Asymmetrical Information

I don't mean to flood your comments - but the small tags still haven't been closed on that post with all the footnotes. It doesn't show up in IE, for some reason, but Phoenix follows the rules and the rest of the page is itty-bitty.

A great deal of this is caused by simple lack of understanding of military science.

But a lot of it is also due to the same factor that tends to drive election coverage: the fact that reporters have to find something to say each day. This tends to cause them to see stories where there are none, because they need a story about which to write.

My how things change. When France was whipped by Prussia in a mere 7 months (1870-1871) it was considered astounding. We're knocking on Baghdad's door after less than a week of real combat and we're "bogged down." The press sure has a high standard for success.

What happens when you have am ethnically and religious minority regime, with myriad security and paramilitary agencies, tied together by corruption, terror and/or marriage, dominating
a sizable ethnic majority of two different clan
and religious groups, looting the key country's
resources, what would you say is the morality of
that regime; and how long would it last. (Guess
which regime, I'm referring to

Shafer misses Part 5: after the victory, the press tells us that the ease of our victory shows that Saddam was so weak he was never a threat, that his regime would have crumbled from within soon anyway, yada yada yada.

Well, we got Austria eventually -- it just took a little more time. Of course, they had working tanks and air superiority.

As we go further and further towards a society that demands immediate gratification, even in events on the battlefield, the reporters for most of the major media outlets more and more are taking on the manic-depressive tone of the New York Post sports section.

Hey, I agree with the Post's editorial stance on the war, but over the past 25 years since Murdoch bought it, the paper's attitude on its back pages towards the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Knicks, etc., is to treat virtuyally every win as one of the triumphant moments in sports history, while every loss is greeted by a "fire everyone before we have to slash our wrists or jump off the building" attitude. While this type of journalism is a relatively harmless amusement when confined to the world of sports, taking the same attitude into the coverage of war turns every victory or on-target missile strike into a sign of an impending cakewalk, while any minor setback becomes a disaster, and every moment we're not lowering the flag over Saddam's compounds in Baghdad another reason to roll out the "Q" word (Johnny Apple's "quagmire").

It also leads the TV pundits and military experts (the video equivalent of newspaper columnists) to make accusations that those drawing up the war plans don't know what they're doing or at the very least have completely underestimated the strenght of the Iraqi forces.

Instead of giving all the reporters cipiro pills in case of an anthrax attack, the Pentagon should have budgeted for some lithium pills instead. It might have calmed down some of the hyperactive prose that's gone out over the last five days.

Reminds me of a John Stewart joke after the first PGW:

Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that we have smart bombs and really stupid children?

Maybe we should have dropped dumb kids instead of smart bombs. I can see the briefing now:

"uh, here we have Johnny parachuting onto the Ba'athist Party Headquarters and he's going to spray paint "Eat Me" on the side of the building. Here he goes now, "E - E - T ..."

Hidden in the hysterical reporting is a real, and very important story. We miscalculated pretty badly on this one. I think we'll get away with it- that's one of the nice things about having overwhelming miltary superiority. But in a fairly even military confrontation a miscalculation this large would have cost us the war. As it is its costs will only be a higher death toll among Iraqi civilians and conscripts (I can't bring myself to consider Iraqi Fedayeen or SRG casualties a cost) and our own forces. In the worst case scenario (that seems possible- I can certainly imagine worse, like us actually losing the war) it will embolden our enemies, and lead to further warfare- they will be wrong to be emboldened, but that's still a loss as far as I am concerned.

What is disturbing about this is that it is a mistake that we seem to keep making. New technology comes along, and we rely on it to fight our wars for us. Civilian commanders make up military doctrine on the fly (usually based on airpower), and ignore the fact that in any multiplication problem the result depends on what is on either side of the multiplication symbol. Asymmetrical warfare gives some multipliers to our enemies as well.

Any well planned military campaign, if its planners have the luxury of doing so, estimates the worst possible scenario and then doubles it. In this case, we sem to have estimated the worst ccase scenario and then halved it, or divided it by three, or four, or ten.

It is a mistake to think that shock and awe consists of blowing up largely empty buildings, even if they are c&c centers. Shock and awe is boots on the ground. Shock and awe is putting down 750,000 troops (some goodly percentage of them infantrymen), 6,000 AIFVs (with at least 2,000 of them main line battle tanks) and a hell of alot of special forces as well, with the means to insert them wherever needed. Had we put a force like that on the ground we might well have seen the capitulation that we expected. Instead, by putting a force on the ground that clearly could not complete its mission if faced with serious resistance, and unnecessarily prolonged the war and raised its costs, both in lives lost, and in the ease of establishing an acceptable peace.

