Beating Goliath Page 3
Mack’s analysis warrants two further comments. First, the disparity in material strength between the stronger and weaker sides is almost always misleading in great-power wars against foreign insurgencies because, as Mack observes, great powers never commit but a fraction of their military power to such fights. As great powers they must always prepare first and foremost for war against other extant or emerging great powers, and they may have other overseas military commitments to boot. What counts is not the gross power relationship—with a few nuclear weapons the United States could have wiped out North Vietnam in a matter of minutes—but rather the balance of power within the theater of combat operations. Going further, within the theater of operations, what counts first and foremost is the balance between those directly engaged in the fighting—combat as opposed to support forces. Distance dilutes combat power. Great powers use expeditionary forces to wage overseas wars, and expeditionary forces, especially those technology-addicted and creature-comforted forces of the United States, are notorious consumers of combat support and combat-service support.
Second, while hindsight argues strongly that losing great powers had no vital interests at stake in wars against vitally interested winning insurgencies, calibration of interest is hardly an objective undertaking. The farther one ventures from homeland physical security, the more subjective the term “vital interest” becomes. Neither Imperial Japan nor Nazi Germany were in a position to attack the continental United States, which accounts in no small measure for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inability to mobilize domestic political opinion for war absent the reckless Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s subsequent and even more idiotic declaration of war on the United States. Who defines vital interests and by what criteria? And are not political leaders, at least in democratic states, compelled to sell virtually all major resorts to force as wars of necessity (as opposed to wars of choice), which in turn require the invocation of threatened “vital” interests? In the case of the United States, even obvious wars of choice—the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, and Iraq wars—are embraced as crusades against the forces of evil, with the attendant demonization of enemy leaders and ideologies. No great power abjures wars of choice, which indeed are a distinguishing feature of great powers; vital interests are not the only interests warranting threatened and actual use of force. That said, the postulation of interest ignores not only the definitional subjectivity of interest but also the fact that the stakes may appear to be far more important on the eve of war than afterward, especially if it is a costly lost war. If the United States had decisively won the Vietnam War in 1965 or 1966, the Johnson administration’s prewar claim that America had critical interests in preserving an independent non-Communist South Vietnam would likely have escaped convincing challenge. Military victory tends to render moot leadership claims of high stakes as well as leadership exertion to sustain public opinion.27
Ivan Arreguin-Toft, in his seminal 2001 assessment, “How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict” (and a subsequent book of the same title28), has taken up where Mack left off. Contending that Mack was the “one scholar [who] has advanced a strong general explanation of asymmetric conflict outcomes”—namely, that “the actor with the most resolve wins, regardless of material power resources,” Arreguin-Toft focuses instead on “how a weak actor’s strategy can make a strong actor’s power irrelevant.” His starting point is that “strategy…can multiply or divide power.”29 He contends that “the best predictor of asymmetric conflict is strategic interaction” and that “strong actors will lose asymmetric conflicts when they use the wrong strategy vis-à-vis their opponents’ strategy.”30
In his view, the strong actor has two strategies available. The first is “direct attack,” or “the use of the military to capture or eliminate an adversary’s armed forces, thereby gaining control of that opponent’s values” (e.g., “a capital city, an industrial or communications center, or a bridge”). Direct attack’s “main goal is to win the war by destroying the adversary’s capacity to resist with armed forces. Both attrition and blitzkrieg are direct-attack strategies.”31 The second strategy available to the strong actor is “barbarism,” or “the systematic violation of the laws of war in pursuit of a military or political objective.” Unlike direct attack, barbarism is aimed at destroying the weak actor’s political will to fight via such depredations against civilian populations as crop destruction, forcible population relocation, collective punishment, hostage-taking, reprisals, rape, murder, torture, and indiscriminate bombing.32 Reliance on barbarism to suppress rebellion has been common to imperial states from the Roman Empire through the Third Reich, and even democratic states have employed at least some elements of the strategy (e.g., Britain in South Africa, France in Algeria, the United States in Vietnam, Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip).
Two strategies are also available to the weaker side: “direct defense,” which entails “the use of armed forces to thwart the stronger side’s attempt to capture or destroy values such as territory, population, and strategic resources,” and “guerrilla warfare” (and its related strategy of terrorism), which involves “the organization of a portion of society for the purpose of imposing costs on an adversary using armed forces trained to avoid direct confrontation.”33 A guerrilla warfare strategy requires a supportive population and a physical or political sanctuary. In Arreguin-Toft’s view, “the universe of potential strategies can be reduced to two ideal-type strategic approaches: direct and indirect. Direct approaches target an adversary’s armed forces in order to destroy that adversary’s capacity to fight. Indirect approaches seek to destroy an adversary’s will to fight.”34 A guerrilla warfare strategy targets enemy soldiers, but it does so for the purpose of wearing down the enemy’s political will over time. Indeed, time is the indispensable ingredient of any successful guerrilla warfare strategy; denied the physical capacity to gain a quick and decisive victory over the stronger enemy, the weaker side must employ protraction of hostilities as its main weapon against the weaker-willed. And it certainly helps if, characteristically, the stronger side is overconfident.
