Today the RAND Corporation released Libya's Post-Qaddafi Transition: The Nation-Building Challenge co-written by a team of researchers. The paper is pretty good on discussing the current security, economic, and political situation and challenges in Libya. However, the paper's discourse on the security situation, specifically through a "light-footprint strategy", has helped me get my brain around an issue I've been struggling to wrap my grey matter around because I don't think it addresses the nature of the conflict that lead to today's situation. To be exact (and with caveats not discussed here):
Light- to no-footprint intervention in support of rebel forces is not a long-term solution for stability.
The U.S. and other NATO involvement in Libya was essentially the provision of air support (with notable exceptions of on-the-ground SOF teams). There are a number of reasons for this approach, much of which is centered around domestic Western politics. But the provision of close and strategic air support to a motley crew of disparate and competitive armed groups is only asking for a disaster. Yes, this method helped bring about the end of the much despised Qaddafi regime, but it is certainly not helping bring about a lasting peace and stability. Much like our initial efforts in Afghanistan, failing to provide the forces necessary in the aftermath of the destruction of a regime creates an environment conducive to warlord-ism and the promise of many years of conflict.
Since the 1990s at least, conflict studies have proven time and again the value of well executed DDR (disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) and SSR (security sector reform) programs. Our failure to begin this in earnest in 2002 (or really up to at least 2005!) in Afghanistan and our failure to do it now in Libya is exacerbating the security situation where the internationally-recognized government has very limited control over its own territory. Did we expect that these militias, that we supported with weapons (in some cases) and effective air support, to simply integrate themselves into the state or to return to their peaceful lives in the interest of democracy and human rights? Our planning for both Libya and Afghanistan suggest that we did expect that even if it sounds profoundly stupid when stated this directly. But without adequate intervention forces (military, police, civil) on the ground to provide security and to direct and lead DDR and SSR efforts, your only other option is to hope that DDR and SSR happen on their own. Which, as near as I can tell, has never happened.
The purpose of this short post is not to lobby for boots on the ground in Libya, but on the contrary to caution those out there who think that we can simply help these rebel groups with air power. For example: here. If our actions in Libya did create a gratitude account with the Libyan people, great. But that does not translate to those warlords that wield power through their militias as often their fight will be with other militias as they strive for greater influence. Without boots on the ground, we are unlikely to be able to stop these violent struggles for power if we can't be there to broker the peace and help move it along.
As much as military analysts bemoan the general public's lack of understanding of the effort and violence of a no-fly zone, the longer peace is much harder to accomplish without large numbers of troops on the ground to provide stability after the regime falls. If we are not willing to put troops on the ground before or after our service as a rebel-force air force, then we should seriously contemplate refraining from intervening in the first place. Or at a minimum, not be surprised when our actions do not provide the stability for which we had hoped. That is where I have issue with the RAND paper: it discusses the light-footprint as a problem in developing long-term stability, but it does not discuss the real nature of our initial intervention and how we have not yet succeeded in using it to accomplish long-term foreign policy objectives. Instead of looking merely at Libya today, we need to understand that this has not worked yet in accomplishing anything other than short-term objectives: removing the guys we don't like. We need to understand that this approach is the minimal-interventionist version of the Bush administration's failure to provide a Phase IV plan for Iraq. It has the exact same consequences and is based on the same weak planning assumptions. Just keep that in mind as debate about intervening in Syria continues and we consider possible courses of action.
Showing posts with label RAND. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RAND. Show all posts
Monday, October 29, 2012
Monday, April 9, 2012
The real threat of hybrid conflict
Talk to ten different military analysts about the meaning of the term "hybrid war," and you'll probably get 20 different answers. Some folks like to talk about hybrid threats, others about hybrid warfare; some talk up hybrid adversaries, and still others worry about hybrid conflict. Usually what they're getting at falls into the grey area between irregular warfare conducted by poorly-armed non-state militants and the purportedly more traditional, "conventional" conflict waged by high-tech, capital-intensive state militaries. In the hybrid future, we're told, irregular adversaries will employ high-tech weapons while sophisticated state enemies are likely to adopt guerilla-style tactics—avoiding American strengths while maximizing their own.