Now that is probably impossible in this day and age (although we could have insisted on having at least a couple more divisions, which might have been enough). Our military budget may be at record levels in terms of absolute spending, but it's pretty low in terms of spending relative to GDP. And an enormous amount of it goes toward weapons that are expensive only because they are intended to minimize civilian casualties. I'm for reduciong civilian casualties- winning the peace is the ultimate goal- but I think we need to recognize that if that is a major component of our military strategy, we will have to spend more to achieve it.

The truth is that we are stretched way too thin. I think that either we need to scale back our military commitments (and I'm a bit afraid of what the results of that would be), or we need to double our military spending in the next few years, and put the money toward assets that actually win wars, like infantrymen and tanks. Either that, or we need to stop worrying about enemy civilians- in that case we're all set- we can level any country that we choose, assuming that it has no nuclear capability. But that is not only inhumane, it is also a losing strategy in today's world, at least for wars of intervention.

It's time to wake up to the fact that the way to win wars bloodlessly is to possess overwhelming force. And that means, given our current commitments, having at least 20 combat ready divisions at all times. Preferably more.

It is also time to face up to the fact that not all wars can be won without blood being shed. And not all wars can be won by chanting "we are the greatest military power in the history of the world- don't bother fighting us", if we choose not to demonstrate that we are in fact such a beast.

An unloaded gun is awfully dangerous to its possessor. And given that the current world order is almost entirely based on the appearance of American invincibility, it is stupid of us to allow any crack, however small, to appear in that facade.

So I think it is either time to get out of the military hyperpower game (the consequences of which are hard to predict), or actually make sure that we have the combat forces that we need to fight a two theatre war, with some to spare, and the logistic support necessary to support that, with a lot to spare.

And we _need_ to stop relying on military doctrine that underestimates the importance of a lot of troops on the ground. Lightning wars are won by overwhelming force, and that force cannot mainly consist of air power if you are interested in minimizing civilian casualties, and your enemy isn't.

I've always like Rummy, but some heads need to roll over this, and I think his is the first that should go. This war was a huge gamble in the first place, and when you gamble on this scale you need to have ensured that you will win, totally. That is now impossible for us, and I'm afraid that even a military victory in Iraq will bne a Phyrric vitory. I hope I'm wrong.

Tagore -- you're right on one aspect: the two regional war strategy is a budgeting tactic not a foreign policy.

The Bush Doctrine subtlely changed this -- but we're still saying to Congress, two regional wars.
Why? Because Congress would have Bush's ass on a stick if he said anything else and his entire 4 years would be spent trying to reset expectations.

Rumsfeld deserves many kudos for challenging the defense department to rethink its doctrine. What you saw in the opening stages of the war on Iraq was indeed a gamble -- and one that I think we were right to take.

In the first PGW, we overestimated their willingness to fight and as a result the Air Force pounded sand for three weeks -- only towards the end did it institute the tactics that are now being used to great effect: close air support and in-air retasking.

Yes, the firefights are bad, but pretty much every Iraqi (or Al-Qaeda disguised as an Iraqi) gets killed when they approach our soldiers. A hidden RPG might do some damage, but what do you think the return fire looks like?

Furthermore, the gamble had two purposes -- the first is the "shock and awe" tactic of surprise that optimistically would have lead to an earlier surrender. The second is a quick positioning of forces to draw Iraqi troops into a kill zone in the desert instead of the streets of Baghdad.

Saddam is a risk taker, and he's going to bring his troops south while he thinks that he's got overwhelming fire power. Now's his chance -- he's going to ignore his flank to try to go after the Third Infantry Division and once he commits, the game will be over.

Am I an optimist? Perhaps. But I do know one thing, nine days is a little bit too early to be suggesting that heads roll.

Matt- well, you're right that nine days is early, and that my statement was a bit over the top. I was a bit upset, because I do think that there was a significant miscalculation involved, but I could be completely wrong about all of this- believe me, I hope I am. And it may be that it just was not possible to have a larger force in place given the constraints that we were under, in which case it was probably wisest to go ahead with this force, and shuttle more troops in as needed. It's unfortunate though- I would much rather have seen a scenario in which we had enough troops on the ground to take firm control of the areas we passed through on the way to Baghdad. It would have reduced civilian casualties, and I think helped to achieve the "tipping point" in Iraq more quickly. Right now I think a lot of Iraqis are unsure that we're going to finish the job, and allowing the Fedayeen to keep control of Basra doesn't help that perception.

