Irregular Warfare Podcast - What are Small Wars?

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a new collaboration between the Modern War Institute at West Point and Princeton University's Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. In this inaugural episode, hosts Kyle Atwell and Nick Lopez talk to Jake Shapiro, co-director of ESOC and Col. Pat Howell, director of MWI. The conversation tackles important questions about what are often called "small wars," including material covered in Jake's book, Small Wars, Big Data. New episodes of the Irregular Warfare Podcast will be released every two weeks. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

You know, if we think about the last era of great power competition that the world saw, it was the Cold War between the U.S. and USSR. How was that war actually fought? The vast majority of military engagements in that conflict were small wars. This bridging the gap effort can help with debates because it can hopefully get the policymakers off the easy topics, which is tactical stuff, and get them to the harder topics, which are the strategic level questions, which are much harder to answer, but it's easy not to get to them when you're debating between 28,000 or 30,000 or 30,000 and 200.

The category mistake in some sense our strategic community is making is they're saying, we more or less tried that algorithm in Afghanistan and Iraq. We did not get strategic outcomes that we're happy with in either country. Therefore, that algorithm was wrong. And that's incorrect. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. In this inaugural episode, we examine some fundamental and big picture questions about irregular warfare that set the scene for the Welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. In this inaugural episode, we examine some fundamental and big picture questions about irregular warfare that set the scene for the rest of the podcast series. To start, what are small wars and why do they matter? And do they matter at all in the era

of great power competition, where U.S. national security strategy has shifted over the past couple years from the global war on terror to near peer competitors. Also, what lessons have we learned or have we not learned from the past decades focused on fighting small wars to include in Iraq and Afghanistan? Our guests for this conversation are Jake Shapiro and Pat Howell. Jake is a professor of political science at Princeton University and co-author of the book Small Wars, Big Data. The conversation focuses heavily on his book, which examines the nature of small wars and how they can better be strategized in one.

Colonel Pat Howell is the director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. Among many interesting experiences, he conducted the analysis to determine how many troops should be sent to Afghanistan in 2009 for the counterinsurgency surge. This review is now complete. And as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative

while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan. I'm Kyle Atwell. And I'm Nick Lopez. And this is the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals.

Here is our conversation with Jake and Pat. Dr. Shapiro and Colonel Howell, thank you for joining us today. I'm going to jump straight into the conversation. Jake, you co-authored the book Small Wars, Big Data with Ellie Berman and Joe Felter. In the book, you describe what small wars are and examine lessons learned from decades of fighting them. What motivated you three to write this book? for me, unfortunately, this is a podcast, so I can't show you the picture that instantiates and kind of encapsulates what the book is about. But let me try and tell you, paint the picture for you. So when Robert Capa, the famed war correspondent of World War II, follows the first wave ashore at Omaha Beach, 11 of the photos he took that day survive. And as Kappa wades ashore at Omaha Beach, he's got one picture of the men wading through the water. And the soldiers are elements of the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division. They are leading the charge onto Omaha Beach on D-Day. fast forward almost a little bit more than 70 years, and soldiers from the 16th Infantry Regiment,

1st Infantry Division, are pulling security on top of a neighborhood council meeting hall in Baghdad in March 2007, as the first stage of what is now known as the surge begins in Baghdad, the thing that some people say turned around the war in Iraq. And as my colleagues and I were sitting and kind of watching this happen in 2007 and 2008, and my co-author Joe was deploying to Balad, and Ellie and I were spending time in Afghanistan trying to get research projects running and help with the war there a few years later, we were very frustrated by the fact that people were talking about the fight that those soldiers in 2007 were fighting in terms that had not really changed significantly since soldiers from the same unit waited ashore at Omaha Beach 70 years before. So as we looked at that, we thought, gosh, we need to really understand the kind of conflict that we're in today. And that conflict to us was defined, or those conflicts, were defined by a couple of characteristics.

The first was that one side had a predominance of combat power. So if they knew the geotemporal coordinates of elements of the other side, they could reach out and touch them in various ways, at most any point of day or night. And then the second was that they were not conflicts which could be won in the sense of seizing and holding the territory through military force alone, at least not in situations where they were being fought by Western democracies or by countries supported by Western democracies. And so those two things came together and they created a very different kind of conflict than what had been seen in the past and what was driving the policy discussions at the time we started working on this research project. what was driving the policy discussions at the time we started working on this research project. Jake, in the first chapter of your book, you provided some stats on how common small wars have been historically. It'd be great to understand your perspective on why small wars matter, either historically or for the future of warfare, especially when as a threat stream,

they need to be balanced against other national security priorities. There are a couple ways to think about this. One is to think about how often historically has the United States and its NATO allies engaged in small wars. And if you look at the data from 1975 through 2005, when a project out of Kansas State, the International Military Intervention data set was created. The U.S. or NATO or both engaged in a new militarized intervention overseas in almost every year between 1975 and 2005. Many of these were small, and some did not end up involving combat, but many involved combat and ended up being quite substantial, whether that's the deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina in a peacekeeping mission, the deployment to Somalia,

Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, the list goes on. So there's an extensive number of such conflicts that have gone on, and there's no reason to think the arrival rate will change in the future. And then if you think about the consequence of these things, between the end of World War II and 2010, more than 90% of the people who died in battle around the world died in battle in asymmetric conflicts. And of those people, that's like a massive undercount of the overall consequences of those conflicts. Because in every one of those where you observe 10,000 or 25,000 or 100,000 battle deaths in any given year, there's an uncounted number of civilians who lost their lives and their livelihoods as a consequence of those conflicts. And so, you know, when you just like think about what are the things that we need to understand in order to minimize human suffering in the world, small wars loom really large on that list.

If I could jump in, this is Pat here. I'd like to actually give a comment on the first question of why do small wars matter? And that's why I was very excited by the topic of the book. One, because it relates to some of my personal research and experiences. But secondly, it actually relates to the current security environment the United States is in. As everyone knows, the U.S. was heavily involved with counterinsurgency for 15-plus years. And only recently, in the last few years years with the new national security strategy, national defense strategy, and military strategy, the military is focusing back to what we're calling

the big four. We're going back to returning to great power competition with the four main, the big four countries being Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. And so some people see that this is a major change for the military. We're leaving that coin behind as we're going to go back to old school fighting against peers and your peer enemies, which is what we're used to. But we'll remind folks that in the National Defense Strategy, it still identifies counterterrorism as a threat that we're still facing, which is basically handed off to SOCOM as well as countering WMD. But just because we recognize that we're going back to a great power competition doesn't mean small worlds don't matter because while we might

have peers and near peers, both of our peer and near peer adversaries have said, we don't want to engage with you one-on-one. They saw Gulf War I and Gulf War II. Just because they're near peer adversaries, they don't want to go toe-to-toe with the U.S. They have told us they are going to go about competing with us with other means, which opens the door for irregular warfare where they might promote an insurgency among our allies, in which case we're now back into the small war topic. Or in some case in the future, especially for those listeners who are special forces officers, we might try to instigate problems in one of their allies' country. And that's, again, an aspect of irregular warfare. So it's a long way of saying that even with the shift back to great power competition,

the importance of understanding these types of asymmetric conflicts has not gone away. Maybe it's going to be a little bit different because now we're having great power sponsors behind these combats. But understanding this asymmetric conflict is just as important now as it was a few years ago. Yeah, that is a great comment and touches on an important question, which is what role should irregular warfare play in the context of great power competition? It seems like in both academia and in government, the focus has shifted largely to how to fight a conventional war with China or other near peer rivals. But the shift in focus has not meant that irregular warfare threats have decreased. Jake, how do you reconcile small wars and great power competition?

You know, if we think about the last era of great power competition that the world saw, it was the Cold War between the US andS. and USSR. How was that war actually fought? The vast majority of military engagements in that conflict were small wars. They were the insurgencies and counterinsurgencies in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, DRC, Somalia, Ethiopia, Vietnam, just to name a few. And so the idea that we're going back to great power competition is absolutely consistent with the idea that there's going to be a continued importance of understanding how to engage in and as successfully as possible prosecute small wars. Thanks, Jake. So you have explained what small wars are and why they remain important, including in the context of great power competition. I'd like to pivot the conversation now to what lessons have we learned about how to fight irregular wars? The U.S. has had a lot of experience now fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and several other places that you mentioned, and scholars have studied these conflicts, what have we learned about the world of irregular warfare? When it comes to what we do know about the world,

you know, one of the striking things about working on this topic for more than a decade now and spending lots of time talking with people who are out there in the field doing the hard work of putting together the programs is that so many of the things that we thought would work ended up not working. And, you know, for the people out there who are like early in their career and they're thinking about what is the, like what's the big er lesson to take from this whole literature, it should be don't believe that we know much at all in some sense. And you want to think about how to make the best bets that you can. in some sense. And you want to think about how to make the best bets that you can.

