Arms and influence

Having the initiative

IN THE NEWS
When you have the initiative, you can execute your own strategy, instead of reacting to the enemy's. Here's an example:

• Al Qaeda in Iraq loses its leader, Abu Musad al-Zarqawi.
• After selecting his replacement, the group decides to send a message that it is still a force to be reckoned with.
• Al Qaeda in Iraq announces that it has kidnapped two American soldiers.

As I argued earlier, Zarqawi's death amounts to a victory only if the US and Iraqi governments can follow up quickly to dismantle his organization. While that process may be ongoing, the signs are somewhat mixed. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda in Iraq continues to hold the initiative, for all the familiar reasons (the general difficulty preventing terrorist attacks, the weakness of population control in Iraq, etc.).

The death of any single individual--Al Qaeda in Iraq's leader, or one of the hostages they hold--is not the measure of victory in terrorism and counterterrorism. The political consequences of these events are.

So far, Al Qaeda in Iraq is in a stalemate with its American and Iraqi enemies. Al Qaeda in Iraq is not a popular organization, and it's perhaps surprising that someone had not passed along the operational information needed to locate Zarqawi earlier. (Or perhaps they did, and US/Iraqi forces missed earlier opportunities.) Everyone in Iraq itself knows that Al Qaeda in Iraq is not representative of other portions of "the insurgency." Meanwhile, Americans constantly confuse Al Qaeda in Iraq with the larger insurgency, and with Al Qaeda as a separate terrorist organization.

In other words, the exuberance that American news anchors didn't even bother to contain when they reported Zarqawi's death is a dangerous emotion for the American public to adopt. In just a few days after Zarqawi's death, his organization has sent a strong, clear message to American and Iraqi audiences: We're still here, and we do what we like. Another Al Qaeda-backed attack in another country would communicate a different, but just as frightening, message: We're still here, too, and nothing that happens in Iraq can stop us from hurting you. The US government and news media should be inuring the public from the power of these messages, not helping terrorist groups magnify the intensity of fear and disappointment manufactured through terrorist attacks.

The indirect approach

THEORY
A corollary of the measure/counter-measure dynamic is the indirect approach. If your opponent is trying to outwit you, avoid doing what's expected. Rather than blasting through the Maginot Line, the Wehrmacht defied expectations by invading France through the Ardennes Forest. Instead of fighting a delaying action against the much larger Union Army, just landed eastern Viriginia during the 1862 Peninsula campaign, Robert E. Lee went on the attack. (McClellan's amphibious invasion was itself a bit of a surprise--particularly given the numbing predictability of previous land-based Union assaults in northern Virginia.) In Operation DESERT STORM, coalition commanders did a double-feint: they encouraged the Iraqis to believe that the Americans would do an end-run amphibious invasion, and then took a direct path through the desert instead.

Basil Liddell-Hart, in his book Strategy, is the most famous advocate for this notion (and he gave it the name the indirect approach). Luttwak discusses it at some length, too, as a way of showing how important it is to keep the enemy's state of mind and likely actions in mind when crafting a strategy. To go back to the example of a family trip to the beach, if you think someone is actively trying to stop you from getting there, take a roundabout route through the back roads--not the well-travelled, expected route. Luttwak uses the phrase "the principle of efficiency" here to highlight the occasional ironies of military strategy: while the direct route may be the most efficient, it may not be the most effective.

The concept of the indirect approach isn't hard to understand. It's a lot trickier to pull off. Strategic deception, which lies at the core of the indirect approach, isn't easy. It took a massive deception campaign, including mock inflatable tanks, to convince the German high command that the Allies were planning to invade at Calais, not Normandy. One well-placed spy, and the ruse would have exploded like one of those tank-shaped balloons.

PRACTICE
There was nothing wrong in principle with a hurry-up invasion of Iraq. Many observers were worried that there weren't enough troops and equipment in theater yet to win a quick victory over the Iraqis. As in 1991, the most worried analysts proved to be wrong. The Iraqis, too, seem caught not totally prepared for the US invasion. Despite the months-long beat of wardrums, it was hard to believe that the United States and Great Britain would invade as quickly as they did.