Nearly all wars are a strategic hybrid: a mix of violent action, diplomacy, and messaging, combining destruction, coercion, and persuasion. The modern hybrid war construct implies that future conflict will take on a more tactically hybrid character: that states will employ guerilla tactics in concert with heavy weapons, or that sub-state groups will use sophisticated weapons hand-in-hand with terrorism and insurgency.
You see, as Conrad Crane has said before (and as I love to repeat), there are only two kinds of war: asymmetric and stupid. Capable adversaries will always seek to capitalize on their own strengths and focus on our weaknesses. The hybrid concept simply tells us that violent actors will seek to diversify their capabilities and become less predictable by employing weapons and tactics more frequently associated with different parts of the sophistication and organization spectrum.
Big deal, right? If a weapon system or tactical method is proven to be effective, shouldn't we expect that our adversaries will make it a part of what they do? Frank Hoffman says hybrid war is defined by a "blend of the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular war," which I'm not sure tells us all that much of anything about how it differs from the sort of war we already know. If those capable of state-like lethality had access to a sustaining base of manpower imbued with the "fanatical and protracted fervor" of violent extremists, why haven't they blended the two before now?
Hoffman does put his finger on the characteristic that seems important to the whole range of hybrid warfare disciples, and that's increased lethality. But dramatically increased battlefield lethality has been a challenge for miltary planners and theorists for a century and a half, one that has been addressed pretty well by those militaries with economic and intellectual capacity to adapt. For our adversaries to combine weapons lethality with "fanatical and protracted fervor" doesn't pose nearly so significant a military challenge as does the combination of lethality with effective force employment.
The big problem with the modern hybrid war concept is that it's based both on a misunderstanding of military effectiveness – one that fails to acknowledge that we do, in fact, know with relative certainty what works on the battlefield (Stephen Biddle calls it "the modern system of force employment," and has specified its component parts pretty elaborately in a 2004 book called Military Power) – and on a blurring of the real distinction between success in battle and success in war.
Still, not every organized violent actor fights the same way, and there are a variety of reasons for that. But if you want to kill the enemy, destroy formations, and seize and hold ground, you do your best to employ your forces in line with the dictates of the modern system. That is, if you want to fight, you do the things you have to do to get good at fighting—you learn to shoot, move, and communicate in dispersed formations, operating with a combined-arms team that seeks maximum cover and concealment to blunt enemy firepower, and you procure the weapons and equipment that facilitate those skills.
Some of those that have learned the modern system are still not capable of producing favorable war outcomes, owing to strategic failures or other circumstantial limitations. And other entities do achieve political success even when they simply cannot do the things that are neccessary to operate effectively on the modern battlefield, whether for internal political, cultural, or economic reasons. That's because they wage war in a strategic fashion (asymmetric, even!)—by minimizing the importance of fighting to the accomplishment of their goals.
Futurists hawking hybrid concepts that focus on tactical or technological hybridity often seem to overlook this basic point: tactical effectiveness is really important, and almost every violent actor is going to do his best to achieve it when the political, cultural, doctrinal, or financial barriers are surmountable. But tactical effectiveness isn't everything, and it's often extremely difficult and extremely expensive to achieve and sustain. All the "hybrid warfare" idea tells us is that in the future, the range of potential adversaries is not so clearly dichotomous when we look at buying power, human capital, and tactical and strategic imagination as it may have been before. Sometimes guerillas will want to fight, because they've gotten better at it. And sometimes armies will want to talk, because they think it's gotten too expensive to fight.
We needed a new term for that?
I bring all of this up in relation to an article that ran on AOL Defense last week, headlined "How to Fight Hybrid Threats: Tanks, Airstrikes, and Training." The piece could just as easily have been called "How to Be Good at Battle: Shoot, Move, and Communicate." I don't mean to be too dismissive, though, because it's a useful reminder to the general audience of the point I made above: we know certain things about how to fight effectively, and our recent involvement in the sort of conflicts where fighting power has thus far failed to translate well into "victory" ought not make us forget that.
The piece is built around an interview with Dr. David Johnson, a RAND scholar and retired Army officer who published a book last year about the lessons of the Israel's recent wars. I'm sure some of you will have read (or at least skimmed) Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza when it first appeared; if not, it's available for free (pdf) on RAND's website, and the AOL Defense interview does a good job of getting at some of the major conclusions.
