Attrition and counterterrorism

IN THE NEWS
I finally got around to reading this provocatively-titled article, "In Praise of Attrition," in the summer issue of Parameters, the US Army War College's academic journal. What makes the title provocative is its astute identification of an assumption that military professionals have been making, somewhat unconsciously, ever since World War II. Maneuver, according to the orthodox view, is what wins wars; attrition, the slow erosion of the enemy's forces, is a lesser, and perhaps even irrelevant, approach.

Attrition sometimes appears on either the operational or the theater level. Operational attrition, like the fabled image of the meatgrinder tactics on the Western front in WWI, points to the enemy's armed forces as the proverbial "center of gravity". To some extent, the Soviets pursued an operational attrition strategy in WWII, especially after the German defeats in the Caucasus in 1942 and the battle of Kursk in 1943. The Stalingrad disaster tipped the balance of force dangerously, for the Germans. As the Soviets maintained the pressure of regular combat, the Wehrmacht could not replace its losses quickly enough.

Theater attrition normally has a different target: the enemy's will to fight. Rather than eroding the enemy's "hardware," you focus on the softer side of the conflict: how long the enemy leaders or population will be willing to stay in the fray. Theater attrition is how the American colonies won their independence from Britain, and how the North Vietnamese won the Vietnam War.

The previous sentence implies that, in revolutionary conflicts, theater attrition is a common strategy. That's exactly the case: except in the cases of lightning political attacks, like coups, revolutionaries fighting for secession, the withdrawal of an invading army, a change of national leadership, or a transformation of the political and social order need to exercise patience. To win, the revolutionaries will have to convince a foreign power that it's not worth continuing the fight, erode their own regime's political base, or both.

The author of the Parameters article, Ralph Peters, makes a convincing case for why people in his former profession (he is a retired Army officer) need to take attrition more seriously. Not only will our enemies often try attrition against us, but we also need to be in the business of attrition--including in our counterterrorism efforts.

Where this article missteps, however, is identifying the kind of attrition we should be talking about when fighting terrorists. Peters implies that the center of gravity is the terrorist army:

With hardcore terrorists, it’s not about PSYOP or jobs or deploying dental teams. It’s about killing them. Even regarding the general population, which benefits from our reconstruction and development efforts, the best thing we can do for them is to kill terrorists and insurgents. Until the people of Iraq are secure, they are not truly free. The terrorists know that. We pretend otherwise.

This will be a long war, stretching beyond many of our lifetimes. And it will be a long war of attrition. We must ensure that the casualties are always disproportionately on the other side.

He's right, security is a key component of counterterrorism. It's also vital for counterinsurgency--the real character of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Peters' second mistake in an otherwise laudable article is confusing the two. (Click here for an earlier discussion in this blog of the differences.) The partisans fighting for the withdrawal of US forces--the majority of those shooting at American troops--are not al Qaeda terrorists.

Terrorist organizations have a nasty regenerative capability. No matter how many members of Hamas or the al-Aksa Martyr's Brigade the militarily-capable Israelis kill, more take their place. In fact, according to one critique of Israel's current counterinsurgency strategy, their focus on killing terrorists is, on balance, inspiring more people to join these groups than the number of terrorist leaders or operatives killed.

The Sharon approach to counterterrorism--kill as many terrorists as possible, give as little as possible in negotiations--is a lot like the pre-WWI military doctrine of the great European powers: hit the bulk of the enemy's army with everything you have. Once you've shattered that lynchpin, the rest falls apart. Unfortunately, the trenches zigzagging through Belgium and France were just as visible a symbol of a failed doctrine as the winding streets of the occupied territories today. It's necessary to kill terrorists, but it's not sufficient. As always, you need to be sensitive to the political effects, and not just fall back on the intellectually lazy response that, if the doctrine is failing, just apply it more vigorously.

Comments

[Oscar]

Is there an editing foobar? I cannot find Peters "first mistake" in any part of the article before the phrase "Peters' second mistake".

I liked Peter's article ( I have read most of his in Parameters and elsewhere), and I think your comments are spot on as well. However, let me commend to your attention to how the Mogols successfully handled the long Nizari terror campaign (which , in fact, predated the Mongol rule in the ME.)

[ali]

He has a point when you look at Iraq. War-Lite is a disastrous idea. You don’t destroy an army’s will to fight by elegant maneuver. You don’t let them go home with their weapons. You don’t make a defeated officer corps unemployed and expect peace. Killing lots of soldiers, Mongol style, or as Stormin Norman did has its merits.

But I have a feeling a lot of folks are living in a cloud cuckoo land on counter-terrorism, and Peters’ is one of them. To anybody who grew up in a Uraban-Terrorist war attrition looks about as useful militarily as Polish cavalry charging at Panzers.

Terrorism is cheap, campaigns typically last decades. It requires very limited military skills. Leaders are easily replaceable; every cell head is a leader. A competent terrorist won’t concentrate forces to be destroyed by main force.

In N.I PIRA only concentrated when deep cover British assets misled them, they were then easily destroyed. Even with patchy support in a small country, facing a 40:1 troop/population ratio, packed with CCTV, monitored by Echelon and crawling with Spooks PIRA proved elusive and deadly enough to mortar No 10, nearly kill Margaret Thatcher and her entire cabinet in Brighton.

Four cells armed with box cutters carried out 9/11, and they weren’t even technically very capable, they were just willing to die and for a low chance of success. Madrid shows a far more sustainable tactical ability, and seems to have been carried out by Moroccan amateurs, who survived the attention of the Spanish authorities less well than bumbling heavily penetrated ETA.

If attrition can play a role it is in breaking the will to violence in the supporting population. It hasn’t worked for the Israelis, they’ve simply multiplied threats. In Chechnya the Russians are drowning despite having killed 20% of the population. In N.I we had 30 years of targeted attrition, an ASU member had a likely operational life of 6 months, but PIRA only stopped fighting when seduced into politics, and the practical abandonment of their rhetorical goals. They still "Have'nt gone away".

[Kingdaddy]

Peters mistake #1: Terrorist troops are the center of gravity.
Peters mistake #2: Counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are much the same.

People have lost patience with the terrorist before, as did the Uruguayans with the Tupemaro "urban guerrillas" (really a terrorist cell), and as many Palestinians in fact have with the suicide bombers. However, there's obviously enough genuine support, outrage, or fear to keep bringing in new recruits for suicide bombing operations.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments from both of you. Something finally struck me about this "get tough on the terrorists" rhetoric: it's not really tough. To use an analogy, anyone can go to the gym for a day, sweat a bit, feel their muscles firm up slightly, and never go back again. The one-day exercise fanatic has no claim to being a great athlete, or just physically fit. Those results take time, diligence, discipline, study, and a willingness to deal with occasionally disappointing results. These qualities define a tough athlete--and a real counterterrorist, worthy of the description, "tough on the enemy."

[Oscar]

Thanks
#2 was obvious from your wording. But I kept looking in the quoted section for #1. I understand it now, but it is still not obvious given that you follow the quotation with the words: "He's right". But enough nitpicking about style.

As to attrition, I again refer to the Mongol campaign against the Nizari (better know to Westerners as the assasins.) The Mongols killed so many of the base supporters, that the rest renounced the Nizari flavor of Ismailism, and today the most common sects (e.g. the Bohra) are not only relatively non-violent, but even progressive, at least for Shiites. (I find their flagelationism repellent, but that probably only shows that like Britanicus in Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra" I am a barbarian becuase I confuse the customs of my tribe with the laws of the universe.