4GW - INSURGENCY and SURVIVAL -- Making the Insane Crazy & the Downtrodden Invincible
(Continued from -- Understanding Iraq/Saudi War- Insurgency as 4GW - PART I
From The Series: Beyond Iraq Strategies: Insurgency To Drive Bush Crazy
Section VII. What Makes a Military Force "Effective"? -- Sun Tzu's and Boyd's Perspective
Sun Tzu focused on the problem of how to get groups of people to work together harmoniously under conditions of hardship, danger, and the inevitable confusion of conflict (and it applies to all forms of conflict, including business, politics, and sport). Before envisioning conflict with another state, the ruler and his immediate advisors must survey and compare five factors:
1. Which leadership has the Way? The "Way" (Tao) means harmony among people, so that the people and the leadership are united in purpose to overcome fear of danger.
2. Is the terrain favorable?
3. Is the weather likely to be favorable?
4. Which side's generals are the more capable? The political leadership must make objective comparisons of such factors as humaneness, intelligence, trustworthiness, courage, and sternness.
5. Which army's doctrine and discipline is superior? Here the leadership must consider organization, control, assignment of appropriate ranks to officers, regulation of supply routes, and provisions.
Sun Tzu believed that the moral strength and intellectual faculty of man were decisive in war, and that if these were properly applied, war could be waged with certain success. (As an aside, there is nothing in Boyd to contradict this statement).
Sun Tzu enumerates 7 factors, related to the five elements above, to guide planning:
1. Which ruler has the Way? The Way, in this sense, includes unity of purpose between the ruler and the population and other factors, such as the ability to clearly perceive the true situation (which includes the ability to make these comparisons).
2. Which commander is the more able? Consider the factors previously noted: intelligence, trustworthiness, bravery, humaneness, and sternness.
3. Which army can better exploit the advantages of climate and terrain?
4. Whose troops are the stronger?
5. Whose discipline is more effective? In which army are regulations and instructions better carried out?
6. Whose officers and soldiers are better trained?
7. Whose system of rewards and punishments is clearer?
Later he restates these with a slightly more tactical (i.e., who will win the next engagement) flavor:
1. Those who know when to fight and when not to fight are victorious.
2. Those who know when to use many or few troops are victorious.
3. Those whose upper and lower ranks have the same desire are victorious.
4. Those who face the unprepared with preparation are victorious.
5. Those whose generals are able and not constrained by their governments are victorious.
Leaders should improve weaknesses wherever they exist, and the final calculation rests heavily on the experience, intelligence, and intuitive understanding of the commander and the ruler. Success in conflict depends on one's ability to perform these calculations and, in particular, not to deceive oneself.
Boyd's scheme is:
1. Mutual trust; unity. Very similar to The Way in Sun Tzu's list of factors.
2. Intuitive competence, at all levels from private to general. In addition to proficiency with weapons at the individual level, "intuitive competence" also applies at the command levels, where it refers to the "feel" great commanders have for the progress of the battle, and in particular to their seemingly uncanny abilities to detect and exploit openings while they still present opportunities. Comes from years of practice at ever increasing levels of complexity. The Germans called it fingerspitzengefühl, literally "finger tip feeling" and it implies such a high level of competence that decisions can be made without hesitation. Perhaps similar to the Zen notion of action without a "sticking mind."
3. Mission orientation. The Germans called this auftragstaktik. The basic idea is that commanders and subordinates enter into a type of contract where the subordinate agrees to fulfill the commander's intent, while the commander agrees to give the subordinate wide latitude on how this is done.
4. Focus and direction. Related to the concept of "commander's intent." It often refers to a specific unit and its mission. All other units must make their activities support the fulfillment of this unit's mission. Depending on the progress of the operation, the commander may shift this role to another unit and another mission.
Boyd's insight was that organizations that operated along these lines would naturally generate higher OODA loop speeds and more irregular ways to employ them. Boyd concluded that such units could:
1. Employ a variety of measures that interweave menace-uncertainty-mistrust with tangles of ambiguity-deception-novelty as a basis to sever the adversary's moral ties and disorient him.
2. Select the initiative (or response) that is least expected [note: not necessarily the one that has the highest predicted effectiveness, since the enemy can perform these calculations, also].
3. Establish focus of main effort together with other efforts and pursue directions that permit many happenings, offer many branches, and threaten alternative objectives.
4. Move along paths of least resistance (to reinforce and exploit success).
5. Subvert, disorient, disrupt, overload, or seize adversary's vulnerable, yet critical, connections, centers, and activities in order to dismember organism and isolate remnants for later mop-up.
6. Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic and chaos in order to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse.