So why is "the hybrid threat" any different to the basic military problem we've been trying to solve for all this time? Johnson contends that a shift in Western states' priorities from inter-state war to counter-guerrilla operations has pushed them to forget about that basic problem: instead of worrying about the perfection of protected maneuver in order to close with and destroy a lethal enemy, Israel and the U.S. have focused narrowly on the subsidiary issue of how to identify and target the enemy.
But this is all somewhat peripheral to the real cause for concern with hybrid war: it exacerbates the expectation–outcome gap so often responsible for puncturing our will to fight. The real problem with so-called hybrid adversaries isn't that they're so much more dangerous than the range of threats we've prepared for—it's that they're so much more dangerous than we expect that they should be, because they're not states. We don't expect Hizballah or the Taliban to be able to deepen the battlefield with anti-access technologies, the sort of weapons that allow them to target exposed forces even when they're not on patrol. We don't expect guerilla fighters to take on Western infantry and armor on the conventional battlefield. When it comes down to it, we frankly don't expect sub-state groups to be able to kill Americans in what we've always considered to be the sort of straight-up battlefield fight in which U.S. arms are dominant; this explains the widespread freak-out in response to Wanat, where American soldiers were killed and positions overrun by Taliban infantry using infiltration tactics and small arms.
I recently mentioned Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," a paper that I think can help us to understand the true political danger of the hybrid threat. Sullivan constructs a model for war outcomes in asymmetric conflict in which
This is the real threat of hybrid conflict: that it reminds us of how bloody war is and has always been; that it delivers that reminder during a strategically inconsequential war; and that the lessons we learn about cost tolerance during that strategically inconsequential war shape our expectations for the future in perverse ways and leave us unwilling to sustain the necessary costs when the next Big One comes along.
Nearly all wars are a strategic hybrid: a mix of violent action, diplomacy, and messaging, combining destruction, coercion, and persuasion. The modern hybrid war construct implies that future conflict will take on a more tactically hybrid character: that states will employ guerilla tactics in concert with heavy weapons, or that sub-state groups will use sophisticated weapons hand-in-hand with terrorism and insurgency.
You see, as Conrad Crane has said before (and as I love to repeat), there are only two kinds of war: asymmetric and stupid. Capable adversaries will always seek to capitalize on their own strengths and focus on our weaknesses. The hybrid concept simply tells us that violent actors will seek to diversify their capabilities and become less predictable by employing weapons and tactics more frequently associated with different parts of the sophistication and organization spectrum.
Big deal, right? If a weapon system or tactical method is proven to be effective, shouldn't we expect that our adversaries will make it a part of what they do? Frank Hoffman says hybrid war is defined by a "blend of the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular war," which I'm not sure tells us all that much of anything about how it differs from the sort of war we already know. If those capable of state-like lethality had access to a sustaining base of manpower imbued with the "fanatical and protracted fervor" of violent extremists, why haven't they blended the two before now?
Hoffman does put his finger on the characteristic that seems important to the whole range of hybrid warfare disciples, and that's increased lethality. But dramatically increased battlefield lethality has been a challenge for miltary planners and theorists for a century and a half, one that has been addressed pretty well by those militaries with economic and intellectual capacity to adapt. For our adversaries to combine weapons lethality with "fanatical and protracted fervor" doesn't pose nearly so significant a military challenge as does the combination of lethality with effective force employment.
The big problem with the modern hybrid war concept is that it's based both on a misunderstanding of military effectiveness – one that fails to acknowledge that we do, in fact, know with relative certainty what works on the battlefield (Stephen Biddle calls it "the modern system of force employment," and has specified its component parts pretty elaborately in a 2004 book called Military Power) – and on a blurring of the real distinction between success in battle and success in war.
Still, not every organized violent actor fights the same way, and there are a variety of reasons for that. But if you want to kill the enemy, destroy formations, and seize and hold ground, you do your best to employ your forces in line with the dictates of the modern system. That is, if you want to fight, you do the things you have to do to get good at fighting—you learn to shoot, move, and communicate in dispersed formations, operating with a combined-arms team that seeks maximum cover and concealment to blunt enemy firepower, and you procure the weapons and equipment that facilitate those skills.
