RATIONALIZATIONS AND WARFARE

Rationalization is something we all do (often daily) when confronted with events that go against our plans and desires. The process is simple. We take a complex event, replete with unknowns, and put it into a framework where everything makes sense to us. The usual output of this process is "if only we had (or not) done this or that..." or "if we had taken this approach (substitute your pet theory here) things would have turned out grand."

We are now at the start of a long process of rationalization over the US defeat in Iraq. The most common of these rationalizations include: if only we had "...not disbanded the Baathist army," "...sent in more troops," or "...become better at nation-building." However, in each case the approach is one dimensional, since we tend to view ourselves as the only actors on the stage. The actions and reactions of the opposition are discounted and explained away as fluff and background noise (those pesky terrorists...).

A better, and more sane approach, is to embrace the concept that war is a conflict of minds. There are two sides. For every change in approach there will be counters mounted by the opposition. In the case of Iraq, that opposition was extremely difficult to beat since it was organized along the lines of open source warfare. This organizational structure gave it a level of innovation, resilience, and flexibility that made it a very effective opponent. Given this, the simplest explanation for the outcome in Iraq is that we were just beaten by a better opponent (the Israeli's seem to be getting this, why can't we?).

The real question we should be asking ourselves is whether or not our maximalist goals in Iraq could ever have been achieved given the capabilities of the opposition and the limited levels of commitment we were able to bring to to bear on the problem. I suspect the answer is no. The goals didn't match our capabilities and there weren't any simple tweaks to our strategy that would have changed the outcome. This was a difficult way to learn this lesson, but given our tendency towards rationalization, I doubt that it will be learned at all.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Comments

[Walter]

An interesting post. I am a bit skeptical about your binary view of postmodern warfare, i.e., "war is a conflict of minds. There are two sides." Why only two sides? Has there really been only "a opponent" in Iraq? Will there only be a single opponent in other wars?

Seems to me that warfare, now more than ever, is multi-sided. Or, at the very least, the opponent will be multi-faceted. If it was a single-faceted enemy we could face off with, we might be able to smash them (except for, as you noted, the political impossibility of committing enough force to do the job). But the shifting, multifaceted nature of the opponent, or worse still the multiple opponents, means that most of our blows are guaranteed to glance off the surface at odd angles, doing no real damage to the enemy and causing unanticipated damage elsewhere from the ricochet.

[Rikkert]

John,
You write "This organizational structure gave it a level of innovation, resilience, and flexibility that made it a very effective opponent." Was this an a priori (or inevitable) fact in Iraq or did it came about through coalition strategical and tactical failures? And outside Iraq?

[Iang]

One of the fascinating things in observing the Iraq affair is to wonder what the goal was. Was it WMDs? WoT? Democracy building? Securing bases? Securing oil? Disrupting oil, bases, democracy? Preparing for the great and eventual tussle with China? Or the lesser but delightfully attractive tussle with Iran?

Perhaps this is to reflect an anglo/germanic tradition which isn't as popular with the American military tradition. In that former tradition, the goal or mission is the beginning of every analysis. Without the goal, it is not possible to measure success, but it is certainly possible to fail. With no mission, there can be no real planning forwards, only planning based on whatever assumptions were floating around on the day. (I use goal and mission indistinguishably here.)

By way of challenge, let's get the mission down. Then, we can easily work out what we should have done, what we didn't do, and why. Without the mission, I suggest that the discussion is meaningless, as befits the title of "rationalisations."

[Syn Diesel]

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

John, maybe you should add a text on Cognitive Therapy to your Books To Read list.

;-)

[John Shreffler]

Our ten divison army meets a 25 division war.

[Duncan Kinder]

Something like Thomas Khun's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ would be helpful here.

Khun posits that there are "paradigms" that only slowly give way to one another. E.g., when Aristotelians first were told about Galileo’s viewing moons around Jupiter, they responded that there was something funny about the telescope that caused it to produce visions of moons.

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-Thomas-Kuhn/dp/0226458083/sr=8-1/qid=1157638883/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-5158171-8088944?ie=UTF8&s=books

Essentially, in Iraq, a neocon, conventional military type paradigm confronted a global guerilla network type paradigm.

Another book to consider would be _Managerial Breakthrough_ by Jospeh Juran. Juran, along with W. Edwards Deming, was one of the two men who went to Japan in post-WWII and helped to launch its postwar boom. In his book, Juran discusses how to develop innovations, how to overcome obstacles to those innovations from the entrenched orthodoxy, and how, then to implement them. Juran notes that people don't just give up established beliefs - they have too much invested in the old system.

http://www.amazon.com/Managerial-Breakthrough-Improving-Management-Performance/dp/0070340374/sr=8-1/qid=1157638810/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-5158171-8088944?ie=UTF8&s=books

[John Robb]

Walter, you are exactly in line with my thinking (as you can see in a plethora of briefs that I have written on the topic).

