I have little respect for Dr. Arquilla's analytical abilities. He drones on about "netwar" but it is clear he is--military-wise--a netwit. The article is craptasticly awful. By all means, skip the rant that will follow and just read his piece. It is such a clusterfuck of cluelessness that I'm confident you won't need my criticisms. Indeed, if you read my earliest posts regarding Arquilla (here, most on topic, but also another here) you'll get the point.
And even if you read what follows here, do go and read the source material and see if I am going overboard. If you can still say, "Hey, Brian. Bad day to give up sniffing glue, eh?" after reading this post and Arquilla's article, I will personally update this post with your objections and full name so you can take credit for correcting my obvious personal vendetta against the finest strategic thinker to put ink to paper since Thomas Friedman or Fareed Zakaria sneezed out a think piece.
I will say that Arquilla takes some common sense observations about naval warfare--that carriers are vulnerable to precision missiles and that littoral combat ships should never be put in littoral waters to face small boats and shore-based missiles and artillery--and mistakenly applies those partially correct ideas to land warfare and air warfare. But as the links show, I've mentioned those issues myself and like to think that I'm not a friggin' idiot. So I'll give the man some credit and be thankful that his day job is teaching naval officers. But the article is, absent those nuggets, some of the dumbest army organization thinking I have read since his last piece (or anything by Lawrence Korb). So I'm in that frame of mind, so you know.
So you are warned. I'm just going to go stream of consciousness here and not do the traditional quote and fisk. I printed the article and made notes of things that offended common sense. Here goes.
The man slams our military for failing to adapt enough to our last decade of war, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we've won in the Philippines, won in Iraq, and are doing just fine in Afghanistan despite it being a holding action until last year. He seems easily distracted by any rebel with a web page and email, calling them nimble fourth generation fighters.
His criticisms extend to our performance in World War II where he claims we didn't outfight the Germans, but "gang-tackled" them. I strongly disagree and point to our campaigns in North Africa, Italy, and the European campaign through the Battle of the Bulge. By the end of the European campaign, the British were breaking up infantry divisions for replacements and we had no strategic reserve of troops at all. Sure, by 1945 we were in the position to pound the Germans who lost much of their strength, but our troops performed well during periods when it could not be said we had overwhelming advantages over the Germans. But I digress. I'll skip over the rest of his attacks on American military thought and practice in history.
But when Arquilla swoons over al Qaeda's netwar nimbleness and says they've dodged our massive force, I have to call bullshit. Has he not noticed that we've decimated them? Has he missed our rather restrained use of firepower in going after them since 2001? Where exactly is the "massive applications of force" that he speaks of? And how can he speak of al Qaeda proving how easy it is for so-called networked warriors to defeat us?
He even claims that the purported cost of the Iraq War, which he cites as $3 trillion based on research by Stiglitz and Bilmes, will bankrupt us. Again, bullshit. Even if the cost is as high as he asserts, it is still a bargain considering the size of our economy.
As for the wars breaking our troops, again, bullshit. Our ground forces were strained by repeat deployments--which obviously are only possible when troops survive their first tour, indicating that our troops aren't being decimated on the battlefield--but rather than breaking are now the best we've ever had, in my judgment. Our troops are battle tested and our training is refined based on combat experience.
So the idea that we've come close to punching ourselves out, as he claims, is ridiculous.
Funny enough, he slams the concept of the Future Combat Systems--now abandoned as a big project. While I had issues with the idea of light vehicles, the funny thing is that Arquilla slams the FCS concept for relying on a battlefield internet sharing massive amounts of data! He ignores that in many ways our battlefield internet is working now, in combat! I guess a snazzy web site and email is all our military needs to be netwarishly awesome.
Arquilla also slams the Air Force for wanting expensive fighters and being devoted to "massive bombing" (it's well known, he says!). Look, the Gods of War did not bestow upon our military perpetual air supremacy. We have it because we work at it. And dropping bombs on insurgents and terrorists isn't the Air Force's only job. We need to be able to fight for air superiority if we face an enemy with an air force capable of contesting us. Are we really to assume that will never happen? Truly, Arquilla seems committed to a new Ten Year Rule that assumes we won't have to fight a bigger foe with an air force that can contest our control of the air in the near future so why bother preparing for such a fight?
As for the massive bombing charge, has Arquilla not noticed that we often have a single heavy bomber for support in the air, dropping single precision bombs here and there? There simply is no massive bombing going on in the war. Even in the initial months of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was precision- and not carpet-bombing.
But now we get into the real idiocy. I simply must quote:
These developments suggest that the United States is spending huge amounts of money in ways that are actually making Americans less secure, not only against irregular insurgents, but also against smart countries building different sorts of militaries. And the problem goes well beyond weapons and other high-tech items. What's missing most of all from the U.S. military's arsenal is a deep understanding of networking, the loose but lively interconnection between people that creates and brings a new kind of collective intelligence, power, and purpose to bear -- for good and ill.
