Unconventional Warfare

sorcerer · Nov 2, 2014

The Road to "Unrestricted Warfare"

In the linear conception of history - which remains the dominant conception in the discipline of military history - the idea of "major wars" is usually associated with one particular period: the Clausewitzian era, i.e. the period from the levee en masse of Valmy (1792) to the dropping of the absolute weapon at Hiroshima (1945).

For this period, the master narrative of Western military historians is that of a gradual process of escalation, in which societal mobilization (from the French revolution on), coupled with industrial mobilization (from the U.S. Civil War on), eventually combine to produce the Total Wars of the twentieth-century in which the military and civilian spheres become blurred. In Hegelian parlance, the underlying philosophy of history of the Valmy-to-Hiroshima narrative is that of a gradual historical realization, in the form of Total War, of the concept of Absolute War elaborated by Clausewitz (1780-1831).

In the field of military history, this "Road to Total War" from Napoleon to Hitler is fairly straightforward, and has been well-traveled by scholars, particularly in the past two decades. The post-Hiroshima era, by contrast, does not easily fit in a single master narrative. To the extent that one major theme has dominated the 1945-1989 period, it is that of the waning of Major Wars and the proliferation of Small Wars. And in truth, in the second half of the twentieth-century, major inter-state wars have become the exception (even among non-nuclear powers) while intra- state wars have become the norm - whether in the form of revolutionary, ethnic, religious, or criminal/resource wars. But this Major Wars/Small Wars narrative is in fact only half of the storyat best.

There is another possible narrative, one that diplomatic history has failed to fully articulate to date: the mutation of kinetic Total War into non-kinetic Total Strategy in the second half of the 20th century. The first part of this narrative - from the birth of the National Security State of the Truman era to the Total Cold War of the Eisenhower era – is by now reasonably well- known. By contrast, the second part - the so-called "Second Cold War" of the Reagan era –remains accessible only in a fragmentary manner, mostly though the accounts of insiders. Yet, as formalized in NSDD-75, Reagan's grand strategy was in fact the prefiguation of Unrestricted Warfare - with American Characteristics. To make a long story short:

In the aftermath of the Great War, as Western strategists began to analyze in earnest the different aspects of the total war they had just experienced, the concepts of "economic
warfare," "psychological warfare," and "political warfare" began to enter the lexicon of strategy. In revisionist powers like Germany, the shared goal was to find a more effective way to win a repeat of the Great War. Hence the theory of an offensive Total War developed by General Ludendorff, in which policy ends up being subordinated to strategy, and War itself is seen as "the highest expression of the racial will to life."

In status quo powers like Britain, by contrast, the goal was to win a "better peace" while avoiding a repeat of the destructiveness associated by many with the Clausewitzian ideology in vogue during the Great War. Hence Liddell Hart's systematic re-evaluation, at every level (tactical, operational, strategic), of an "Indirect Approach" which eventually led him to formulate his concept of Grand Strategy. Like Ludendorff's Total War, Liddell Hart's Grand Strategy leads to a blurring of the distinction between wartime and peacetime; but the two conceptions radically differ in that, in Grand Strategy, the military dimension proper only plays a supporting role in what will later become known as the DIME spectrum (diplomacy, military, information , economy).

Overrated during the interwar era, Liddell Hart's reputation suffered an eclipse after WWII for reasons having to do with both theory, history and policy. Theory: unlike Clausewitz, Liddell Hart never offered a systematic treatise on Grand Strategy. His theory remained sketchy, and scattered in a series of books published mostly between 1929 and 1954. History: his theses on the "indirect approach" rests too much on dubious historical claims regarding an alleged "British way in war" – which historians have only been too happy to demolish. Policy: to this day,Liddell Hart is best remembered for his advocacy of "appeasement" in the late 1930s - even though, upon closer scrutiny, his theoretical work itself can be said to anticipate Georges Kennan's "containment."

After WWII, Western officials will stay away altogether from the concept of "grand strategy" and adopt instead the more nebulous concept of "national security strategy." With the advent of the first hydrogen bomb (1952) and for the next decade, the official strategic debate in the West will focus quasi-exclusively on nuclear strategy and will quickly become an exercise in strategic theology.

Meanwhile, Liddell Hart will go on to arguing that an "indirect" grand strategy is now more than ever a matter of necessity: "The H-bomb, even in its trial explosions, has done more than anything else to make it plain that "total war" as a method and "victory" as a war aim are out of date concepts (p.xviii). The common assumption that atomic power has cancelled out strategy [other than in the form of deterrence] is ill-founded and misleading. By carrying destructiveness to a "suicidal" extreme, atomic power is stimulating and accelerating a reversion to the indirect methods that are the essence of strategy."

But his book on Strategy (1954) will only devote a few pages to the subject of Grand Strategy, on the ground that "to deal adequately with this wider subject would require not only a much larger volume, but a separate volume – for while grand strategy should control strategy, its principles often run counter to those which prevail in the field of strategy." (p.353). By the time of the revised edition (1967), his interest in the Indirect Approach has shifted from the national- strategic level (grand strategy) to the theater-strategic level (guerrilla warfare).

In 1963, French General Andre Beaufre, the main disciple of Liddell Hart on the Continent, will try to bring greater theoretical rigor by re-framing Grand Strategy in terms of Total Strategy (in an explicit opposition to Ludendorff's Total War). While Beaufre's book is too dense to be done full justice here, two things are worth noting here:

First, his distinction between "interior maneuver" (the Area of Operations proper) and "exterior maneuver" (mostly, strategic communication on the world stage) anticipates today's distinction between "battlefield" and "battlesphere."

Second, long before Stefan Possony published the blueprint for technological warfare that will constitute the core of the Reagan strategy in the Second Cold War, Beaufre presciently remarked: "a new form of strategy is developing in peacetime; a strategy of which the phrase 'arms race' used prior to the old great conflicts is hardly more than a faint reflection. There are no battles in this strategy; each side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It has been termed 'logistic strategy'. Its tactics are industrial, technical, and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him an enormous expenditure...A silent and apparently peaceful war is therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could be decisive."

Though not without merits, Beaufre's work was definitely "too French" for American audiences. The closest thing to an American version of Total Strategy is to be found in The New Frontiersof War: Political Warfare, Present and Future, a book published in 1962 and co-authored by the most improbable odd couple: Colonel William Kintner, a West Point graduate and Omaha Beach veteran, and Joseph Z. Kornfeder, a founding member of the Communist Party of America and aformer representative of the Comintern. In retrospect, the book both captures well the spirit of the Total Cold War of the Einsehower era and, at the same time, anticipates Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui's Unrestricted Warfare by a generation:

"'The new frontiers of war' defines political warfare as a form of conflict between states in which a protagonist nation seeks to impose its will upon its opponents without the direct use of armed force...Political warfare has been defined as consisting of diplomacy, international commerce, information, and other civilian activities, governmental as well as non-governmental, as well as military action....The higher frequency and intensity of present-day actions call for new descriptive labels. Let us therefore substitute new terms: for diplomacy, political action; for commerce, economic warfare; for information, psychological warfare. And let us extend the term "military action" beyond its traditional scope to include intervention to aid foreign governments and populations, and guerrilla and partisan warfare."

Kintner's book never got the attention it deserves, for two reasons. On the one hand, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, American strategists became less interested in grand strategy than in its opposite: crisis management. (McNamara: "Today, there is no longer any such thing as strategy; there is only crisis management"). On the other hand, with the ongoing escalation in Vietnam, grand strategy took a back-seat to something more urgent: counterinsurgency.

In IR theory, meanwhile, due to the victory of the "numerates" (social scientists) over the "literates" (historians) in the 1970s, classical realism - and its attention to statecraft - gave way to a mechanistic structural realism in which, by definition, there was no room for a concept like "grand strategy." Despite the meritorious efforts of British historian Paul Kennedy (Liddell Hart's former assistant), the study of grand strategy will be relegated to the margins of both international relations theory and diplomatic history.

Then came the "Second Cold War" of the Reagan era, and with it, a grand strategic shift from Containment to Rollback

By 1979, the conventional wisdom in the West was that the Soviet Union was on the offensive, and America in terminal decline; by 1989, it was the Soviet Union's turn to be in terminal decline, and the U.S. to be in the position of "lone remaining superpower." Even more than the Eisenhower era, the Reagan era's Second Cold War deserved to be called a Total Cold War. Surprisingly enough, though, there is still not a single book-length, strategic study of this grand strategic "surge" formalized by NSDD-75.

In part, this absence is due to the fact that the Second Cold War was waged essentially covertly, and that some elements remain classified to this day. For the most part, though, it is due to the academic world's tendency to give excessive credit to Gorbachev, and to see in Reagan nothing more than a Hollywood actor "sleepwalking through history." Thus, in their account of the end of the Cold War, most historians have focused on the role of Gorbachev (i.e. from 1985 on), and neglected Reagan's role during his first term (1981-1985). To put it differently: by defining the Second Cold War as the period between 1979 and 1985, academics have managed to give the impression there was no causal relation between the Rollback strategy of Reagan and the end of the Cold War itself.

The truth is that, even as Reagan warmed up to Gorbachev, the grand strategy devised during the early 1980s by Bill Clark (NSC), Bill Casey (CIA), and Cap Weinberger (DOD) continued to produce effects at the working level long after the departure from the scene of these policy principals. The debate over the Second Cold War Even is further muddied by an endless debate opposing those, on the Right, who argue that the hard power surge (SDI in particular) were the decisive factors, and those, on the Left, who credit the soft power surge made possible by the "third basket" of the Helsinki Accords. In truth, while both the military build-up and democracy promotion constituted important pillars, the core of the Reagan strategy was an elaborate economic warfare a outrance ranging from restricting technology transfers to Russia, to enlisting third parties to keep oil prices artificially low so as to deprive Moscow of hard currency earnings.

From a functional standpoint, Reagan's grand strategy ranged from patent warfare to petro- warfare, and from low-intensity warfare to "theological warfare" (through the weaponization of religion in both Poland and Afghanistan). From a geopolitical standpoint, Reagan's strategy went beyond rolling back Soviet gains in Central America, undermining Soviet control of Eastern Europe, and forcing Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan: with the help of China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, Reagan's strategy included a campaign of subversion within the Muslim republics of the USSR, which hastened the demise of the Soviet empire. Last but not least, Reagan's combination of ways and means not only ran along the whole DIME spectrum (diplomacy, information, military, economy) at the horizontal level, but also from IGOs (NATO, COCOM, IEA) to NGOs (NED, AFL-CIO, Solidarnosc) at the vertical level. In short, the Reagan Rollback offensive was a prefiguration of Unrestricted Warfare. But there was a flaw.

Though from a formal standpoint, Reagan's total strategy was extremely sophisticated, wide- ranging, and terribly effective, the downside of this "unrestricted war" was the absence of any cost-benefit analysis, leading to what can only be described, in retrospect, as a Pyrrhic victory. Domestically, America, once the world's main creditor nation, had become by 1986 the main debtor nation. Internationally, America's empowerment of China and of the Muslim world (particularly Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) against Soviet Russia created unexpected consequences that we are still living with thirty years later.

As military strategist John Arquilla recently pointed out, since Pakistan "served as a haven for the rebels resisting Russian occupation of Afghanistan, Reagan was unwilling to pressure the ruling Pakistani military dictator to forgo his efforts to develop such deadly [nuclear] weapons. The consequences of this error have resonated in ever more troubling ways, as an illicit proliferation network originating in Pakistan has played a powerful role in the secret struggles of North Korea, Iran, and even the al Qaeda terror organization to acquire weapons of mass destruction of their own."

In addition to this blind spot concerning WMD proliferation, the Reagan administration gave a blank check to U.S. armed forces for a post-Vietnam conventional rebuilding and, Arquilla argues, neglected the then-emerging problem of counterterrorism: "For the most part, these funds were spent preparing for a cataclysmic conventional war in the heart of Europe that was never more than a remote possibility, while at the same time terror was emerging as a form of warfare in its own right. And when some members of Reagan's team urged a retooling of the military to launch a commando-style preventive war on terrorism – more than twenty years ago – they were loudly shouted down by traditionalists." In short, the Reagan administration was instrumental in creating the Sino-Islamic nexus identified by Samuel Huntington a decade later (more on that later).

For two reasons, Reagan's grand strategy (engineered mostly by the intelligence community) failed to register with either the academic or military community. From 1979 on, the interest of IR academics massively shifted from policy-making to theory-building, and structural realism ("the science of Realpolitik without politics") became hegemonic in the field until the end of the Cold War. Around 1979 as well, a freshly-defeated, but newly-professionalized, U.S. military decided that the job of the professional soldier was to focus exclusively on conventional tactical and operational matters and, drawing the wrong lessons from Vietnam, took refuge in Clausewitzology - the science of War without strategy.
With the end of the Cold War, the concept of strategy and, a fortiori, that of "grand strategy," became even more neglected in both academic and military circles.

On the military side, as Carl Builder remarked in the mid-nineties: "With the end of the Cold War and the political constraints imposed by the risks of nuclear confrontation, one might have expected a renaissance in strategic thinking in the American military. It hasn't happened. Both the Persian Gulf War and Bosnian conflict have been approached mostly in operational and tactical terms....Strategic thinking by the American military appears to have gone into hiding... Three decades ago, strategic thought burnt bright in the sanctuary of the national security temple. And for three decades prior to that—back to the 1930s—strategic theorizing dominated military debates in this country....If the operational thinking of our military is secure and without peer, and if tactical thinking has come to the fore, strategic thought has been all but abandoned. The difficulty lies in seeing the strategic side of national security increasingly as the province of politicians and diplomats while the operational and tactical sides belong to the military, free from civilian meddling...."

On the academic side, meanwhile, noted scholars like Richard Betts began to wonder out loud whether – given the declining strategic literacy of Western elites, the diminishing fungibility of military force, and the increasing nonlinearity of war itself - strategy as such had become an "illusion."debates in this country....If the operational thinking of our military is secure and without peer, and if tactical thinking has come to the fore, strategic thought has been all but abandoned. The difficulty lies in seeing the strategic side of national security increasingly as the province of politicians and diplomats while the operational and tactical sides belong to the military, free from civilian meddling...."

On the academic side, meanwhile, noted scholars like Richard Betts began to wonder out loud whether – given the declining strategic literacy of Western elites, the diminishing fungibility of military force, and the increasing nonlinearity of war itself - strategy as such had become an "illusion.") As a result, the academic subfield of "strategic studies" dissolved into an amorphous "security studies" and, in the process, not only did the concept of "grand strategy" altogether disappear, but the concept of "national security" itself dissolved into the nebulous (UN- and EU-sponsored) concept of "human security." As for War itself, it was increasinglytreated, in civilian circles, as a subset of "risk management."

In the post-cold War era, in fairness, neither the academic nor the military world had any (monetary) incentive to invest intellectual efforts in grand strategy. For academics, research
money from the major foundations was available only to those willing to wax lyrical about "global governance" and/or "human security" – the very negation of grand strategy. Within the military, against the backdrop of drastic budget cuts, the official strategic debate was quickly reduced to a "Clausewitz vs. Computers" faux debat pitting the manpower-intensive Army and Marine Corps against the platform-centric Navy and Air Force. Except for a few fundamentalists convinced of the "inerrancy" of Vom Kriege, most U.S.
military intellectuals were by then aware of the increasing inadequacy of the Clausewitzian straight-jacket but, given the rhetorical self-intoxication of the supporters of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), the old Prussian looked like a lesser evil. At the Naval War College, influential professor Michael Handel, in a well-meaning attempt to reconcile Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu, the Western and Eastern tradition, did not hesitate to push the interpretative envelope and to highlight the "complementarity" between the two authors: Sun-Tzu approached war from the standpoint of grand strategy, while Clausewitz was mostly concerned with sub-strategic matters.

Despite his meritorious efforts to salvage Clausewitz, Handel was forced to reluctantly conclude:

"Sun Tzu's comprehensive framework for the analysis of strategy and war is much more relevant to our own time than that of Clausewitz." On the eve of 9/11, Handel could only express the hope to see the emergence of a "unified theory of war" – that very unified theory the absence of which General Barno would lament a decade later. Meanwhile, while keeping an eye on the ongoing American Revolution in Military Affairs, the Chinese military was busy rediscovering its own strategic tradition and, in the process, elaborating something bigger: a Revolution in Strategic Affairs. As a result, the academic subfield of "strategic studies" dissolved into an amorphous "security studies" and, in the process, not only did the concept of "grand strategy" altogether disappear, but the concept of "national security" itself dissolved into the nebulous (UN- and EU-sponsored) concept of "human security." As for War itself, it was increasingly treated, in civilian circles, as a subset of "risk management."

In the post-cold War era, in fairness, neither the academic nor the military world had any (monetary) incentive to invest intellectual efforts in grand strategy. For academics, research
money from the major foundations was available only to those willing to wax lyrical about "global governance" and/or "human security" – the very negation of grand strategy. Within the military, against the backdrop of drastic budget cuts, the official strategic debate was quickly reduced to a "Clausewitz vs. Computers" faux debat pitting the manpower-intensive Army and Marine Corps against the platform-centric Navy and Air Force.

Except for a few fundamentalists convinced of the "inerrancy" of Vom Kriege, most U.S. military intellectuals were by then aware of the increasing inadequacy of the Clausewitzian
straight-jacket but, given the rhetorical self-intoxication of the supporters of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), the old Prussian looked like a lesser evil. At the Naval War College,
influential professor Michael Handel, in a well-meaning attempt to reconcile Clausewitz and Sun-Tzu, the Western and Eastern tradition, did not hesitate to push the interpretative envelope and to highlight the "complementarity" between the two authors: Sun-Tzu approached war from the standpoint of grand strategy, while Clausewitz was mostly concerned with sub-strategic matters.

Despite his meritorious efforts to salvage Clausewitz, Handel was forced to reluctantly conclude: "Sun Tzu's comprehensive framework for the analysis of strategy and war is much more relevantto our own time than that of Clausewitz." On the eve of 9/11, Handel could only express the hope to see the emergence of a "unified theory of war" – that very unified theory the absence of which General Barno would lament a decade later. Meanwhile, while keeping an eye on the ongoing American Revolution in Military Affairs, the Chinese military was busy rediscovering its own strategic tradition and, in the process,elaborating something bigger: a Revolution in Strategic Affairs.

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I wonder : Is our India's TOT and Make in India campaign counter to the Logistic Strategy which could be employed by a foe or foe in disguise?
Obama is doing the OIL PRICE game same as did by his former Reagan. Its all in the game!!

Ray · Nov 2, 2014

@sorcerer,

You may also look at the Modern terminology that has been added - Hybrid War.

sorcerer · Nov 2, 2014

@Ray
Sure sir, I will.

sorcerer · Nov 2, 2014

The Tao of Unrestricted Warfare

Ever since the Enlightenment at least, the distinction between a Western and an Eastern tradition of war and/or strategy has been part of conventional wisdom. At the risk of caricaturing: on the Western side, discipline, technology, and decisive battle; on the Eastern side, deception, stratagems, and reluctance to use force.

This distinction began to break down in the 20th century with the pervasiveness of technology. In the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-5, much to everybody's surprise, Japan turned out to be more "Western" than Russia in military terms (even as the Japanese victory was interpreted in the non-Western world as the first victory of an Eastern power over a Western power in political terms). The military Westernization of the East continued unabated throughout the 20th century to the point where, by 1998, the nuclear tests in India and Pakistan would lead some Westernobservers to announce the end of two centuries of Western military supremacy:

"For two hundred years the world has been shaped by the fact of Western military dominance. Gunboats as agents of national power have been supplanted by warplanes, and they in turn by missiles and satellites and computers, but until very recently all were monopoly of Europeans and North Americans. Now that monopoly is coming to an end."

In the aftermath of 9/11, other observers have gone as far as to wonder whether the end of Western military supremacy, far from being limited to technology, extends to strategy as well.

Even before the end of the Cold War, as longtime China watcher Ralph Sawyer pointed out, the Chinese themselves had begun to rediscover their own strategic tradition:

"Since 1985, coincident with the founding of the National Defense University and the publication of the initial volumes of the great Chinese military corpus (Zhongguo Bingshu Jicheng), Chinese military science has been increasingly looking to its own heritage for theories and practices that will enable it to formulate a distinctive militaryscience, one that will allow its practitioners not to just be imitators, second-best in Western thinking and methods, but to surpass Western strategists and be unfathomable while yet incorporating all the latest advances in weaponry, command, and communications. The traditional Chinese military writings, especially Sun-Tzu's Art of War, the Six Secret Teachings, Hundred Unorthodox Strategies, and Thirty-Six Stratagems, have also enjoyed astonishing popularity among the populace at large and appear in many formats ranging from vernacular editions through serialized television dramas and comic book versions."

