Why Great Powers Fight Small Wars Badly by Major Robert M. Cassidy, U.S. Army
I will be damned if I will permit the U.S. Army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war.1
Organizational structures that encourage the presentation of innovative proposals and their careful reviews make innovation less likely.2
These quotes engender two truisms about the military organizations of great powers: they embrace the big-war paradigm, and because they are large, hierarchical institutions, they generally innovate incrementally. This means that great-power militaries do not innovate well, particularly when the required innovations and adaptations lie outside the scope of conventional war. In other words, great powers do not win small wars because they are great powers: their militaries must maintain a central competence in symmetric warfare to preserve their great-power status vis-à-vis other great powers; and their militaries must be large organizations. These two characteristics combine to create a formidable competence on the plains of Europe or the deserts of Iraq. However, these two traits do not produce institutions and cultures that exhibit a propensity for counterguerrilla warfare.3
In addition to a big-war culture, there are some contradictions that derive from the logic that exists when a superior industrial or postindustrial power faces an inferior, semifeudal, semicolonial, or preindustrial adversary. On one hand, the great power intrinsically brings overwhelmingly superior resources and technology to this type of conflict. On the other hand, the seemingly inferior opponent generally exhibits superior will, demonstrated by a willingness to accept higher costs and to persevere against many odds. "Victory or Death" is not simply a statement on a bumper sticker; it is a dilemma that embodies asymmetric conflicts. The qualitatively or quantitatively inferior opponent fights with limited means for a strategic objective -- independence. Conversely, the qualitatively or quantitatively superior opponent fights with potentially unlimited means for limited ends -- maintaining some peripheral territory or outpost. Seemingly weaker military forces often prevail over those with superior firepower and technology because they are fighting for survival.4
History offers many examples of big-power failures in the context of asymmetric conflict: the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest, the British in the American Revolution, the French in the Peninsular War, the French in Indochina and Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and the Americans in Somalia. This list is not entirely homogeneous, and it is important to clarify that the American Revolution, the Peninsular War, and the Vietnam war are examples of great powers failing to win against strategies that combined asymmetric approaches with symmetric approaches.
However, two qualifications are necessary when generalizing great powers' failures in small wars. First, big powers do not necessarily lose small wars; they simply fail to win them. In fact, they often win many tactical victories on the battlefield. However, in the absence of a threat to survival, the big powers' failure to quickly and decisively attain their strategic aim causes them to lose domestic support. Second, weaker opponents must be strategically circumspect enough to avoid confronting the great powers symmetrically in conventional wars.
History also recounts many examples wherein big powers achieved crushing victories over small powers when the inferior sides were injudicious enough to fight battles or wars according to the big-power paradigm. The Battle of the Pyramids and the Battle of Omdurman provide the most conspicuous examples of primitive militaries facing advanced militaries symmetrically. The Persian Gulf war is the most recent example of an outmatched military force fighting according to it opponent's preferred paradigm. The same was true for the Italians' victory in Abyssinia, about which Mao Tse-tung observed that defeat is the inevitable result when semifeudal forces fight positional warfare and pitched battles against modernized forces.5
Asymmetric conflict is the most probable form of conflict that the United States may face. Four factors support this probability:
* The Western Powers have the world's most advanced militaries in technology and firepower. * The economic and political homogenization among the Western Powers precludes a war among them. * Most rational adversaries in the non-Western world should have learned from the Gulf war not to confront the West on its terms. * As a result, the United States and its European allies will employ their firepower and technology in the less-developed world against ostensibly inferior adversaries employing asymmetric approaches.
Asymmetric conflict will therefore be the norm, not the exception. Even though the war in Afghanistan departs from the model of asymmetric conflict presented in this article, the asymmetric nature of the war there only underscores the salience of asymmetric conflicts.6
The term "asymmetric conflict" first appeared in a paper as early as 1974, and it has become the strategic term de jour.7 However, the term "asymmetric" has come to include so many approaches that it has lost its utility and clarity. For example, one article described Japan's World War II direct attack on Pearl Harbor as conventional but its indirect attack against British conventional forces in Singapore as asymmetric. So encompassing a definition diminishes the term's utility. If every type of asymmetry or indirect approach is subsumed within this definition, then what approaches are excluded?