We find echoes in Sun Tzu: 1. Take them by confusion. 2. Throw them into disarray. 3. Cause division among them. 4. Victory is gained by surprise. 5. Take away the heart of their general.
Cheng and Ch'i: Forcing or Deceiving
The interplay of Cheng (Pinning -- Orthodox) and Ch'i (Distracting -- unorthodox) strategies is a tool of available to those who operate inside their opponents' OODA loops. It applies to the force (people-ideas-hardware) rather than to any particular component alone. Making armies able to take on opponents without being defeated is a matter of unorthodox (ch'i) and orthodox (cheng) methods ... The unorthodox and the orthodox give rise to each other like a beginning-less circle -- who could exhaust them? (24.) The utility (resiliency, cohesion and cleverness training) of a force can be assessed without predicting how effective it will be. This seeming contradiction hinges on the idea that the actual performance of the force in the field depends on the enemy's actions, which cannot be predicted.
True war-winning effectiveness comes from the force's ability to play the cheng / ch'i game, that is, to set up the opponent, then quickly shift to something he does not anticipate, and then to exploit to the fullest the resulting confusion. A key element of strategy is to "drive the opponent crazy" before actually committing military forces. Isolation in all forms -- particularly diplomatic and economic -- is an effective tool for accomplishing this. (25) Morally-mentally-physically isolate our adversaries from their allies and outside support as well as isolate them from one another in order to magnify their internal friction, produce paralysis, bring about their collapse and/or bring about a change in their political / economic / social philosophy so that they can no longer inhibit our vitality and growth. -- Boyd
As noted previously, the goal of "morally-mentally-physically isolating our adversaries from their allies and outside support" is one of the primary objectives of grand strategy. For the purpose of protecting vital national interests, effective military forces would harmonize with those of allies, help enforce diplomatic and economic efforts to isolate adversaries, and end any recourse to armed conflict. In keeping with Boyd's concept of grand strategy, this would attract the uncommitted to one's side and make it easy for the "conquered" population to resume normal diplomatic and trade relationships after the conflict has ended.
But drawn out campaigns tend to strain both alliances and domestic support, and what is seen as gratuitous destruction alienates support in the US, among allied countries, and within those groups in the target society that would support the U.S. (26.) Insurgents will seek to exploit the weaknesses in this strategy and make it backfire. They can take advantage of election cycles and mistakes to add to strains in alliances and catch shifting public opinion with symbolic or terror-inducing strikes (assassinations, bombings and kidnappings).
See: Section VII. What Makes a Military Force "Effective"? - Sun Tzu's and Boyd's Perspective
http://www.zorpia.com/cgi/member.cgi?username=Soldierforum&type=journal&zorpiasid=fe7fd06c088bed188556a25b6c0ac96f
Section VII. What Makes a Military Force "Effective"? - Sun Tzu's and Boyd's Perspective
http://insurgency-4gw.squarespace.com/display/ShowJournalEntry?moduleId=31058&entryId=19428
Section VIII.
Creating Forces: Designs for Multiple Next-Generation Strike Forces
At the beginning of "Patterns of Conflict," Boyd suggests four elements that would enable a force to function effectively in maneuver conflict and 4GW. Two of these are external and two internal:
It is advantageous to possess a variety of responses that can be applied rapidly to gain sustenance, avoid danger, and diminish an adversary's capacity for independent action.
The simpler organisms -- those that make up man as well as man working together with other men in a higher level context -- must cooperate or, better yet, harmonize their activities in their endeavors to survive as an organic synthesis.
Military forces that possess these qualities gain competitive advantage: they operate with quick/inconspicuous/irregular OODA loops, they can play the cheng / ch'i game, and they can shape the course of the conflict, responding as necessary to moves by their thinking human opponent.
In creating forces and assessing them, one needs to ask:
1. Do they offer the requisite variety? Do they present a range of options to the people actually conducting the conflict? Do they facilitate the creation of cheng / ch'i situations? Do they create options that would be least expected by the enemy, not necessarily the one that is predicted to be the most effective?
2. Can commanders rapidly shift the focus if required? When a decision is made, are forces structured and trained so that it can be rapidly carried out? Is this capability being tested and exercised under a variety of circumstances? When selecting between quickness and predicted effectiveness, is there a strong bias towards quickness?
3. Are people and forces being trained to act in harmony? Are organizations formed to foster harmony? Is this quality exercised in a variety of circumstances and are those who prove adept in its employment promoted?
4. What is being done to ensure that people at all levels will take the initiative in harmony with others in the force to achieve objectives? In particular, are all commanders trained to issue mission orders?
