The Series: Beyond Iraq Strategies -- Insurgency and 4GW
Section X. Equipment and Organizations for Maneuver Warfare
It is possible to execute maneuver warfare and 4GW with the equipment the U.S. military has today and has planned for the future. As the 16th Century samurai philosopher Miyamoto Musashi insisted, a warrior using this strategy and armed only with a fencepost can take on a fully outfitted samurai and defeat him as Musashi in fact did. Three hundred years later, blitzkrieg warfare achieved its greatest success, against France and England in May 1940, when German tanks were generally inferior to their allied counterparts in quality and in numbers.
However, the question is whether, by applying the principles outlined by Sun Tzu and John Boyd, one can produce a force more attuned to the challenges of the modern post-Soviet world, and reduce the burden of defense on the national economy. The people and ideas portion, which relates primarily to harmony, initiative, and rapidity of decision, was considered in the previous sections. This section looks at the more visible part of military forces – hardware and organizations. We begin with an assessment of the demands that maneuver warfare and 4GW make on them.
First, military hardware and organizations must possess the inherent variety of action to facilitate cheng / ch’i maneuvers. To belabor a point, in the Boyd / Sun Tzu scheme the estimated effectiveness of the force to perform any given option is important, but not the dominant element of victory. Of much greater weight is the range of options the force offers and the rapidity with which it can switch between them. This weighting reflects the fact that a clever and motivated enemy can develop counters to any particular capability. One force will win because – through training, cohesion, and leadership – it can create options for itself and dilemmas for the enemy, and switch between them more rapidly, more inconspicuously, and with more irregularity than the enemy can cope.
What the U.S. military must ask of hardware and formal organization is that it facilitate this cheng / ch’i process or at the least not hinder it unduly. Ponderous though highly lethal forces will constrain options for commanders, since they are most suited to cheng roles. Also, it is a challenge to become formless with such a force, and its attendant logistical tail. Great armored sweeps through the desert and the 31-hour missions of the B-2 bomber in the NATO-Serbian War come immediately to mind.
Once an option is selected, performance of it does come to the fore. Maneuver warfare requires that forces must be able to sustain a high operational tempo so that when a vulnerability (“gap”) has been created or discovered, it can be exploited. Since the enemy is a clever and determined human being, one must assume he will find and close gaps as rapidly as possible, or, even more insidiously, change them into traps, or convert some of them into chengs of his own by attempting to create and exploit gaps in one’s own forces. If he can do this more rapidly than friendly forces can cope, he can create Boyd-type effects: panic, confusion, and chaos, leading to collapse. This suggests that forces with mission cycles measured in days, or in some cases even hours, will find it difficult to function as the ch’i component of maneuver warfare, thus limiting the options for commanders.
Logistics and support requirements also play a role in sustaining high operational tempos. In the worst case, a force will self-attrite if its equipment breaks down or takes too long to repair, or it may simply grind to a halt if it runs out of fuel. Any of these obviously interfere with the ability to maneuver and create and exploit gaps. Systems that require extensive logistical support also tend to focus commanders’ attention inward. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, it was the rare commander who could envision how to break free of the railroads that were providing his sustenance. Part of the genius of both Grant and Sherman is that they were able to convert this obvious dependency into a cheng, that is, fool Confederate commanders into attacking “lines of supply” while they launched out cross country: Grant towards Jackson and Vicksburg, and Sherman towards the sea.
There is also the complexity issue. As Boyd warned (p. 33), complex hardware and systems tend to focus organizations inward, which can accelerate the trend towards confusion, disintegration, and collapse. However, technical complexity per se is generally not the most severe issue, since it generally “just” degrades how often the system is available for combat. This is bad enough, and can push the focus inward, but in the hands of a skillful commander can also be mitigated or even used to deceive the enemy, in the manner of Grant and Sherman. Organizational complexity, however, is much more debilitating and is the key component in Clausewitz’s famous friction. It represents organizational entropy that dissipates energy and converts it into chaos, without having to wait for the enemy to do it. In particular, the OODA loops of complex organizations can degrade very quickly in such an environment, making them vulnerable to cheng / ch’i maneuvers by the other side.
Because of this slowing of OODA loops, complex organizations typically become predictable. Through great effort, they master a small number of options, and they execute these over and over again. Perhaps the most familiar example is the practice of flying “route packages,” the same bombing routes on every mission, which allows even a Third World opponent to set up flack alleys and MiG orbits. Serbia used the U.S. military’s predictability to shoot down one of the previously-thought invisible F-117 stealth fighters.
The real problem with very complex equipment is that it spawns complex organizations to operate, support, and maintain it. In other words, technical complexity tends to generate organizational complexity, and thus predictability and slowness.