The problem, of course, wasn't invading faster than expected, with fewer troops than expected. The real mistake was occupying with fewer troops than needed. The dynamics of the indirect approach work best when your opponent is a single leader, or a small group of commanders, who stand to win or lose a conventional war by which troops they position where, with what orders. At some point, the nature of the conflict changed, from conventional warfare to counterinsurgency. On that day, the number of troops did matter in a new, critical way. In the day-to-day operations against urban guerrillas--often which boils down to simple police work--the number of people who can patrol, interview, monitor, ambush, and do the other tactical jobs of counterinsurgency matters a great deal.

The initiative

THEORY
A subtle but important strategic dynamic is the initiative. Except under the rarest of circumstances, you’re usually enjoying an enormous advantage when you can control the place, time, and nature of conflict. You want to act, and force the other side to react. The longer you can maintain the initiative, the better. (The rare circumstance, by the way, is the nuclear game of chicken, in which one side deliberately cedes control of the situation to force the other side to blink. See Schelling’s Arms and Influence for details.)

To go back to the blitzkrieg example, the shock of “lightning warfare” had everything to do with Germany’s power to control the initiative at the operational level. Maneuverability, flexibility, and communications made it possible for the Germans—often numerically inferior, even on the attack—to disorient, disrupt, and ultimately defeat their French, Belgian, and Polish opponents. The successes of the early campaigns in North Africa and the Soviet Union also depended on the way blitzkrieg gave the Germans the operational initiative. In both the North African and Russian campaigns, however, the Germans ran out of the resources (men, tanks, fuel, etc.) needed to maintain earlier “tempos” of operations. German losses at Stalingrad and Kursk, therefore, took the initiative out of their hands and placed it into the Soviets’. In North Africa, the supply of fuel, spare parts, and replacements across the Mediterranean was never enough to keep up with the Afrika Korps’ needs. As dazzling as Rommel’s successes were, they weren’t enough to decisively end the North African campaign before time ran out.

In the two types of asymmetric strategy that are constant topics on this blog, guerrilla warfare and terrorism, the initiative is all-important. Wherever guerrillas are fighting, they usually are at a distinct numerical disadvantage. To make matters worse, their supplies are meager, their weapons less advanced, and their access to external forms of support are often smaller. The one key advantage they do have, however, is the ability to hide in the population or in remote locations, wait until an opportune moment, and then carry out a raid, sabotage mission, or other operation designed for some political effect. Sometimes, these are dramatic moments, like the Tet Offensive. Normally, however, each small operation is part of the steady drip, drip, drip that erodes the political and military base of the enemy regime. Given their even smaller numbers, terrorists also depend on their ability to avoid their enemy’s crosshairs, staying in hiding or on the move until the time ripens for a bombing, kidnapping, or other attack. (This is the major reason why, as I’ve discussed earlier, there can’t always be a “ticking bomb” of an imminent terrorist attack about to happen. Terrorists can’t possibly afford the exposure; instead, they normally wait until they’re sure of success—which depends on the survival of the terrorist organization, if not individual suicide bombers.)

Modern guerrilla warfare and terrorism both depend on maintaining the initiative, not just on the battlefield, but in the media. During the 1980s, Reagan Administration officials and their contra allies were constantly upstaged by the surprisingly more media-savvy, camera-friendly Sandinistas. On one key front, American and world public opinion, the Sandinista commandantes like Daniel Ortega, Ernesto Cardenal, and Miguel d’Escoto constantly outflanked their enemies. The initiative in the highly political “war of the flea” sometimes depends on controlling the terms of the political debate inside and outside the country as much as the terms of battle.

Since I was a teen, I’ve been a big aficionado of wargames. I started in junior high school playing the classic Avalon Hill games—Panzerblitz, Squad Leader, The Russian Campaign, and the like. I don’t harbor any illusions that wargames are 100% perfect simulations of warfare—they can’t be. What they can do, however, is highlight important parts of the story of a conflict, just as a narrative history, a political science study, or this blog can shine a light here or there on important points.