Although effectiveness on the battlefield depends on people, ideas, and hardware in that order, when creating forces there can be advantages to starting with ideas. There are instances where superbly trained and led troops have been defeated because of flawed doctrine (WWI, WWI-Eastern front). But more important, different ideas, strategies, and doctrines make different demands on people. They answer the question, "training to do what?" for example. Although people will predominate once in combat, the ideas element of Boyd's trinity is important in creating forces.
Instead of detailed tactics, followers of Sun Tzu evolved a way of thinking about conflict. That guerillas should be using Sun Tzu is not surprising, given his emphasis on deception and formlessness, since guerillas that become predictable are quickly eliminated. As the world moves into the 21st Century, such forms of highly irregular and unpredictable conflict are becoming the only way for many opponents to confront U.S. military forces. 4GW (asymmetric" conflict pushed to its limits) is what the U.S. military will have to face in the future. 4GW is nothing especially new and may represent the oldest form of organized conflict between groups of humans. Applied to large-scale "conventional" conflict, where both sides have large forces and roughly equal levels of technology, the result is known as "maneuver warfare" or "third generation warfare."
See full article at: SectionVIII. Creating Forces: Designs for Multiple Next-Generation Strike Forces
http://www.mblog.com/imperialiststrategy/060395.html
SectionVIII. Creating Forces: Designs for Multiple Next-Generation Strike Forces
http://insurgency.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=18999
Section IX.
Enhanced Third Generation Warfare: The Warfare of Rapid Maneuver
The notion of "bringing the enemy to battle" and defeating him as the goal of war characterizes first and second generation warfare. Sun Tzu cautioned that:
The general rule for the military is that it is better to keep a nation intact than to destroy it ... Therefore those who win every battle are not really skillful -- those who render others' armies helpless without fighting are the best of all.
An early example of maneuver warfare was the campaign in the south by US General Sherman in the Civil War. From the time he left Chattanooga on May 1, 1864, and entered Savannah (7 months later), Sherman initiated a total of one major battle against a prepared Confederate position -- Kennesaw Mountain, June 27, 1864 -- which he lost. The entire Atlanta campaign was one cheng / ch'i operation after another. Certainly Sherman was an adequate tactician, capable of fighting battles should they be forced upon him, but that was not his strategy. Sherman so befuddled the Confederate leadership that they replaced Joe Johnston (who had a good idea of what Sherman was up to) with John Bell Hood (who hadn't a clue). Hood proceeded to launch four bloody battles and lose them all, thereby handing Atlanta (on Sept. 3), the upcoming 1864 election, and most probably the Civil War to Lincoln and the Union.
Maneuver warfare follows Sun Tzu's admonition that:
The condition of a military force is that its essential factor is speed, taking advantage of others' failure to catch up, going by routes they do not expect, attacking where they are not on guard.
The essence of maneuver warfare is:
Warfare directed towards destroying enemy cohesion as opposed to seizing real estate; at taking the enemy force out of play decisively instead of wearing him down through slow attrition; high tempo war; fluid war that has no defined fronts or formations; decentralized armies where troops act on their own with high initiative as opposed to centralized command structures where troops ask permission and wait for orders; war designed to place the enemy in a dilemma, to suck him in to traps of his own creation, taking advantage of his stupidities and weaknesses and avoiding his strengths; war where soldiers act on judgment not on rules; war without rules; war that seeks to penetrate the enemy rather than push opposing lines backwards and forwards; war waged by a cohesive team that is like a family or tribe with a common culture and common outlook; a willingness to fight close, not just applying firepower from a long standoff, but infiltrating when the opportunity arises, as did 1st. Marine Division in Desert Storm. (26.) "In maneuver warfare, we attempt not to destroy the entire enemy force but to render most of it irrelevant."
People Issues in Maneuver Warfare
Although people issues are not glamorous like new ships and fighters, and do not provide the opportunities for political engineering and simple pork-barreling inherent in large weapons programs, they are the heart and soul of a military force. People and cultural factors demand the majority emphasis for study and planning. Sun Tzu would not recognize the U.S. Defense Department as a military force -- with its 300,000 people working in acquisition compared to 42,000 in combat arms battalions. Personnel are shuffled constantly so that cohesion (the single largest component of force effectiveness) is impossible.
Experience shows that the current Army personnel system (created in the late 1940s) cannot deploy rapidly enough to deal with flare-ups like Kosovo. When forces do reach the field, they lack the cohesion that would come from years of training together and the trust this engenders. As both Sun Tzu and Boyd insisted, these virtues are the foundation of success for any military force.