Rikkert, it was in hindsight inevitable. I believed it before the invasion commenced, but that was as much luck/gut on my part as analysis. Within a year of the invasion, as the process played out according to the anticipated form, it was clear to me that this was an inevitable result.

[wtofd]

Great post, John. Thank you.

"the Israeli's seem to be getting this, why can't we?"

Really? What makes you say this? Or, who in the Knesset shows understanding of the Lebanese or Palestinian "problems"?

[CK]

Three very weak countries created where once there was one profitable country. Kurdistan is already de facto independent if not exactly de jure so, Shiastan comes next ( it has already started ) and the rump desert remains will become sunnistan ... and then we will see which companies and countries get to drill and exploit the finds in those undrilled blocks that Cheney et.al allocated to his friends in the weeks before the Operation Iraqi Liberation began.
Iraq was not the whole play, it was not even the whole first act of the play, it is more like an out-of-town run through/audition/matinee to tweak the dialogues and improve the stage sets and weed out the poorer actors and actresses before the show tries to open on the Great White Way. The 4thGen warriors within the USA have gone a long ways in a short time in destabilizing this country. What institutions in the USA are not having their legitimacy continually whittled away?
4th Gen warfare works just as well when you have your hands on the levers of state and you wish to spay the state as it does when you are the downtrodden lowly serfs with HighSPeed Internet and Sat Phones. But then I am an optimist and fully expect a pony and ice cream and cheap goods and high wages and did I mention a pony.

[tim302]

John,

Have you ever encountered Amway or any of the other pyramid marketing schemes? Most of the time participants aren't making any money, but they spend a lot of time on 2 things. First, faking it till they make it, by going into debt to buy nice cars, clothes etc. Second, a belief that simply "believing" and working harder will allow them to succeed even when the strategy has failed them repeatedly. There's a big focus on blocking out any feedback as "negative," since the participants have already decided that the strategy works.

Perhaps it is no mistake that the DeVos family is high up the chain in the GOP these days.

[James Bowery]

Duncan, you may be ready to read about the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge:

http://prize.hutter1.net/

It is based on Marcus Hutter's unification of Solomonoff's algorithmic probability for universal prediction (really a mathematically rigorous formulation of Occam's Razor) and sequential decision theory to define universal intelligence.

As Iang pointed out, without a goal there can be no intelligent analysis let alone action.

Khun's "paradigm" is really nothing more than the Bayesian prior used to sub-optimally compress observations. Optimal compression (to the Kolmogorov Complexity of the observations) is not computable (a well known theorem of algorithmic information theory) so we're continually making tradeoffs between the time it takes to compress our observations and the degree of compression we can achieve.

Some of that tradeoff has been done for us (or at least biased for us) by evolution under the selective pressures on a species that dies within a limited lifespan.

[Patrick]

Dear John,

I'm not convinced the whole idea was intrinscially unachievable.

Consider the counterfactual:

30,000 more troops (if they were, indeed, available), no liquidation of the Baath party/army (which means far less unemployment), serious prewar planning around training police, rebuilding civilian infrastructure, immediate and public and sincere rejection of torture by the Administration, early recognition that there was an insurgency and a switch to counter-insurgency strategy, a policy that entrusts key decisions about the country's oil to the new government, etc etc.

I don't think its just delusional rationalisation to imagine that the enemy would have had a much harder time adapting to these circumstances. Of course, we can't know, but counterinsurgencies have historically been successful in other contexts.

Views?

[Andy]

This main problem in Iraq can be summed up by one word: Loyalty. For our strategy to succeed in Iraq, Iraqi's must have greater loyalty to the central government than their religious, ethnic or tribal militias. Unfortunately, the years of oppression under Saddam's regime instilled an inherent distrust of central government. Even Saddam was a tribalist as the few he gave any trust were Tikriti's.

Until the mindset of the Iraq people can be changed to place loyalty in the new central government then things will largely stay as they are. Sure, more troops may quell some of the violence, or at least the open violence, but it will not change the fundamental factor of where the Iraqi people place their loyalty. US military, diplomatic and even economic power have little influence in this regard. Troops who don't speak the language and only have the most basic knowledge of the local culture are probably a hindrance on building loyalty to the central government. The Army Special Forces excel in this area, sometimes called FID, but there are not enough of them to cope with the massive strife we see today. The problem is compounded by outside interference from “jidadis” and neighbors like Iran and Syria.