One thing I’ve always noticed is how poorly wargames depict the initiative. The classic wargames, with their “you go-I go” heritage of how each player takes his turn, can’t possibly depict the fluid nature of the initiative. Sometimes they can, either in explicit ways, or cleverly implicit ones. Games like Turning Point: Stalingrad and Breakout: Normandy actually have an initiative chit that one side or the other keeps until used. Once you decide to use some special advantage that the initiative confers, such as the option to re-roll a die if you don’t like the result, you hand the chit and its potential advantages to the other player. This game mechanic makes an interesting point, but it isn’t the same as, say, a well-designed simulation of WWII on the Eastern Front, in which you can feel the German initiative slip away as the supply lines grow too long, the partisan attacks too frequent, your own losses too heavy, and the balance of forces tilting too far in the direction of the ever-regenerating Soviet Army.

Still, if you’re not familiar with wargames or military history enough to appreciate the importance of the initiative, watch a good football game for signs of it in operation. During key points in a game, one side clearly has the advantage in an ineffable way. Everything else is the same—the players, the field, the game—but clearly, the team with the initiative is, for the time being, “stealing a march” from the other side. The initiative is powerful enough in the game of football, in which events on the field are tightly constrained by the rules and the referees. In warfare, where there are no such constraints, the ability to pick the time, location, and type of conflict is vastly more important.

PRACTICE
In 2003, the Bush Administration had an ambitious strategy for how to re-take the initiative in its theater strategy for the Middle East. Long the source of economic and security headaches, from world oil prices to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the 9/11 attacks heightened the direct threat to US security that also emanated from this fractious, dangerous, but nonetheless vital region. The invasion of Iraq, therefore, was an effort to upset the game board of Middle Eastern politics, upsetting old assumptions, creating new opportunities, and perhaps ending old, intractable problems.

This is the argument that a good friend of mine once made in defense of the Iraq invasion. In theory, I also think the idea had merit. (If only it had been the argument the Bush Administration had made at the time, instead of deliberately misleading the US public about weapons of mass destruction.) Given how critical this blog has been of the Bush Administration, you might be surprised to hear me praise this idea. The Middle East had become the proverbial Gordian knot, and perhaps it was time for an Alexander-like, creatively direct approach to unraveling it. It’s hard to see years of patient diplomacy to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unravel without asking, Have we missed all the options? Is there something we overlooked? Is it time to take bigger risks? It’s annoying to see Saddam Hussein thumb his nose at the United States, continuing to claim (justifiably, I think) a substantial victory merely by surviving. It’s frightening to see radical Islamist movements on the march, more often than not with Saudi Wahabbist support, without being alarmed. Perhaps, then, it was time to seize the initiative.

A bold move, yes, but an incredibly risky one. Risks like these are often worth taking, however. Frederick the Great did, and succeeded in fundamentally re-aligning the alliances that governed the European balance of power in his day. Napoleon did, and almost succeeded at creating a French continental hegemony. However, the riskier the gambit, the more you need to study the odds, plan for contingencies, summon everything and everyone you can in your cause before you roll the dice. Not only will you reduce the risk of rolling craps, but you cushion your losses if you do.

That’s what made the Bush Administration’s otherwise laudable attempt at seizing the initiative a grand failure. The Administration did not carefully study the pros and cons, the opportunities and risks. Not only did it brush aside (and alienate) its traditional allies, but it also paved over the advice from its very own experts in the executive branch. (See the sad history of the Future of Iraq project for a good example.) Like an eight year old playing his first game of Risk, the Bush Administration scooped up its forces, dropped them on the map, rolled the dice, and then childishly refused to admit that its strategy wasn’t well thought through.

Sometimes, a game isn’t totally lost. Another player might take over someone’s position, look at the board with fresh eyes, and extricate that side from what had looked like certain defeat. Or, perhaps, the original player might realize his mistakes, and act with the candor and self-criticism needed to dig out of the hole he made for himself. What won’t work, of course, is another childish display of petulance, in which, against all objective measures, the player claims that, in fact, he’s really winning the game. In chess, if someone refuses to admit checkmate, you know never to play with that person again. It’s just a game. War is not.