But I think that no matter how well things go in the next few weeks we've already created future problems for ourselves based solely on perceptions of ths war, whether they're correct or not. A lot of the current world order is based on the apparent invincibility of the US military. And the appearance, to a lot of people in the world, is that we're struggling in this war- that things are not going as planned, and that the Iraqis are doing significantly better against us than we expected.

I hope you're right about Saddam as risk-taker. He's certainly shown poor judgement in all his previous wars. But I don't like the idea that we're building in the assumption that his judgement will be poor this time into our military plans. What if he doesn't come out into the desert? The force on the ground seems a lot smaller than what you would ideally want to take Baghdad. How long will we have to wait before we have the forces in place to actually do it? And if we move with too little force, how much bloodier will the fighting be?

I don't disagree with you re the firefights. I hate to see us losng M1s, but our losses have been small and will continue to be. But I feel genuinely sorry for the Iraqi conscripts that are being killed in these one-sided battles (although I think that it's probably a good thing if the Fedayeen, or possibly al-Qaeda involved are being decimated- I hate to be that ghoulish about it, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for them). Maybe a larger force wouldn't have made a difference in this respect. But maybe it would have. And I tend to believe that more mass is, in general a good thing (probably not a controversial statement :)). Could we really not have had a larger force in place? If we could have, is there any reason that we shouldn't have?

If we're going to fight these kinds of wars, and also maintain our other commitments, _and_ have a sizeable reserve in place for contingencies (i.e., what if Pyongyang decides that this would be a perfect time to roll toward Seoul?- not likely, but those guys are nuts), I think we're just going to have to bite the bullet and ratchet up defense spending to Reagan-era levels as a percentage of GDP. If we're not willing to do that, we're going to have to get other nations to shoulder more of the burden of upholding the international order.

Tagore -- as a sidenote: I believe regardless of how the war on Iraq proceeds, both Bush and Chirac will be losers and winners.

After Iraq, France will be marginalized and isolated from its current allies, but the cost will most likely be the end of the Bush Doctrine (unless for some reason Congress had a major change of heart on defense spending).

Surprsingly enough, if I were anti-war and I really didn't want us in Iraq, I would have pulled this argument out a long time ago. :)

With respect to increases in military funding, I think Defense has, since Reagan, sold a package that is unlivable for the current age. There was a *study done for Congress in 97* that showed that our military was dangerously understaffed and in times of high preparedness would suffer a higher accident rate than was experienced in the Gulf War.

You're right to point out the discrepancy between the expectations of the Bush Doctrine with the reality of Defense funding. The two regional war strategy simply doesn't reconcile with the War on Terror.

At the same time, what Rumsfeld is doing is right. He rides the generals hard to do more with less and generally speaking the armed services are much more effective as a result.

We pounded way too much sand in the PGW and ground forces moved way too slowly. This time, we're focusing our bombing and we're pushing the ground troops.

*Strategy Page* has a high level explaination of the purpose of the new strategy -- and by and large, I think the approach is reasonable.

All this talk about more troops in the overlooks the fact that the troops would need food and water daily, and transportation to bring it to them, and fuel/maintainence for the transport, etc. So we'd have had to wait weeks or months more, giving Saddam more time to get ready, and giving him more time to mine and booby trap ports, then we'd have had to move forward more slowly . . .

Maybe the ultimate results would have been much better than what we've done so far, but that is NOT obvious.

A press cycle driving reporting is the premise of the initial post. Pretty much looks like there is a press cycle, not to mention a pecking orders and lots of other interesting sociological features. That sort of obscures the point that the stories are feeding off of comments from professional soldiers who want to get a message out. I do not know whether the level of dissent heard from military officers is normal. I have a suspicion that, like many other things in this war, this level of dissent this early is not the norm. Are these concerns evidence of antique ideas among soldiers or real risks? Can't know that yet, but if US soldiers lives are being put on the line, erring on the side of caution seems wise. The press cycle is a side show. What's up with the soldiers?

On that point, here's something out today. A senior Central Command military officials is quoted on MSNBC as saying that "We're prepared to pay a very high price" to take Baghdad. Further, that "If it means a lot of casualties, then it means a lot of casualties. We"re going to take them out."

That, I assume, is a request to reporters to ask Rumsfeld what an acceptable level of casualties would be in taking Baghdad.

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