This article circumscribes the scope of asymmetric conflict to analyze conflicts in which either national or multinational superior external military forces confront inferior states or indigenous groups in the latter's territory. Insurgencies and small wars lie within this category, and this article uses both terms interchangeably. Small wars are not big, force-on-force, state-on-state, conventional, orthodox, unambiguous wars in which success is measured by phase lines crossed or hills seized. Small wars are counterinsurgencies and low-intensity conflicts in which ambiguity rules and superior firepower does not necessarily guarantee success.
Asymmetry in Strategy
The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.8
Symmetric wars are total wars wherein there is a zero-sum struggle for survival by both sides -- World Wars I and II are the most obvious examples. An asymmetric struggle implies that the war for the indigenous insurgents is total but that it is inherently limited for the great power. This is because the insurgents pose no direct threat to the great power's survival. Moreover, for the great power in an asymmetric situation, full military mobilization is neither politically prudent nor militarily necessary. The disparity in military capabilities is so great and the confidence that military power will predominate is so acute that the great power expects victory. However, although the inferior side possesses limited means, its aim is nonetheless the expulsion of the great power. The choice for the underdog is literally victory or death.
After the Continental Army unsuccessfully defended New York in 1776 and Brandywine Creek, Philadelphia, in 1777, Washington was compelled to adopt a Fabian strategy. Fabius Maximus was a Roman consul charged with defending Rome against Hannibal. According to B. H. Liddell Hart, Fabius' strategy "was not merely an evasion of battle to gain time, but calculated for its effect on the morale of the enemy." 9 Fabius knew his enemy's military superiority too well to risk a decision in direct battle. Thus, Fabius sought to avoid direct battle against superior Carthaginian-led concentrations and instead protracted the war by "military pin-pricks to wear down the invaders' endurance." 10
Like Fabius against Hannibal, Washington generally avoided head-on collisions with the British Army. Since Washington's army was limited in personnel, resources, and training, he soon realized that committing his troops to open battle against the British would be disastrous. Washington adopted an indirect strategy of attrition by avoiding general actions against the British main body and concentrating what forces he had against weak enemy outposts and isolated detachments. Washington's plan for victory was to keep the revolution alive by preserving the Continental Army and by exhausting the British will to sustain the fight with raids against peripheral detachments. Washington's political objective was to remove the British from the American colonies, but his military means were so weak that "Washington's hopes had to lie mainly not in military victory but in the possibility that the political opposition in Great Britain might in time force the British Ministry to abandon the conflict."11
The American Revolution witnessed some of the best unconventional and guerrilla fighting in the history of American warfare. In the Northern Department, irregulars helped bring about the surrender of British Major General John Burgoyne's army at Saratoga by conducting unconventional hit-and-run attacks on Burgoyne's flanks and lines of communication. In the Southern Department, General Nathanael Greene combined conventional with unconventional tactics to wear down Major General Lord Charles Cornwallis. Greene "developed a capacity to weave together guerrilla operations and those of his regular forces with a skill that makes him not unworthy of comparison with Mao Tse-tung or Vo Nguyen Giap."12 In part, Greene's strategy stemmed from the shortage of provisions for his regulars and from the presence of partisan bands in the Southern Department.