A decade later, even as it was 'Westernizing' itself in terms of technology, the PLA was increasingly 'Easternizing' itself in terms of strategy. As Sinologist Arthur Waldron presciently
argued at the time:
"Since at least the beginning of revolutions in military affairs in the early 19th century there has been a tendency in the West to assume that increased power would make military solutions to problems easier. So time and again we have looked to weapons for decisiveness—be it rapid-firing guns, tanks, airpower, or current high tech. But with the advent of nuclear weapons and the expansion of potential battlefields to a global scale, we may reach a point where decisive force is increasingly difficult to achieve. This situation, however, is familiar to Chinese whose fundamental approach to warfare stresses the limits and hazards of relying too heavily on force alone... It may be that the Chinese emphasis on stratagem...offers an intellectual context for modern weaponry that the Western tradition has difficulty providing."

Ironically, it is precisely at the time when the Chinese were busy rediscovering their own tradition that revisionist academics in the West began to claim there was no such thing as a
Chinese tradition. For the most part, our revisionists only ended up trading one "essentialist" view of Chinese strategic culture for another. At most, what they succeeded in demonstrating is that, when confronted with "wars of necessity," the Chinese could be just as Clausewitzian as anybody else. (No surprise here: had the Chinese tried the "indirect approach" against the Mongols, China would be known today as Greater Mongolia). When it comes to "wars of choice," though, the fact remains that the Chinese have traditionally favored the indirect approach. Winning by outsmarting, rather than by outfighting, has remained "the acme of skill." Contrary to the claims of our revisionists, Chinese strategic culture is not primarily defined by half-a-dozen canonical texts but, like any other strategic culture, by historical experiences and collective memories . And while the Chinese have made an honest effort to understand the logic behind the rise of Western powers, their understanding of "power transitions" is not primarily based on European references dear to Western IR theorists (be it the Peloponnesian wars or the Anglo-German rivalry), but on their own history: the Warring States era (475-221 BC) and the Sino-Japanese Wars (1894-95 and 1937-45).

Central in China's collective memory is the memory of its encounter with the West in the form of the Opium Wars - an episode long forgotten in the West itself, but which the Chinese see as marking the beginning of the so-called "century of humiliation." In truth, what must have been particularly humiliating was that China was in essence "out-Suntzued" by foreign devils who opted for the ultimate indirect approach: the weaponization of opium. This "war-beyond-rules," which began in earnest at the end of the eighteenth century, ended up by contaminating four million members of the Chinese elite, so that, by the time the military operations proper began in earnest (1839), the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

In China as elsewhere, "collective memories" often have little in common with factual history. Yet, even when the collective memories happen to be imaginary, their effects on collective action are real. "Politics is perception": the financial crisis of 1997-98 (now forgotten in theWest) was perceived in some Asian quarters as a "financial 9/11" of sorts engineered by Western powers. For our two colonels, who don't hesitate to compare financier George Soros to terrorist Osama Bin Laden, the Asian crisis was a watershed event: "Non-state organizations, in this firstwar without the use of military force, are using non-military means to engage sovereign nations.Thus, financial war is a form of non-military warfare which is just as terribly destructive as a bloody war, but in which no blood is actually shed. Financial warfare has now officially come to war's center stage...Today, when nuclear weapons have already become frightening mantelpiece decorations that are losing their real operational value with each passing day, financial war has become a hyperstrategic" weapon that is attracting the attention of the whole world."

For Qiao and Wang, it seems, the historical significance of the Asian "financial war" of 1998 actually trumps that of the Gulf War of 1991. Hence their view that the technological revolution in military affairs is only a first step that must lead to a conceptual revolution, i.e. a revolution in strategic affairs:

"For a long time both military people and politicians have become accustomed to employing a certain mode of thinking, that is, the major factor posing a threat to national security is the military power of an enemy state or potential enemy state. However, the wars and major incidents which have occurred during the last ten years of the 20th century have provided to us in a calm and composed fashion proof that the opposite is true: military threats are already often no longer the major factors affecting national security. Even though they are the same ancient territorial disputes, nationality conflicts, religious clashes...these traditional factors are increasingly becoming more intertwined with grabbing resources, contending for markets, controlling capital trade sanctions, and other economic factors, to the extent that they are even becoming secondary to these factors."

The idea of a paradigm shift from geopolitics to geo-economics had been expressed in the West a decade earlier by strategist Edward Luttwak and others, though without any explicit reference to what this shift meant for military strategy . Unconstrained by Western totems and taboos, our two colonels don't hesitate to proclaim that Clausewitz, who was never part of the Eastern tradition to begin with (Vom Kriege was translated only in 1910), is of no use in the case of financial warfare. By contrast, the Chinese found enough common ground with Liddell Hart instead to translate his Strategy in 1994.

As analysts, our two authors have done their homework, and show a fairly good grasp of the U.S. military debate of the 1990s (including the bureaucratic politics behind it). As strategists, they tend to be too exclusively focused on America and, as is usually the case with strategists the world over, their discussion takes place in an ill-defined geopolitical context. As futurists, they promote a resolutely "constructivist" conception of war and, in that respect, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui could be considered China's equivalent to Alvin and Heidi Toffler (whose work they freely draw upon).

Thus, two years before the publication of Unrestricted Warfare, the Tofflers had argued that,while the industrial era had been dominated by the alliances among nation-states, the information era would see the emergence of "deep coalitions" between states and non-state actors:
"A de facto deep coalition – instead of being limited to nation-states as in the Gulf War alliance – might consist, for example, of three nation-states, fourteen civil society organizations, a narcotraficante here or there, a couple of private corporations with their own self-interest at stake, an individual speculator, and who knows what other
components. The deep coalition involves players at many levels of the system. It is multi-dimensional with all these groups operating all the time, in continuous flow – multiplying, fissioning, then fusing into others, and so on...Unlike the nation-state system that emerged in the wake of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the new system is based less on "balance of power" relations among major nations than on the ability to configure the right combination of players at every level. More important than the balance of power is the "power of balance" – the ability of a major state to keep its senses in the midst of this turbulence, and to match its economic and military capabilities with high-level knowledge resources. The world, thus, is entering into a global order – or disorder, as the case may be – that is post-Westphalian, and post-Clausewitzian."

This idea of "deep coalition" is present in all but in name in Unrestricted Warfare, with its repeated references to the political role played by non-state actors ranging from credit rating
agencies to narco-mafias, and its emphasis on the "civilianization of war" thesis

"Precisely in the same way that modern technology is changing weapons and the battlefield, it is also at the same time blurring the concepts of who the war participants are...Non-professional warriors and non-state organizations are posing a greater and greater threat to sovereign nations. . Faced with warfare in the broad sense that will unfold on a borderless battlefield, it is no longer possible to rely on military forces and weapons alone to achieve national security in the larger strategic sense, nor is it
possible to protect these stratified national interests. Obviously, warfare is in the process of transcending the domains of soldiers, military units, and military affairs, and is
increasingly becoming a matter for politicians, scientists, and even bankers ."

For Qiao and Wang, "combination" is the key word, and our two authors do not hesitate to make the same hyperbolic claim for the importance of "combination" in military history as Liddell Hart did for the "indirect approach": "Regardless of whether the war was 3,000 years ago or at the end of the 20th century, it seems that all of the victories display one common phenomenon: the winner is the one who combined well."

Their main originality could well be in their emphasis on the need for a systematic "combination" of the various domains and/or Lines of Operation (legal, economic,
psychological, etc.) with the various Levels of Operation (supra-national, inter-governmental, sub-national). It is this centrality of Combination that has led some Western officers to give Unrestricted Warfare the more accurate name of Combination Warfare.

At the end of the day, though, Unrestricted Warfare is a rather uneven work. On the one hand, their distinction between "lethality" and "violence" has a very post-modern ring. The assertion that non-lethal warfare does not mean non-violent warfare, but a re-definition of violence itself ("while we are seeing a relative reduction of military violence, at the same time we are definitely seeing an increase in political, economic, and technological violence") would deserve to be developed further. On the other hand, our two colonels' claim to have found a "silver bullet" in he form of the Golden Rule dear to Renaissance artists is likely to be met with massive incredulity on the part of military planners (modelize that!).

As an intellectual exercise in strategic theory, the main interest of Unrestricted Warfare resides in the fact that it stands at the intersection of the Western and Eastern traditions. Some will see in it an updated version of the concept of Total Strategy elaborated a generation earlier by General Beaufre, and expanded to include innovative strategies of non-state actors; others, a post-modern version of Sun-Tzu's Art of War, updated to take into account not only the digitalization of the battlefield, but the weaponization of law and the financialization of foreign policy. When it comes to its institutional significance in China proper, though, the status of Unrestricted Warfare is more uncertain. It has been argued that Unrestricted Warfare is only one of the four competing schools of thought in the Chinese military.

The first school, it is said, is that of the Traditionalists, faithful to Mao's conception of a defensive People's War; the second is represented by the Neo-Traditionalists who favor regional power projection; the third school is that of the High-Tech Revolutionists, who are betting on network-centric warfare in a more distant future. In this view, Unrestricted Warfare (URW) is said to be the most recent additioncompeting with the other three.
Such a characterization is convenient, though not convincing. For one thing, as the authoritative Science of Military Strategy makes it clear, today's conception of People's War is not your grandfather's conception: "People's War is a form of organization of war, and its role has nothing to do with the level of military technology. The concept of People's War is not confined to the war of low technology only. . . . The great power of the People's War is released through comprehensive national power, the combination of peace time and war time,
the combination of the military and the civilian, and the combination of war actions and non-war actions." In short, far from being synonymous with the old peasant guerrilla of lore, today's People's War resembles nothing more than the "civilianization of war" and the rise of cyber- patriots mentioned in Unrestricted Warfare, so the opposition between the first and third school is therefore artificial.

For another, ever since the promulgation by Hu Jintao in December 2004 of the "Historic Missions for Our Military in the New Phase of the New Century," the vocation of the PLA has
been officially redefined as power projection rather than mere territorial defense - so that the opposition between the first and second schools is no longer topical either. (56)
Upon scrutiny, then, Unrestricted Warfare is not so much a later addition to the three existing schools of thought as a, well - combination of the three. As Charles Hawkins remarked in 2000:

"The newly emerged unrestricted war concept has philosophical merit on several counts. Advertised as a means to let the "inferior defeat the superior" power, it borrows from each of the other schools of thought and adds its own dimension of greatly expanding the scope of war. Unrestricted warfare advocates borrow from the advanced technology agenda of the RMA enthusiasts, and at the same time propose to project power by any and all means available. For example, if missiles can not intimidate Taiwan, perhaps cyber attacks on critical infrastructure will; or perhaps both should be used in concert. Unrestricted war concepts are also rooted in traditional thinking. It is People's War and active defense by other or additional means. By expanding the scope of conflict and by using advanced technology there is room in the concept for greater involvement of larger segments of society."

Yet, ascertaining the status of Unrestricted Warfare outside military circles is complicated by the state of civil-military relations. Some Western observers have stressed the existence of a three-way struggle between army, party and government, while others have raised the possibility of a "civil-military gap" between military and political elites.

Western observers distinguish four generations of political and military leaders in Communist China:
Mao Zedong (1949-76),
Den Xiaoping (1976-92),
Jiang Zemin (1992-2003), and
Hu Jintao (2003- ).

One thing that should be clear by now is that, since the rise of the fourth generation in 2003, the contradiction between the official "Peaceful Rise" diplomatic doctrine and the unofficial Unrestricted Warfare military doctrine has been more apparent than real. As mentioned in the introduction, the fourth generation is making increasing uses of legal warfare, psychological warfare, media warfare, financial warfare, and cyber warfare. In that respect, Unrestricted Warfare could be called "Fourth Generation" Warfare, in both the Chinese and Western senses of the expression.

sorcerer · Nov 2, 2014

DOD's 'Indirect Approach' to URW

Though in the aftermath of 9/11, Qiao and Wang's book enjoyed its proverbial fifteen minutes of fame in the West, the Pentagon has been tip-toeing around Unrestricted Warfare for the past decade (in the unclassified literature at least).

Though mandated by Congress to report annually on the "probable development of Chinese grand strategy, security strategy, and military strategy, and military organizations and
operational concepts," the Pentagon's annual report actually focuses on "kinetic" threats and, in its 2009 edition, devotes only two of its seventy-eight pages to the kind of non-kinetic threats associated with URW.

To catch glimpses of the contours of China's grand strategy, the best point of departure remains the annual report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (thereafter referred to as the USCC Report) and its various specialized reports on Chinese soft power, strategic deception, cyber capabilities, trade compliance, etc.
One can only speculate as to why the Pentagon has remained relatively quiet about the Unrestricted Warfare manifesto.

The first reason that comes to mind is basic bureaucratic survival. No military institution will spontaneously condone the idea that the military has "lost its monopoly on war," and/or that war can be waged more effectively through non-military means – which is essentially the message of Qiao and Wang. In that respect, nothing illustrates better the difference of mindset between strategists in revisionist countries and their counterparts in status quo countries than the initial reaction to Unrestricted Warfare by one military analyst associated with the U.S. Army War College:

"Many senior PLA leaders will not find the implications of Unrestricted Warfare terribly appealing. For one, it directly challenges the idea of the existence of a clearly identifiable body of expert knowledge for the Chinese soldier of the twenty-first century. If there are no boundaries in warfare then it becomes virtually impossible to train soldiers to master the entire spectrum of modern warfare. Consequently the task for China's institutions of professional military education becomes extremely daunting. Moreover, in unrestricted warfare traditional military hardware - tanks, armored cars, high performance aircraft, and warships - becomes largely peripheral and increasingly irrelevant. And conventional measures of military capability - manpower, firepower, etc. - also fall by the wayside. In an ancient civilization that can be said to have invented bureaucracy, bureaucratic politics tend to be particularly serious. Concepts discussed in Unrestricted Warfare, such as information warfare and economic warfare, may be appealing to China's political leaders because they offer the lure of defense policy on the cheap but generals will find it difficult to make the case on the need for new and expensive weapon systems. Most of China's soldiers are likely to be far less enchanted with these forms of warfare because they will tend to see it translating into smaller defense budgets, lower manpower, less bureaucratic clout, and declining
prestige for the PLA."

This exercise in "mirror imaging," which may be illustrative of the bureaucratic mindset of 'Big Army' in the pre-9/11 era, would in fact have been quite relevant, had the URW manifesto emanated from another status quo country. But it is of the essence of revisionist powers to precisely transcend this kind of corporatist mindset.

The second reason is that, by definition, a status quo power like America cares about its respectability, and does not want to give legitimacy to a concept as scabrous as Unrestricted
Warfare (UWR) by including it in its own official doctrine. It is symptomatic that, even though Unconventional Warfare (UW), long part of U.S. doctrine, can easily be mistaken for Unrestricted Warfare Lite from a conceptual standpoint, the latest edition of the Unconventional Warfare Manual goes out of its way to stress that, from a doctrinal standpoint, UW and URW should not be confused:

"The first rule of [Qiao Liang's] unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules. Strong countries would not use the same approach against weak countries because "strong countries make the rules, while rising ones break them and exploit loopholes."... Whether or not the authors break any new ground or establish a new theory is debatable. Their monograph has generated interest in the West primarily for what it may signify in Peoples' Republic of China strategic thinking— such ideas could not be published without some official sanction in the often inscrutable Chinese government. Army Special Forces Soldiers—and their joint, interagency, and multinational partners— should be aware of unrestricted warfare, but they must understand that the term is not synonymous with the aforementioned terms, is not approved doctrine, and has a very specific international context and usage. "

That said, at the same time as the Pentagon was downplaying the importance or novelty of Unrestricted Warfare, the U.S. military was quietly adopting some of its tenets. This low-key revolution in strategic affairs has proceeded along two main axes. At the spatial level, by the broadening of the kinetic battlefield to include the non-kinetic battlesphere. At the temporal level, by the blurring of the distinction between wartime and peacetime through the adoption of the concept of "persistent conflict," and the addition of the so-called "phase zero" (environment shaping) to the traditional four phases of military campaigns

Three other "indirect approaches" to Unrestricted Warfare are worth mentioning here:
The "Contested Commons" Agenda: while U.S. academics frame the rising antagonism between America and China in terms of an old-fashioned power transition between two great powers, U.S. officials understandably prefer to highlight the fact that America is the main provider of "global public goods," the main guarantor of the "global commons" and, as such, uniquely qualified to raise the problem of "contested commons" - a broad framework which includes the militarization of space and the territorialization of the seas, and put the growing sea, air, space, and cyberspace capabilities of China in proper perspective.

The Withering Away of Clausewitz: At the doctrinal level, the past four years have seen a spectacular re-evaluation of the "indirect approach" promoted by Liddell Hart, and the demotion of the direct approach associated with Clausewitz. The old Prussian soldier, to be sure, will never die – but he will nonetheless fade away. Already, the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review marked the rehabilitation in all but in name of Liddell Hart in official doctrine.(66) The 2007 edition of the Counterinsurgency Manual signals the return of Lawrence of Arabia (Liddell Hart's alter ego), and the much-touted shift from an "enemy-centric" approach to a "population-centric" approach represents a further setback for Clausewitzology. Last but not least, the 2008 edition of the Unconventional Warfare Manual itself is the most explicit institutional acknowledgment to date that, when it comes to grand strategy, Sun-Tzu (Liddell Hart's spiritual father) is more relevant than Clausewitz:

"Competition between contending groups using all their means of power has always characterized the international environment. In the modern era since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), this competition has generally been conceived as occurring between nation-states. Such competition involved all instruments of state power: diplomatic, informational, military, and economic (DIME) expanded in some recent policy documents to diplomatic, informational, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement (DIMEFIL)... Only when other instruments of national power were exhausted or proved inadequate was the military instrument of power wielded to settle international differences....Clausewitz famously characterized such use of state military power as, "an act of violence to compel the enemy to do our will." This assertion has been profoundly influential. However, it is too constrained a vision for applying national power in today's world. The ancient Sun Tzu is more relevant today; although battles should be won, "winning 100 victories in 100 battles is not the acme of skill; defeating the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."

The Hybrid Threat Debate: If, in a revisionist power like China, the key word of strategists is the dynamic concept of "Combination," the focus of their counterparts in a status quo power like America is "Hybridity" - a more static concept, to be sure, but one on which an inter-service consensus can be reached, if only by default. In a series of articles published in the past five years, Colonel Frank Hoffman has analyzed the"multi-modal" (conventional and irregular) and "multi-nodal" (state and non-state actors) aspects of Hybrid Threats and, with the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in mind, emphasized the combination of "the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare."For Hoffman, "Our greatest challenge in the future will not come from a state that selects one approach but from states or groups that select from the whole menu of tactics and technologies and blend them in innovative ways to meet their own strategic culture, geography, and aims."

Warning against too narrow a focus on "tactics-and-technology," Colonel Nathan Freier has called on military analysts to go beyond the "defense-specific" (i.e. military) dimensions of
hybrid threats and factor in the "defense-relevant" (civilian) aspects as well. Unafraid of being labeled a heretic, Freier has actually gone so far as to hint that China's conventional military build-up in recent years could well be just a diversion: "It might be useful to recognize that the purely military aspects of hybrid, high-end challenges, e.g., a hostile state's armed forces, may be peripheral to the actual conflict or competition. [/COLOR]Instead, these components might be diversions or foils employed by adversaries to increase U.S. risk calculations or capture U.S. attention while the real "war" occurs in other domains—politics, economics, social action, etc." And, in truth, a good case can be made that, just like academics are too obsessed with a conventional "major war," military strategists may well be too focused on a high-tech "local war" (Taiwan) at the risk of missing the bigger picture.

Yet, as Freier himself acknowledges, there is considerable institutional resistance within the U.S. military to the concept of non-kinetic war: "Today, roughly half of the Defense department focuses on the wars we have and is too exhausted by them to see anything but serial counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in the future. The other half still focuses on high-tech war with archetypal rising powers, though states actually falling into this category increasingly see politics, economics and unconventional resistance as more effective tools against us."