And one of the great examples of this, this program called the Local Governance and Community Development Program in Afghanistan, this was a program that USAID spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on. They thought very carefully about the program. And what they did is they went in basically to 2,600 or so different projects that were designed to address local grievances and put a bunch of money into communities around the country in these small-scale, very local projects, which is what the doctrine would say as of mid-2007 onward, was probably a good way to spend money. And systematically in every fighting season from 2007, when the program was really up and running onward, the places where this program was being administered had more violence per capita than the places where it was not administered.

Now, you can kind of look at that a couple different ways. One is like, wow, that program totally didn't work. The other is maybe it was put into the harder places. But what is for sure true is that if you had at the start of the program asked anyone in USAID who was in the authorization chain for this program, do you expect the places where you're doing this will be more violent this fighting season and every fighting season for the next eight years than the places where you're not doing it, they would have looked at you like you were crazy. And that happened again and again with different programs over the last 15 years. And so there's like this, I think, important lesson of caution and the importance of thinking about local context,

which should come out of these fights and out of the research base, that I think is a very important lesson for people early in their career who are getting out there and starting to think about running programs and starting projects. Colonel Howell, you've deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa fighting in irregular wars as an active duty army officer. Does Jake's comment resonate with your experiences? Yeah, well, thanks for the question. I'll give a historical story, a personal story of mine. And my story goes back to 2009. I was a planner in Afghanistan. I was called the lead planner in the future operations section for the NATO force there. General McChrystal was the commanding general. And I was the planner that

did the analysis that was called the troop to task analysis. It was the analysis that General McChrystal used when he went to the president to request 40,000 more troops. So while it was a large planning team, the methodology for how we got to 40,000, that was mine. And well to this day, I'll stand by the rigor and hard work that my planning team, the methodology for how we got to 40,000, that was mine. And well, to this day, I'll stand by the rigor and hard work that my planning team did. I knew even then that it was based on a very shaky foundation because at that time, the doctrine that we had for what we call boots on the ground ratios or how many soldiers, we came from doctrine, but doctrine was based upon two small studies done in 2000 and 2005.

What the study did, one was from RAND and one was from Combat Studies Institute in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to figure out how many soldiers do we need to do well in a counterinsurgency. They both looked at a small number of successful counterinsurgencies. And then they said, well, here's the average number of troops per thousand people of the population. So for every civilian, you might need 20 counterinsurgent forces. And they did that by looking at five to eight successful cases. Well, if you study the full population of counterinsurgencies. I can find 20 cases that had ratios of 40 to 1,000 and they lost. So it was a research design problem. By only picking successful, they just ignored part of the data that was out there. So doctrine was built upon that. And that's the only thing we had.

And we would get very strange questions like, well, what if you had 28,500 instead of 30,000? What's the difference? And intuitively, I knew I couldn't answer that question because I just don't have enough data, but I had no way to show it. But the great news is the academia, I think they started getting counterinsurgency into large end studies. And so when I was at Duke, I pursued or I did more research in large end counterinsurgency. And I actually, when I finished at Duke, I pursued or I did more research in large-end counterinsurgency. And I actually, when I finished all my research there, I actually shot a note to General McChrystal with a note, hey, boss, this is the analysis I wish I could have given you 10 years ago. But the data didn't exist and the research didn't exist. So I think this is a great project because when we bring in these intellectual tools from academia, it can help us understand

better what is the realm of possible and not possible. And if I had this data back in 2009, the debates might not have been on, is it 28,000 or 29,000, but it might have been on, should we do this? It might change the questions to the more important strategic questions instead of having the National Security Council wondering where we're going to put the next 10 soldiers. Yeah, definitely. And so it is not all bad news. Jake, in your book, you make the case for what you call information-centric warfare, and you lay out a fairly specific formula to fight a counterinsurgency. Can you switch over to the upside of what you and your co-authors argue

we have learned can work in small wars. Absolutely. So when we talk about information centric warfare, what we mean is that the critical factor in success or failure in a given location is not the number of forces present. It is the amount of information that the stronger side has about what the weaker side is doing, where they are, who they are, when they're going to be out operating, all those little details. And the intuition is that everything an insurgent has to do, every time they move around, every time they go to set an ambush or plant an IED or intimidate an aid worker, all of those things are observed by people who aren't combatants. And in the modern world, those people have a thousand ways to get information about what

the insurgents are doing to the stronger side, whether that's the government or the government's allies or people who are listening to the podcast out deployed, supporting governments in different places in the world. And so if that information flows, then the government and its allies can take action against the insurgents. And so what the insurgents do in that situation is they commit just as much violence and have just as much presence as they can manage before people start sharing information with the government. And so to bring violence down in an area, what the government's job is, is fundamentally to get the people to be willing to share information. And you see evidence that this is a useful way of thinking about it in quantitative data