Asymmetry in Technology
For the Chechens an outright military victory was unlikely, so their goal was to inflict as many casualties as possible on the Russian people and erode their will to fight. The Chechens used an `asymmetric' strategy that avoided battle in the open against Russian armor, artillery, and air power. They sought to even the fight by fighting an infantry war. Time and again, the Chechens forced their Russian counterparts to meet them on the urban battlefield where a Russian infantryman could die just as easily.13
Asymmetry in technology stems from a huge disparity in technological and industrial capacities between adversaries in asymmetric conflicts. The disparity inheres in the structure of any conflict that witnesses a peripheral power facing a core power. Not only does conventional military and technological superiority not ensure victory, it may even undermine victory in an asymmetric context. One need only ask a veteran of the 1995 Battle of Grozny how superior numbers and technology fare against a guileful opponent using an asymmetric approach.14
The Russian forces that assaulted Grozny on 31 December 1994 were technologically and quantitatively superior to their Chechen defenders. Perhaps the Russian military's perception of its own invulnerability, stemming from a numerical and technological superiority, contributed to the haphazard manner by which it ambled into a beehive of Chechen antiarmor ambushes. In raw numbers, the Russians employed 230 tanks, 454 armored infantry vehicles, and 388 artillery guns. The Chechens, on the other hand, had 50 tanks, 100 armored infantry vehicles, and 60 artillery guns. Despite Russia's superior weapon systems, the Russians were unable to maneuver the Chechens into a disadvantageous position. Despite former Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev's claim that he could topple the Dudayev regime in a couple of hours with one parachute regiment, the Chechen forces' skillful resistance in Grozny compelled the Russian forces to fall back from the city's center to regroup. Firing from all sides and from all floors, from city block to city block, Chechen antiarmor teams systematically destroyed a large number of Russian tanks with RPG-7s. In fact, during the New Year's Eve assault, one Russian regiment lost 102 out of 120 vehicles as well as most of its officers.15
The 1994-1996 conflict in Chechnya witnessed the massive use of Russian technology and firepower -- carpet bombings and massive artillery strikes -- the application of which exhibited little concern for civilian casualties or collateral damage. On the other hand, for the rest of the war, the Chechen forces avoided direct battles and isolated Russian forces into smaller detachments that could be ambushed and destroyed piecemeal. For the Russians, unskilled in counterinsurgency techniques and nuances, massed artillery became the substitute for infantry maneuver, and the conventional principle of the offensive "came to be interpreted as the tons of ordnance dropped on target."16 It seems, then, that instead of adopting the preferred counterinsurgent approach of separating the guerrillas from the people, the Russians in Chechnya tried to destroy the population, guerrillas and all.
The fact that the Russians' technological and numerical superiority did not enable them to achieve their objectives only highlights technology's chimerical nature. One author writes: "Technology offers little decisive advantage in guerrilla warfare, urban combat, peace operations, and combat in rugged terrain. The weapon of choice in these conditions remains copious quantities of well-trained infantrymen."17 Guerrilla war is more a test of national will and endurance than it is a military contest.
Asymmetry of Will
As far back as two millennia, the professional, salaried, pensioned, and career-minded citizen-soldiers of the Roman legions routinely had to fight against warriors eager to die gloriously for tribe or religion. Already then, their superiors were far from indifferent to the casualties of combat, if only because trained troops were very costly and citizen manpower was very scarce.18
This quotation highlights a profound disparity that characterizes differences between imperial powers and nonimperial powers. Imperial powers are unable or unwilling to accept high casualties indefinitely in peripheral wars. The weaker side's will is sometimes manifested by a high threshold of pain that enables small powers to succeed against big powers. Samuel B. Griffith II explains: "Guerrilla war is not dependent for success on the efficient operation of complex mechanical devices, highly organized logistical systems, or the accuracy of electronic computers. Its basic element is man, and man is more complex than any of his machines. He is endowed with intelligence, emotion, and will (author's italics)."19
All asymmetric conflicts exhibit this same disparity of will. No single phrase better captures this disparity than this question posed in "Gardens of Stone," a movie about the Vietnam war: "How do you beat an enemy who is willing to fight helicopters with bows and arrows?"20 In Vietnam, enemy tactics seemed "to be motivated by a desire to impose casualties on Americans regardless of the cost to themselves."21 According to one RAND analysis of Vietnam, the enemy was "willing to suffer losses at a far greater rate than our own, but he has not accepted these losses as decisive and refuses to sue for peace."22 In Somalia, the enemy used slingshots against helicopters and used women and children as human shields during firefights.