So far, it appears that institutions of we’ve built have little loyalty to their “elected” government. Iraqi military and police forces refuse to operate outside their ethnic “comfort zone” and multiple reports indicate both forces have a significant number of insurgent and militias members who conduct operations outside the control of central authority. The military and police we’ve trained are therefore a hollow force since very few of them are willing to fight or die for “Iraq,” much less the current government.

I don’t know of a strategy to turn this around. Obviously, changing the loyalty and mindset of an entire population is no easy task and will likely require a generational effort – something I doubt the American people have the stomach for. If not, then we are simply training the future combatants in a true civil war, one in which the Shia’s will likely win.

[Mark Eichenlaub]

Excellent post and excellent site.
Nice job.

[Dan]

John,
Excellent post as usual :)
However you said
"I believed it before the invasion commenced, but that was as much luck/gut on my part as analysis."

Wasnt it apparent that once Saddam's iron grip on the region is taken away ethnic groups will clammer to dominate politics and resort to militancy ? Further,Saddam was secular and a dictator,both the factors helped him hold Islamic terrorists at bay, but after his downfall Islamists were bound to get foothold.
I think you would have analysed all these pretty well without any need of luck or instinct :)

[John Robb]

Dan, thanks for the confidence in my ability, but to be truthful, I hadn't confirmed the mechanics of the system that produced the failure prior to the invasion. It was pure conjecture. So I would classify my writing prior to the war as more of a prediction than true analysis. That fell away quickly within months of the invasion, as I picked up signs that my earlier thinking was correct.

Also, at the time, I was pretty busy finishing the launch the Weblog concept and the RSS standard. Only one revolutionary idea at a time please!

[Z]

Iraq might have worked out fine if the U.S. was prepared to accept the only possible result of a 'democracy.' whoch is a Shiite state naturally allied to Iran. If that minor fact were irrelevant to the U.S., it could have left years ago. Yes the Sunnis would resist but they would loose.

But I think there has been a great deal of unspoken regret about the "monster" created. To leave now would mean a territorially unbroken alliance stretching from Iran to South Iraq to Syria to Lebanon. The U.S. is unwilling to accept this outcome and so wont leave.

And yet by staying it is mearly being bleeed white in a guerrilla war.

The sad fact is that eventually the U.S. will leave anyway and get the worst of both worlds.

[anna missed]

The U.S. may have had a chance early after the fall of Baghdad -- if it had followed the Garner plan of retaining the military establishment, using it for reconstruction and police work. Further, if the U.S. had preserved the nationalist/socialist economic infrastructure, unemployment, may have been held at bay. The Bremmer plan of de-nationalizing and privitizing the economy is probably the single root cause of the growth of insurgent support among the population, not to mention becoming the alternative employer of choice. And then there was that idea floated by the crazy French (in the September after the invasion) -- hold elections as soon as possible. The occupation of Iraq has been no less than an encyclopedia of how not to occupy another country.

[gmoke]

Ah, the Serenity Prayer. Reinhold Neibuhr and Alcoholics Anonymous.

My guess is you've made Peter Beinart happy and put your finger on the underlying problem in late stage capitalism, an economy based upon addiction. Read _The Addictive Organization_ by Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassell to see our pathology laid bare.

I myself am a recovering member of Oilcaholics Unanimous. That's why I say Solar Is Civil Defense.

[Adam]

John,

The problems faced in Iraq were well known and widely predicted. The US would have had to look hard for any experts in the area that thought things would go well. Its one reason that the US didn't bother with the experts.

But there are huge questions that were never answered before, during or after the invasion. In most respects they haven't been answered: Why are we invading? Why now? What for? What kind of Iraqi government are we looking at? How long is the US prepared to stay? How much money will it cost? Are the Iraqis our friends or our victims? Who are we going to work with? Are our young men prepared to spend their entire careers doing colonial governance in Iraq? What does winning mean? What levels of force are acceptable (and to who)? What deals are we willing to make? How long is our timeframe (weeks, months, years)?

And these are the simple basic questions; none of which were actually answered, or ever have been. In short I'd suggest that we didn't have any goals in Iraq. We still don't.

Throw in a confused military / civilian command, the influence of Israeli think-tanks on Paul Bremer, American politics, and the scene was set.

