoughts on Hybrid Conflict" and "Even More Thoughts on Hybrid Conflict"), I think it's time someone came up with a primer on the subject.  And, unfortunately, I think I might just volunteer and do something of the sort, as it's at least a productive use of my time (no women and no beer make Homer something something).  

Part of the problem also resides in the fact that people like the phrase "hybrid war", but they can't really agree on what to apply the term to.  Some apply it to Hezbollah's use of high-tech weaponry in the 2006 war with Israel, whereas others (such as David Kilcullen) refer to the vastly complex environment in Iraq, which included multiple insurgencies, criminal organizations, terror networks, and ethnic conflicts.  After reading the third article, I have also determined that the experts disagree on whether or not hybrid war is a newly-evolvled method of conflict or simply a conceptual framework through which we interperet many of the new threats in the globalized world.   

I swear, I think I just need to come up with a cool enough sounding phrase and let the experts debate what it means.  

Next project

Well, the challenge has been laid forth.  A lieutenant colonel who goes by the moniker of "Boss Mongo" has challenged someone to write about "compound warfare"--a simultaneous use of conventional and unconventional forces.  It's a phenomemon seen during the Southeast theater of the First World War, where T.E. Lawrence (controlling an Arab insurgency) and General Edmund Allenby (controlling maneuver forces, which were predecessors of the German blitzkreig forces) were able to drive back the Turkish forces.  Indeed, the use of both insurgent and conventional forces would actually make up much of Maoist doctrine on revolutionary conflict.  

I'm actually going to kick this one up a notch and look at "compound warfare", and also "hybrid warfare"--a blending of conventional and unconventional tactics to create a new, more deadly phase of conflict, which proved quite effective in the hands of Hezbollah forces in 2006, inflicting losses on an Israeli army who first tried counterinsurgency, then conventional tactics.  I'm thinking of writing a basic primer on the subject and hoping someone who is not only bright but also with access to a much larger library and free time is able to finish it.  

Two articles on hybrid warfare in the past two days from Small Wars Journal:

Thoughts on "Hybrid" Conflict--Dr. Russel W. Glenn

Further Thoughts on Hybrid Threats--Frank G. Hoffman

How successful can a proper blend of orthodox and unorthodox methods be in conflict?  Let's hear what Sun Tzu has to say on the topic:

In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, 

but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.  

Indirect tactics, efficiently applied, are inexhaustible as Heaven and Earth, 

unending as the flow of rivers and streams; 

like the sun and moon, they end but to begin anew; 

like the four seasons, they pass away to return once more.  

There are not more than five musical notes, 

yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.

There are not more than five primary colors (blue, yellow, red, white, and black), 

yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.  

There are not more than five cardinal tastes (sour, acrid, salt, sweet, bitter), 

yet combinations of them yield more flavors than can ever be tasted.  

In battle, there are not more than two methods of attack--the direct and the indirect;

yet these two in combination give rise to an endless series of maneuvers.  

The direct and the indirect lead on to each other in turn. 

It is like moving in a circle--you never come to an end.  

Who can exhaust the possibilities of their combination?