Friction

THEORY
Aside from the “war is the continuation of politics by other means” idea, the most famous concept from On War is friction. The basic idea is simple: things go wrong. In other words, never depend on everything going according to plan. You'd think people would know better, but...

Luttwak has a nice, everyday example in Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. Suppose you and your neighbors decide on the spur of the moment to have a beach party. Of course, the beach is only a half hour’s drive away. Factoring in another half an hour for packing the car with blankets, food, sunscreen, and other necessities, that means you can all meet at the beach in an hour, right?

I think we all know how this story turns out. One family is low on gas, so they’re delayed fifteen minutes. Another family is new to the neighborhood, so when they take a wrong turn, it takes them 45 minutes to get back on course. The family responsible for bringing the cooler can’t find it in the garage, so they have to stop to buy a new one. The party really doesn’t start until an hour or two after the planned time, despite everyone’s best intentions.

The same principle applies in war, only more intensively, since there's an enemy working hand in hand with fate to undo your plans. In our beach party example, no one is actively trying to prevent the families from reaching the beach. No one has tampered with the street signs, let air out of their tires, or blocked the streets with debris. Our hypothetical beach party is like an engineering problem—just one that isn’t very well project managed. When you throw in a surly neighbor doing everything he can to stop the beach party from happening, the number of things that can go wrong skyrockets. (Maybe that’s another good reason to be nice to your neighbors.)

In war, friction happens all the time. In 1862, someone in the Confederate army wrapped a copy of the marching orders around some cigars, then accidentally dropped it where a Union soldier later found it. A storm smashed the Mongol fleet that was poised for an invasion of the Japanese islands. There are plenty of such examples, at every level of strategy, of the role that blind fate played in the history of warfare. A responsible commander tries to plan for the unexpected. A clever commander actually figures out ways to prevent accidents, or at least minimize the damage. Not even the most brilliant commander can ever plan for every contingency.

Obviously, friction applies to any human enterprise. Speaking as a veteran of software releases, I only wish people in my industry sometimes had a better appreciation for this principle. Inevitably, release dates slip, but no one ever builds in some padding in the schedule the next time around. Quite the contrary: the trend has been to squeeze releases further together, giving friction an even bigger chance to wreak havoc with deadlines.

Friction can help make better sense of failures. The natural tendency when something goes wrong is to point fingers. Who’s the idiot who made the mistake? Usually, there’s no convenient idiot; systemic failure is often the culprit. During the Cold War, many people concerned about strategic surprise—particularly the risk of a surprise Soviet nuclear attack—were focused on these kinds of systemic failures. The Pearl Harbor disaster didn’t happen from a single person’s catastrophic mistake. Many pebbles rolling down the hill contributed to the avalanche: It was clear that the Japanese were planning an attack, but where, when and how were the question. The commanders at Pearl Harbor, fearing sabotage by Japanese infiltrators, moved aircraft closer together, to make them easier to guard—but also making them easier targets en masse for Japanese bombers. A Soviet agent in Japan passed along detailed intelligence about the planned attack, but it was small strand amidst a tangle of information that American authorities were in the midst of evaluating. For some sharp analyses of the systemic failures behind Pearl Harbor and other great catastrophes, I recommend Gooch and Cohen’s Military Misfortunes or Allison’s Essence of Decision for details.

Friction is almost axiomatic in Clausewitz, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that it has some useful corollaries:

• Keep your strategy as simple as possible. The more moving parts in the strategy, the greater the risk that the whole strategy comes to a halt when one of these cogs slips. The Japanese attack on Midway, for example, had too many task forces moving on a precise schedule to expect all of them to arrive on time.


• Never have a strategy predicated on a chain of if’s. This is a slightly different version of the previous corollary. Sometimes, strategic thinking depends too much on a particular chain of events occurring. Back in the 1980s, when Enver Hoxa, the communist leader of Albania, died, an overheated analysis in The Atlantic Monthly argued that this one small event (no offense intended to Albanians) might lead us to the brink of World War III. If the Soviets saw their prestige at stake, if another independent Albanian took power; if they had to move their ground forces through Yugoslavia to enforce their will on Albania; if the Yugoslavians decided to halt the Soviet columns; if, if, if. Anyone who has ever drawn a decision tree knows the fallacy of this kind of thinking. Unfortunately, in policy circles, where people do worry a great deal about being blamed for catastrophic failures, analysis can get a little unhinged. (Fortunately, the US government didn’t see Hoxa's death quite the same ways as The Atlantic Monthly did.)