from dozens of places. And you also see it in the doctrine of insurgent groups themselves, who often put a lot of weight on being careful about how violence is used in avoiding civilian casualties. So there's like almost an algorithm to gaining control of any given village or valley. And it basically runs through bring some forces in who can provide security, do some small-scale nice things for the population, take the information that is received as a result of that, go out and run operations against the insurgents,

deliver more nice things for the population, and repeat through that cycle until the area is stable. So that's kind of like the good news. There's very good evidence that there is an algorithm to win the village or the valley. And it seems like implied is that the number of boots on the ground does matter, but that's not the only thing that matters because you can't win these villages if you don't have anybody there to actually road in and out of a given area 24-7, 365. That may be necessary to gain control of areas in certain places, but in the steady state,

that's not what's necessary. What you need is that the people in the area, when someone from the outside shows up or when someone's nephew decides to do something stupid and attack a police station, they pick up the phone and call the police and say, hey, Johnny's nephew is about to do something stupid. Maybe you guys want to arrest him. is unfortunate, though, is I think there's been a little bit of a misreading of what that set of tactical level findings means for the strategic level. Because when you're thinking about political contests like the one in Afghanistan, what matters is not, is a neighborhood of Kandahar secure, or is a district in Orezgan pro or anti-Tiban what matters is do the political leadership of the taliban and the political leadership of the government of afghanistan do they see a solution which will meet both their critical needs that is better than continuing to fight and winning those villages and those valleys can contribute to moving towards those political solutions. But it's not the same thing. And it doesn't accumulate to those political outcomes in the

intuitive way, because there are never going to be enough forces or enough government capacity in a country like Afghanistan to go through the process I just described in every village and every valley at the same time. And I think the category mistake in some sense our strategic community is making is they're saying, we more or less tried that algorithm in Afghanistan and Iraq. We did not get strategic outcomes that we're happy with in either country. Therefore, that algorithm was wrong. And that's incorrect. The algorithm was right for controlling the villages and the valleys, but controlling the villages and the valleys was not sufficient to get the strategic outcome of the wars. And that I think in many ways is like the next frontier for

research is figuring out under what conditions can you translate those local victories into the big political settlement that makes fighting the war worth it in the first place? I should throw in real quick that Jake may be my dissertation advisor, and I think he's throwing me some hints right now. There you go. He's making it easy for you. I can see the title already. It's the aggregation challenge. Is that right, Jake? I was thinking the aggregation dilemma, but challenge works. There you go. Nice. Nice. I'll jump in real quick. One thing I really like from Jake that I brought from your book is, and I like that I'm stealing the verbers that you used.

And there's been a number of military writers writing within military circles that have critiqued the DOD's counterinsurgency strategy as it's a strategy of tactics. We are focusing on how do we take the village? How do we win the village? And that's great. And I like the way you put it in your book. That's absolutely necessary to buy the time and space to get some degree of peace. But then there's a very separate problem, which is the strategic level problem. And I think you even used the principle, you brought in the concept of principal agent on, the strategic problem is a different problem. You just can't

simply do the aggregation symbol and say, look, we brought peace to a thousand communities, therefore we have strategic success. No, it just means we have peace. But the strategic problem is a very different problem that will require a different set of intellectual tools to think through. So you put into words what I've been thinking, but I never knew how to put it. And when I read it in your book, I went, yes, that's the way to describe it. That's awesome to hear. I mean, I think when I think of, you know, Iraq in 2014, to me, that's the shining example of this in the sense that the tactical victories in, you know, starting from2006 through 2009 brought the level of

violence down to the point where there was political space and opportunity for a settlement of the long-running sectarian divides in the country. And then we didn't manage the strategic process of helping the Iraqi people and Iraqi politicians get to whatever that bargain was. helping the Iraqi people and Iraqi politicians get to whatever that bargain was. And so then the war reignited in 2013 and then really exploded in 2014 again in Iraq. And that's being taken as like a marker of the idea that the things which were done from 2006 to 2009 weren't actually the things you needed to do to get strategic victory. And I think that's, yes, it's mistaken that they were a step along the road, but then there was this other process that needed to come in. And

it was that other process which failed in that setting. And it's that other process which has never succeeded in Afghanistan. Yep. I'm going to shift us to our last question. The final question is, what are the policy implications of your findings? The one kind of comment I'll throw in there is that if we agree that the tactics used for the surges is correct and effective, and then, Colonel, if you believe that you would still get the same number. One thing I always ask myself is, even if the tactics are militarily correct, are they domestically, politically sustainable? And if you have a strategy that isn't rooted in what we can actually do based on the American electorate or the electorate of our allies,