Some of those that have learned the modern system are still not capable of producing favorable war outcomes, owing to strategic failures or other circumstantial limitations. And other entities do achieve political success even when they simply cannot do the things that are neccessary to operate effectively on the modern battlefield, whether for internal political, cultural, or economic reasons. That's because they wage war in a strategic fashion (asymmetric, even!)—by minimizing the importance of fighting to the accomplishment of their goals.
Futurists hawking hybrid concepts that focus on tactical or technological hybridity often seem to overlook this basic point: tactical effectiveness is really important, and almost every violent actor is going to do his best to achieve it when the political, cultural, doctrinal, or financial barriers are surmountable. But tactical effectiveness isn't everything, and it's often extremely difficult and extremely expensive to achieve and sustain. All the "hybrid warfare" idea tells us is that in the future, the range of potential adversaries is not so clearly dichotomous when we look at buying power, human capital, and tactical and strategic imagination as it may have been before. Sometimes guerillas will want to fight, because they've gotten better at it. And sometimes armies will want to talk, because they think it's gotten too expensive to fight.
We needed a new term for that?
I bring all of this up in relation to an article that ran on AOL Defense last week, headlined "How to Fight Hybrid Threats: Tanks, Airstrikes, and Training." The piece could just as easily have been called "How to Be Good at Battle: Shoot, Move, and Communicate." I don't mean to be too dismissive, though, because it's a useful reminder to the general audience of the point I made above: we know certain things about how to fight effectively, and our recent involvement in the sort of conflicts where fighting power has thus far failed to translate well into "victory" ought not make us forget that.
The piece is built around an interview with Dr. David Johnson, a RAND scholar and retired Army officer who published a book last year about the lessons of the Israel's recent wars. I'm sure some of you will have read (or at least skimmed) Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza when it first appeared; if not, it's available for free (pdf) on RAND's website, and the AOL Defense interview does a good job of getting at some of the major conclusions.
The driver of the hybrid threat, for Johnson, is the spread of long-range weapons: anti-tank guided missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons (called "man-portable air defense systems," or MANPADS), even relatively unsophisticated long-range rockets like those used by Hezbollah in 2006. When Israeli airstrikes alone couldn't find and destroy the well-hidden rocket launchers, Israel sent in ground troops, only to be bloodied by unexpectedly fierce resistance.Here we see the bankruptcy of the hybrid idea as a tactical construct laid bare: what's just been described as "the driver of the hybrid threat" is in fact the driver of nearly all tactical adaptation over the last century or so: the problem of the offensive in the face of overwhelming firepower—increasing weapons range and rate of fire, the deepening of the battlefield, and the consequent limitations on tactical and operational maneuver.
So why is "the hybrid threat" any different to the basic military problem we've been trying to solve for all this time? Johnson contends that a shift in Western states' priorities from inter-state war to counter-guerrilla operations has pushed them to forget about that basic problem: instead of worrying about the perfection of protected maneuver in order to close with and destroy a lethal enemy, Israel and the U.S. have focused narrowly on the subsidiary issue of how to identify and target the enemy.
So how can the US prepare for hybrid threats? In part by going back to the future, said Johnson, whose books include a history of how the US learned to use tanks and airpower in World War II. "It is a problem that can't be solved by a single service," he said. The Air Force and Army today work together more closely than ever before in providing air support to ground troops in Afghanistan, but air-ground cooperation has gotten good in past conflicts as well, only to break down post-war when bureaucratic and budgetary battles between the services start to matter more. Hybrid threats will impose serious limits on helicopter operations – as the Soviets found out in Afghanistan after the CIA provided the mujahideen with Stinger missiles – so support from higher, faster, and harder-to-hit fixed-wing aircraft will be essential. Conversely, the Air Force will need the ground troops to root out hybrid enemies from their hiding places, he argued, just as the Israeli Air Force proved unable to spot Hezbollah's rocket launchers from overhead. "Ground maneuver is the only thing that will make him visible because he's hiding from everything overhead," said Johnson.The challenge of so-called hybrid war is that it's reminded us of the need to consider these two questions together: firepower and maneuver, attack and defense, target identification and force protection. The excerpt above is like a billboard for Biddle's modern system (miraculously, Johnson doesn't cite Military Power in his recent study, though he does take lessons from a recent monograph Biddle co-authored about the Lebanon war): artillery and air power are used in close combination with ground forces to pin down the enemy, force him to keep his head down and allow friendly ground forces to maneuver on his position. But how to separate him from the population, to force him to come out and fight? Well-trained infantry must be capable of meeting the enemy in his sanctuaries – whether forests or mountains or urban areas – to identify, isolate, and fix him for destruction. These are the fundamentals of combined-arms land warfare, as useful for Americans in 2018 as for Germans in 1918.