There is much of value in the ongoing conversation on "hybridity." More often than not, though, since it takes place in a geopolitical vacuum, this discussion remains limited to the elaboration of a grammar of hybrid threats and has yet to tackle the question of the logic of hybrid wars. Since Unrestricted Warfare is best described as a stealth war , it is no surprise if it has remained something of an "unknown unknown" outside the Pentagon. The interagency bureaucracy has never heard of it, nor does the academic world ever make reference to it. The unclassified literature is not exactly user-friendly, and as such unlikely to raise the situational awareness of the civilian world. Even within the military, URW does not have the visibility it deserves: with two ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military debate since 2005 has predictably become trapped in "presentism." The need to develop a coherent doctrine for Counterinsurgency warfare (COIN) then to elaborate a whole-of-government approach at the interagency level - has sucked the intellectual oxygen out of the broader strategic debate opened in 1999 by Unrestricted Warfare (URW).

According to Freier, one of the main drafters of the 2005 National Defense Strategy (NDS), "There was a concern that introduction of the concept of "unrestricted warfare" into the defense strategy might add confusion. To senior leaders, it was important first for defense consumers to understand the most urgent manifestations of the irregular challenge—terrorism and insurgency. The exclusion of an explanation of concepts like "unrestricted warfare" likely artificially limited meaningful consideration of the irregular challenge and its implications to commonly recognized forms of "irregular warfare."

Five years later, though, it may be time for the Pentagon to acknowledge that, at the intellectual (if not operational) level, the difference between COIN and UWR is in fact more one of degree rather than one of kind. The main difference of course is that, while COIN deals with tactical and operational matters within an intra-state context, URW deals with strategic and grand- strategic matters in an inter-state context. But in both cases, the logical lines of operations (LLOOs) predominate over the physical lines of operations. In that respect, both COIN and URW can be said to be "eighty percent political, twenty percent military."

There is no reason a priori why DOD cannot elaborate a whole-of-government approach to URW the way it did with COIN. If you can grasp the six LLOOs of COIN, surely you can grasp the twenty-four LLOOs of URW.

Writing in 1998, Qiao and Wang remarked about the sorry state of the U.S. interagency: "What is surprising is that such a large nation unexpectedly does not have a unified strategy and command structure to deal with the threat [of non-military warfare]. What makes one even more so wonder whether to laugh or cry is that they have 49 departments and offices responsible for anti-terrorist activities, but there is very little coordination and cooperation among them...[In addition, the U.S.] spends seven billion dollars in funds for anti-terrorism, which is only 1/25 of the U.S. $250 billion military expenditure."

A decade later, much progress has been made in fixing the interagency mess, yet much remains to be done. In the course of the 2009 Unrestricted Warfare Symposium, the director of Program Analysis and Evaluation at the Pentagon emphasized the need to "establish a Quadrennial National Security Review (QNSR) similar to Quadrennial Defense Reviews (QDRs), which have served as a useful framework for prioritization of DOD requirements... Effective response to national security challenges requires a whole-of- government approach; QNSR would allo consideration of these complex issues in a coordinated fashion." . Raising the situational awareness of the interagency through a Quadrennial National Security

Review (QNSR) has indeed become all the more necessary now that the Department of State has decided to come up with a Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) – anexercise which, by definition, privileges the diplomacy-development nexus at the expense of the diplomacy-defense nexus. On URW as on so many issues, if the Pentagon does not take the interagency lead, nobody else will.

If better information is a top priority, better education is a close second. As the Pentagon's PA & E director pointed out, the need to close the academic-military gap has never been more urgent than today: "Much of warfare today—hybrid, irregular, unrestricted warfare- is mostly concerned with soft power and social issues, and we really do not know how to do that. For the last four or five years, we have spent an extensive amount of our energy trying to understand that. We have consulted with anthropologists, historians, and sociologists to try to understand their science and bring it into our analytic capability. We have made some progress, but I think we are still a few years away."

While military analysts, who are for the most part trained in operation research (OR), have not hesitated in recent years to reach out to social scientists for insights on the nature of the China Threat, this kind of outreach is not without its perils. Not to make too fine a point: academics are less likely to shed light on Unrestricted Warfare than to endorse what journalist James Mann, in a scathing critique of the China Frantasy of U.S. elites, has called the Soothing Scenario:

"The Soothing Scenario holds that China's economic development will lead inexorably to an opening of China's political system. While this is merely one of the possible outcomes one can envision for China's future, it is certainly the mainstream view of China in America today. The purveyors of the Soothing Scenario include leading academic experts on China, business executives who are eager to trade and invest in China, and the think-tanks and other elite organizations that depend on corporate contribution for their funding...Leading scholars on China...have discovered that they can make money on the side as consultants for companies doing business in China. When the academics write op-ed pieces, testify in Congress, or take part in seminars, they are identified by their jobs at universities: rarely are the additional financial stakes in China business or consulting disclosed."

The problem won't be solved by avoiding China specialists and reaching out to IR generalists who, being only "accidental" China watchers, presumably do not have any particular incentive to "spin" the China challenge. For when ostensibly debating China, the main concern of mainstream IR generalists these days is not so much how to assess China's threat to America as to contain the threat of rising theories (in particular PTT) to their own pet theories, academic status, and "grant strategies."

The net result is an endless series of confusing faux debats which generate more heat than light, and are often misleading from a policy standpoint. Liberal institutionalists, for instance, are prone to criticize PTT for the wrong reasons, by arguing ad nauseam that Beijing's spectacular increase in participation in IGOs in recent years constitutes the incontrovertible proof that China is becoming a "responsible stakeholder."

The truth is, upon scrutiny, this activism on the part of post-Maoist China awfully resembles, at times, a Trotskyte infiltration strategy ("entrism") or a Gramscian subversion strategy ("long march through the institutions"). Participation is one thing, "socialization" quite another. China's membership in the WTO in the past decade has neither led Beijing to put an end to massive piracy regarding intellectual property rights, nor – if the Doha Round is any indication – has it led to an overall strengthening of the WTO. More importantly, while in 2001 China joined the Western-created institution called WTO, that very same year, China also created an anti-Western institution called the SCO which, in the long term, may well have a greater impact on the world order than the WTO itself (if only because the SCO deals with high politics while the WTO is confined to low politics).

Like the proverbial drunkard looking for his keys under the lamp post "because that's where the light is," liberal institutionalists – who have the ear of the current Administration - have been looking for the keys of the New World Order under the light of Western-created IGOs – because that's the only "light" available when you can't read anything other than English. For all their professed devotion to "global governance," liberal institutionalists have produced hundreds of monographs on the EU, NATO and the WTO, and next to nothing on OPEC, the OIC or the SCO. Yet, there is a whole galaxy of non-Western IGOs out there, which China is increasinglyinterested in as potential force multipliers (e.g. the Sino-Arab Cooperation Forum created in 2004), and which should become a research priority for the Pentagon's Minerva project.

In short, while military analysts should continue to reach out to academe, they should always keep in mind that debates in academic circles never take place in an institutional vacuum, and that academic tribes are just as likely to cloak their institutional or ideological preferences in the language of science as do military tribes. One thing is sure: As long as strategic education, strategic intelligence, strategic planning, and strategic communication remain at an all-time low , the formulation and implementation of an American grand strategy will remain a pipedream. And if the Pentagon does not take the initiative to bring a grand strategic mindset to the interagency, nobody else will

sorcerer · Nov 2, 2014

DOD's 'Indirect Approach' to URW

Though in the aftermath of 9/11, Qiao and Wang's book enjoyed its proverbial fifteen minutes of fame in the West, the Pentagon has been tip-toeing around Unrestricted Warfare for the past decade (in the unclassified literature at least).

Though mandated by Congress to report annually on the "probable development of Chinese grand strategy, security strategy, and military strategy, and military organizations and
operational concepts," the Pentagon's annual report actually focuses on "kinetic" threats and, in its 2009 edition, devotes only two of its seventy-eight pages to the kind of non-kinetic threats associated with URW.

To catch glimpses of the contours of China's grand strategy, the best point of departure remains the annual report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (thereafter referred to as the USCC Report) and its various specialized reports on Chinese soft power, strategic deception, cyber capabilities, trade compliance, etc.
One can only speculate as to why the Pentagon has remained relatively quiet about the Unrestricted Warfare manifesto.

The first reason that comes to mind is basic bureaucratic survival. No military institution will spontaneously condone the idea that the military has "lost its monopoly on war," and/or that war can be waged more effectively through non-military means – which is essentially the message of Qiao and Wang. In that respect, nothing illustrates better the difference of mindset between strategists in revisionist countries and their counterparts in status quo countries than the initial reaction to Unrestricted Warfare by one military analyst associated with the U.S. Army War College:

"Many senior PLA leaders will not find the implications of Unrestricted Warfare terribly appealing. For one, it directly challenges the idea of the existence of a clearly identifiable body of expert knowledge for the Chinese soldier of the twenty-first century. If there are no boundaries in warfare then it becomes virtually impossible to train soldiers to master the entire spectrum of modern warfare. Consequently the task for China's institutions of professional military education becomes extremely daunting. Moreover, in unrestricted warfare traditional military hardware - tanks, armored cars, high performance aircraft, and warships - becomes largely peripheral and increasingly irrelevant. And conventional measures of military capability - manpower, firepower, etc. - also fall by the wayside. In an ancient civilization that can be said to have invented bureaucracy, bureaucratic politics tend to be particularly serious. Concepts discussed in Unrestricted Warfare, such as information warfare and economic warfare, may be appealing to China's political leaders because they offer the lure of defense policy on the cheap but generals will find it difficult to make the case on the need for new and expensive weapon systems. Most of China's soldiers are likely to be far less enchanted with these forms of warfare because they will tend to see it translating into smaller defense budgets, lower manpower, less bureaucratic clout, and declining
prestige for the PLA."

This exercise in "mirror imaging," which may be illustrative of the bureaucratic mindset of 'Big Army' in the pre-9/11 era, would in fact have been quite relevant, had the URW manifesto emanated from another status quo country. But it is of the essence of revisionist powers to precisely transcend this kind of corporatist mindset.

The second reason is that, by definition, a status quo power like America cares about its respectability, and does not want to give legitimacy to a concept as scabrous as Unrestricted
Warfare (UWR) by including it in its own official doctrine. It is symptomatic that, even though Unconventional Warfare (UW), long part of U.S. doctrine, can easily be mistaken for Unrestricted Warfare Lite from a conceptual standpoint, the latest edition of the Unconventional Warfare Manual goes out of its way to stress that, from a doctrinal standpoint, UW and URW should not be confused:

"The first rule of [Qiao Liang's] unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules. Strong countries would not use the same approach against weak countries because "strong countries make the rules, while rising ones break them and exploit loopholes."... Whether or not the authors break any new ground or establish a new theory is debatable. Their monograph has generated interest in the West primarily for what it may signify in Peoples' Republic of China strategic thinking— such ideas could not be published without some official sanction in the often inscrutable Chinese government. Army Special Forces Soldiers—and their joint, interagency, and multinational partners— should be aware of unrestricted warfare, but they must understand that the term is not synonymous with the aforementioned terms, is not approved doctrine, and has a very specific international context and usage. "

That said, at the same time as the Pentagon was downplaying the importance or novelty of Unrestricted Warfare, the U.S. military was quietly adopting some of its tenets. This low-key revolution in strategic affairs has proceeded along two main axes. At the spatial level, by the broadening of the kinetic battlefield to include the non-kinetic battlesphere. At the temporal level, by the blurring of the distinction between wartime and peacetime through the adoption of the concept of "persistent conflict," and the addition of the so-called "phase zero" (environment shaping) to the traditional four phases of military campaigns

Three other "indirect approaches" to Unrestricted Warfare are worth mentioning here:
The "Contested Commons" Agenda: while U.S. academics frame the rising antagonism between America and China in terms of an old-fashioned power transition between two great powers, U.S. officials understandably prefer to highlight the fact that America is the main provider of "global public goods," the main guarantor of the "global commons" and, as such, uniquely qualified to raise the problem of "contested commons" - a broad framework which includes the militarization of space and the territorialization of the seas, and put the growing sea, air, space, and cyberspace capabilities of China in proper perspective.

The Withering Away of Clausewitz: At the doctrinal level, the past four years have seen a spectacular re-evaluation of the "indirect approach" promoted by Liddell Hart, and the demotion of the direct approach associated with Clausewitz. The old Prussian soldier, to be sure, will never die – but he will nonetheless fade away. Already, the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review marked the rehabilitation in all but in name of Liddell Hart in official doctrine.(66) The 2007 edition of the Counterinsurgency Manual signals the return of Lawrence of Arabia (Liddell Hart's alter ego), and the much-touted shift from an "enemy-centric" approach to a "population-centric" approach represents a further setback for Clausewitzology. Last but not least, the 2008 edition of the Unconventional Warfare Manual itself is the most explicit institutional acknowledgment to date that, when it comes to grand strategy, Sun-Tzu (Liddell Hart's spiritual father) is more relevant than Clausewitz:

"Competition between contending groups using all their means of power has always characterized the international environment. In the modern era since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), this competition has generally been conceived as occurring between nation-states. Such competition involved all instruments of state power: diplomatic, informational, military, and economic (DIME) expanded in some recent policy documents to diplomatic, informational, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement (DIMEFIL)... Only when other instruments of national power were exhausted or proved inadequate was the military instrument of power wielded to settle international differences....Clausewitz famously characterized such use of state military power as, "an act of violence to compel the enemy to do our will." This assertion has been profoundly influential. However, it is too constrained a vision for applying national power in today's world. The ancient Sun Tzu is more relevant today; although battles should be won, "winning 100 victories in 100 battles is not the acme of skill; defeating the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."

The Hybrid Threat Debate: If, in a revisionist power like China, the key word of strategists is the dynamic concept of "Combination," the focus of their counterparts in a status quo power like America is "Hybridity" - a more static concept, to be sure, but one on which an inter-service consensus can be reached, if only by default. In a series of articles published in the past five years, Colonel Frank Hoffman has analyzed the"multi-modal" (conventional and irregular) and "multi-nodal" (state and non-state actors) aspects of Hybrid Threats and, with the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in mind, emphasized the combination of "the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare."For Hoffman, "Our greatest challenge in the future will not come from a state that selects one approach but from states or groups that select from the whole menu of tactics and technologies and blend them in innovative ways to meet their own strategic culture, geography, and aims."

Warning against too narrow a focus on "tactics-and-technology," Colonel Nathan Freier has called on military analysts to go beyond the "defense-specific" (i.e. military) dimensions of
hybrid threats and factor in the "defense-relevant" (civilian) aspects as well. Unafraid of being labeled a heretic, Freier has actually gone so far as to hint that China's conventional military build-up in recent years could well be just a diversion: "It might be useful to recognize that the purely military aspects of hybrid, high-end challenges, e.g., a hostile state's armed forces, may be peripheral to the actual conflict or competition. instead, these components might be diversions or foils employed by adversaries to increase U.S. risk calculations or capture U.S. attention while the real "war" occurs in other domains—politics, economics, social action, etc." And, in truth, a good case can be made that, just like academics are too obsessed with a conventional "major war," military strategists may well be too focused on a high-tech "local war" (Taiwan) at the risk of missing the bigger picture.

Yet, as Freier himself acknowledges, there is considerable institutional resistance within the U.S. military to the concept of non-kinetic war: "Today, roughly half of the Defense department focuses on the wars we have and is too exhausted by them to see anything but serial counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in the future. The other half still focuses on high-tech war with archetypal rising powers, though states actually falling into this category increasingly see politics, economics and unconventional resistance as more effective tools against us."

There is much of value in the ongoing conversation on "hybridity." More often than not, though, since it takes place in a geopolitical vacuum, this discussion remains limited to the elaboration of a grammar of hybrid threats and has yet to tackle the question of the logic of hybrid wars. Since Unrestricted Warfare is best described as a stealth war , it is no surprise if it has remained something of an "unknown unknown" outside the Pentagon. The interagency bureaucracy has never heard of it, nor does the academic world ever make reference to it. The unclassified literature is not exactly user-friendly, and as such unlikely to raise the situational awareness of the civilian world. Even within the military, URW does not have the visibility it deserves: with two ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military debate since 2005 has predictably become trapped in "presentism." The need to develop a coherent doctrine for Counterinsurgency warfare (COIN) then to elaborate a whole-of-government approach at the interagency level - has sucked the intellectual oxygen out of the broader strategic debate opened in 1999 by Unrestricted Warfare (URW).

According to Freier, one of the main drafters of the 2005 National Defense Strategy (NDS), "There was a concern that introduction of the concept of "unrestricted warfare" into the defense strategy might add confusion. To senior leaders, it was important first for defense consumers to understand the most urgent manifestations of the irregular challenge—terrorism and insurgency. The exclusion of an explanation of concepts like "unrestricted warfare" likely artificially limited meaningful consideration of the irregular challenge and its implications to commonly recognized forms of "irregular warfare."

Five years later, though, it may be time for the Pentagon to acknowledge that, at the intellectual (if not operational) level, the difference between COIN and UWR is in fact more one of degree rather than one of kind. The main difference of course is that, while COIN deals with tactical and operational matters within an intra-state context, URW deals with strategic and grand- strategic matters in an inter-state context. But in both cases, the logical lines of operations (LLOOs) predominate over the physical lines of operations. In that respect, both COIN and URW can be said to be "eighty percent political, twenty percent military."

There is no reason a priori why DOD cannot elaborate a whole-of-government approach to URW the way it did with COIN. If you can grasp the six LLOOs of COIN, surely you can grasp the twenty-four LLOOs of URW.

Writing in 1998, Qiao and Wang remarked about the sorry state of the U.S. interagency: "What is surprising is that such a large nation unexpectedly does not have a unified strategy and command structure to deal with the threat [of non-military warfare]. What makes one even more so wonder whether to laugh or cry is that they have 49 departments and offices responsible for anti-terrorist activities, but there is very little coordination and cooperation among them...[In addition, the U.S.] spends seven billion dollars in funds for anti-terrorism, which is only 1/25 of the U.S. $250 billion military expenditure."

A decade later, much progress has been made in fixing the interagency mess, yet much remains to be done. In the course of the 2009 Unrestricted Warfare Symposium, the director of Program Analysis and Evaluation at the Pentagon emphasized the need to "establish a Quadrennial National Security Review (QNSR) similar to Quadrennial Defense Reviews (QDRs), which have served as a useful framework for prioritization of DOD requirements... Effective response to national security challenges requires a whole-of- government approach; QNSR would allo consideration of these complex issues in a coordinated fashion." . Raising the situational awareness of the interagency through a Quadrennial National Security

Review (QNSR) has indeed become all the more necessary now that the Department of State has decided to come up with a Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) – anexercise which, by definition, privileges the diplomacy-development nexus at the expense of the diplomacy-defense nexus. On URW as on so many issues, if the Pentagon does not take the interagency lead, nobody else will.

If better information is a top priority, better education is a close second. As the Pentagon's PA & E director pointed out, the need to close the academic-military gap has never been more urgent than today: "Much of warfare today—hybrid, irregular, unrestricted warfare- is mostly concerned with soft power and social issues, and we really do not know how to do that. For the last four or five years, we have spent an extensive amount of our energy trying to understand that. We have consulted with anthropologists, historians, and sociologists to try to understand their science and bring it into our analytic capability. We have made some progress, but I think we are still a few years away."

While military analysts, who are for the most part trained in operation research (OR), have not hesitated in recent years to reach out to social scientists for insights on the nature of the China Threat, this kind of outreach is not without its perils. Not to make too fine a point: academics are less likely to shed light on Unrestricted Warfare than to endorse what journalist James Mann, in a scathing critique of the China Frantasy of U.S. elites, has called the Soothing Scenario:

"The Soothing Scenario holds that China's economic development will lead inexorably to an opening of China's political system. While this is merely one of the possible outcomes one can envision for China's future, it is certainly the mainstream view of China in America today. The purveyors of the Soothing Scenario include leading academic experts on China, business executives who are eager to trade and invest in China, and the think-tanks and other elite organizations that depend on corporate contribution for their funding...Leading scholars on China...have discovered that they can make money on the side as consultants for companies doing business in China. When the academics write op-ed pieces, testify in Congress, or take part in seminars, they are identified by their jobs at universities: rarely are the additional financial stakes in China business or consulting disclosed."