You've got to be freaking kidding me. We risk being Facebooked into submission? I'm sorry, but you can't Twitter a king to death. This faith in the power of networking as anything more than a useful tool is astounding.
American troops, including those in irrelevant tanks, expensive aircraft, and large ships, brought down the Taliban regime and Saddam's reign of terror. We didn't flame war them into submission, or de-friend them into humiliating surrender. And his claim that al Qaeda exists "cohesively in more than 60 countries" because of the Internet ignores that al Qaeda does not operate cohesively! Where is the evidence of this? Locals seek the cachet of brand Osama but other than a shared hatred of the West and a willingness to kill innocents in the name of Islam, where is the evidence of cohesion?
I'm only a third of the way in, but thankfully the heart of the article is upon us. You see, Arquilla has three simple rules to win in a modern networked environment that will save untold amounts of blood and treasure--notwithstanding the facts that the costs have been relatively small and our casualties historically low with the disastrous approach Arquilla claims we've had.
So let the Ultra Bullshit begin. Rule 1:
"Many and Small" Beats "Few and Large."
I can hardly wait to read this stuff! Check it out:
The demands of large-scale conflicts have led to reliance on a few big units rather than on a lot of little ones. For example, the Marines have only three active-duty divisions, the U.S. Army only ten. The Navy has just 11 carrier strike groups, and the Air Force about three dozen attack aircraft "wings."
Huh? Even Arquilla backtracks a little bit on noting the move to Army brigade combat teams. But let's not let him get away with this foolishness. One, the Marines routinely fight with regimental combat teams and Marine expeditionary units (battalion-based). The Army has 45 brigade combat teams in the active force. It is silly to speak of fighting with big divisions as if 10 to 20 thousand troops line up shoulder to shoulder on a battlefield. In counter-insurgencies, our units routinely break down into companies and platoons operating fairly independently, sending out sub-units like squads (10 men or so) on missions.
The Navy has 11 carrier strike groups but when every ship and sub has missiles to attack ships, subs, planes, and land targets, it is highly misleading to imply that this is our only offensive punch. Further, for the small wars we are in now, carriers are actually very valuable since they don't face the risk of being lost to enemy anti-ship assets and can project a wing of war planes into any fight anywhere on the planet.
As for the Air Force having only three dozen attack wings, is Arquilla stoned? [Sentence deleted since I misread it as "three" and not "three dozen". But the rest still applies notwithstanding my error. three dozen wings is quite a bit, actually.] Is he really implying that somehow ground forces have been denied air support? Everything from gunships through fighters and heavy bombers drop bombs and missiles very effectively in support of ground operations. I'm stunned at this idiocy.
The Vietnam War was lost from the same attitude he says, when massive numbers of AK-47 fighters beat our B-52s. Um, one problem. We beat our enemy in Vietnam and then Congress lost it after we withdrew with a sovereign South Vietnam intact and the Viet Cong defeated. North Vietnamese tanks and heavy artillery organized in those inconvenient big units conquered South Vietnam. It's amazing how this type of myth about Vietnam can entrench itself.
In a ridiculous attempt to link his failed Vietnam analysis with his silly notions, he notes that we used B-52 bombers in both. Funny, it seems like only moments ago that he was complaining about new, expensive F-22s and F-35s. Now it is bad to use old weapons that still work?
Arquilla goes on to discuss the novel approach of putting platoon-sized elements--as opposed to our big divisions--among the population--saying it allowed us to facilitate "social networking" with the Iraqi tribes. One problem is that this misses the point that the surge approach was simply classic counter-insurgency as has been practiced for centuries. And it over-states the concept of going from big to small. We had small before the surge to hold, but we relied on Iraqis to do the holding to "social network" with Iraqis. The surge put US forces in the role since the Iraqi security forces couldn't handle the still too strong enemy.
Arquilla correctly hints at the worry among many in the Army that training and organizing for COIN will make us less able to fight big conventional enemies. This is a correct concern notwithstanding Arquilla's completely misleading analogy with Roman legions organized in maniples. Arquilla says that they could beat organized big armies or loose bands of tribal fighters. This is certainly true, but when battling scattered tribes the legion would be dispersed. When fighting big armies, the legion would be concentrated. How is that different from our big units which are still organized into platoons whether fighting big or small? I'm at a loss to understand the point he's trying to make.
On Iraq, Arquilla claims we faced only a handful of firefights and that the Iraqi army outsmarted us by melting away and waiting to fight as insurgents. This ignores the many and hard battles we fought against the Republican Guards, Saddam's Fedayeen, and Baath Party militias on the march up. Are we to be penalized for winning those many small battles decisively? Yes, the Iraqi regular army dissolved--as we wanted it to do so we didn't have to be slowed down by taking care of several hundred thousand POWs--but the regular Iraqi army was so feeble that it was basically an internal security force only capable of beating down civilians despite being called "ther army."