But this is all somewhat peripheral to the real cause for concern with hybrid war: it exacerbates the expectation–outcome gap so often responsible for puncturing our will to fight. The real problem with so-called hybrid adversaries isn't that they're so much more dangerous than the range of threats we've prepared for—it's that they're so much more dangerous than we expect that they should be, because they're not states. We don't expect Hizballah or the Taliban to be able to deepen the battlefield with anti-access technologies, the sort of weapons that allow them to target exposed forces even when they're not on patrol. We don't expect guerilla fighters to take on Western infantry and armor on the conventional battlefield. When it comes down to it, we frankly don't expect sub-state groups to be able to kill Americans in what we've always considered to be the sort of straight-up battlefield fight in which U.S. arms are dominant; this explains the widespread freak-out in response to Wanat, where American soldiers were killed and positions overrun by Taliban infantry using infiltration tactics and small arms.
I recently mentioned Patricia Sullivan's "War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars," a paper that I think can help us to understand the true political danger of the hybrid threat. Sullivan constructs a model for war outcomes in asymmetric conflict in which
strong states select themselves into armed conflicts only when their pre-war estimate of the cost of attaining their political objectives through the use of force falls below the threshold of their tolerance for costs. The more the actual costs of victory exceed a state's prewar expectations, the greater the risk that it will be pushed beyond its cost-tolerance threshold and forced to unilaterally withdraw its forces before it attains its war aims. (497)She goes on to make a compelling case about the difference between wars of coercion and wars of destruction, but that's less germane to our point here. What I'm getting at is this: because we don't expect irregular adversaries to fight in conventional ways and with conventional weapons, we're not prepared for the sort of casualties that are normally associated even with wildly successful conventional ground combat. (This expectation is exaggerated yet further by the experiences of Desert Storm and OIF I, when U.S. forces inflicted historically unprecedented casualty ratios on conventional enemies due to a remarkable confluence of American technological edge, extraordinarily poor Iraqi force employment, and good fortune. Our recent opponents have been irregulars who mostly lack the capacity to engage our forces using the modern system and regulars who proved unwilling or incapable of doing so.) In short, we have forgotten that land warfare has significant costs in men and materiel, even when waged successfully.
This is the real threat of hybrid conflict: that it reminds us of how bloody war is and has always been; that it delivers that reminder during a strategically inconsequential war; and that the lessons we learn about cost tolerance during that strategically inconsequential war shape our expectations for the future in perverse ways and leave us unwilling to sustain the necessary costs when the next Big One comes along.
Friday, May 27, 2011
[insert pithy, non-profane post title here]
I don't like to scream profanity into cyberspace via post titles, which are embedded in the URL, so I'm just going to bump it down into the body text.
Max Boot: Are you fucking kidding me?
Are you fucking kidding me?
The political and public will to secure, stabilize, state-build, or otherwise involve U.S. forces and resources in a post-conflict scenario in Libya simply does not exist. A significant majority of Americans oppose U.S. involvement even at current levels: when asked last week "do you think the U.S. is doing the right thing by using military force in Libya now, or should the U.S. not be involved in Libya now?", only 33% of those polled approved of the enterprise. (See question 31.) There's no small irony in Boot's exhortation to policymakers to "shine greater public attention on this issue and make clear why a peacekeeping force would need to be sent," considering the way Boot himself is manifestly incapable of offering a persuasive rationale to his own audience.