The problem won't be solved by avoiding China specialists and reaching out to IR generalists who, being only "accidental" China watchers, presumably do not have any particular incentive to "spin" the China challenge. For when ostensibly debating China, the main concern of mainstream IR generalists these days is not so much how to assess China's threat to America as to contain the threat of rising theories (in particular PTT) to their own pet theories, academic status, and "grant strategies."

The net result is an endless series of confusing faux debats which generate more heat than light, and are often misleading from a policy standpoint. Liberal institutionalists, for instance, are prone to criticize PTT for the wrong reasons, by arguing ad nauseam that Beijing's spectacular increase in participation in IGOs in recent years constitutes the incontrovertible proof that China is becoming a "responsible stakeholder."

The truth is, upon scrutiny, this activism on the part of post-Maoist China awfully resembles, at times, a Trotskyte infiltration strategy ("entrism") or a Gramscian subversion strategy ("long march through the institutions"). Participation is one thing, "socialization" quite another. China's membership in the WTO in the past decade has neither led Beijing to put an end to massive piracy regarding intellectual property rights, nor – if the Doha Round is any indication – has it led to an overall strengthening of the WTO. More importantly, while in 2001 China joined the Western-created institution called WTO, that very same year, China also created an anti-Western institution called the SCO which, in the long term, may well have a greater impact on the world order than the WTO itself (if only because the SCO deals with high politics while the WTO is confined to low politics).

Like the proverbial drunkard looking for his keys under the lamp post "because that's where the light is," liberal institutionalists – who have the ear of the current Administration - have been looking for the keys of the New World Order under the light of Western-created IGOs – because that's the only "light" available when you can't read anything other than English. For all their professed devotion to "global governance," liberal institutionalists have produced hundreds of monographs on the EU, NATO and the WTO, and next to nothing on OPEC, the OIC or the SCO. Yet, there is a whole galaxy of non-Western IGOs out there, which China is increasinglyinterested in as potential force multipliers (e.g. the Sino-Arab Cooperation Forum created in 2004), and which should become a research priority for the Pentagon's Minerva project.

In short, while military analysts should continue to reach out to academe, they should always keep in mind that debates in academic circles never take place in an institutional vacuum, and that academic tribes are just as likely to cloak their institutional or ideological preferences in the language of science as do military tribes. One thing is sure: As long as strategic education, strategic intelligence, strategic planning, and strategic communication remain at an all-time low , the formulation and implementation of an American grand strategy will remain a pipedream. And if the Pentagon does not take the initiative to bring a grand strategic mindset to the interagency, nobody else will

Ray · Nov 2, 2014

Conflicts in the 21st Centrury
The Rise of Hybrid Wars

http://www.potomacinstitute.org/images/stories/publications/potomac_hybridwar_0108.pdf

Ray · Nov 2, 2014

Fourth Generation Warfare Defined

William Lind begins his initial work on 4GW by declaring that "the peacetime oldier's principal task is to prepare effectively for the next war. In order to do so, he must anticipate what the next war will be like."

To aid in this process, Lind continues by describing what he and his colleagues see as three distinct generations of warfare throughout modern history, followed by an emerging fourth generation. This lastemanation of warfare, Lind asserts, builds somewhat on the first three, but clearly differs in its intent, motivations, and approach.

The four elements that Lind believes carry over into 4GW from the earlier enerations are:
(1) Mission orders that enable small groups of combatants to operate
within the commander's intent, yet retain a necessary level of flexibility. Local flexibility irected by general guidance is essential to 4GW, which is mostly fought in a dispersed manner throughout the whole of the enemy's society.

(2) A decreasing dependence on centralized logistics that facilitates the more dispersed conflict and higher tempo. 4GW warriors must be able to fend for themselves in whatever environment they operate.

(3) More emphasis on maneuver over firepower that negates the traditional requirement of massing of soldiers and weapons. Instead, 4GW relies on employing "small, highly maneuverable, agile forces" that can blend into their environment and avoid being targeted.

(4) Collapsing the enemy internally rather than destroying him physically requires that 4GW leaders have a keen ability to identify and target their enemy's centers of gravity. Lind asserts that in 4GW, the enemy's population and even the culture itself become the targets.

In general, 4GW blurs the lines between war and politics, conflict and peace, oldier and civilian, and battlefield violence and safe zones. This new form of warfare has arisen from the loss of the nation-state's monopoly on violence; from the rise of cultural, ethnic, and religious conflict; and from the spread of globalization, particularly advanced technology.

It is conducted in an increasingly decentralized manner, dispersed throughout a region or even the world. It has no defined battlefield; instead 4GW is conducted simultaneously in population centers, rural areas, and virtual networks. It moves constantly to avoid detection and to target its enemy's vulnerabilities. As Lind explains, "Actions will occur concurrently throughout all participants' depths, including their society as a cultural, not just a physical, entity."

Fourth Generation Warfare's targets are not just soldiers, but also non-combatants, religious ideas, legal frameworks, media outlets, international agencies and
agreements, economic activities, political power, and the minds of the people. Accordingly, targets are selected not just for physical destruction, but more for their mental and moral impact on an adversary. In the end, 4GW's goal is to exploit an adversary's weaknesses and undermine its strengths in order "to convince the enemy's political decision-makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit."

Fourth Generation Warfare theorists believe that the substantial disparity between the philosophies and resources of nation-states and non-state actors has produced the strategy and tactics of 4GW. In conflict, these apparent mismatches entice decentralized, non-state actors to adopt irregular and asymmetric methods in an attempt to circumvent their military opponents' strength and strike directly at their opponents' critical political, cultural, or population targets. Sometimes supported by rogue nation-states, these non-state actors recognize that their attacks against markets, communications, and cultural icons can have a dramatic affect on the psyche of their adversary's populace. Their aim is to demoralize the people and destroy their leaders' will to fight.

Profiling 4GW warriors, Chuck Spinney, a Pentagon analyst and 4GW advocate, offers this description:

They usually present few, if any, important targets vulnerable to conventional attack, and their followers are usually much more willing to fight and die for their causes. They seldom wear uniforms and may be difficult to distinguish from the general population. They are also far less hampered by convention and more likely to seek new and innovative means to achieve their objectives.

To succeed, 4GW warriors must destroy the moral cohesion that binds a society. They do this with menacing attacks that threaten the very basic of human instincts for survival, by creating mistrust and divisions among internal societal groups, by producing uncertainty in the political system's ability to support its people, and by undermining the economic system to reduce confidence in its viability.

Ray · Nov 2, 2014

Hybrid warfare is a military strategy that blends conventional warfare, irregular warfare and cyberwarfare. In addition, hybrid warfare is used to describe attacks by nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, improvised explosive devices and information warfare. This approach to conflicts, is a potent, complex variation of warfare. Hybrid warfare can be used to describe the flexible and complex dynamics of the battlespace requiring a highly adaptable and resilient response.
Hybrid warfare - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ray · Nov 2, 2014

Hybrid vs. compound war
The Janus choice: Defining today's multifaceted conflict

Over the past two years, the hybrid threat construct has found some traction. It appears in official government reports and has been cited by the defense secretary in articles and speeches. In addition, it was referred to in the new Joint Capstone Concept for Joint Operations, in Joint Forces Command's Joint Operational Environment 2008 and in the latest Maritime Strategy.

However, it is not clear this usage is based on a common understanding of what a hybrid threat or hybrid warfare entails. Hence, this article details an array of definitions and debates their merits and an alternative concept — compound war. It also provides a preliminary overview of ongoing historical study related to this issue.

Some colleagues resist new adjectives and prefer to retain oversimplified depictions of warfare in two distinct bins: conventional and irregular. I do not share their concerns about new adjectives if they help us think about, debate and prepare for the future. I have greater concerns about preparing for the future by just looking backward. I fear we face a more complex phase in the ever-evolving character of modern conflict, and that a Janus-like approach would allow us to better understand modern conflict and better prepare our operating forces for success. We need a sound appreciation of history, and we need to understand the ever-evolving character of the emerging future all at the same time. In short, as warfare evolves, which Clausewitz reminds us it will do in every age, our professional lexicon should evolve, too.

HYBRID THREATS DEFINED

Recently, in an essay in the foreign policy journal Orbis, Col. Gian Gentile of the U.S. Military Academy posed a number of unique insights into the debate about future threats. In this essay, hybrid warfare was labeled "vague." In another monograph out of the Army War College, the hybrid threat concept was simply truncated to blurring of regular and irregular warfare. Neither author found the construct clear or of much value. As H.L. Mencken said: "Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood."

There are a number of hybrid definitions in today's debate. Marine Lt. Col. Bill Nemeth's graduate work on Chechnya and hybrid warfare is path-breaking research. He defined hybrid warfare as "the contemporary form of guerrilla warfare" that "employs both modern technology and modern mobilization methods." He noted that the Chechens were capable of easily transitioning from conventional to guerrilla tactics, as needed, and that their tactics would often straddle the boundary between guerrilla warfare and terrorism.

Nathan Freier of the Center for Strategic and International Studies was one of the originators of the hybrid warfare construct when he worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense on the national defense strategy. That strategy laid out in its now famous "quad chart" four threats — traditional, irregular, catastrophic terrorism and disruptive — that exploit revolutionary technology to negate our military superiority. This strategy noted that in the future, the most complex threats would be combinations of these four. Freier's version defines a hybrid threat as any actor who uses two of the four modes of conflict. Additionally, unlike my definition, Freier retains the fourth mode as "disruptive technology," per its original usage by the Pentagon.

Retired Army Col. Jack McCuen focuses on the loci of the asymmetric battle, fought on three decisive battlegrounds "within the conflict zone population, the home front population and the international community." This definition emphasizes the battle of the narratives, and reinforces Nemeth's emphasis on modern information tools and mass mobilization. Dave Kilcullen is another advocate. In his acclaimed book, "The Accidental Guerrilla," he supports hybrid warfare as the best description for today's modern conflicts. Yet, he emphasizes combinations of irregular modes of conflict, including civil wars, insurgency and terrorism. Other contributors to hybrid wars find more utility in conceptualizing the hybrid threat in terms of how the adversary is organized or his legal status (states and nonstate actors as proxies).

My own definition is adapted from the national defense strategy and focuses on the adversary's modes of conflict. It explicitly eliminates "disruptive technology" and incorporates "disruptive social behavior" or criminality as the fourth modality. Many military theorists are uncomfortable with this element and do not want to deal with something our culture curtly dismisses as a law enforcement matter. But the nexus between criminal and terrorist organizations is well-established, and the rise of narco-terrorist and nefarious transnational organizations that use smuggling, drugs, human trafficking, extortion, etc., to undermine the legitimacy of local or national government is fairly evident. The importance of poppy production in Afghanistan reinforces this assessment. Additionally, the growing challenge of gangs as a form of disruptive force inside America and in Mexico portends greater problems down the road.

I define a hybrid threat as: Any adversary that simultaneously and adaptively employs a fused mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism and criminal behavior in the battle space to obtain their political objectives.

There are a number of issues raised by my definition. These include five distinct elements of the definition:

Ã¥ Modality versus structure: Should our definition focus on the adversary's modes of fighting or his structure (combinations of states, nonstate actors, foreign fighters)?

Ã¥ Simultaneity: Does the force have to simultaneously employ four different modes of conflict or demonstrate the capacity to employ all four during a campaign?

Ã¥ Fusion: Does the force have to fuse different forces, regular and irregular, into the theater or must it mix different modes of conflict? How much coordination qualifies and at what level of war?

Ã¥ Multimodality: Does an actor have to mix all four modes, or are three out of four sufficient to make it hybrid?

Ã¥ Criminality: Is criminality a deliberate mode of conflict, or simply a source of income or support for gangs and the Taliban?

My definition incorporates these elements, so my own determination on these questions should be clear. I don't think this definition is vague; quite the opposite. If anything, it's too precise. However, the plethora of definitions in the literature is generating the perception of vagueness.

COMPOUND WARS

Hybrid threats are not novel. Over the past few years, I have delved deeper into a number of case histories. This analysis has greatly benefited from the work of numerous historians, but I learned a lot from Thomas Huber's "Compound Wars: That Fatal Knot." This is a much-underappreciated gem.

Huber notes that great captains have often been frustrated by guerrilla warfare that is used in concert with a regular force. In compound war (CW), there is a deliberate simultaneous use of a regular main force with dispersed irregular forces. Huber asserts that the complexity of the admixture of approaches gives distinct advantages to the "CW operator" because it forces the intervening power to both concentrate and disperse at the same time. This increases the command-and-control, logistics and security problems for the CW commander, making him risk averse and slower. Huber's definition assumes that there are separate forces and that they are working in concert; that is, their activities are being coordinated at higher levels. He also notes that there are degrees of coordination, and that sometimes the coordination is limited or simply inadvertent.

Thus, CWs are conflicts with regular and irregular components fighting simultaneously under unified direction. The complementary effects of compound warfare are generated by its ability to exploit the advantages of each kind of force and by the nature of the threat posed by each kind of force. The irregular force attacks weak areas and forces a conventional opponent to disperse his security forces. The conventional force generally induces the adversary to concentrate for defense or to achieve critical mass for decisive offensive operations.

In my study of CWs, the irregular forces are used as an economy of force, to attrite the opposing force and to support a strategy of exhaustion. They are employed to create the conditions for success by the conventional force. The forces operate in different theaters or parts of the battle space but never fuse or combine in battle. Hybrid threats, on the other hand, appear to have a greater degree of operational and tactical coordination or fusion. It does not appear that any separate force exists or that conventional combat power is decisive in the traditional sense. The unanswered question raised by this is: What is the defeat mechanism or a defeat avoidance strategy of the hybrid threat?

The table at right presents my evaluation of 14 case studies starting with the French and Indian War. The fusion of British and French regulars with their respective militias, mercenaries and Indian forces qualifies as a hybrid conflict to me, as does the raiding and deliberate terrorism employed by both sides. The American Revolution, on the other hand, is a classic compound war, where George Washington's more conventional force stood as a "force in being" for much of the war, while the South Carolina campaign was characterized by irregular forces in general. Some exceptions in Nathan Greene's employment of regular and militia units at Cowpens are noted.

The Napoleonic era is frequently viewed in terms of its massive armies marching back and forth across Europe. But the French invasion of Spain turned into a quagmire with British regulars contesting Napoleon's control of the major cities, while the Spanish guerrillas successfully harassed his lines of communication. Here again, strategic coordination was achieved, but in different battle spaces.

Likewise, the American Civil War is framed by famous battles at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Antietam. Yet, partisan warfare and famous units like John Mosby's 43rd Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, provided less-conventional capabilities as an economy of force operation. Huber has classified the Plains Wars as compound, but I am hard-pressed to support that conclusion and do not see how these frontier fights fit the hybrid definition.

The second Boer War has some elements of hybrid warfare in it. I was particularly struck by the Boers' modern Mausers and Krupp artillery, and their mobility and commando structure. However, the war's opening phases were rather conventional, and the British were ultimately successful in forcing the Boers to reconsider their strategy. Ultimately, they fought a rather traditional guerrilla war until a negotiated settlement was ground out.

T. E. Lawrence's role as an adviser to the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans is another classic case of CW that materially assisted Gen. Edmund Allenby's thrusts with the British Expeditionary Force against Jerusalem and Damascus. But here again, Lawrence's raiders did not fight alongside the British; they were strategically directed by the British and supplied with advisers, arms and gold. One could argue that the Arab forces were irregular forces by definition and that they employed terrorism and some looting. Yet this did not attain any element of simultaneity or fusion.

The French return to Indochina against the Viet Minh is an interesting case. The Viet Minh could certainly conduct a fluid form of warfare with modern conventional capabilities. Their success at Dien Bien Phu might be taken as a manifestation of hybrid combinations. Gen. Henri Navarre's poor choice of terrain and overreliance on air-delivered logistics may have doomed the French more than the Viet Minh's combat capability.

The American intervention in Vietnam is another classic case of the strategic synergy created by compound wars, posing the irregular tactics of the Viet Cong with the more conventional capabilities of the North Vietnamese Army. The ambiguity between conventional and unconventional approaches vexed military planners for several years. Even years afterward, Americans point to the conventional nature of the final victory by North Vietnam's armor columns as an indicator that it was a conventional war.

My colleague T.X. Hammes looks at the Afghans as a hybrid threat against the Russians in the 1980s. Certainly, the infusion of U.S. arms like the Stinger shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile gave this irregular force a particular conventional tool that helped offset the Soviet's massive firepower advantage and the terrorizing Hind helicopter. Today's fight in Afghanistan may be an even better case, as there is overt evidence of increased terrorism, information operations and the criminally disruptive influences of opium production.

In my monograph "Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars," I had dismissed the Chechens' success in Grozny as a case where a former Soviet republic had access to Russian weapons and unique knowledge of their doctrine and tactics. In retrospect, I was wrong. The Chechens' fusion of conventional capabilities, irregular tactics, information operations and deliberate terrorism makes this case an excellent prototype against a modern power.

I am still finishing my study of the Balkans and the Serbian incursion into Kosovo. The latter appears to include modern air defense assets and modern armor, with ethnic cleansing and irregular urban tactics. Looking over the case history, it appears to meet the standard for hybrid warfare.

As both Ralph Peters and I have separately written in these pages, Hezbollah's defiant resistance against the Israeli Defense Force in the summer of 2006 may be a classic example of a hybrid threat. The fusion of militia units, specially trained fighters and the anti-tank guided-missile teams marks this case, as does Hezbollah's employment of modern information operations, signals intelligence, operational and tactical rockets, armed UAVs and deadly anti-ship cruise missiles. Hezbollah's leaders describe their forces as a cross between an army and a guerrilla force, and believe they have developed a new model.

More recently, the Russian incursion into Ossetia and Georgia in 2008 warrants some consideration. The Russian main thrust was conducted by armor columns, covered by bombers. However, there were irregular Chechen units, including the notorious Vostock Battalion, also present. Some of the destruction against economic targets and Georgian property can only be classified as terrorism, targeted killings and looting.

This is a preliminary overview, and more detailed research is needed to delve deeper into the case histories before we can draw out insights. It appears that CW is the more frequent type, and that hybrid threats are simply a subcomponent of CW in which the degree of coordination or fusion occurs at lower levels. It also appears that the greater degree, the hybrid version, is increasing in frequency. We need to study the interaction of different strategies and the intended victory/defeat mechanisms of the protagonists. What strategies are effective against compound or hybrid threats? How does it influence campaign design and operational art? Are classical counterinsurgency and Field Manual 3-24 relevant, or is more discriminate firepower required? Does it matter whether the hybrid threat is embedded as part of a homogenous and supporting population?

I realize that there are those uncomfortable with the messy combinations of modern conflict, and those who don't like the notion of hybrid threats. Some of my colleagues have moaned about the spate of new terminology being thrown around today. Our profession evolves over time, and new lexicon captures the changes better than hanging on to old terms with newer meanings. If we were still fighting in phalanxes or using the tactics of Marcus Aurelius, we could cling to dated definitions and conceptions. However, since we are not, the argument seems rather moot to me. Up until the current conflict, we had poor doctrinal terms such as "low-intensity conflict" and "military operations other than war." We eventually dismissed those terms as inadequate, and our profession benefited from their expulsion.

I am equally uncomfortable with untested terms and assumptions in the joint community about conventional powers and our current understanding of irregular warfare. I am distressed to hear general officers describe China, North Korea or Iran as conventional. I am even more dissatisfied with the parochial arguments supporting a return to the Revolution in Military Affairs and Transformation agenda of the 1990s that got us where we are today. That agenda was focused without any regard to what sort of enemies we were fighting, which is the antithesis to the hybrid warfare debate.

A QDR DEBATE

I would like the Pentagon and the defense community to use the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review to debate the range of threats we face and their potential combination. We need to assess today's likely irregular threat and potential for high-end asymmetric threats. But this raises a critical issue in our evaluation of the emerging character of conflict: Is the character of conflict diverging into lower and higher forms, or converging, as the hybrid threat suggests? Defense Secretary Robert Gates appears to embrace the convergence of threats and assesses this as likely and dangerous. How is this being incorporated into the scenarios and analyses of the QDR?