Asymmetric conflict is not limited to military operations on the battlefield. The weak opponent looks to affect the great power's domestic cohesion, imposing a continual aggregation of costs on its adversaries.23 From a strategic perspective, the rebels' aim must be to provoke the great power into escalating the conflict. Escalation produces political and economic costs to the external power -- soldiers killed and equipment destroyed -- but over time, these may be considered to be too high when the great power's security is not directly threatened.
This problem was particularly acute during the Vietnam war when the Clausewitzian-minded U.S. security establishment incorrectly determined that destroying North Vietnam's means of waging war would affect its will to wage war. Even though the United States dropped more than 7 million tons of bombs on Indochina -- more than 300 times the impact of the atomic bombs that fell on Japan -- North Vietnam's will was resolute, but the United States' will wavered. Lacking the military means to destroy the United States' ability to wage war, Ho Chi Min and General Vo Nguyen Giap correctly focused on U.S. domestic political resolve to continue to support the war. Mao expressed this as "the destruction of the unity of the enemy," but another author explains it even more lucidly: "If the external power's will to continue the struggle is destroyed, then its military capability -- no matter how powerful -- is totally irrelevant."24
Big powers are less tolerant of casualties in small wars than their opponents are. This disparity arose again, this time during the U.S. Army's participation in Somalia: "The enthusiasm of the nation to take an active hand in crafting a new International order through the agency of the UN and multilateral operations, never strong to begin with, died along with 18 of America's soldiers on the streets of Mogadishu."25 The Army's operations there culminated with the 3-4 October 1993 battle in Mogadishu that left 18 U.S. soldiers killed and 84 wounded, compared to 312 Somalis killed and 814 wounded. The United States' entire involvement in Somalia witnessed at least 30 U.S. troops killed and more than 100 wounded whereas Somali casualties ranged between 1,000 and 3,000. However, 4 days after the ill-fated raid, President William J. Clinton announced the end of U.S. involvement in Somalia, "ostensibly because of the public's adverse reaction to the casualties."26 Since Somalia, the United States' use of force has appeared to be even more restricted by a zero-deaths syndrome. Another manifestation was Kosovo where an air campaign exacerbated the notion of using force without bleeding. Moreover, the U.S. forces that deployed to Kosovo to conduct peace operations had no friendly casualties as their most important criterion for success....
3. To win or to be effective in the context of counterinsurgency or low-intensity conflict (LIC) is subjective and relative. However, although diverse missions comprise the realm of LIC/operations other than war, a general corpus of principles has emerged from a legacy of experiences in operations short of war. To be effective, doctrine in this area should help promote two central aims: to integrate military, political, economic, and social objectives, moving them toward the desired strategic outcome and to gain and maintain support of the indigenous population.
6. Once again, inferior connotes a weakness in conventional measures of military might, not necessarily in strategy, tactics, and warrior skills. Asymmetric conflict was also the norm during the Cold War and throughout U.S. history.
8. Henry Kissinger, "The Vietnam Negotiations," Foreign Affairs (January 1969), 214.
16. Finch, 5-6 and Celestan, 5. Wiping out the noncombatant population is not the preferred solution in counterinsurgency. To counter Mao's approach in which the people in a guerrilla war are "likened to water" and the guerrillas are likened "to the fish who inhabit it," most counterinsurgency experts would assert the necessity of separating the fish from the water by winning the hearts and minds of the population. For Mao's fish and water simile, see Mao Tse-Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, Samuel B. Griffith II, trans. (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 93....
Major Robert M. Cassidy, U.S. Army, is the S3, 4th Aviation Brigade, 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Hood, Texas. He holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and is a graduate of the French Joint Defense College, Paris. He previously served as assistant professor of international relations, Department of Social Sciences, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York.
[Endnotes omitted, except the above four. The full text of the article is available at <http://www.cgsc.army.mil/milrev/english/SepOct02/cassidy.asp>.] -- Yoshie
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