Beyond that, Boot's analysis of force requirements is so stupid it practically drools. One can only assume that the RAND state-building study is cited and linked as a sort of bluff; surely Boot knows that his foolishness will be revealed if the reader takes time to examine it even cursorily. "In particular look at page 39," we're told, where a chart compares the peak troops-to-inhabitants ratio for Germany and Japan in 1945 with six peace enforcement missions from the post-Cold War period. Here's Max:
It is, of course, intuitive to assume that high force levels are conducive to low violence. But the sample size of the RAND study is troubling, as is the lack of consideration given to a number of other qualitative differences between the various campaigns. The wars against Germany and Japan, for example, ended with the surrender of each country's high military command, to the evident relief of populations that had been battered by years of total war. The Bosnian war had a similarly settled conclusion, with Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic (acting by proxy for Bosnian Serbs) agreeing to the Dayton Accords alongside the Bosnian and Croatian national leaderships. The Kosovo conflict, on the other hand, ended with the withdrawal of Serbian forces from the province and the entry of KFOR peacekeepers, who were joyously received by Kosovar Albanians. (In this sense, it can hardly be classed as "peace enforcement.") And the Iraq war, of course, merely shifted from conventional to irregular war in 2003, the year the data was reported; the government in Baghdad had collapsed, the armed forces scattered, and the anti-coalition resistance taken up by sectarian militias and loyalist irregulars.
What this brief exploration should show is that a great many variables related to conflict termination can impact the level of violence in the peace enforcement or stability operations phase, and troop levels are not uniquely determinative. Boot seems to acknowledge this when he writes that "these are very rough rules of thumb that need to be adjusted based on circumstances." But he goes on to conclude that the risk of post-Qaddafi violence in Libya is likely even lower than in any of the scenarios mooted above, and that a stabilizing occupation could perhaps be effected with an even lower force ratio than Iraq in 2003 (which, contrary to Boot's assertion, is not "on the low end of force levels," but rather just above the median in a set of eight cases). Of course, there's a serious problem with this line of reasoning: if the post-war situation in Iraq were reproduced in Libya this year, that would be a totally unacceptable result for the United States and the international community! The force levels in 2003 Iraq didn't come close to assuring stability!
There are a good many reasons to believe the precise opposite of what Boot asserts -- to believe that the risk of violence in Libya is much, much higher than in Japan or Somalia or Kosovo. Many Libyans have already insisted that a Western troop presence in the country would be unacceptable to them, even during a phase of the conflict when the outcome is still uncertain. If Libyans are unwelcoming of American combat power that could aid in Qaddafi's demise, how much more likely are they to resist a foreign presence once the dictator is gone? As Boot has clearly noticed -- he reminds us early in the piece that "Libya has been a major recruiting center for Al Qaeda" -- Arab North Africans in authoritarian countries are solidly within the target demographic of America's most committed foe; should we expect that AQAM will be unable to rouse resistance fighters to the anti-crusader cause in an Arab country with weak borders, surrounded by other Arab countries with weak borders and populations presumably susceptible to the bin-Ladenist pitch? We should instead pretend that post-conflict conditions in Libya will be less like the disaster of post-Saddam Iraq and more like Kosovo, where occupying forces had come to the aid of a weaker ethno-religious faction after the expulsion of an aggressive, invading army?
In the end, we can't know whether Libya would violently oppose a Western occupation (even one that Boot would surely proclaim as salutary to the cause of Arab freedom). Steven Goode, summarizing the findings of a study on force levels by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, adverted to just this point.
Max Boot: Are you fucking kidding me?
To head off the dangers that may come with “catastrophic success,” it is important for the coalition to plan now for stabilizing a post-Qaddafi Libya. If policymakers haven’t already done so, they ought to consult The Beginner's Guide to Nation-Building put out by Jim Dobbins, Seth Jones, and their colleagues at RAND. In particular look at page 39, which lists “peak military levels for peace enforcement” in a variety of conflicts from 1945 Germany to 2003 Iraq. Iraq was on the low end of force levels—only 7 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. Germany was on the high end—101 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. This helps to explain why post-war Germany was so much more peaceful. Bosnia and Kosovo, also relatively successful exercises in nation-building, were in between—with 19 and 20 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants, respectively.