In closing, this effort has tried to clarify hybrid threats so that the concept can be fully debated. There are a number of definitions of hybrid threats that emphasize different characteristics. We need to work through both the definitional aspect and its implications. Undoubtedly, the concept is imperfect and its implications are unclear. Just as clearly, some of our existing vocabulary and our understanding of modern conflict are woefully insufficient. Further historical analyses and more war games are required to ascertain the implications in campaign design, operational art, doctrine and training. Our adversaries appear committed to learning and adapting; hopefully we measure up as just as curious and just as resolved to win.

If at the end of the day we drop the "hybrid" term and simply gain a better understanding of the large gray space between our idealized bins and pristine Western categorizations, we will have made progress. If we educate ourselves about how to better prepare for that messy gray phenomenon and avoid the Groznys, Mogadishus and Bint Jbeils of our future, we will have taken great strides forward. AFJ

FRANK G. HOFFMAN served more than 24 years as a Marine Corps officer. The views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Department.
Hybrid vs. compound war

sorcerer · Nov 2, 2014

From Elite 'Protracted War' to Mass 'Cyber Blitzkrieg'?

For at least three reasons, the U.S. military has been more inclined to view Unrestricted Warfare as some sort of 'Shock-and-Awe with Chinese characteristics' than as the continuation of Maoist Protracted War by other means. For one thing, the military establishment of a country whose historical experience has been shaped by traumatic episodes like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 cannot but be haunted by the question of "strategic surprise." For another, the fascination with Clausewitzian decisive battles, combined with the worshipping of technological prowess, has made the U.S. military uniquely vulnerable to "the cult of the quick." Last but not least, some passages of Unrestricted Warfare itself actually encourage an interpretation in terms of Blitzkrieg.

While the book does a good job articulating the relations between Strategy and Space, its main shortcoming is that it has little to say about Strategy and Time. URW dismisses traditional military thinking in terms of "phases" and promotes "synchrony" yet, the authors tell us,"synchrony" should not be confused with "simultaneity." That's about all. This neglect is all the more curious as the main difference between a "Western" and "Eastern" way of war has always been the relation between Strategy and Time (78) and that, more than ever today, the temporal dimension constitutes the main vulnerability of this "empire with attention deficit disorder" (Nial Ferguson) called America.

One could argue that, if the grammar of Unrestricted Warfare is best described by the concept of Combination Warfare, the logic of Unrestricted Warfare remains that of Protracted War. As Colonel Kintner put it fifty years ago: "As conceived by Mao, the strategy of protracted conflict is the lever for effecting a gradual change in the relative strength of the two sides - the revolutionary and the status quo...Thus, unlike most Western strategists, who have traditionally equated war with the clash of arms, Communist leaders are trained to think of conflict in much larger dimensions. Military action for them is but one of the many forms of warfare. Other forms of conflict – political, psychological, sociological, technological and economic – are just as important or, under certain circumstances, even more important...In order to survive or winthis conflict, strategies must be planned to the scale of decades, not years."

What cannot be overemphasized is the fact the overwhelming majority of the twenty-four logical lines of operations identified by Unrestricted Warfare are definitely not susceptible to a Blitzkrieg-like approach. Consider, for instance, the different timelines of legal warfare, financial warfare, and cyber-warfare.

The timelines of legal warfare are very long indeed. In 1971, the year when the People's Republic of China became a member of the UN, political analyst Adda Bozeman warned that the Western-inspired international legal order embodied by the UN would eventually be undermined by the increase of non-Western nations in the wake of decolonization. But overturning this international order (or at least some parts of it) is not the kind of thing that can be achieved overnight, and the first significant challenge to the Western legal order only took place in 1990, with the OIC-sponsored Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. In the post-Cold War era, within the framework of the UN General Assembly, China has not hesitated to play the role of revisionist leader along with the OIC; within the UN Security Council, China has behaved by and large as a status quo power - though its foot-dragging on Iran and North Korea show that being a status quo power is not necessarily synonymous these days with being a "responsible stakeholder."

Only in the past decade has China decided to add multilateral organizations as the "fourth pillar" of a diplomacy which, until then, had focused on three sets of bilateral relations (great powers, neighboring countries, developing countries). In that respect, liberal institutionalists are right to argue that, unlike previous international orders, the current one is "easier to join and harder to overturn." When it comes to legal warfare, China's offensive for now appears to be both limited and "laser-guided" - as in the case of "maritime lawfare." At any rate, legal warfare calls for a protracted approach, unless it is part of a broader "swarming" offensive (e.g. the 'Cartoon Jihad' of 2006).

The timelines for financial warfare are not nearly as long those of legal warfare, yet not nearly as short as those of cyberwarfare either. It is only in the past two years that Chinese officials have called for an end to the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and it will probably take a decade or so for China to achieve this goal without shooting itself in the foot in the process (or less, if Russia, OPEC and/or the EU join in). In the meantime, China is making sure the yuan is informally becoming the common currency of East Asia, while increasing its outbound direct investments (ODI).

The timelines for cyber-warfare are the shortest. Though one could argue that the cyber- offensives that have been going on nonstop since the 2003 Titan Rain offensive constitute a long war of attrition, the image that usually comes to mind about "cyber-warfare" is closer to shock- and-awe than to siege warfare. Just as the information revolution has led to an acceleration of History in general, the cyber weapon has the potential to lead to an acceleration of war. As former counterterrorist czar Richard Clarke points out, the similarity of the cyber age with the advent of the missile age is striking:

"As in the 1960s, the speed of war is rapidly accelerating. Then, long-range missiles could launch from the prairie of Wyoming and hit Moscow in only thirty-five minutes. Strikes in cyber war move at a rate approaching the speed of light. And this speed favors a strategy of preemption, which means the chances that people can become trigger-happy are high. This, in turn, makes cyber war all the more likely. If a cyber-war commander does not attack quickly, his network may be destroyed first. If a commander does not preempt an enemy, he may find that the target nation has suddenly raised new defenses or even disconnected from the worldwide Internet. There seems to be a premium in cyber war to making the first move."

Today, the risks of miscalculation are even higher, enhancing the chances that what begins as a battle of computer programs ends in a shooting war. Cyber war, with its low risks to the cyber warriors, may be seen by a decision maker as a way of sending a signal, making a point without actually shooting. An attacker would likely think of a cyber offensive that knocked out an electric-power grid and even destroyed some of the grid's key components (keeping the system down for weeks), as a somewhat antiseptic move; a way to keep tensions as low as possible. But for the millions of people thrown into the dark and perhaps the cold, unable to get food, without access to cash and dealing with social disorder, it would be in many ways the same as if bombs had been dropped on their cities. Thus, the nation attacked might well respond with "kinetic activity."

Responding, however, assumes that you know who attacked you. And, one of the major differences between cyber war and conventional war—one that makes the battlefield more
perilous—is what cyber warriors call "the attribution problem." Put more simply, it is a matter of whodunit. In cyberspace, attackers can hide their identity, cover their tracks. Worse, they may be able to mislead, placing blame on others by spoofing the source." In the academic world, a theory known as Offense-Defense Balance posits that, all things being equal, the state of military technology at any given time tends to favor either the offensive or the defensive, thus making war either more or less likley. With the advent of cyber-weapons, the balance has drastically tilted toward the offensive - a development all the more worrisome that a large-scale offensive can be the result of a spontaneous cyber levee en masse.

In a seminal essay on "The Beginning of History: Remembering and Forgetting as Strategic Issues" published in 2001, Gerritt Gong argued that the information revolution has given a
strategic dimension to the question of collective memory in just about every corner of the globe: "Accelerated by the collision of information technology with concerns of the past, issues of "remembering and forgetting" are creating history. They are shaping the strategic alignments of the future...Modern technologies, including digital technologies and the Internet, are bringing together images and sounds that give remembering and forgetting issues surprising intensity, speed, scope, and emotional resonance...Memory, history, and strategic alignment are inextricably linked."

As Gong points out, the accidental U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 triggered a chain reaction: "The news of the bombing traveled first by Internet, straight from Europe to China's students, who angrily mobilized. Pro-Chinese hackers from Hong Kong ...shut down sites for the Department of the Interior, Department of Energy, National Park Service, and other official U.S. government agencies. ... The Chinese government was forced to react to nationalistic contentions that the United States had deliberately destroyed a sovereign diplomatic structure in a direct affront to China. ...This combination of globally sourced cyber news and multidimensional cyber attack underscores how unpredictable emotionally charged remembering and forgetting issues coupled with new technologies can become. Chinese citizens saw the accidental bombing in the context of the history of U.S.-China relations. In that past, some saw a history of gunboat diplomacy promoting Western commercial penetration and exploitation...The sharp divergence of U.S. and Chinese popular perceptions is a disturbing reminder that global movements of information, capital, and technology may knit us into one world, but one that still has fundamental misunderstandings and misperceptions at its core.

Indeed, the global speed of change combined with divergent historical prisms may in some cases accelerate international misunderstanding and crisis." (emphasis added) In that respect, the most likely cyber-scenario may not be a PLA-sponsored, anti-U.S. 'shock-and-awe' offensive in the context of an invasion of Taiwan, so much as a spontaneous cyber levee en masse on whatever issue that happens to resonate with an increasingly nationalist Chinese public opinion.

Chinese strategic culture has traditionally been defensive, as Chinese General Li Jijun rightly reminded his American counterparts. Unlike Christopher Columbus and other Western discoverers, Admiral Zheng He never tried to establish colonies; and to this day, unlike the US, China does not have 761 military bases in 156 countries. But as the examples of both Germany and Japan have shown, strategic cultures do change, sometimes drastically. For most of their history, Germans were perceived in Europe as a bunch of harmless pipe-smoking, beer- drinking, day-dreamers – except, that is, for that short 1870-1945 period. Similarly, Japan may have been the only country in the world that tried to "dis-invent" the gun by banning firearms in the 17th century, but it is also a country that managed to militarize something as peaceful as Zen in the 20th century.

Deng Xiaoping was unquestionably the most talented statesmen the world has ever seen since Otto von Bismarck; but as is well-known, after Bismarck's retirement in 1890, lesser talented leaders were unable to restrain an increasingly nationalist German public opinion. Meanwhile, the technological revolution between 1880 and 1914 created the same acceleration of history, and the same "short-war illusion," that we are witnessing today. The national Patriotic Education Campaign put in place by Chinese leaders since 1991 has
exacerbated the victimization narrative at the popular level. Meanwhile, since the 1999 incident, the number of Chinese Internet users has gone from 20 to 400 million, and the number of "cyber-patriots" has presumably increased accordingly.Add to that the understandable overconfidence of elites that have managed the unprecedented feat in history of lifting 300 million people out of poverty in one generation, and one can only imagine what the chain reaction would be in the case of another accidental bombing, or of a major incident-at-sea. Thereis still, however, one major difference between Wilhelmine Germany and today's China: while German elites knew that time was not on Germany's side, most Chinese are hopefully smart enough to realize that the future belongs to them if only they keep on following Deng Xiaoping's advice: "hide your strength, bide your time."

sorcerer · Nov 2, 2014

The Long War Revisited

Ever since 1979, the defining characteristic of the international environment has been the return of both China and Islam in History after a two-century-long eclipse. During the 1980s, the U.S. was too fixated on waging the Second Cold War to ponder the historical significance of the revolutions engineered by Deng Xiaoping and Khomeiny. During the 1990s, intoxicated by the prospects offered by the Asian markets, U.S. elites failed to recalibrate America's policy vis-Ã - vis China, and came dangerously close to fulfilling Lenin's prophecy: "the capitalists will sell us
the rope with which we will hang them."

Then, in the decade following 9/11, Washington singled-mindedly focused on Islam and, in a fit of absent-mindedness, ended up "borrowing money from China to give to Saudi Arabia" (as then-candidate Barak Obama put it in his 2008 campaign). By the end of the Bush administration, the Global Trends 2025 of the National Intelligence Council would announce: "In terms of size, speed, and directional flow, the global shift in relative wealth and economic power now under way – roughly from West to East – is without precedent in modern history."

It is now time for U.S. elites to take a closer look at China and, to begin with, to realize that – in the felicitous expression of Lucian Pye - "China is not a nation: it is a civilization masquerading as a nation." Hence the asymmetry between the American and Chinese visions of both history and geopolitics: If you are American, your historical frame of reference is the past 60 years, and China cannot but come across as a "revisionist power" threatening the U.S.-created status quo. If you are Chinese, your historical frame of reference is the past 3,000 years, and the Middle Kingdom is simply regaining today its legitimate place under the sun after a "brief" (200 years) interruption. In short, one man's revisionism is another man's normalization. In addition, if you are American, you tend to assume that China, as the last multi-national empire on earth, is an anachronism bound to undergo significant retraction at some point. If you are Chinese, by contrast, you think that global economic and information networks will make it possible to build a "virtual" Greater China that includes the diaspora from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific all the way to – America?

There is, at any rate, something terribly naÃ¯ve in trying to reduce the future to the following alternative: "If the defining struggle of the twenty-first century is between China and the United States, China will have the advantage. If the defining struggle is between China and a revived Western system, the West will triumph." This belated interest in the "West" on the part of our academic globalists is commendable but, theirs is a false alternative. For one thing, there is such a thing as a China-Islam nexus; for another, there is no longer any such thing as an Atlantic West.

In the twentieth-century, every single rising power, from Imperial Germany to Imperial Japan, from the Soviet Union to the United States, has tried to enlist Islam as a force multiplier. There is no reason to think that China will decide to be the exception to the rule (especially given the magnitude of its energy needs), nor is there any reason to assume that Islam will not be happy to reciprocate. Already, as Kishore Mahbubani observed: "The rise of China is warmly welcome throughout the Islamic world. China is increasingly seen as the only card that the Islamic world can play to temper America's unwise geopolitical policies."

While the absence of a "unity of command" makes the idea of a Sino-Islamic Axis (Huntington) rather hyperbolic, there is unquestionably - on some issues and in some fora - a "unity of effort" that justifies the notion of a Sino-Islamic Nexus. Oblivious of this fundamental truth, some
strategists like Nathan Freier have argued that defining the challenge of our generation in terms of a "Long War" risks leading to too narrow a focus on the Islamic challenge alone at the expense the china challenge and other contingencies:

"It is true that the United States is at the front end of a long, irregular (and potentially catastrophic) conflict with a web of determined extremist opponents. In the author's view, it is not true, however, that the "long war," as it is narrowly described, constitutes by itself the totality of active, hostile competition and resistance to the United States... Indeed, the "long war" against radical jihadists, as it is conceived by security and defense leaders in and out of uniform, is only one aspect of a complex mosaic of non- state and state competition and resistance. Adherence to the "long war" concept artificially limits meaningful consideration of the full range of opponents certain to aggressively push back (politically, economically, socially, and at times quite violently) against American primacy."

While the concern is legitimate, Freier the strategist lets his "inner planner" get in the way and end up putting on the same level "threats" and "risks," historical challenges and natural disasters. The job of the policy planner, to be sure, is to compile a laundry list of possible challenges and
contigencies as comprehensive as possible. The job of the policy-maker, by contrast, is to set priorities and in that respect, the two generational priorities are clearly Islam and China, not tsunamis and pandemics. Rather than throw away the concept of Long War, what is needed is a
redefinion of it that includes the China-Islam nexus.

Since the Muslim world is far from monolithic, the main difference between the Cold War and the Long War is that there is no such thing as a Sino-Islamic bloc similar to the former Sino-Soviet bloc. That said, not only is there a unity of effort (ends) for a selective rollback of the Western-inspired order, but there is also a strategic isomorphy (ways and means) which defense analyst Robert Bunker, in a discussion on Unrestricted Warfare, expressed in a striking metaphor: "Many of the lessons learned are borrowed from non-state groups— terrorists, insurgents, and hackers—and, in this sense, Unrestricted Warfare is akin in some ways to an al Qaeda manual for states. However, while al Qaeda manuals are tactical and operational in focus,this work is operational and strategic, even grand strategic, in orientation."

In and of itself, the existence of this China-Islam Nexus does not make a "Clash of Civilizations" unavoidable . An equally plausible scenario – one that was the subject of a lively discussion in Washington in the summer of 2007 - is that of a "World without the West," i.e. a consensus on
the part of the Rest to organize its own affairs while simply ignoring the West.

There is no such thing as an Atlantic West anymore. Outside official discourses, the West is a residual notion. For the optimists, what there is instead is a competition between three empires (America, Europe, and China) for influence in the "Second World." In fact, on some issues, there is only a difference of degree between the Brussels Consensus and the Beijing Consensus,while there is a difference in kind between these two and the Washington Consensus.

For the pessimists, there is, on the one hand, an America so obsessed with the idea of retaining "global leadership" as to be unable to concretely cope with the realities of a Post-American World; on the other hand, there is an energy-dependent Europe that seems to think that Finlandization by Russia is a lesser evil compared to Islamization by Arabia. In short, Europe's default grand strategy boils down to that: "Better Eurasia than Eurabia."

If a West is to be re-invented, it will have to take the form of a looser, Greater West, resting on three pillars: America, Europe, and Russia. At the very least, just like winning the Cold War required at some point playing the China card, winning the Long War will require playing the Russia card.

sorcerer · Nov 2, 2014

Sun-Tzu Rules, OK ?: The Future Is the Past – with Chinese Characteristics

In the post-Cold War era, at a time when every other book coming out of academic presses bore the title "The Social Construction of – fill the blank," there was something immensely refreshing in the attempt by Clausewitzian theologians to reassert an unchanging "essence" of war. And in truth, given the amount of wishful thinking in the West at the time, there was even some pedagogical merit in leading strategist Colin Gray's contention that "Clausewitz rules, OK? The Future is the Past – with GPS."

Las! The September 2001 events have reminded us that, like just about everything else in life - including Peace itself , War is, always has been, and always will be, a social construction. In the past decade, the evolution of the U.S. strategic discourse has taken the form of a gradual, reluctant acknowledgement of this fundamental truth.
War is socially constructed. English and French soldiers circa 1400 would have been greatly surprised to learn they were fighting the "Hundred Years War" (1373-1453): the expression was invented only in the 19th century.

War is socially constructed. If there is no chapter on "opium warfare" in Clausewitz' Vom Kriege, it is because the social construction of war at the time made that concept unthinkable in Prussian military circles. That sure did not prevent a nation of 40 million people from subduing a much bigger country of 400 million people through the weaponization of opium. War is socially constructed. For the professional soldier today, War is many things but, unless he does not mind standing accused of war crimes, War is first of all what the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) says War is. If the international conventions designed during the Clausewitzian era are no longer adequate for today's wars, either you make it a priority to change the conventions – or chances are that, even with the bravest and smartest soldiers, you will lose your war.

War is socially constructed. As they embark on the drafting of a new Strategic Concept since 1999, NATO Allies are currently debating whether a cyber-attack should be considered as an "act of war" calling for an Article 5 response (the U.S. position) or as something else falling under Article 4 contingencies (the German position).

War is socially constructed. Domestically at least, the fine distinction between "organized crime" and "irregular warfare" can be overturned in twenty-four's time. The same U.S. lawmakers who talk about urban violence in terms of "third-generation gangs" can decide that the time has come to reframe the issue in terms of "fourth-generation warfare" – and goodbye Posse Comitatus.

War is socially constructed. Reduced to its simplest expression, the main problem with Clausewitzologists is their failure to realize that the Clausewitzian dictum, being always reversible, is at best a half-truth. In ordinary times, war can indeed be said to be "the continuation of politics by other means." I[/B]n extra-ordinary times, it is politics that becomes "the continuation of war by other means." If the 20th Century has a good chance of going down in history as "The Age of Extremes" , it is because it was, for the most part, an extra-ordinary time.

In the first half of the century, domestic politics itself, in Europe at least, was the continuation of war by other means. That was the message of the two most influential Western political thinkers of the time: on the left, Antonio Gramsci, for whom politics unfolded along a spectrum ranging from "war of maneuver" to "war of position"; on the right, Carl Schmitt, for whom the essence of politics was the "friend-enemy" distinction, and the difference between politics and war not a matter of substance so much as a matter of intensity.

In the second half the 20th Century, politics continued to be "the continuation of war by other means," though mostly at the international level - that's why it was called the Cold War. When Walter Lippman in 1947 published the little book by that name, many contemporaries believed the concept to be too oxymoronic to ever endure. In truth, it was not any more exotic than the concept of Armed Peace in vogue in Europe between 1870 and 1914. It later turned out that, far from being a radical novelty, the concept of Cold War (guerra fria) had first been used in medieval Spain to designate the, well – Long War between Islam and Christendom (711-1683).

