Still Searching for that Decisive Battle
Paul Cella has an article today on TCS asking how we can force insurgent forces to give us battle. His reasoning is as follow:
…our enemy will not fight. He avoids battle like few adversaries we have come to grips with before.
I say that one of our strategies in this war should be to maneuver our enemies into a real battle, or series of them.
…In many ways his weaknesses are our strengths, and ours his. Thus, as one of our overwhelming strengths is military might, we must set our minds upon the question of how we can force him to give us battle.
Cella falls into a trap that has caught many others. The reasoning goes as follows. If we could just force the enemy to commit himself to a decisive battle, then we could demolish him once and for all and finally go home. Like Foreman looking for that one KO punch again Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle, the US spent much of the Vietnam War looking for the chance to bring first the Vietcong and then the North Vietnamese to decisive battle. In both cases, that moment never materialized the way the US or Foreman expected it to.
Instead of trying to get our enemy to fight us the way we’d like them to, we ought to be probing the enemy for weaknesses which we can then exploit to disrupt his cohesion and create non-cooperative centers of gravity. Cella touches on this when he speaks of trying to “provoke the enemy to recklessness,” but he can still only think in terms of climatic battles. He only seeks to provoke the enemy’s recklessness in order to “drive him en masse into the field of battle, and keep him there… Once this is done, I think our military forces will be eminently capable of delivering him savage repulses, and pursuing these to resounding victories against him.”
Cella gets close to something actually useful when he speaks of attacking our adversaries minds. By getting “a better handle on the enemy’s inherent mental vulnerabilities… we [can] discover his points of psychological pressure, the advantages he presents to us by virtue of his own character…” The problem is, he offers no insights into how such advantages are discovered or exploited. Contrast this with the detailed descriptions and assessments of Muckian’s article.
Cella’s article illustrates the pitfalls of remaining devoted to the dream of a decisive battle. Anyone who persists in searching for a heroric final clash will be a pawn in the hands of even a medicore guerilla. We can never force an adversary to play to our strengths. We can, however, adapt ourselves to exploit an aversaries’ weakness. Understanding this is a first step in adapting to reality, which is a prerequisite for useful strategic thought.
I don’t understand the value of foreclosing the possibility of a battle from the get-go.
Is it your view that there is no way — literally none — that we could provoke the enemy to battle?
What if a detachment of special forces captured and held an important mosque in somewhere in the Muslim world? I’m not advocating this, mind you; but as a thought experiment, how do you think the Jihadists would react to infidel desecration of a holy site? Might they not rise up in fury and plunging recklessly into the defense preparations of our men?
Given our military capacity and the skill of our special forces, such an operation seems hardly beyond us. A mosque could be turned into a kind of fortification, against which the enraged rabble would hurl themselves and suffer the demoralization of repulse after repulse.
My aim was to spark such a discussion of the vulnerabilities, not merely of guerillas in general, but of warriors of the Jihad in particular. Perhaps no decisive battle could ever be forced, but this seems doubtful to me given the sensitivity of the enemy to certain insults.
The Cartoon Jihad alone ought to be enough to suggest that he can indeed be provoked to recklessness.
Comment by Paul J Cella — January 26, 2007 @ 9:52 am
Hi Paul,
Thanks for coming by.
What your rhetorical question neatly sidesteps is whether any such battle would be decisive. Inspiring reckless behavior might help us kill insurgents and rack up body counts, but that doesn’t necessarily bring us any closer to victory. In your mosque example, maybe we could provoke wave after wave of enraged militants to slaughter themselves against our prepared defenses, but what does
that achieve? In our current conflict, winning a battle in such a manner actually impedes our strategic goals.
Consider how insurgent forces use information operations to leverage battlefield defeats. The slaughter of guerilla forces hurled against your fortified mosque would be sold as a sign of their bravery and righteousness. You may vehemently disagree with the validity of that story, but we don’t get to decide how others interpret it. Col. Hammes (USMC, ret.) has described how Palestinians used savvy media packaging (such as using rocks instead of guns in order to make the Israelis, with their tanks and body armor, look like bullies using excessive force) during the first Intefada to win a strategic advantage [1]. We’re facing adversaries who use similar techniques to turn battlefield slaughters into recruiting tools for enlisting active and passive support. Thus far, this has enabled them to be resilient in the face of battlefield defeats.
In order to counter such adversaries, we need to tailor our strategies to their vulnerabilities. Having seen the American military’s ability to dominate any conflict where the enemy offered battle, thinking enemies have tailored themselves to deny us the opportunity to use this skill. That means that we need to adapt, and we are. Adapting means that we have to be willing to discard familiar approaches, such as seeking a climactic battle, if they are not appropriate to the challenge at hand. This is why I criticized your battle-centric focus, because in a very real way, our adversaries want us to be always looking for a battle. We need to be disrupting our adversaries’ plans and assumptions, and a great way to start is by looking for alternative ways to destroy their cohesion. They expect us to come at them with an armored unit. How do we surprise them?
I applaud you for wanting to spark a discussion of guerilla vulnerabilities. It is one of the most essential strategic issues we face. A great deal of good thinking has been done on the topic, but a great deal of work remains. More minds are always needed. The Muckian article I cited offers an excellent summary of current thinking on guerilla vulnerabilities. If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend it. You’ll note that Muckian cites Sun Tzu, not Clausewitz, which says a great deal about what perspectives professionals have been finding useful in understanding 21st Century conflicts.
cheers,
Wiggins
[1] Col. T.X. Hammes. The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, 2004.
Comment by Wiggins — January 26, 2007 @ 3:05 pm
“You know you never defeated us in the field.” - Col. Harry Summers.
“That may be true, but it is also irrelevant.” - Unknown North Vietnamese Colonel.
Comment by Wiggins — July 31, 2007 @ 4:56 pm