Stardate 20020209.1850

(On Screen): Douglas Turnbull discusses asymmetric warfare. I find that I don't like that term, because it seems to imply that it is something that our opponents can do but that we cannot. A better term would be "unconventional warfare", and one of the interesting results of the Afghan campaign is that the US is really quite good at it.

It is true that in some ways unconventional warfare can nullify some of our big muscley ways of fighting, such as heavy use of airpower and armor. But not as much so as he thinks, and we have other weapons. For one thing, it's important to remember that the goal is to win the war, not necessarily to win every battle, or to necessarily fight for every asset.

We have unconventional ways of attacking of our own. One way is economic warfare. That can happen quietly, by seizing economic assets belonging to our enemies. Another form of economic warfare is to attack capital assets. He mentions how an enemy can fortify a city and prevent us from using bombing by mixing combatants closely into a population of non-combatants. However, any city can be made uninhabitable by taking out its water works. By the same token, you can make a city much harder for the enemy to operate in by eliminating its supply of electricity. In the most extreme case this would involve destruction of generation facilities, but usually the thing to attack is power transmission lines. Not only are they spread out and liable to be much less well defended, but they can more easily be repaired after the war is over.

Psych warfare is very powerful. ("Supreme excellence in war lies in causing your enemy to surrender without a fight." Sun Tzu.)

There are some surprisingly effective non-lethal weapons that can be used in low-level sieges. For instance, if the political leader you're trying to bag is holed up in a building and won't come out, play blazingly loud rock music 24 hours a day until he gives up. (That's how they captured Noriega.)

The biggest and best weapon the US has is money. Nearly everything costs money, but sometimes money can be applied directly. If your enemy is using guerrilla warfare, careful application of bribes and offers of rewards can turn up a great deal of information which can be of use. Once you have a lot of information about your enemy's force, even a guerrilla army uses a lot of supplies, and they have to come from somewhere. If you know where they are operating and have some idea of where their supply lines are, they can be weakened by air interdiction aimed at their supply lines.

No guerrilla army can operate without a patron or support organization somewhere. That can be attacked even if the guerrilla army itself can't be found, and once it is gone the guerrillas will be severely weakened.

A form of unconventional war which has sometimes been waged informally is war by assassination. That happened in the gangster era in Chicago, but that was pretty crude. It is possible for such a thing to be much more sophisticated, and a sniper's bullet through the correct skull or a remote control bomb in the correct car trunk can be the equivalent of a major victory. The closest I'm aware of right now to such a thing is Israel's campaign of directed retaliations against Palestinian terrorists.

Guerrilla war and terrorist war are indeed problems. It is true that you cannot fight them with armored divisions. But we are not helpless against them; it is just that we have to adopt unconventional tactics of our own. Fortunately, we too have many unconventional options.