Could the Long War be the Cold War of the 21st Century? At the very least, it looks like we may – as the old Chinese curse has it "live in interesting times." In September 1991, Deng Xiaoping's claim that the U.S. and China were heading toward a Cold War went largely un- noticed in the West. Two decades later, fifty-five percent of the Chinese population (six hundred million people) appears to agree with Deng. Meanwhile, a plurality of Americans already thinks that the 21st Century will be the Chinese Century.

War is socially constructed. Pay attention when Chinese strategists argue that Mao's old definition "war is politics without bloodshed, politics is war with bloodshed" needs a"revision," and declare that the clearest exponent of Unrestricted Warfare could well be Old Nick himself: "A chasm has already appeared between traditional soldiers and what we call modern soldiers. Although this gap is not unbridgeable, it does require a leap in terms of a complete military rethink...The method is to create a complete military Machiavelli...Even though Machiavelli was not the earlier source of an 'an ideology of going beyond limits' (China's Han Feizi preceded him), he was its clearest exponent."

War is socially constructed. If Counterinsurgency Warfare can be said to be the "graduate level of war," then Unrestricted Warfare deserves to be called the "post-graduate level of war." Revisionist powers like China know it, which is why there are today more Chinese military officers studying in U.S. universities than American military officers.

War is socially constructed. There is only one legitimate reason why the U.S. military should go on pretending there is such a thing as an "essence" of war: if they don't define their job, in a self- deprecating manner, as "killing people and breaking things," their civilian masters will not hesitate to use, misuse and abuse them for just about any conceivable task, from baby-sitting to garbage collecting. That said, to the extent that there is really such a thing as an essence of War, it resides in its interactive dimension. If your peer competitor decides to trade Clausewitz for Mahan, Liddell Hart and Sun-Tzu , drop Clausewitz and pick up Mahan, Liddell Hart and Sun-Tzu.

In short, in a status quo country like America, military strategists would do well to err on the side of caution and decide that, until further notice, War will be defined as "whatever the revisionist peer-competitor decides War is." If you are searching for a "unified field theory" of war, then, look no further than Unrestricted Warfare. In an ideal world, questions of grand strategy should not be at the center of attention of an already overburdened military. In post-modern America, though, the political class is too focused on the electoral "permanent campaign" to develop an interest in "grand strategy." If the U.S. military is either unable or unwilling to deal with grand strategic questions, it will not necessarily end in a tragedy: but the 21st Century will sure go down in history as the Chinese Century.

Dr. Tony Corn is the author of "World War IV as Fourth-Generation Warfare," Policy Review,web special, January 2006. He is currently writing a book on the Long War.

pmaitra · Nov 2, 2014

@sorcerer, I think that is a typo in the article.

Actual quote:

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.

Read more at Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed. - Mao Zedong at BrainyQuote

sorcerer · Nov 2, 2014

@pmaitra
Thanks you for pointing it out..I corrected it

sorcerer · Nov 2, 2014

THE ARABIAN INSURGENTS

A military specialist in Middle Eastern Affairs draws upon the literature as well as his own extensive experience in the region to describe the importance of culture in Arab societies and what it means for unconventional warfare. –Ed.

John Keegan observed in his landmark book Face of Battle, "that war is always an expression of culture, often an determinant of social forms, in some societies the culture itself." John Lynn continued this theme in a more nuanced fashion in Battle: A History Combat and Culture. To be specific, just as there is an American way of war, as explained by Russell F. Weigley, there is an Arab way of war which has been more broadly described as the 'eastern way of war" by historians such as Victor Davis Hanson.

Kenneth Pollock, (Arabs at War) amply covered the historical ineffectiveness of Arab military organizations in conventional wars against Western opponents while some of the cultural and societal rationale was illuminated in my study, "Why Arabs Lose Wars" However since that article appeared a frequent topic has been the "New Arab/Muslim Way of War," expounding the view that in irregular or unconventional warfare against Western armies the Arabs do much better. From the historical record it appears to be true, and it is my thesis that the answer as to why may be found in the cultural attributes of Arab society.

Irregular warfare, in being touted as a "new" way of Arab warfare, is somewhat deceiving in that only the weapons and techniques have changed, not the strategy or tactics. It is, in fact, a very old form of Arab warfare. As depicted in the works by John Jandora (The March from Medina, A Revisionist Study of the Arab Conquests), and in others such as those by John Keegan, Steven Runciman, and Rueben Levy, early Arab triumphs were not a result of religious zeal, as many historians believe, although it was a factor. More significantly, success was due to superior martial skills, such as experience gained in constant tribal warfare, excellent leadership, adaptability, and rapid mobilization techniques. In the era of early conquests, Arabs were able to assimilate European methods and weapons and retain their own advantages among which were the ability to rapidly mass and disperse, move quickly, and use surprise. They scrupulously avoided the close direct grinding warfare found so often among the Greeks, fighting this way only as a last resort.

Despite the success of the early Arabs in adapting to European warfare, the favored Arab form of war remained traditional Bedouin methods. Traditionally, war fighting included a penchant for secrecy, the ability to pick and choose the time and place of the battles, and an emphasis on individualism, the latter an attribute not part of the mass tactics of the West. The Arab way of war was historically also one of deception, avoidance of close-in warfare, and a preference for standoff weaponry, including the near veneration of archery.

Indirection, evasion, excellent intelligence, subterfuge, and psychological operations are the features of the Arab way of war today. In particular, no aspect in the Arab way of war is more important than psychological operations.

T. E. Lawrence eloquently described the importance of the psychological in his observations on the Bedouin strategy of winning wars without battles. In the typical ghazwa (Bedouin raid) this included the use of bloodcurdling yells and screams in which the attackers sought to frighten the defenders. If things were not going well on the battlefield, there was no shame in a hasty retreat. As H. A. R. Dickson has written in his book Arab of the Desert, running away was never considered shameful but rather intelligent. Arab historian Ibn Khaldun called it the "attack and withdraw" strategy.

The early history of Arab warfare against Western empires reveals a people more innovative, adaptable, and strategic thinking than their adversaries. The advanced civilization and culture of Islamic empires atrophied, however, and along with it, their military competence. The Muslim community was secure in its view that the defeated Europeans of the Crusades were a barbarous and inferior people. As historian Bernard Lewis has so well documented in his writings, this view held that little was to be learned from the West, complimenting a feeling of self-sufficiency and allowing European advances in military doctrine and weapons to overtake and outclass the Middle Eastern Islamic world.

The renaissance in the Western world rendered the Muslim's deprecatory view of the West as fatally flawed. An easy French victory over Ottoman forces in 1798 was shocking to both the Europeans and the Islamic world. Ottoman Turks realized their inferiority, particularly in military capability, and began to import Western instructors and technology. A massive European intrusion into the Islamic world was induced by the weakness of a once powerful Ottoman Empire.This included the economic capitulations levied on the Ottoman Empire, the French takeover of most of Arab North Africa, and the British expansion of their empire, ostensibly to guard the routes to India.

In the Middle East the Europeans created indigenous military forces to do their bidding, in particular assisting in maintaining security, while being controlled carefully enough to prevent a military threat to their rule. In so doing they attempted to inculcate their culture into Middle Eastern military establishments. In some cases a complete makeover was attempted. In the case of Egypt, Winston Churchill wrote in his book River Wars, ""¦the European system was substituted for the oriental."

From this point on most Arab armies were trained, equipped, and organized on European methods, albeit still maintaining their cultural attributes. Earlier attempts to re-make Arab armies in a European system was just as unsuccessful as was the Soviet attempt to impose their doctrine on their client Arab states. (See "Armies of Snow and Armies of Sand: the Impact of Soviet Military Doctrine on Arab Militaries" by Michael Eisenstadt and Kenneth M. Pollack, Middle East Journal, Autumn, 2001) which deals with the Soviet Union's military patronage of Egypt, Syria and Iraq. While these countries readily accepted Soviet hardware, Arab authoritarian political culture (strongly reinforced by Western imports of advanced coercive tools and systems) tended to encourage conformity and could not integrate the doctrine upon which the Soviet military system was based (although to an extent the Soviet system was more acceptable to the recipient Arabs than Western models). Overall, as I personally observed in Egypt while working with the Egyptian army, the attempt to graft the Soviet military system onto the tree of the Egyptian army was a failure.

The greater effectiveness of Arabs fighting in traditional Arab ways of war has a historical basis and more importantly is deeply rooted in their culture. In my observations of why the Arabs are more effective in unconventional war I suggest the following reasons:

More in Consonance with Qu'ranic Laws of Warfare
In a widely quoted book among senior Arab military professionals, The Qu'ranic Concept of War, Pakistani general, S. K. Malik has written that "war is the cause of God" and not a calamity to be avoided. There is much in this book that would promote unconventional war, including the importance of total war concepts, the use of terror to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy, the use of psychology, using economic tools, and as he wrote, avoiding "the kid gloves" approach to war. For many pages he details the strategy promoted in the Qu'ran, mostly based on the early wars of the Prophet and his followers against the "apostates." In other passages he extols the early Muslim armies' ability to fight on favorable terrain, at a time of their choosing, and using deception and intelligence to gain advantage over the enemy. Echoing a theme written by T. E. Lawrence, the principal aim in warfare is to win "bloodless battles" by convincing the enemy of the futility of resistance. In the wars against the "apostates" the Prophet used threat as a major psychological weapon, with injunctions such as "it is not for any prophet to have prisoners until he has thoroughly subdued the land." The Prophet also imported the catapult ( manjaniq) for use in sieges – a weapon used little but of tremendous intimidation effect. According to Muslin scholars, of the 28 battles into which the Prophet led his followers, only 8 were fought. In the 20 others the enemy fled. The more modern version of this is the extensive use of video capturing sniper attacks and attacks on US troops in Iraq, which were broadcast around the world by satellite stations such as Al-Jazeera and a host of others. Lawrence also details the laws on the spoils of war. All the writers on Bedouin warfare have written about the importance of loot or spoils in typical desert warfare. As an irregular, a fighter is far more likely to obtain his share of the spoils of war than as a foot soldier in a regular army unit in which it is most likely that the officers would take any spoils of war.

The Importance of Blood Lines and Tribal Solidarity
Nothing is more important in the Arab world than tribal or family solidarity. For this reason Arab rulers often see this solidarity (assibiyah) as a threat to be dealt with. In most Arab countries there is a conscious effort on the part of rulers to ensure that regular army units are generally mixed in terms of ethnicity and regional origins to ensure that there is no cohesive unit attitudes toward the ruling establishment. As detailed in "Why Arabs Lose Wars," the land forces of most Arab nations are the greatest existing threat to the regime. Prior to the 1980's, Arab history was replete with examples of military coups. All land forces constitute a "double-edged sword." One edge of the sword points toward the capitol. Forces loyal to the regime for ethnic, religious, or ideological reasons mitigate this potential threat. Examples of this are the Saudi Arabian National Guard and the now-defunct Republican Guard of Iraq. It is a system that encourages distrust and compartmentalization. Harkabi examined this concept in his study of the collapse of Arab conventional forces in the 1967 war ("Basic Factors in Arab Collapse during the Six Day War," Orbis, Fall, 1967).

Arab unconventional or insurgent forces, on the other hand, are almost always composed of clans, tribes, ethnic groups, or urban sectarian neighborhoods. They know each other, trust each other and often have blood ties and family connections. This also makes it difficult to penetrate for intelligence or creating dissention. Blood trumps all in the Arab world, including religion. Moreover, unlike conventional Arab forces that are often assigned to areas away from their origins on purpose, these unconventional Arab units are in their home territory, know the terrain, be it the desert or the urban slums, and the people are their people. They can hide among the civilians, creating great difficulties for Western armies trained on minimizing collateral damage.

Casting Off the Conventional Arab Military Straitjacket
Arab conventional forces, basing their tactics and doctrine on Western models, tend to be very predictable, with stovepipe leadership, inhibited by a top-down command structure that rewards political loyalty to the regime and usually exhibits a wide gap between soldiers and their officer leadership. Usually the officers are drawn from classes above the peasantry or urban poor, and in a reflection of the Arab society in general, there is very little empathy to create the cohesiveness a professional army demands. In a Western army the non-commissioned officer is the bridge between officer and soldier, but the Arab armies in general lack a professional NCO corps.

In Arab insurgent groups, the informal command structures are based more on traditional Arab leadership qualities and charismatic personalities, and the concept of tribal or family loyalties produces a far more effective fighting force than that of most Arab conventional units. In fact, in more recent times the conventional army armies have become the targets of derisive media coverage in the Arab world, with unfavorable comparison to the "success" of Hezbollah against the Israelis. In Iraq the insurgents surprised U. S. forces with their ability to adapt to changes in our counter-insurgency tactics, clever use of small assault units of 5-10 personnel, and ability to integrate direct and supporting fires, something conventional Arab forces have never done well.

Leadership
More pointedly, in conventional Arab militaries promotion and assignments are based more on loyalty, political linkages to the regime or family connections. Prevalent in Arab conventional forces, there is a distinct attribute that the "nail that stands up gets hammered down." Officers tend to avoid personal responsibility, seek consensus, and wait for orders from above. This is much less the case in Arab unconventional forces. Leaders are responsible to their tribe or families for the successes of their missions and lives of their unit's members. Very often they are considered only the first among equals and are subject to removal for incompetence or wasting lives.

Weaponry and Uses
Almost every American advisor will lament the perennial problem of the lack of a systemic logistics and maintenance capability among Arab armies. It was particularly true of the Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi armies. The capability to keep sophisticated weapons systems operational has always been a complaint of U.S. advisors. It is not a symptom of a lack of intelligence or will; but rather it is an aspect of Arab culture in which teamwork and daily application of effort is missing. To a lesser but important degree it is also a reflection of the nomadic influence which views menial "dirty hands" work as the responsibility of low-caste people. Officers shun manual labor and rarely get involved in it.

On the contrary, the noted Arabists Wilfred Thesiger and Alois Musil pointed out the care and knowledge with which the Bedouin handled their personal weapons. This is the advantage of the Arab irregular. He has no heavy weaponry to maintain, only small arms and small standoff weapons such as rocket propelled grenades (RPG) and mortars. And as Thesinger observed, and I did as well, the Arabs have a talent for jerry-rigging weapons and equipment that can be quite amazing. With few tools or sophisticated workshops this ability is a prerequisite for insurgent operations. The use of 155 MM artillery shells rigged as roadside bombs, triggered by garage openers are only one example.

Individualism
Ibn Khaldun, in his 14th century book The Muqaddimah, laments the nature of the Bedouin as barbaric, but also emphasizes the individualistic nature of the Arab; the desire among them to vie for leadership, and each one feels qualified to assume a leadership role. This trait is one of many that has been absorbed by Arab society in general. Anyone who has spent some time in the Arab world can relate to this. For example, imagine the scene of an accident wherein dozens of men will gather, all shouting orders to others, and no one is listening. At the American University in Beirut my sociology professor asked the class to observe a basketball game and relate their observations. The Arab students saw nothing of particular note but many American students noted that there was very little passing or teamwork. A player would get the ball, dribble the length of the court and make a shot. This overwhelming trait of individualism is a difficult obstacle in developing a smoothly functioning conventional unit. My own observation over the years has been that Arab units are not lacking in the individual skills required for war fighting; they are hardy, used to privation, and tough. The basic problem on the modern battlefield is the lack of functioning combined arms.

For the unconventional fighter these are not particular problems. In fact the Arab in a guerilla unit is able to exhibit his imagination and initiative in a way never allowed in the conventional unit. Conformity of the Arab military system is a result of draconian discipline imposed to get obedience. It is not a natural Arab attribute. In contrast to the conventional military system, the insurgent success depends on individual initiative. Most often insurgent success is dependent on being able to respond quickly to targets of opportunity, e.g., enemy convoys, momentary lapses in defensive security, attacking quickly, and dispersing before the enemy reacts. The Iraqi insurgent was very adept at these tactics. Time and time again our convoys were hit by a combination of improvised explosive devices, rocket propelled grenades, and small arms fire lasting only a few minutes.

Glory and Self-Promotion
The thespian impulse found in many Arabs is a remarkable and often observed trait. General Glubb Pasha (Lt. General Sir John Glubb), British commander of the Royal Jordanian Army, who worked with Arabs for almost 50 years, commented on their spirit of romance, need for the dramatic gesture, and quest for personal glory. Eric Hoffer wrote of this trait in describing leftist terrorists in the 60's. His descriptions of this motivation fit perfectly with the Twin-Tower terrorists of 9-11. Hoffer wrote in his book The True Believer, "Dying and killing seem easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance or game. Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience - the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries." Obtaining this personal glory as a foot soldier in an infantry unit is by no means impossible but hardly as likely as the Arab insurgent with face mask, kaffiya, individualized battle dress picking the time and place for his personalized heroic act.

Conclusion
In describing the reasons for Arab effectiveness as an unconventional warrior I have drawn on my own experiences as well as the observations of those who have worked with Arabs over the past two centuries. Much of the materiel relates to the nomadic Arab. Yet today probably less than 5% of the Arab population can be considered nomadic. The contemporary Arab world is a mostly urban society. However this in no way diminishes the validity of the traits described above. As the great Iraqi historian Ali Al Wardi has written a half-century ago, nomadic traits are part of the ethos of the Iraqi and Arab character. This has more recently been reinforced by the study of Philip Salzman in his book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East. The fact that Ibn Khaldun's observations of so long ago can be applied today offers proof of the remarkable resistance of Arab culture to change.bluestar

This article includes some extracts from Mr. DeAtkine's chapter in Conflict and Insurgency in the Contemporary Middle East, ed. Barry Rubin, London and New York: Routledge, 2008.

Author:

Norvell B DeAtkine is a retired Colonel, a graduate of West Point with an MA from the American University of Beirut in Arab Studies. His extensive overseas service includes combat service in Vietnam, an assignment in Korea, and 8 years in the Middle East. Among his positions held were as an artillery battalion commander and deputy commander of a Corps Artillery. Following his military service he taught for 18 years as the director of Middle East studies at the John F Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.

sorcerer · Nov 3, 2014

Unconventional Warfare- Article from 1962

By Franklin A. Lindsay
From our January 1962 Issue

Unconventional war is the war that is being fought today in Laos and South Viet Nam; it is the war that the French fought in Indochina and are now fighting in Algeria. It is a form of warfare the Communists have learned to employ with great effectiveness, and one which they will continue to exploit to the maximum in furthering their long-range objectives.

Unconventional warfare differs profoundly from warfare in which regular armies are openly engaged in combat. The objective of such conventional combat is to win control of a state by defeating the enemy's military forces in the field. In contrast, the strategy of unconventional forces must be to win control of the state by first winning control of the civil population. For without the disciplined support of the civil population, militarily inferior guerrilla forces can have no hope of success.

As yet the West has not developed a form of defense that is adequate against this form of warfare. And even where the defense has been effective, the costs to the West of suppressing such attacks have been many times the costs to the Communists of mounting them. In Greece between 1945 and 1948, for example, Communist guerrilla forces, numbering less than 20,000 armed men, successfully cut the country in two so that the only communication between north and south was by sea and air. A Greek army of several hundred thousand men, heavily supported by the United States, was required to contain the very much smaller guerrilla force. The total cost of military and political pacification, and of economic reconstruction, was about $2 billion-or somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times what the Communists had spent. The fortuitous defection of Jugoslavia from the Soviet bloc, and the consequent loss of guerrilla bases in Macedonia, caused the Communists to call off their attack. Had this not occurred, the costs in men, money and matÃ©riel needed finally to subdue the Communist rebels would have been many times greater. And the outcome would not have been certain.

The essential reasons the Communists have been able to do so much with so little in many areas of the world are four:

1. They have learned thoroughly the techniques of gaining control of the civil population by combining effectively the positive incentives of a political doctrine, applied meticulously from the grass roots up, and the negative pressures of a terrorism applied against those who refuse to accept their leadership voluntarily.

2. They have mastered the principles and techniques of guerrilla warfare, a form of warfare quite apart from regular or frontal warfare.

3. They have directed their most determined attacks against countries whose territory is contiguous to the Communist empire so that safe haven and training areas can be provided for guerrillas and so that supplies can be provided clandestinely.

4. They have also been able to exploit effectively the pent-up hatreds against former colonial powers and pent-up frustrations with the slow pace of economic advancement.