What does that mean for Libya—a country that, according to the CIA Factbook, has a population of 6.6 million? If the aim is to replicate the Bosnia/Kosovo experience then 330,000 peacekeepers would be called for. If Iraq is the model, 94,000 peacekeepers would be needed.
Of course, as with all such metrics, these are very rough rules of thumb that need to be adjusted based on circumstances. In Libya there are a number of factors that suggest lesser levels of risk, including the fact that the eastern portion of the country around Benghazi has been relatively peaceful and stable under rebel control. So perhaps even 94,000 peacekeepers won’t be needed. But it is likely that a need substantial if smaller force will still be required, and it is imperative for NATO policymakers to begin planning for such a deployment. As part of that planning process, they need to shine greater public attention on this issue and make clear why a peacekeeping force would need to be sent. Otherwise they risk shock and opposition among publics that have not been prepared for yet another deployment.For ten minutes after I read this post, I could do nothing but stare blankly at the screen.
Are you fucking kidding me?
The political and public will to secure, stabilize, state-build, or otherwise involve U.S. forces and resources in a post-conflict scenario in Libya simply does not exist. A significant majority of Americans oppose U.S. involvement even at current levels: when asked last week "do you think the U.S. is doing the right thing by using military force in Libya now, or should the U.S. not be involved in Libya now?", only 33% of those polled approved of the enterprise. (See question 31.) There's no small irony in Boot's exhortation to policymakers to "shine greater public attention on this issue and make clear why a peacekeeping force would need to be sent," considering the way Boot himself is manifestly incapable of offering a persuasive rationale to his own audience.
Beyond that, Boot's analysis of force requirements is so stupid it practically drools. One can only assume that the RAND state-building study is cited and linked as a sort of bluff; surely Boot knows that his foolishness will be revealed if the reader takes time to examine it even cursorily. "In particular look at page 39," we're told, where a chart compares the peak troops-to-inhabitants ratio for Germany and Japan in 1945 with six peace enforcement missions from the post-Cold War period. Here's Max:
Iraq was on the low end of force levels—only 7 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. Germany was on the high end—101 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. This helps to explain why post-war Germany was so much more peaceful. Bosnia and Kosovo, also relatively successful exercises in nation-building, were in between—with 19 and 20 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants, respectively.Yes, force levels do help to explain the success of peace enforcement and stability operations. Dobbins et al. agree: "High levels of forces have generally tended to correlate with high levels of security and order and low levels of casualties." But they don't completely explain outcomes: just look at Japan, where post-conflict violence was nonexistent with a ratio of only five occupying troops to every 1,000 people -- the same as violent Somalia in 1992.
It is, of course, intuitive to assume that high force levels are conducive to low violence. But the sample size of the RAND study is troubling, as is the lack of consideration given to a number of other qualitative differences between the various campaigns. The wars against Germany and Japan, for example, ended with the surrender of each country's high military command, to the evident relief of populations that had been battered by years of total war. The Bosnian war had a similarly settled conclusion, with Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic (acting by proxy for Bosnian Serbs) agreeing to the Dayton Accords alongside the Bosnian and Croatian national leaderships. The Kosovo conflict, on the other hand, ended with the withdrawal of Serbian forces from the province and the entry of KFOR peacekeepers, who were joyously received by Kosovar Albanians. (In this sense, it can hardly be classed as "peace enforcement.") And the Iraq war, of course, merely shifted from conventional to irregular war in 2003, the year the data was reported; the government in Baghdad had collapsed, the armed forces scattered, and the anti-coalition resistance taken up by sectarian militias and loyalist irregulars.
What this brief exploration should show is that a great many variables related to conflict termination can impact the level of violence in the peace enforcement or stability operations phase, and troop levels are not uniquely determinative. Boot seems to acknowledge this when he writes that "these are very rough rules of thumb that need to be adjusted based on circumstances." But he goes on to conclude that the risk of post-Qaddafi violence in Libya is likely even lower than in any of the scenarios mooted above, and that a stabilizing occupation could perhaps be effected with an even lower force ratio than Iraq in 2003 (which, contrary to Boot's assertion, is not "on the low end of force levels," but rather just above the median in a set of eight cases). Of course, there's a serious problem with this line of reasoning: if the post-war situation in Iraq were reproduced in Libya this year, that would be a totally unacceptable result for the United States and the international community! The force levels in 2003 Iraq didn't come close to assuring stability!