Then we get to the apparent explanation for why Arquilla finds our COIN campaign so novel--he doesn't understand that insurgency is old. That is how the weak fight the strong until the weak can get stronger and weaken the strong. He says of the Iraq insurgency, that it was "a new type of irregular warfare in which a series of small attacks no longer signaled buildup toward a major battle." What?! Is he kidding? We faced a conventional type of irregular warfare/terrorism in Iraq (novel in that it relied so much on IEDs rather than direct and indirect fire) and did so well that we prevented the enemy from going up the escalation ladder from terror and small-scale units to fight in larger units to eventually be capable of fighting a major battle against our side.
He also expresses some wonder that we worked with local Iraqis ("a social network of tribal fighters") during the surge--the classic local defense force of a successful counter-insurgency. You can label something new, as Arquilla does, but that doesn't make it so.
And while Arquilla gives the spread out US platoons who worked with Iraqi local defense forces (and Iraqi forces) credit for exposing the enemy to attacks by a small majority of our troops, he strongly implies (by calling them "the small percentage of coaltion forces actually waging the campaign against them") that all those forces creating the net that snared the enemy don't count as being part of the campaign to defeat them. That is ridiculous. And as he jumps to advocating a "small networked corps of 'finders'" to fight insurgents, he makes the jump officially stupid.
Arquilla moves on to extolling the brilliance of the new form of "swarming" that the enemy has "pioneered" to attack government forces and targets. One, there is no pioneering going on--this is the stuff of traditional insurgencies. And two, the "wave attacks" that swarm by attacking multiple targets at the same time is nothing new or amazing. Has he never heard the expression, "synchronize your watches"?
He also calls the Russian August 2008 attack on Georgia an example of swarming. Hah! The Russians performed poorly in the invasion, yet Arquilla calls that brief massing of old weapons used by second-rate troops against a COIN-focused and poorly deployed inferior enemy an artistry of "omnidirectional attack"? That is netwar? Just because Russia waged a cyber-war on Georgian web sites while they sledgehammered their way to an incomplete battlefield victory?
Arquilla then makes the stunning leap that since swarms of insurgents stymie our massed armies (which they did not do in Iraq or Vietnam; and it is an error to think we were massed in either war) we should face massed enemy armies with swarms of our small units that overwhelm them by striking at many points. Wow. That is idiotic.
Again, Arquilla takes a valid point about naval warfare in a network centric world (something I agree with) and tries to apply it to ground warfare. Arquilla goes on to extoll the forward thinking of Marine LTG Riper who abandoned the rules in Millennium Challenge 2002 to inflict heavy damage on US aircraft carriers in the exercise. Arquilla misses the point that the exercise was to train officers in doing their jobs in a large-scale operation and not to explore all strategy options when doing so would end the exercise and deny the officers the training opportunity. This was not a case of swarming or netwar that our dumb military wouldn't see--it was a grandstanding officer who wrecked the training opportunity bolstered by analysts who couldn't find their butts with both hands in an omnidirectional search. There is a place for thinking outside the box. And in that context, Riper's approach would be valuable.
After not explaining how we'd use large numbers of small units to disable a conventional enemy army, Arquilla then says we could have that army of small units by slashing out the apparently useless armor, signal, artillery, MP, infantry, and assorted logistics units that a modern army needs to take the field. Yet somehow, we'd have to rotate those units in the face of a big enemy army. Just how do we do that when the enemy would control the ground? It is simply foolishness to extrapolate from a valid observation about carriers versus large numbers of smaller, networked missile-armed ships. And arguing that his reduction in forces could be done just as big reductions were made after 1945, 1975, and 1991 ignores that the earlier reductions did not eliminate the army and replace it with vast numbers of fire teams that apparently have no higher organization.
Arquilla states that China (navy) and Russia (army) are already going in the direction of swarming. Which is bull. Both China and Russia have stated they want carriers. And Russia's army is devolving from division-centric to brigade-centric forces--based on our experience! But otherwise, Russia's army is rotting away--not becoming networked.
Amazingly, Arquilla also extols the example of networked Hezbollah beating nation Israel in defense of his notions. Again, this is BS. Israel screwed the pooch in Lebanon, relying on air power and failing to use their army effectively against an enemy that fought from prepared positions as light infantry; but less than three years later in Gaza, showed they learned their lessons. Hezbollah did not swarm in 2006 unless you elevate their rocket barrage to that level--in which case Israel swarmed, too, with their aerial assault.
Arquilla takes a valid point about the survivability of big carriers in a networked age where missiles and surveillance in a network can overwhelm a carrier's defensive systems, and thinks he can apply the lesson to the Army by saying tanks are just an obsolete, too-heavy system. Yeah, that view was popular after 1991 and lasted until the Iraqi insurgency demonstrated the value of heavy systems even in COIN. So, he writes, cut the Army combat forces to special forces teams (ignoring that we can't have many more special forces without dramatically reducing quality) capable of fighting divisions or terrorists, and we're good to go.
This, dear readers, is effing idiocy.