In most cases these have proven to be unbeatable combinations.

To gain control of a key part of the civilian population is an absolute prerequisite for further action. Having gained this control, the Communist leadership is then in a position to use its guerrilla force with great advantage against equal or superior forces supporting the government in power.

A guerrilla force is like the top of an iceberg; the supporting civilian organization, without which it cannot survive, is the much larger part that can't be seen. Just as control of the air has become a prerequisite for successful frontal warfare, so control of the population is a prerequisite for successful unconventional warfare. From the outset of conflict, a major struggle for control over the civilian population will take place and it will continue throughout the entire course of the war. Each side must try to organize the civil population into a tightly disciplined force, and, through propaganda and police activities, try to break the grip exercised by its adversary.

In Viet Nam, for example, the defeat of the French was due primarily to the Communists' success in this regard. It made it possible to trap French forces in one bloody ambush after another until the French were so weakened they could no longer keep open supply lines to their fortified outposts. Once the fortified outposts were isolated and could no longer be supplied, except in driblets by air, the Communists were in a position to complete the establishment of political and military control over the rest of the country. With their base of operations thus secured, they could safely convert their guerrilla forces to regular assault forces equipped with heavy artillery and a supply system to back it. The final phase was to launch massive frontal assaults against these weakened fortresses.

Thus the French and their local supporters were progressively driven from the country into the villages, and from the villages into the cities until, at the end, they held in the north of Indochina only the heavily fortified perimeter immediately surrounding Hanoi. In the areas from which they had withdrawn, the Communists erected a political structure which exacted the positive loyalty of every peasant and his family by the stark example of violence to some and the threat of heavy punishment or death to others.

The key to the successes of the Communist guerrillas in Viet Nam and elsewhere is found in the fact that they had established control over the rural population as a first step. For every man in a guerrilla force carrying a rifle there must be a large number of civilians who provide the support he must have to survive and fight. They are the source of food, clothing and recruits. Even more important, the civilian organization must supply the guerrilla force with constant operational intelligence on every movement of the enemy. Only with such information can a militarily inferior guerrilla force be forewarned of an encircling trap, a planned offensive or an ambush. This intelligence net embraces not only the peasants who observe military movements but also spies in enemy headquarters who provide advance warning of intended offensives.

The cause of the French defeat in Viet Nam can be traced to their loss of the support of the civilian population. Here, as elsewhere, the Communists had been able to capitalize upon a basic anti-colonial feeling and to harness this antagonism into an effective tool for political indoctrination of the population. But in order to obtain effective control, the Communists go far beyond political indoctrination. Once they have a fanatically dedicated minority, they begin the application of systematic terror to ensure that the masses of the people will be brought under, and kept under, complete Communist control. Their objective is to build in each village- even though it may be under nominal control of the legitimate government-a shadow government completely controlled by the local Communist representative. It has often happened that in a single village two governments exist simultaneously, one the official and open government representing the anti-Communist central government, the other the secret government which, in fact, exercises complete control over the actions of every member of the village.

The use of terror to form a secret government under the nose of the enemy has long been a Communist technique. In some of the worst German concentration camps, a secret Communist government was often sufficiently powerful to bring about the execution, through clandestine manipulation of Gestapo records, of those prisoners who failed to accept its control.

The French were defeated in Viet Nam because they were fighting blind. They never knew where the enemy was. They were repeatedly caught on the march in the most indefensible positions where, without warning, they were subjected to murderous rifle, machine gun and mortar fire from concealed positions on both sides of the track. The surviving remnants of one ambush lived only to be cut down the next day by the same Viet Minh force, which held them constantly under surveillance, and moved through the jungles on foot to prepare the next ambush on the expected line of march. When the French undertook mop-up operations in areas known to be harboring guerrilla forces, the Communist-controlled civil population collaborated in warning the guerrillas, and in helping them to hide or escape.

The pattern of, first, political organization, second, guerrilla warfare and, finally, frontal assault was followed in Jugoslavia during World War II, in China from the thirties until the Communist victory in 1950, and in Viet Nam prior to the partition of the country in 1955. Now it is being followed in South Viet Nam, where Communist organizers have been increasingly active in building clandestine organizations in the rural areas. During the last year, guerrilla activities were stepped up with the objective of forcing government troops to withdraw from the villages into the larger towns and into fortified positions. Now it appears from reports from Saigon that the Communist leaders have decided that their control of many areas outside the cities is sufficiently firm to permit the use of regular military units trained in North Viet Nam. If their judgment is correct, the war for South Viet Nam has entered the third, or final, assault stage.

Because the Communists have been permitted to consolidate their hold over most of the country, the forces of the government, supported by the United States, find themselves in a very precarious position. They can be extricated from the situation only by an extraordinary military effort coupled with a major effort to free the rural areas from the pressures of Communist terror.

In Malaya and in the Philippines are found two examples of the successful suppression and ultimate defeat of Communist guerrilla forces. In both cases, the heart of the Western strategy was twofold: (1) a vigorous and aggressive pursuit of the Communist guerrillas into their own territory while maintaining constant pressure on them so that they were denied the initiative and the ability to launch attacks on their own terms; (2) a major political program undertaken to win back the population, to protect it against the violence and reprisals of the Communists, and to match force with force.

The second of these represents one of the West's most difficult problems, for it is obvious that when two forces are contending for the loyalty of, and control over, the civilian population, the side which uses violent reprisals most aggressively will dominate most of the people, even though their sympathies may lie in the other direction. Communist efforts to dominate the population must be frustrated before their control has become strong enough to support guerrilla operations. If the Communists are unopposed in their initial application of force against the civilian population, and thereby gain control, the counterforce which must be applied finally to break that control will be far greater and the population will suffer far more than if action had been taken resolutely at the outset.

In 1945 in Rumania, for example, a broad popular feeling of support for the monarchy had developed spontaneously. As evidence of this loyalty, people wore badges with the royal coat of arms. Communist thugs began systematically beating up people wearing the monarchist symbol whom they were able to catch alone in back streets after dark. There was no reaction from the population other than to stop wearing these pins when they were alone at night. Thus emboldened, the Communists became more aggressive until they beat up, in broad daylight and in the open streets, those who still wore the monarchist pins. Finally the pins were driven completely from the streets; the will of the people had been broken and the first step in the Communist takeover had been accomplished.

The way in which force is applied to counter Communist terror is nevertheless all-important. The strategy of the Communists may be to use acts of terror and sabotage to goad the government into repressive counter- measures and thereby widen the split between the population and the government. Thus when the government and its security forces use force to meet the Communist terror they must do so resolutely, but with great selectivity and only against those who are directly responsible.

II

The first step in mobilizing a civilian population against Communist subversion and guerrilla attack is to establish a set of political goals expressed in terms that the average person can understand. They must be goals that strike a sympathetic response and that aim to remove the inequities in the existing society and the grievances which they have caused. Through mass communications these reform programs must be communicated effectively, and repeatedly, to the population.

But this is only the beginning of the task. Political organizers must be recruited and trained in sufficient numbers to reach by direct contact nearly every family in the land. They must be as thorough as the best of ward or district leaders in American politics. The organizer must know everyone in his village. He must know who are the Communist sympathizers and who are the secret Communist organizers. He must know who comes and goes in the village and what their business is. He must build a core of persons loyal to himself and to the government. Through these people he must be constantly informed of the activities of the Communists and the pressures they are placing on villagers to gain their secret help. Above all, he must be able to provide effective protection to those who, against their will, are being forced into Communist collaboration by threats of violence against themselves and their families. To accomplish this, he must have the support of his own government and of the West; he must be able not only to provide physical protection but to alleviate the legitimate economic and political grievances of his village. More than anyone else, the local political organizer holds the key to success or failure. If he is successful in his task, he will hold the loyalty of his village and will be able to integrate its people and resources into the effort to defeat the Communists.

If he is not successful, the shadow of Communist control will gradually be extended and consolidated until the village is organized entirely in support of the Communist forces. Food and money will regularly be collected for that purpose. The entire village will become part of the Communist intelligence network, reporting to the guerrilla commanders every movement of the government security forces. At the same time the government will be totally cut off from information about the guerrillas-their strength, their movements and their intentions.

The organization of the civilian population will require months, if not years. But where control by the Communists has already progressed to the point where they are able to launch guerrilla war, military operations must be conducted aggressively against them, regardless of the disadvantage at which government forces will be operating. Government patrols must push vigorously into Communist-dominated territory, try to contact the guerrillas and force them into open combat. Lacking the intelligence that the civilian population might have provided, the defending forces must employ to the fullest all other means, such as air reconnaissance. The United States has effectively applied its advanced scientific skills to the solution of major problems in the missile and space fields. There is now the opportunity, as yet largely untried, to apply these same scientific capabilities to the development of modern equipment designed to help meet the special problems of guerrilla and counter-guerrilla warfare.

The basic principle of counter-guerrilla military operations is to maintain the offensive and thereby deny the guerrillas the initiative. The Communist guerrilla strategy, in turn, will be to attempt to seize and hold the initiative by mounting a variety of attacks against fixed installations so that large government forces are pinned down defending towns and villages, rail lines, power lines, ports and other vital installations. A counter- guerrilla offensive, then, will have these objectives:

To keep guerrilla units off balance at all times; to force them to flee continuously from attacking government units, and thereby to minimize their opportunities to mount attacks on vital communication lines and military installations or to lay ambushes.
By maintaining the initiative, to force guerrilla units to overrun their intelligence screens, and thereby to deny them the protective cover they need to survive against superior military forces.
To prevent guerrilla forces from grouping for strong attacks against isolated points.
To tire them out, and keep them tired out, through constant offensive action against them; to force them into more isolated hinterlands where food supplies are less and less available; to force them through constant offensive action to expend their limited ammunition.

Whatever the means used to carry out this offensive strategy, the basic and overriding necessity is that counter-guerrilla forces be organized early enough and strongly enough so that they are able to meet and contain, at the outset, the attacks of guerrilla forces. Too little and too late has been the normal reaction of governments to the development of such forces.

The core of the counter-guerrilla troops must be a highly mobile attacking force. Normally it need not be substantially larger than the guerrilla elements opposed to it. It should be able to meet and defeat guerrilla forces essentially on their own terms, that is, with small mobile units capable of moving in patrols over extended periods in enemy territory. As soon as one patrol is withdrawn for rest, another should take its place.

Mobile counter-guerrilla units should operate without fixed plans, and with the ability to modify their operations quickly, in order to take advantage of unforeseen targets and to concentrate superior forces against guerrilla units that have been located and brought to combat. In contrast, the government force that relies on "set piece" offensives, based on plans drawn up days in advance, will always be at a disadvantage. Even before the operation is launched, such plans may find their way into the hands of the guerrillas, who will have moved meanwhile to another area. Periodic offensives of limited duration have the further disadvantage of permitting the guerrillas to hold the initiative between offensives. A strategy of constant offensive can effectively deprive the guerrillas of the opportunity to conduct the war on terms favorable to themselves.

It will also be necessary to provide defensive forces to guard key installations. Care must be exercised, however, that these forces are not spread out beyond all reasonable bounds in the attempt to defend an increasingly large number of fixed installations. A French military commentator has written, "There should be no fortified posts except those necessary for promoting mobility."

III

In a broader sense the dilemma of the West is that, even if we can develop a more effective strategy for defending countries against unconventional Communist warfare it can at best only limit further losses. When one considers a strategy for liberating areas over which the Communists have gained control, the difficulties are seen to be very great. The organization of clandestine activities in a Communist state faces extraordinary obstacles. It is, for example, common practice for the Communists to undertake provocative activities designed to test the loyalty of each individual in the rÃ©gime. A person may at any time be contacted by someone purporting to represent a clandestine organization. Even though the sympathies of the person approached may be strongly anti-Communist and his fondest hopes that the Communists be overthrown, he must assume that this is not a genuine resistance movement but rather one conducted under the control of, and at the direction of, the secret police. To prove his loyalty he must not only refuse to join the purported clandestine organization, but must also inform the police. If he does not, he will have failed to demonstrate his positive loyalty to the rÃ©gime and will be subject to reprisals and imprisonment. Thus a clandestinely organized resistance within a consolidated Communist rÃ©gime is not likely to get very far before someone has, out of fear, reported its existence to the police.

A second device used by the Communists is to form a clandestine anti- Communist organization under their own secret control, to encourage its growth by recruiting unwitting members, and to permit them to conduct actual operations against the rÃ©gime until finally, having attracted a large number of the most aggressive anti-Communists, its entire membership is arrested.

The communes and collective farms provide other means of containing potential resistance operations, by centralizing food supplies, rather than allowing them to remain under the control of individual peasants. It is thus extremely difficult to obtain locally the food needed to support a guerrilla force. Similarly, the Communist practice of issuing new currency from time to time minimizes the opportunities to build up currency reserves to finance resistance operations.

Because of these techniques, a Communist dictatorship probably can be overthrown from within only in an area in which the Communists have not yet consolidated their control, or in which their control has been seriously weakened by other events. It is therefore of the utmost importance to move quickly to prevent the total consolidation of a nation into a completely controlled police state. This struggle will take place at a very personal level, and the final outcome will depend on whether the individual, faced by the Communist instruments of terrorist control, can, in the face of this force, be given a viable alternative to complete surrender.

Where the effective political control of the country has passed to the Communists, it will not be enough to conduct long-distance propaganda activities or to make plans on the assumption that the very real and very considerable dissatisfactions with the Communist rÃ©gime will automatically result in a popular uprising as soon as the guerrilla forces appear. Clandestine support of at least a part of the villages and the countryside is an absolute prerequisite to the employment of guerrilla forces, for they must have local intelligence support and supplies if they are to survive in areas in which superior enemy forces are openly in control. In Jugoslavia, for example, in World War II, the Communist partisans had in many ways as favorable a situation for guerrilla warfare as might be expected anywhere. The main German forces were engaged by powerful allies on other fronts. Tito's partisan forces had as overt allies not only the Soviet Union but the United States and Britain. And from the latter two they received massive air support. In Slovenia, where there were no CÃªtnik forces of Mihailovich to contend with, the political commissars of the Communist- established National Liberation Front could represent themselves to the people as the only force fighting the invader, and as having the complete support of all the major powers fighting the Germans. Yet they still found it necessary, in the words of one commissar, to "prepare the area intensively by the introduction of clandestine political organizers for a period of several months before we dared to introduce guerrilla forces."

It is not merely with benefit of hindsight that one can say it would have been a better strategy in Cuba to have built organized support in the villages and rural areas of Cuba and to have organized widespread guerrilla activities rather than to have risked all on a spontaneous uprising following a single assault landing. By far the largest part of any population will not voluntarily risk reprisals even though their sympathies may be strong. Instead, they will sit on the sidelines while others battle it out, joining in only when the outcome becomes a foregone conclusion. The political organization of each village must be undertaken under the nose of vigilant Communist political and security services. This is not easy. It requires unusual men possessing great personal courage and high motivation as well as superior political organizing skills. They must be thoroughly trained and then supported to the fullest extent possible under the circumstances. Guerrilla operations can be initiated only as the Communist control at the village level is loosened so that clandestine support to guerrillas can be provided.

The West needs to acquire the ability to conduct unconventional warfare successfully, and it must do so quickly. The Communists have evolved a highly effective strategy combining grassroots political organization and guerrilla warfare which they are employing against the non-Communist world. They have devised a totalitarian political structure that is highly resistant to counter-attack. The creation by the West of an adequate defensive and offensive capability for political and guerrilla warfare will require time and effort. It must be pursued vigorously and without further delay.

The United States has expanded significantly its military capabilities and, in the Army's Special Forces units, is creating a highly competent corps of guerrilla and counter-guerrilla fighters. This capability must be quickly matched with the political skills to conduct unconventional warfare at the village level. This will require training in depth and an extraordinarily high level of individual aptitude and competence. Specifically, we require a system of training-both for our own personnel and for those we are aiding- comparable to that for an army officer, a physician or an engineer. A national institute or staff college comparable to those of the Army, Air Force and Navy is needed to provide a center for training of United States and possibly foreign personnel and for elaborating strategic concepts of unconventional warfare and developing practical and effective tactics to meet the operational problems we now face in many parts of the world. Similar institutes should be established jointly with our NATO partners and in the countries lying across the Communist lines of attack.

The Communists have allowed themselves lead times of as much as 10 to 20 years in training revolutionary leaders. One can only hope that the free world yet has time to build the political leadership, both abroad and at home, to meet their threat successfully.

Source:Unconventional Warfare | Foreign Affairs

sorcerer · Nov 3, 2014

The Philippine Insurrection, 1899

Major Thomas S. Bundt, Ph.D.

When Aguinaldo found out that his army could not stem the American advance in northern Luzon by frontal resistance, he [gave] orders to all subordinate commanders to engage in guerrilla warfare. As a result, American casualties doubled. -Carlos Quirino

THE U.S. ARMY made an arduous journey from conducting predominantly conventional battles during the American Civil War to conducting unconventional operations during the Philippine Insurrection in 1899. The Philippines' guerrilla war- fare environment, with its distinct language, society, and culture, created new challenges for the U.S. Army. While adhering to U.S. strategy, several of- ficers developed alternative measures with which to combat unconventional circumstances during the Philippine Campaign. After several failed undertakings, the techniques eventually evolved into an un- conventional warfare modus operandi that current U.S. military doctrine recognizes.

What must an army accomplish to shift from conventional to unconventional warfare? In 1899 in the Philippines, the Army had to change its tactics and weaponry, incorporate native constabulary forces, and develop pacification techniques and procedures.

Changing tactics because of lessons learned and the discovery of new principles of warfare trans- formed an essentially 19th-century Napoleonic army into a flexible, lethal force.New, smaller scale joint operations demonstrated a change in tactics, with the Army using weaponry in ways for which it had not been designed. The Army evolved a set of military laws similar to current doctrine's rules of engagement to govern its operations. Constabulary operations using local indigenous populations in military and civil contexts strengthened the Army's position to respond to un- orthodox guerrilla attacks, and pacification programs introduced infrastructure-rebuilding programs with an emphasis on education and governmental reform.

Transforming the Army to counter unconventional threats required changes in tactics. When hostilities began in the Philippines, the Army had limited experience with alternative tactics to counter unconventional formations. The Army's institutional knowl-edge of irregular or guerrilla warfare developed from experiences gained during skirmishes and small-scaleoperations in the Civil War. This knowledge was lim-ited, however, because it only included experiences in combat operations against soldiers from similar cultures, with similar personalities and beliefs, and sometimes even from the same families. Combat in the Philippines did not include any of these similari- ties. American soldiers faced new complexities.

Civil War tactics focused on drill, linear formations,en masse offensive maneuvers, and fixed fortifica- tions, all plausible for conventional wars but not well suited for unconventional scenarios. The traditional tactical guidelines changed. Massed formations be- came small patrols, and security measures and de-centralized command responsibilities became much more important. Soldiers embraced new techniques to address doctrinal deficiencies, and the new tactics proved successful in an unconventional war.

In the Philippine theater, combined arms transformed the existing patrochial systems of artillery, infantry, and cavalry formations into small units with increased mobility. The cavalry turned in its horses for pack mules because mules could carry artillery pieces through rugged terrain. When feasible, the U.S. Navy participated in Army attacks on enemy
encampments through preparatory bombardments, as in the Samar Campaign. New formations and new uses of weapons developed in response to unconventional threats.

Soldiers increasingly used basic issue rifles and emphasized good marksmanship. By exercising strict target discipline, soldiers engaged guerrillas from longer distances in relative safety. In an unusual use of weapons in the conventional arsenal, soldiers used the shotgun as the weapon of choice in close-quarters operations. Guerrillas preferred close-quarters
combat because they typically did not have the marksmanship skills to use these weapons in the proper way.

These events foreshadowed developments in Vietnam and Operation Iraqi Freedom when another generation of Army soldiers found new uses for existing weaponry.

The Samar Campaign highlights the extremely brutal methods of unconventional warfare. The Samar region of the Philippines is home to the infamous Moros who to this day conduct kidnapping and terrorist activities against conventionally armed and trained Philippine government forces. During the 1899 Philippine Insurrection, a few dozen Moro laborers entered a U.S. military compound carrying bolos (short broadswords) concealed inside coffinscontaining the corpses of children. The guerrillas attacked the isolated U.S. outpost as its defenders sat down to breakfast and killed over three-fourths ofthem. The guerrillas used ruses and close quarter attacks to successfully negate the Army's advantage in advanced weaponry and marksmanship.