But if the reasons for the war were confused the US military actions were more so. No general had the courage to say anything, leaving it to yesterdays men like Schwartzkopf to suggest that the Iraq plan was stupid. Everyone found it impossible to believe that the US military, after the awesome kicking it took in Vietnam, had no idea whatsoever about counterinsurgency. Collective blindness is one thing, a collective lobotomy is something else. Everything the US military did in Iraq counteracted basic theory. Theft, rape, torture, random arrests, murder, night raids, casual use of firepower on civilians and so on are the simple no-nos. Did any American officer actually think that any of these things would make things better? 4th Infantry Division regularly used to use H&I fire - random artillery fire at locations that enemy forces might use - like crossroads. The sanity of this during a counter insurgency operation should be questioned but it never was. Presumably Iraq civilians shouldn't use crossroads or Insurgents are basically like armoured divisions.

Even worse the US added a number of cruel psychological refinements - far earlier than Abu Ghraib. If we were to ask why they did it, they wouldn't know, but I'd guess that it was for fun. For example in June 2003 the 1st Armoured Division carried out its "Sophies Choice" mock executions. This was simply taking a father and sons and making the father choose which sons were going to be "executed". In some cases the father would beg - on his knees - for the soldiers to shoot him instead of his sons. In 1st Armoured they'd then drag all the sons around the corner. And this, bear in mind, was with people from other units there which is how we know it happened. I'd not unreasonably assume that without the witnesses it wouldn't have been a mock-execution but a real one. Does anyone think that real or otherwise this would reduce the insurgency? Anyone who knew the victims would be pretty annoyed.

More to the point this was something that the generals should have known about and aimed to stop. They didn't. The support of Sanchez (former commander of the 1st Armoured Division) for torture at Abh Ghraib is a matter of public record ("go to the outer limits"... he claims that he meant either the TV show or their authority - whichever was less clear - when he said that to his torturers. Quite why torturers would take that as a green light to torture he claims to have no idea).

Whilst this particular method was vile, it was merely a symptom of US moral collapse, a precusor to torture across the boards. Every unit in Iraq has its particular torture albatross, and the social effects on the US military and civilian population, as well as international affairs, will be felt for years. One colonel who specialised in torture via mock executions now teaches schoolkids in Florida. Lucky them. Sanchez washed up in V Corps in Germany. Lucky Germans.

Ironically it'd be 3rd ACR that reached the high water mark of torture. They would actually torture to death a willing informant with key information about the insurgency before he could speak. They were so keen on torture by that time that they no longer bothered with a reason for it. General Mowhoush had surrended to the US when the US took his sons hostage(hostage taking is another no-no and for a few months the US military would lie and insist that he was captured in a raid before changing their story. Lying is another counterinsurgency no-no). He was tortured to death, suffering hundreds of wounds including 5 broken ribs. When he died 4 men were sitting on those ribs.

The irony is that he was a key player in setting up the military stocks for the al-Quds division; which the insurgency was at that time using. By all accounts he'd even agreed to help the US. The US military was so annoyed at the death of their informant that they actually accused 3 soldiers of murder (the 4th was offered a deal to finger the others) a James Bond henchman punishment for failure.

Iraq is going to be studied for decades as the "how not to do it", far more so than the Russians in Afghanistan. The Russians needed the Americans to be defeated, the Americans simply didn't need anyone elses help. The classic line of the US being Bin Ladens indispensible ally continues to be true.

[SteinL]

It's quite simple. This administration has substituted photo-ops for action from Day 1. It consists of daydreamers who are all seeing themselves in the role of Big Wallahs subjugating the world to their wills.
Trouble is, that takes action.

Consider the dropping of "the world's biggest bomb" before the invasion of Iraq. Photo Op warfare intended to weaken the enemy and strengthen the home front. Consider how actions that went wrong were continuously painted better (supply convoy fucks up, gets ambushed and has its members captured? Shhhh. Iraqis rescue a crew member, take her to a hospital and give her medical aid. Shhhh. Stage a dramatic rescue, pretending to be under fire, and getting her out of there in the last second. TRUMPET IT TO THE WORLD).

You can't make sensible tactical or strategic dispositions based on a world-view that has nothing to do with reality. (We create our own, so there).

The war was never understandable - no matter how many Senators showed up with purple fingers on the Hill. If they had shown up after having gone swimming in oil we might get better bearings on this one.
But today's world doesn't allow one to say: You want to keep driving that mess of an SUV? Then we gotta go get us some oil.

So we spread democracy with cluster bombs and torture and secret detention. Wars must have an inner logic, an inner consistency relative to real world objectives. Even Blair is finally having to face reality catching up with his grandstanding.

History will consider this the last twitch of the Occidental Colonial Ambition.

[John Robb]

LOL. Adam, although I value the contribution of regional experts, I am sure they are not experts in the mechanism of warfare used in Iraq by the opposition. Those people are very thin on the ground. It's that mechanism that I was referring to when I note the difference between vague prediction and analysis.