In asymmetric conflicts when strategic interaction causes an unexpected delay between the commitment of armed forces and the attainment of military or political objectives, strong actors tend to lose for two reasons. First, although all combatants tend to have inflated expectations of victory, strong actors in asymmetric conflicts are particularly susceptible to this problem. If power implies victory, then an overwhelming power advantage implies an overwhelming—and rapid—victory. As war against a Lilliputian opponent drags on, however, dramatic overestimates of success force political and military elites in the strong state to escalate the use of force to meet expectations (thus increasing the costs of a conflict) or risk looking increasingly incompetent…. Strong actors also lose asymmetric wars when, in attempting to avoid increasing costs—such as declaring war, mobilizing reserves, raising taxes, or sustaining casualties—they yield to the temptation to employ barbarism. Barbarism conserves friendly forces, but even when militarily effective it is risky. Barbarism carries the possibility of domestic political discovery (and opposition) as well as external intervention.35
Arreguin-Toft contends that the stronger side is most likely to lose when it attacks with a direct strategy and the weak side defends using an indirect strategy, all other things being equal. Why?
Unlike direct strategies, which involve the use of forces trained and equipped to fight as organized units against other similarly trained and equipped forces, indirect defense strategies typically rely on irregular armed forces (i.e., forces difficult to distinguish from noncombatants when not in actual combat). As a result, an attacker’s forces tend to kill or injure noncombatants during operations, which tends to stimulate weak-actor resistance. Most important, because indirect defense strategies sacrifice values [territory, population, resources, etc.] for time, they necessarily take longer to resolve so long as weak actors continue to have access to sanctuary and social support. In asymmetric conflict, delay favors the weak.36
This was pretty much what happened in Vietnam. The United States opted for a direct “search-and-destroy” strategy against enemy field forces practicing (with the exception of Tet) an indirect strategy of guerrilla warfare. The result, for the stronger side, was a politically intolerable protraction of bloody and indecisive hostilities. Both Westmoreland and Vo Nguyen Giap pursued a strategy of military attrition aimed at breaking the other side’s political will, and the Communists prevailed because they always had the stronger will as well as a strategy based on that fact. The British in North America also pursued a direct strategy against American forces, which were waging what amounted to a protracted guerrilla war. The colonial militia fought as irregulars, and after 1776 Gen. George Washington was careful not to risk the survival of the regular Continental Army. He was always prepared to run away from superior British force. Both the Vietnamese Communist and American rebel leaderships understood a critical reality that their stronger opponents failed to grasp: the insurgent can win simply by not losing, whereas the counterinsurgent power can lose by not winning.
Indirect defense via irregular warfare is in most cases the only sensible strategy for the weaker side because a direct defense is an invitation to swift defeat. The principal elements of irregular warfare are protraction, attrition, and deception. Protraction and attrition are dictated by the conventional enemy’s military superiority. Because the weaker side has no hope of quick and decisive victory, it employs time and the steady infliction of casualties and other war costs to subvert the enemy’s political will to continue fighting. Protraction also requires a willingness to trade space and resources for time because attempted territorial defense plays to the conventional enemy’
s superiority in firepower. Anonymity, or the capacity to dissolve into the local population and terrain (natural and man-made), shields irregular forces from the potentially catastrophic consequences of the enemy’s firepower superiority and can provoke the enemy to inflict politically self-defeating collateral damage on the civilian population.
In the twentieth century, Mao Tse-tung crafted a theory and practice of irregular warfare known as “protracted war” or “revolutionary war” that delivered Communist victories in China and Indochina and inspired other insurgents elsewhere in the third world. When the United States encountered this particular brand of irregular warfare in Vietnam, it grasped neither the essentially political nature of the conflict nor the limits of its own conventional military power in the Indochinese political and operational setting. It waged the only war it knew how to fight but was stalemated by an enemy with a ferociously superior will to win and a strategy of warfare that denied decisive application of U.S. military strengths. The United States picked the wrong strategy.