In retribution, U.S. soldiers committed atrocities against the guerrillas, including summary executions and the infamous "water cure," a method of interrogation in which a captive was held down and water forced down his throat until he provided the information sought. Although prisoners usually "talked" during these sessions, they often died as a result of
damage to their internal organs. The guerrillas did not take long to reciprocate, using Punjabi sticks and booby traps. These tactics were intended to demoralize U.S. Army soldiers and had significant effects on the theater of operations.

Some techniques the Army used in this unconventional war demonstrated the need to remain within the guidelines of the laws of war, but the laws of war were in their infancy. The Army learned two lessons: the U.S. soldier will persevere, but strict a herence to discipline and the rules of war must apply in future conflicts.

The Army also learned to use the native popula tion in ancillary roles, which gained notoriety in the Philippines. Army leaders recruited personnel from the local population, redominantly for intelligence, scouting, and spying, and to learn about the unfamiliar culture, language, and social systems.

The Army addressed some native concerns with pacification operations, similar to those Special Forces and Marine Expeditionary Forces use today, where their application can reduce hostilities and increase the chance of successful negotiations to end conflicts. Pacification operations were crucial to success inunconventional operations in the Philippines. Commanders and junior leaders were involved in governmental, administrative, and collaborative activities with noncombatants. Soldiers acted as representatives of the United States and helped noncombatantsenhance their position through activities such as building community infrastructure. These new pacification methods proved enormously significant and evolved into the components of present-day peace- keeping operations. Building schools and bringing literacy to the Philippines was a positive act for future American and Philippine relations.

Unconventional warfare initially stymied traditional operations. The initial failures and setbacks in combating this relatively new threat changed U.S. Army doctrine. The rationale for these shifts devel oped through new techniques born in the most brutal of circumstances.

Tactical changes in an unconventional situation led to new applications of the principles of war, including new uses for weapons such as shotguns. Soldiers also learned to abide by the laws of war and set more humane boundaries for future military operations to mitigate extreme cruelty. Work with the local population countered the enemy's use of terrorism by employing culturally, religiously, and socially acceptable methods of pacification.

The Army's 1899 Philippine Campaign led to important doctrine for irregular warfare. Nonetheless, continued investigation and evaluation can complement existing doctrine and prove useful in unconventionalwarfare situations

Source:http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/milreview/bundt2.pdf

sorcerer · Nov 3, 2014

The Unconventional War :- Parallels between the Combat Experience in Vietnam and Iraq
Part 1
BY JOSHUA AKERS

Prior to the current operations inside Afghanistan, the conflict in Vietnam was considered "America's longest war," lasting from 1950 to 1975. While American combat troops were not committed in Vietnam until the summer of 1965, the long stalemate and the withdrawal of troops in the following years weighed heavily on American minds afterward. The war in Iraq, or in military parlance, Operation Iraqi Freedom, began in 2003 and has taken on many "alarming . . . similarities" to the Vietnam War. Ted Galen Carpenter notes that, "contrary to the clichÃ©, history never truly repeats itself," and that one should be cautious when comparing Iraq to Vietnam. While comparisons can be drawn between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, some contrasts can also be illuminated—the most important difference being the absence of the Selective Service System, better known as the draft." The number of servicemen deployed to each war is far from equal. During the so-called "surge" in Iraq, 160,000 ground forces were deployed. On the other hand, Vietnam reached nearly 530,000 troops at its climax.

Another difference concerns the nature of the enemy. Carpenter opines that in Vietnam the U.S. faced a well-defined threat, the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). On the other hand, U.S. forces in Iraq face an unorganized, mixed-bag insurgency that "resembles a Hobbesian struggle of all against all rather than the kind of conventional insurgency the United States encountered in Vietnam." Despite the differences between the Vietnam War and Iraq War, parallels emerge when considering the average combat experience of American infantry in each war. While examining the similarities in the nature of the enemy, the combat environments, the occurrence of ambushes, and the utilization of anti-personnel devices, this essay will also attempt to infer to what extent lessons from Vietnam could have been applied to the war in Iraq.

Soldiers in both Vietnam and Iraq had to endure taxing guerilla warfare. Paul Rieckhoff, a lieutenant serving in the Third Infantry Division, believed that the Iraq War presented many of the same problems that the United States encountered during Vietnam, including "a guerilla enemy . . . indistinguishable from civilians, a culture [that American soldiers] didn't understand at all, and tenuous public support" at home. Soldiers in Iraq dealt with the constant threat of "Ali Baba," a pejorative term designating guerilla fighters, which constituted "remnants of the Iraqi Army, foreign fighters, criminals, [and] political enemies." Often, the "Ali Baba" were indistinguishable from innocent civilians and, more often than not, were "dressed in civilian clothes." One particularly lethal group of paramilitary fighters constituted the Fedayeen— Saddam loyalists, who often rode in "civilian trucks" with "markings on the side." The Fedayeen would occasionally use taxis to infiltrate "[U.S.] lines and observe [movements] or to ferry troops" behind American positions. Taxis and civilian vehicles also served to evacuate their wounded in the midst of battle, and also, to perpetrate car bombings against American targets.

Likewise, the generation of soldiers who fought in Vietnam encountered their own "Ali Baba," only at that time these enemies were known by the pejorative "Vietcong," a catch-all term short for Vietnamese Communist. While soldiers in Vietnam faced a formidable opponent in the North Vietnamese Army, it was common for skirmishes to be fought against elements of the Vietcong. Vietcong forces presented an ambiguous target, allowing for no set "criterion by which to distinguish a pretty Vietnamese girl from a deadly enemy." The Vietcong were adept at ensnaring American combat forces in traps, as Private First Class Reginald Edwards recalls:

"The first time we thought we saw the enemy in big numbers was one of these operations by Marble Mountain. We had received fire. All of a sudden we could see people in front of us. Instead of waiting for air, we returned the fire, and you could see people fall. I went over to this dude and said, "Hey man, I saw one
fall." Then everyone started yelling, "We can see 'em fall . . ." Come to find out it was Bravo Company. What the VC had done was [to] suck Bravo Company in
front of us . . .

Sergeant Ron Asher's letters parallel the situation recalled by PFC Edwards, as Sgt. Asher's platoon walked "right into" a "perfect ambush" which constituted a company of "gooks" at 5:00 a.m. in the "pitch dark."

As outlined above, American soldiers in Iraq did not face a "well-defined" enemy such as the North Vietnamese Army. The Iraqi Army under Saddam Hussein rumbled in the beginning stages of the 2003 invasion. Further complications arose from the elusiveness of the insurgent enemy, whose ranks were bolstered each day. American soldiers, tasked to "locate, capture, and kill all noncompliant forces,"—a tactic eerily reminiscent of General William Westmoreland's strategy of attrition during the Vietnam war—often faced difficulties due to the complexities of urban warfare.[COLOR="#FF0000"] Marine and Army combat elements in Iraq often found themselves "flanked on both sides by a jumble of walled, two-story buildings" where guerilla fighters concealed themselves behind "windows, [and hid] on rooftops and in alleyways," launching salvos of machine-gun and rocket fire on disoriented American detachments[/COLOR]. This is evidenced by examples of combat in the city of Nasiriyah. Elements of Task Force Tarawa, originating out of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, became utterly helpless while pinned down
by "Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes" concealed in buildings on flanks and viciously firing "AK rifles, machine guns, and [Rocket-Propelled Grenades]." In another situation, members of Lt. Rieckhoff's squad were forced to search "the halls and rooms of [a] medical complex, flushing out shooters from inside closets and from behind dying patients." It was also often hard for soldiers to discern the impact of engagements on enemy strength, especially when combatants "melted away" as quickly as they appeared.

Similarly, combat forces in Vietnam engaged in pitched battles daily against elements of the Vietcong, often in a confusing and frustrating environment. The majority of combat in Vietnam was not fought in an urban setting as it was in Iraq. As Specialist Richard Ford notes, "before the Tet Offensive, all the fighting was in the jungles." In general, U.S. forces encountered Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army elements in the midst of a tropical jungle environment. The usual assignments sent "small American units" probing for "the hidden enemy in a manner comparable to the Pacific island campaigns of World War II." Soldiers sometimes found themselves struggling through "grass eight to fifteen feet high, so thick as to cut visibility to one yard," and meanwhile, there were "all around . . . men possessing guns trying to kill you." Soldiers recalled finding it extremely difficult to locate enemy combatants in the "impenetrable jungle" of Vietnam, constantly being "tangled in 'wait-a-minute vines.'" Captain Joseph Anderson recalled that sometimes the squad could maneuver easily, and other times the squad "moved 25 yards in one hour, cuttin' and choppin' [a] way through the bamboo every step." Furthermore, Warrant Officer Richard Elliot argued that the jungle was "so thick" that it made it difficult to fire accurately at Vietcong running "from 20 feet" ahead. While the jungle tended to create a claustrophobic setting for combat, the elusiveness of the enemy proved equally frustrating to soldiers.

The combination of the environment and the enemy's skillful maneuvering often obstructed American forces from acquiring accurate body counts. Colonel James Lincoln expressed frustration that, "it [was] unusual to catch [Vietcong] in an ambush," and even when in the midst of combat, it was "difficult to tell" if the enemy had sustained any casualties. Col. Lincoln attributed this to the fact that the Vietcong "never leave dead or wounded after a battle." Specialist Robert Mountain notes a firefight between U.S. and VC forces in which his men "supposedly killed four [VC]" but had nothing "to show for it" other than "some blood." Moreover, George Herring opines that, "the sheer destructiveness of combat made it difficult to produce an accurate count of enemy killed in action."

While soldiers in Iraq dealt with "a million rooftops and windows" from which enemy insurgents could appear, the U.S. ground forces in Vietnam had to deal with the infamous tunnel systems constructed by the National Liberation Front and Vietcong regulars. Thetunnel systems were of a complex nature, usually consisting of "thousands of miles of tunnels that connected villages and linked staging areas to battle zones." Second Lieutenant Fred Downs recollected a skirmish with the Vietcong, who effectively utilized concealment in tunnel networks: My platoon sergeant crossed with his element and gave chase on the right flank.
I took control of the left flank, and we took [the VC] under fire. We hit one, but he dropped into a tunnel and we lost sight of him. Meanwhile, on the right flank,
a VC popped out of a hole and threw a grenade . . . up the right side of the hill . . . we found tunnels, spider holes, [and] straw mats."

By dint of effective camouflage in the dense jungle and utilizing tunnel systems, the Vietcong were able to engage American soldiers with little to no risk of sustaining casualties. Sergeant George Carver recollected "a couple of shots . . . whizzing past" his vehicle while in Vietcong territory, and expressed his wishes that "these little SOBs would come out in the open." As Sergeant George Bassett commented, it was extremely difficult for U.S. forces to pin down and annihilate or force the surrender of NVA or Vietcong units, primarily due to their knowledge of the terrain. Soldiers in both wars were under constant threat of sniper fire, although it had the tendency to be inaccurate. 2nd Lt. Fred Downs recalled that a man could not "feel safe anywhere" in Vietnam due to numerous threats, snipers among them.Tim O'Brien remembered a particular mission in which "the company took continuous sniper fire, and it intensified into a sharp thunder" when they reached a bridge crossing the Diem Diem River.

Philip Caputo characterized part of the Vietnam combat experience as "an invisible enemy" shooting at soldiers from "distant tree lines." Specialist Robert Mountain argued that when on patrols, the Vietcong would "fire [sniper rounds] every once in a while to let you know they were still there," which served to keep U.S. forces on edge.

sorcerer · Nov 3, 2014

The Unconventional War :- Parallels between the Combat Experience in Vietnam and Iraq
Part 2

While also facing the constant threat of snipers, soldiers in Iraq encountered various other forms of ambush. Marines in Nasiriyah dubbed one of the city's roads "sniper alley," but it was noted that before long that term applied to "any street in an Iraqi town." Lt. Paul Rieckhoff recalled that in cities a "sniper shot could come from anywhere at any time."

Thomas Ricks notes a study that indicated in September 2004 that "every U.S. vehicle that moved near Fallujah was shot at" by snipers, men with AK rifles, or men with Rocket-Propelled Grenades (RPGs). Hardly ameliorating the condition of infantry, Rocket-Propelled Grenade launchers had nearly replaced the sniper rifle in Fallujah, and insurgents were capable of taking accurate shots from roof-tops and windows and in one case crippled armor elements of the 1st Infantry Division in a "kilometer-long" gauntlet of ambushes. As a consequence, the "constant threat of violence" which constituted snipers' ambushes from rooftops and buildings, among other things, led to the tendency for soldiers, as in Vietnam, to become "dangerously violent." Lt. Rieckhoff found "so many reasons . . . to be angry," including the enemy's notorious use of "Improvised Explosive Devices, a lack of [accurate intelligence], the uncertainty [of combat], and the heat."

The threat of booby-traps, mines, and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) presents the most obvious consistency between combat in Vietnam and Iraq. For instance, U.S. soldiers
occupying cities in Iraq after the 2003 invasions dealt with a variety of deadly hazards ranging from the usual to the bizarre. Possibly the most ostentatious method of wanton violence perpetrated against U.S. soldiers during the Iraq War was a hand-gun assault. In this scenario, soldiers found themselves in the midst of a crowd of friendly Iraqis. Then emerging from the group, an assassin would casually approach the soldier, pull out a hand-gun and shoot the man in the face.53 Lt. Paul Rieckhoff underscored the brutality of these acts, opining that "any man shaking your right hand would shoot you in the face with the gun in his left."

Another crude booby-trap was a series of "cables" dropped from rooftops, designed to "decapitate or knock down the Humvee's turret gunner." In areas designated as mine fields, soldiers contend that the "most obvious thing to booby-trap [is] a helmet lying on the ground."

Sophisticated mines and explosive devices were commonly found in the streets and cities of Iraq. Staff Sergeant David Bellavia recalled his squad stumbling across a Building Improvised Explosive Device (BIED). The bomb was designed for the sole purpose of transforming an entire platoon of men into "mist adrift on the desert winds." Constructe
impediments compounded problems of urban warfare. Often, once traversable streets would transform into "heavily barricaded and IED-strewn" impasses to halt the movement of armor and funnel dismounted infantry into "kill zones."

A common counter-insurgency tactic in Iraq was house-to-house warfare. This involved rooting out insurgents from the inside of various buildings, which were, on occasion, riddled with mazes of "trip wires" and other devices, in one instance containing exploding "pineapple grenades" and C4 explosive charges. Roads, such as the "Airport highway" in Baghdad constituted a gauntlet of mines and RPG attacks, thus compelling American units to avoid the route entirely.

Improvised bombings were perpetrated on both American soldiers and administrative buildings. These attacks were usually delivered by a suicide bomber, by parking a car packed
full of explosives in proximity of troop concentrations, or planting mines on road-ways traversed by American convoys. On February 8, 2006, "two bombs" exploded in a Baghdad
market killing five Iraqi civilians and injuring numerous Iraqi police officers, while at the same time separate explosions cost the lives of "four marines."Highlighting specific examples of IED incidents and car-bombings leads one to believe that these occurrences may have been sporadic at most. However, quite the contrary seems to have occurred, as upon examining statistics for July of 2006, the New York Times reported that "roadside bombs" totaled "2,625 explosive devices" of which "1,666 exploded," and "959 were discovered before they went off." In January of 2006, the total number of bombs "exploded or . . . found" tallied 1,454.63 In fact, of 42 U.S. soldiers killed in action during January 2006 and 38 killed during July 2006, "explosive devices accounted for slightly more than half of the total deaths."In June of 2007, American soldiers were still dying as a result of these devices. Of fourteen men killed in action during June, thirteen had been the result of IEDs. During 2007, bombings in the Diyala Province did not assuage the plight of American servicemen, as five soldiers were killed in March, and nine other American servicemen were killed in August by suicide bombers and IEDs. Eruptions of insurgent violence in the Diyala Province failed to taper off in 2008; six soldiers were killed in January as the result of a Building-IED, and bombs were also discovered in neighboring buildings.

American soldiers were also tasked with deflecting anti-Christian violence, which pervaded Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Ned Parker asserts that militants targeted the Christian minority, which constituted 800,000 in 2003, because of Western views and "their small numbers." On January 30, 2006, bombs erupted outside Christian churches in Baghdad, killing three and wounding the Vatican envoy, among others. In 2008, the Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Rahno, was kidnapped outside his church on February , and tortured to death. Reports in 2008 showed that between October 2004 and October 2008, "insurgents had attacked 219 Shiite mosques, Sunni mosques and [Christian] churches;" meanwhile, the total number of civilian dead from all hostile aggression had reached "more than 85,000." Throughout the occupation, the Christian minority residing in Mosul was forced to evacuate in the face of threats and acts of violence, such as "homemade bombs" being detonated at the Miskinta Church in October 2008. On the whole, the use of explosives against American soldiers and Christians illuminates another variation of counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq as opposed to Vietnam: attempts at the interdiction of IEDs and other traps.

Soldiers in Vietnam sometimes experienced anxiety as a result of booby-traps and minefields. The threat of mines and traps in Vietnam was so ubiquitous that nearly every veteran memoir contains some description of the havoc wreaked by these devices. In light of these threats, Sergeant George Carver suggested that "each twig . . . broken [in the jungle] or the
stillness of the animals means that danger may be near," which caused him to admit he was "a bundle of nerves." Tim O'Brien recalled a particularly deadly patrol in Vietnam that resulted in "a booby-trapped artillery round" blowing up "two popular soldiers" and launching them into a "hedgerow." If a soldier survived a mine explosion, he was usually left mangled physically and tormented mentally by indelible reminisces of the event. Tim O'Brien described the fear of mines as looking "ahead a few paces and wonder[ing] what your legs [would] resemble if there [was] more to the Earth in that spot than silicates and nitrogen."The most feared mine was the "Bouncing Betty," which leaped "out of its nest in the earth, and when [reaching] its apex . . . explodes."In fact, O'Brien recalled various mines, each with a nickname, all of which left deep impressions on the psyche of soldiers in Vietnam. Among the lethal arsenal were "M-14 anti-personnel mines, nicknamed the toe-popper," the "booby- trapped grenade," "Soviet TMB and the Chinese antitank mines" that were "known to have shredded more than one soldier," and the "directional-fragmentation mine," otherwise known as the claymore mine.

These devices took their toll on American forces in Vietnam. In one instance, an operation took "almost 30 percent . . . casualties" from only mines and booby-traps. The
Vietcong were regarded as "experts in the use of explosives," particularly when using them to hinder the movement of U.S. units. Specialist Salvador Gonzalez recalled "a 250IB bomb that a plane had dropped and didn't explode . . . so the NVA wired it up" to detonate as American forces approached.In some instances, soldiers would be forced to choose between routes replete with thick foliage, notorious for ambushes, or trails commonly laced with "booby- trapped" mines. Private First Class Robert Wilson recalled during one operation that the Vietcong set off "10 mines . . . spread out on the trail" causing "every man in the patrol [to be] hit." Colonel Richard St. John argued that booby-traps were the Vietcong's most effective means for inflicting "nickel [and] dime" casualties, meaning two or three wounded or dead at a time. Mines had a damaging psychological effect on soldiers in Vietnam, and many came to harbor a "bitter hatred for the local villagers," whom soldiers believed knew of the traps.

The psychological consequences of combat in Iraq and Vietnam also bear some striking similarities. For example, soldiers in each war felt the psychological ramifications of constant
vulnerability to enemy attack. Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman, a military psychologist, opines that the "constant anticipation of being attacked can have a profoundly toxic effect, especially . . . over months and years." Grossman also suggests that the most psychologically strenuous aspect of combat pertains to one's awareness that "at any time you can go over the edge to personal death and destruction. Indeed, Tim O'Brien commented that combat in Vietnam always left the soldier feeling "perfectly exposed" with "nowhere to hide" from the enemy. Similarly, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia summarized his experience in the town of Diyala as miserable, under constant threat of "IEDs on the local highway, the Mahdi militia around Muqdadiyah, and the house-to-house fights downtown," which combined to position soldiers in an atmosphere of perpetual unpredictability.88 Likewise, Philip Caputo partially blamed the pressure of combat in Vietnam for the arousal of a "psychopathic violence in men of seemingly normal impulses."

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