[Andy]

Wow Adam,

The only thing you're missing is the bayoneting of babies. One wonders why you didn't include that in your atrocity list as well.

[Duncan Kinder]

One aspect of Global Guerillas is its aesthetic implications.

Modern American culture has manifested an almost anal distain for any sort of irregularity or imperfection. Modern quality standards assert a Six Sigma level of quality - that defects should be limited to six times sigma, which is about one defect per million. Human conduct will generate defects about one time per 10,000. Hence the devaluation of the American workforce, since only machines reliably can produce Six Sigma quality.

We could, and in other contexts should, digress into a discussion of the resulting effects on the American workforce and the growing economic inequality, but at Global Guerillas we are here to discuss the military.

It also partakes of this disfavoring of human input over machine input. Jeffrey Record, in "The American Way of War: Cultural Barriers to Successful Counterinsurgency," has discussed the implications of America's high tech culture on its war making capacity. His summary is as follows:

quote:

The U.S. defeat in Vietnam, embarrassing setbacks in Lebanon and Somalia, and continuing political and military difficulties in Afghanistan and especially Iraq underscore the limits of America's hard-won conventional military supremacy. That supremacy has not delivered decisive success against nonstate enemies practicing protracted irregular warfare; on the contrary, America's conventional supremacy and approach to war—especially its paramount reliance on firepower and technology—are often counterproductive.

The problem is rooted in American political and military culture. Americans are frustrated with limited wars, particularly counterinsurgent wars, which are highly political in nature. And Americans are averse to risking American lives when vital national interests are not at stake. Expecting that America's conventional military superiority can deliver quick, cheap, and decisive success, Americans are surprised and politically demoralized when confronted by Vietnam- and Iraq-like quagmires.

The Pentagon's aversion (the Marine Corps excepted) to counterinsurgency is deeply rooted in the American way of warfare. Since the early 1940s, the Army has trained, equipped, and organized for large-scale conventional operations against like adversaries, and it has traditionally employed conventional military operations even against irregular enemies.

Barring profound change in America's political and military culture, the United States runs a significant risk of failure when it enters small wars of choice, and great power intervention in small wars is almost always a matter of choice. Most such wars, moreover, do not engage core U.S. security interests other than placing the limits of American military power on embarrassing display. Indeed, the very act of intervention in small wars risks gratuitous damage to America's military reputation.

The United States should abstain from intervention in such wars, except in those rare cases when military intervention is essential to protecting or advancing U.S. national security.

:close_quote

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6640

This anal need for inhuman perfection is not the only way Western society could be organized. The 19th Century thinker, John Ruskin, advocated the Gothic style as a more humane style than the subssequent Classic style.

quote:

Rejection of mechanisation and standardization also informed Ruskin's theories of architecture. For Ruskin the Gothic style embodied the same moral truths that he sought in great art. It expressed the meaning of architecture — as a combination of the values of strength, solidity and aspiration; all written, as it were, in stone. For Ruskin, true Gothic architecture involved the whole community in its creation, and expressed the full range of human emotions, from the sublime effects of soaring spires to the comically ridiculous carved grotesques and gargoyles. Even its crude and "savage" aspects were proof of "the liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure."[5] Classical architecture, in contrast, expressed a morally vacuous repressive standardisation. Ruskin associated Classical values with modern developments, in particular with the demoralising consequences of the industrial revolution, resulting in buildings such as The Crystal Palace, which he despised as an oversized greenhouse.

:close_quote

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruskin

Essentially, Gothic architecture involves swarms of workers each contributing their input to the building as opposed to the more deterministic command-and-control features of Renaissance style.

Those looking for a picture of this should visit Tuscany, where Gothic Florence, with its regularly laid out broad streets and buildings contrasts with Gothic Siena, with its twisting narrow streets and irregular buildings.

Siena would provide global guerillas with far greater shelter than would Florence.

[Marcello]

"Those looking for a picture of this should visit Tuscany, where Gothic Florence, with its regularly laid out broad streets and buildings contrasts with Gothic Siena, with its twisting narrow streets and irregular buildings."

General streets layout was not determined by architectural style prevalent at those late times but rather by convenience at the time of the founding of the city itself.
The majority of the current italian cities were founded either in roman times by top down planning with a highly standardized grid layout, or in the aftermath of the fall of the roman empire.
In that case they were built without centralized planning in defensible locations such as hilltops or even marshes (Venice).While the buildings changed the general streets layout often remained.
Where I live there is not much older than the 14th century, but the roads still follow the original square grid pattern of when the place was a roman military garrison.