But if the stronger side can pick the wrong strategy, so too can the weaker side. Positional warfare is the stronger side’s best game, and for the weaker side to attempt to play that game, or at least play it prematurely, is to invite impalement on the stronger side’s firepower. The battles of Rorke’s Drift (1879) and Omdurman (1898) are but two of many colonial warfare examples of inevitably defeated weaker-side frontal assaults against prepared stronger-side defenses. The Boers in the Orange Free State and Transvaal initially attempted positional warfare against advancing stronger British forces, were defeated, and then switched to irregular warfare.37 Insurgencies that attempt to transition from guerrilla to conventional warfare before the balance of strength at least approaches parity with the regular enemy risk operational and even strategic defeat. The Communist-led insurgency in post–World War II Greece made this mistake, as did the Vietcong in mounting the Tet Offensive in 1968. Tet was a military calamity for the Vietcong because it sought to take and hold ground against vastly firepower-superior U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. The weaker side must never lose respect for the stronger side’s conventional superiority.
Arreguin-Toft’s analysis rests on a review of all asymmetric (i.e., strong actor versus weak actor) wars fought from 1800 to 200538 and on case studies of the Murid War (Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus, 1830–59), the Boer War (1899–1902), the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–40), the Vietnam War (1965–75), and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–89). He forcefully argues that strategic interaction is a better predictor of asymmetric war outcomes than any other factor, including interest, political will, strong-actor regime type, and foreign assistance to the weak actor. With respect to foreign help, he dismisses it as a significant contributor in all his case studies except the Soviet-Afghan War, in which U.S.-supplied handheld surface-to-air missiles enabled Afghan resistance forces to impose unacceptable losses on Soviet heliborne infantry operations.39 His analysis rejects the view that “weak actors could…be winning asymmetric conflicts because they are supplied from the outside, rather than because they use a favorable counterstrategy.” In fact, he claims his data show that “even when they receive no external support, weak actors are more likely to win opposite-approach interactions than they are same-approach interactions. Essentially, the effects of strategic interaction overwhelm the effects of external support for weak actors.”40
And what of the influence of the strong-actor regime type? The stronger side’s vulnerability to defeat in protracted conflicts against irregular foes is arguably heightened if it is a democracy. Indeed, the nature of the stronger side’s government is a key variable in the predicting prospects for insurgent success. Chances for victory are virtually nonexistent against powerful and ruthless dictatorships, which are not answerable to public or parliamentary opinion and are accustomed to violence and the threat of violence in getting what they want. Resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe were never in a position to liberate their countries on their own; German forces were too powerful and the Nazi state was exceptionally barbarous. Similarly, captive peoples in Eastern Europe had no prospect of overthrowing Soviet rule as long as Moscow retained the will and capacity to use force; Eastern Europe freed itself from Communist tyranny only when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev renounced Soviet use of force to preserve its European empire. Insurgent prospects improve against weak dictatorships and strong democracies, however. The former may in fact be weaker than the supposedly “weak” insurgent side, or at least not in possession of a strategically significant measure of physical superiority. And though modern democracies may be exceptionally powerful, they face internal constraints on the use of force that most dictatorships do not.
Gil Merom, in his persuasive study, How Democracies Lose Small Wars, examines France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam. “How,” he asks, “do democracies lose [small] wars in spite of their military superiority?” Put succinctly,
democracies fail in small wars because they find it extremely difficult to escalate the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure victory. They are restricted by their domestic structure, and in particular by the creed of some of their most articulate citizens and the opportunities their institutional makeup presents such citizens. Other states are not prone to lose such wars…. Furthermore, while democracies are inclined to fail in protracted small wars, they are not disposed to fail in others types of wars. In a nutshell, then, the profound answer to the puzzle involves the nature of the domestic structure of democracies and the ways by which it interacts with ground military conflict in insurgency situations.41
Merom accepts the importance of motivation and strategy in determining the outcome of state-versus-insurgency wars, but he believes that “the nature of the strong contender—that is, its domestic structure—remains the most important determinant of the outcomes of small wars.”42 Specifically, for democracies, “what dooms the prospects of political victory in protracted small wars involves an almost impossible trade-off between expedient and moral dicta that arise from an intricate interplay between forces in the battlefield and at home.”43
For Merom, the expedient strategy against an insurgency would be that of Arreguin-Toft’s “barbarism” against the weaker side’s noncombatant political and social support base, a strategy commonly practiced by dictatorships confronted with rebellion.
The ensuing brutality, however, invigorates moral opposition to the war. Depicted as immoral, the war objectives and casualties seem even less sensible. In the final analysis, then, events in the battlefield of small wars and the political requirements they entail create a front against the war that operates in the marketplace of ideas at home. This front alone can convince democracies to relinquish the initiative and become defensive in the battlefield, if only in order to minimize the pressure at home. In such a case, the war initiative shifts to the insurgents, and retreat becomes only a matter of time.44