• Never have a plan that doesn’t permit adjustments. You have to build some flexibility into the plan. During Lee’s invasion of the North in 1863, he knew the Union army would eventually have to fight the Confederates. Lee wanted to make sure that it was the right time and place, but he couldn’t tell where. Instead, he knew had had to feel his way through the operational level of his strategy—which, of course, depended on good intelligence from his cavalry about the Union army’s movements. When J.E.B. Stuart took the Confederate cavalry on another raid around the Union rear, he robbed Lee temporarily of critical information.


• Have more resources than you think you need. Troops, fuel, ammunition—you’ll never feel as though you have enough, so put your hands on more than you think you need. If you play too closely to the margin of expected resources, you’ll be stuck when it turns out you unexpectedly need more. The famous three-to-one rule (if you’re attacking, always outnumber your enemy by at least three to one) is, to a large degree, inspired by hard lessons on this subject.


• Always have an exit strategy. Needless to say, not only might you need to make adjustments to a strategy, but you may have to throw it out altogether. The term exit strategy, of course, is an instant reminder of the Vietnam quagmire. A common mistake early in the war wasn’t figuring out how to apply the strategy more vigorously, or against a different target (this bridge or that factory in North Vietnam?). The real mistake was not having an escape hatch if strategies like Operation ROLLING THUNDER were based on false premises.

One word of caution: you can easily take the fear of the unexpected too far. As I mentioned earlier, you can’t plan for every contingency. You can’t wait until every piece is in place. “The slows”—Lincoln’s derisive term for McClellan’s unwillingness to begin an attack until every soldier and supply wagon was in the proper place—can be as dangerous as recklessness. The ablest commanders are sometimes the people who make the best guesses at how to balance preparation and initiative.

PRACTICE
The Iraq invasion, at the theater level of strategy, violated these rules altogether. Operationally, tactically, technically, the invasion was initially a great success, a quick occupation against far less resistance than many expected. (However, segments of the Iraqi army had already planned to melt away into the population to fight the Coalition during the occupation, not the invasion. Shock and awe, therefore, didn’t exactly work as advertised.)

Tragically, the theater level strategy—invade Iraq, find and eliminate the weapons of mass destruction the Baathists were concealing, install some new leaders to replace the “decapitated” Baath party, shake the hands of a grateful populace, and leave—didn’t work. Its failure was no big surprise to anyone familiar at the most basic level with the concept of friction. Too large a chain of ifs. No flexibility built into the occupation plan… No exit strategy…You can’t blame some inevitable level of bad luck, missed opportunities, or unexpected turns of events. These were deliberate decisions, at the theater level, to ignore friction altogether.

Anyone reading this post already knows, in literally gory detail, what hasn’t gone according to plan in Iraq. I won’t repeat the details here.

The dynamics of strategy

THEORY
Everyone has heard some tried and true principles of strategy like, “Expect the unexpected,” “Always have a plan B,” or, “Better to have more firepower than you think you need, because you might have thought wrong.” These common sense principles have their echoes in the great works of military strategy—in fact, some “great works” might seem like prescriptive lists, dressed up as profundity. What makes Clausewitz’s On War a great book, however, isn’t necessarily how original it is. Clausewitz couldn’t claim that he scooped someone else who might have written a book with the same arguments In fact, as a participant in the Napoleonic Wars, Clausewitz admitted to being a student of what Napoleon, Wellington, Blucher and others did and said.

Any characteristics from the following list might make a book great:

• Originality, including unexpected and surprising insights.


• Depth, breadth, and general comprehensiveness in covering a topic.


• The ability to move or persuade a large or critical audience.