There are a good many reasons to believe the precise opposite of what Boot asserts -- to believe that the risk of violence in Libya is much, much higher than in Japan or Somalia or Kosovo. Many Libyans have already insisted that a Western troop presence in the country would be unacceptable to them, even during a phase of the conflict when the outcome is still uncertain. If Libyans are unwelcoming of American combat power that could aid in Qaddafi's demise, how much more likely are they to resist a foreign presence once the dictator is gone? As Boot has clearly noticed -- he reminds us early in the piece that "Libya has been a major recruiting center for Al Qaeda" -- Arab North Africans in authoritarian countries are solidly within the target demographic of America's most committed foe; should we expect that AQAM will be unable to rouse resistance fighters to the anti-crusader cause in an Arab country with weak borders, surrounded by other Arab countries with weak borders and populations presumably susceptible to the bin-Ladenist pitch? We should instead pretend that post-conflict conditions in Libya will be less like the disaster of post-Saddam Iraq and more like Kosovo, where occupying forces had come to the aid of a weaker ethno-religious faction after the expulsion of an aggressive, invading army?
In the end, we can't know whether Libya would violently oppose a Western occupation (even one that Boot would surely proclaim as salutary to the cause of Arab freedom). Steven Goode, summarizing the findings of a study on force levels by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, adverted to just this point.
Another caveat of the work is that the analysis cannot predict the violence level before a conflict starts. Many insurgencies simmer at a low level for years before becoming serious enough to provoke a significant reaction from the government. In contrast, the Soviet Union faced intense resistance immediately upon invading Afghanistan, with more than 4,000 Soviet and Afghan soldiers killed every year of the conflict (or more than 250 fatalities per million Afghan residents). Policy-makers contemplating intervening in other nations should remember that not only can invasions lead to insurgencies; they can also lead almost immediately to levels of violence more than three times that currently [in the winter of 2009-10] seen in Afghanistan after eight years of war.All of which by way of saying what almost everyone except for Max Boot seems to have learned by now: this kind of thing isn't as simple as you think it is. (Or more succinctly: STFU.)
Monday, April 26, 2010
Hot off the RAND Press: Insurgencies are Complicated
Ignore the glib title above (I'm trying to make up for some of Gulliver's alleged turn to sincerity) and check out RAND's latest major study How Insurgencies End. Written by Ben Connable, a retired USMC Major, and Martin C. Libicki, it tackles an impressively broad swathe of insurgencies stretching back to the 1930s, and asks a bunch of interesting and highly policy relevant questions. I've barely begun reading it, but two things strike me.
First, the list of ways governments lose insurgencies (see p. 152) maps pretty well onto Afghanistan 2001-2009 (possibly 2010):
- Governments ignore the insurgency until it develops into a credible threat.
- Governments fail to address root causes.
- Governments address root causes half-heartedly or too late, stoking discontent.
- Governments fail to identify major shifts in strategic momentum.
- Governments fail to extend credible control into rural areas.
- Governments become dependent on a fickle sponsor.
Which is pretty depressing. More heartening, the study also argues that "No insurgency ending is inevitable." Let's hope so.
Second, their emphasis on the role of political/social/economic discontent is a healthy reminder to keep our priorities in line even as the Marines in Helmand fight to retain (or regain at this point?) the momentum, and the Kandahar offensive slowly builds:
The kind of grassroots support necessary to build and sustain an insurgency is fed on social, economic and political discontent. If a government successfully addresses root causes, it is possible to defeat an insurgency without defeating the insurgents themselves.
I do note with concern that the study consistently mislabels the Ugandan Allied Democratic Forces as the 'Arab Deterrent Force' (who were, um, Syrian, and in Lebanon), and claims that it lasted from 1986-2000 (the ADF in Uganda fought from 1996 until, arguably*, they were chased out of their sanctuary by a joint UN-Congolese operation in 2005). I suspect this is a small blip on their data, and not indicative of larger data or coding problems, but I'd suggest keeping an eye out for any other issues.
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