See: Section IX. Enhanced Third Generation Warfare: The Warfare of Rapid Maneuver
http://www.mblog.com/imperialiststrategy/060399.html
Section IX. Enhanced Third Generation Warfare: The Warfare of Rapid Maneuver
http://insurgency.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=18998
Section X. Cohesion; Training and Leadership
According to Sun Tzu, The Way of military operations winds through unit cohesion:
Those whose upper and lower ranks have the same desire are victorious.
Good warriors seek effectiveness in battle from the force of momentum, not from individual people. (28. -- Spanish Civil War)
Cohesion works because it creates and in turn depends on trust. Harmony is an essential element of any successful organism, and "mutual trust," (translation of the German einheit -- literally, "oneness") is at the top of Boyd's "organizational climate for operational effectiveness." He concluded that: Harmony in operations is created by the bonds of implicit communications and trust that evolve as a consequence of the similar mental images or impressions each individual creates and commits to memory by repeatedly sharing the same variety of experience in the same ways. (29.)
The first item in a defense review is to stop doing those things that erode cohesion and mutual trust. (30.) A brief analysis of Vandergriff's recommendations demonstrates that not only would they greatly increase the effectiveness of U.S. military forces, they would save money. Officers are more expensive than enlisted, so reducing the percentage of officers improves the force by devolving increased responsibility downward and lowering cost. (31.)
Training
The "people-ideas-hardware" orientation suggests that training needs to be robust, even at the occasional expense of procurement. One of Boyd's four principles for operational effectiveness (p. 27) was "intuitive competence," which can only come from increasingly rigorous training of individuals and units at all levels under a variety of conditions as closely related to real conflict as possible. Unit training, particularly free play exercises, not only improves proficiency, but it creates cohesion and mutual trust among its participants. Exercises can also be a laboratory for evolving the ideas that will win in the theater of operations.
Leadership
As one reduces the percentages of officers, eliminates intermediate headquarters, and uses performance in the field as the primary criterion for promotion, one should naturally improve leadership. Leadership in the military carries a heavy load. Boyd defined it as: The art of inspiring people to enthusiastically take action toward the achievement of uncommon goals. (31.)
Performance -- in exercises and in actual operations -- should be the criteria for promotion. Service members who aspire to the higher ranks need a broad education. Credential-ism counts for little in high-performing civilian organizations, and there is no reason it should continue to exert such strong influence in the military.
Remember that for insurgents the critieria for leadership is primarily a willingness or drive to become a martyr.
The Officer Corps
Boyd and Sun Tzu put considerable emphasis on the importance of leadership, and Congress and U.S. national command authorities should do likewise, especially in the area of commissioning officers. In the British Army, from which the U.S. system largely derives, officers held the King's (now Queen's) Commission. This allowed them to act in the name of the monarch, in particular, to issue orders that held the force of law. Disobeying such an order was tantamount to treason and could result in execution. In the U.S. military, commissions begin with "The President of the United States ..." but other than that, little has changed. Commanders, who must be commissioned officers, can still issue life-and-death orders and can, when necessary, invoke the Uniform Code of Military Justice to ensure they are obeyed. (33.)
See complete article at: Section X. Cohesion, Training and Leadership
http://soldierrebelion.squarespace.com/display/ShowJournalEntry?moduleId=29099&entryId=20512
Section X.. Cohesion, Training and Leadership
http://zorpia.com/cgi/member.cgi?username=soldierforum&type=journal&start=0
(or it could be a 5 instead of 0 or (all))
Section XI. Equipment and Organizations for Maneuver Warfare
It is possible to execute maneuver warfare and 4GW with the equipment the U.S. has today (and planned for the future). As the 16th Century samurai philosopher Miyamoto Musashi insisted, a warrior using proper 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. The question is whether one can produce a force attuned to the challenges of the post-Soviet world.
Military hardware and organizations must possess the inherent variety of action to facilitate cheng / ch'i maneuvers. The range of options that a force offers and the rapidity with which it can switch between them is crucial. 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.
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 play a role in sustaining high operational tempos (ammo, fuel, spare parts). These can 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.
Complex hardware and systems 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. Organizational complexity 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 quickly in such an environment, making them vulnerable to cheng / ch'i maneuvers by the other side.
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.
See complete article at: Section XI. Equipment and Organizations for Maneuver Warfare
http://zorpia.com/cgi/member.cgi?username=soldierforum&type=journal&start=0
Section XI. Equipment and Organizations for Maneuver Warfare
http://soldierrebelion.squarespace.com/display/ShowJournalEntry?moduleId=29099&entryId=20469
Also see: Section X. Equipment and Organizations for Maneuver Warfare
http://insurgency.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=19075