maybe it's not an effective strategy, again, at the strategic level. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that and then just broader implications for information-centric warfare and your experiences on what policymakers should be thinking about. Kyle, it's a great question. And I'll take a stab at one big implication, which is that policymakers in the U.S. government at senior levels ought to spend a lot less time thinking about how to fight the fight and a lot more time thinking about what comes next. And so the debate that Colonel Howell's analysis played into in terms of the numbers of soldiers was a huge preoccupation of the Obama administration during their Afghan policy review. And really, if you think about what the research suggests in terms of there being an approach

to win the village or the valley, a complete damn waste of their time. They should have been thinking about what is the political strategy which we can enact with Pakistan and India that will make it possible that as we put pressure on the Taliban, the Taliban leadership can come to the table and make a bargain that's acceptable to everyone. And instead, they spent huge amounts of cycles at the NSC level and at the Joint Chiefs level, worrying about 38,000 or 40,000 soldiers, which is like just nonsense. And I think it is reflective of a broader lack of realism in how the US government approaches planning for these kinds of missions.

My other favorite example of this was the debate over the civilian surge. So the civilian surge was this policy that was put in place starting in 2009 that as the U.S. military increased its presence in Afghanistan, the civilian elements of national power, state, USAID, ag, and others were also going to plus up their end strength. And it basically failed. They didn't meet their goals in terms of the numbers of folks they were going to send. And they didn't meet them for entirely predictable reasons having to do with manpower rules, rules regarding salaries and what you could bring people back into the government to work on if they've left the government and the availability of people with the relevant regional or language skills

and the availability of people with the required qualifications to be contracting officers and whatnot. And all of that was knowable, but they came up with this plan, which was premised on the idea that you could rapidly send an additional thousand civilians to work in Afghanistan. additional thousand civilians to work in Afghanistan. And there's like an element of kind of like fantastical thinking, which sometimes happens in our policymaking process, that sat behind, I think, that decision, and that also sat, I think, behind the choice that was made to focus on end strength as the thing that senior leaders should spend time on, as opposed to saying, got it, we'll figure out some number that will succeed tactically in a bunch of places. How are we going to transmit that into a political settlement that could actually end this thing?

And I don't know how we change that pattern, but to me, that's the big policy implication of this is like senior leaders should be focused on the politics and not the details of execution. Yeah, I'm going to just completely agree. Maybe I'll say it slightly differently. I think to use the quote I said before, if I had the data in 2009, I've had all the research that I had in 2016, my recommendation on the question I was given, which is how many troops should we have? I would have had the same recommendation but with all this analysis that has bridged the gap from academia into sort of the planning or practitioner realm I think all the the one to two months we spent debating back and forth the National Security Council we could have boiled that down to one

or two days because the numbers are the numbers of the numbers so let's stop worrying about the tactical questions which is what they're fixated on but it numbers. So let's stop worrying about the tactical questions, which is what they're fixated on, but it would have been, let's focus on the real strategic questions. One is, should we be in Afghanistan? That's not my question to answer as the army guy, but that's a question that could have been asked.

Or the other ones are, okay, we see how you're going to take the village or win the village, but how are we going to get strategic success of the point that we brought up earlier? So I think that this bridging the gap effort can help with debates because it can hopefully get the policymakers off the easy topics, which is tactical stuff, and get them to the harder topics, which are the strategic level questions, which are much harder to answer. But it's easy not to get to them when you're debating between $28,000 or $30,000 or $30,000

and $200,000. I,000 or 30,200. I'm going to stop the conversation here, but I would like to thank both of you for joining us today. This has been a great conversation on irregular warfare and a great inaugural episode for the Irregular Warfare podcast. Thank you, Kyle. Super fun to take part and appreciate the opportunity to discuss this with all of you. Thank you, gentlemen. It was great.

the opportunity to discuss this with all of you. Thank you, gentlemen. It was great. Hey, thanks again for listening to the inaugural episode of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We will be releasing a new episode at least every two weeks. The next episode includes a discussion on whether drone strikes are effective in counterterrorism campaigns with Esfandi Armir of Stanford University. And then on deck, we have a talk with Matt Kantzian of MIT and Steve Biddle of Columbia University on whether building a partner nation's military capacity actually works. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Feel free to provide feedback on this episode or ideas for future topics.

And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent the views of West Point, the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. government. This wraps up Episode 1 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We will see you next time.