What makes On War a great work are both its arguments and how Clausewitz makes them—a kind of general theory of action. After reading Clausewitz, you not only understand individual concepts like friction, but you also gain an almost emotional appreciation for the dynamic nature of war. If you brush aside the often stilted language of a 19th century German officer, you can see a roiling, restless world of about attack and defense, sudden brilliance and catastrophic error, measure and countermeasure.

Clausewitz didn’t necessarily tell the whole story; plenty of later writers filled in many important parts. As Luttwak points out in Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, crafting a strategy isn’t a static affair, like assembling the plan and materials for building a treehouse for your kids. Instead, military strategy, to match reality at all, has to be based on the expected and unexpected reactions of all the participants, plus the inevitable curves that Fate will throw at you. These statements will make more sense once we look at the individual moving parts.

PRACTICE
I want to dwell on that last notion—strategy isn’t like an engineering problem—for a moment. We have a tendency to look at American wars as questions of what the United States is and isn’t doing, should and shouldn’t be doing. In other words, we often do see it as an engineering problem: apply some precisely-targeted force here, a little diplomacy there, and voila! you have victory.

We only sustain this fiction by ignoring our opponents, allies, and everyone in between. If journalism is both an insight into the news and how we as Americans color it with our own worldview, you might identify this blind spot through recent news articles. In the last week of Iraq coverage in The New York Times, here’s the focus of these articles:

New York Times Iraq coverage, 05/26/04 to 06/02/04
	Primary focus		Substantial mention
GROUP	#	%	#	%
US military in Iraq	40	38%	8	8%
US civilian authorities in Iraq	11	10%	8	8%
US military and civilian leaders in the US	22	21%	4	4%
Average US citizens	2	2%	3	3%
Coalition troops and civilian workers in Iraq	1	1%	0	0%
Coalition leaders	2	2%	1	1%
Average citizens in coalition countries	0	0%	0	0%
Other governments or NGOs	6	6%	9	8%
General Iraqi insurgents	8	8%	12	11%
Specific Iraqi insurgent groups	11	10%	3	3%
Terrorists generally	0	0%	2	2%
Specific terrorist groups	0	0%	0	0%
Specific Iraqi leaders	12	11%	10	9%
Specific Iraqi religious sects	3	3%	9	8%
Specific Iraqi clans, ethnic groups, or formal organizations	4	4%	10	9%
Average Iraqi citizens	10	9%	8	8%
TOTAL # OF STORIES	106

Just to be up front about my methodology, I left out any editorials, op-ed pieces, and the sidebar summaries of all Iraq-related news from the last few days. Some stories shared multiple main emphases (for example, the Najaf-Kufa clashes were predominantly about both the Sadrists and the US forces fighting them).

Consider, for a moment, that this week has been dominated by news that skew these numbers: UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi’s announcement of Iraqi interim president and premier appointees; the Ahmed Chalabi espionage scandal; the continued conflict between US forces and the Sadrist Army of the Mahdi. In other words, the news was unusually skewed in the direction of particular Iraqi leaders (Iyad Alawi, Ahmed Chalabi, and Muqtada al-Sadr) and a particular insurgent group (the Sadrists). If you factored out the clash with the a-Sadr's militia, the actual number of New York Times stories that clearly identified specific insurgent groups and analyzed their organization, strategies, goals, and strength would be zero.

To make informed, intelligent choices about the war in Iraq, we can’t afford this level of ignorance. The other side has its strategies, and it’s working vigorously to undermine our own. We have allies, but they have their own interests that don’t match ours completely. And the people whose hearts and minds we’re supposed to be winning aren’t an amorphous, undifferentiated lump on which we can impress our desires.

Maybe, by the time we finish discussing of strategic dynamics, you’ll cringe the way I do whenever you hear phrases like Iraqis, the Arab street, the insurgents, terrorists--terms that effectively describe nothing at all. If you’ve read the previous paragraph carefully, you might understand why.

Postscript: You can blame journalists for being justifiably frightened of venturing into some of the more dangerous parts of Iraq in search of a story. Or maybe they’re just too lazy to leave the comforts of the hotel. However you look at it, though, I think we have a serious, national blind spot.