Stardate 20031214.1206

(On Screen): War in its most broad sense is the use of force or the threat of force to achieve political goals. This was first argued by Clausewitz in his seminal book On War. As such, trade war is indeed a form of war, even though no one ever points a weapon at anyone else. But the common use of the term war refers to violent war, the use of violence to achieve political ends, and for the rest of this article that is how I'll use the word.

Clausewitz' book is loaded with insight about aspects of war which transcend the particular way it was fought during the Napoleonic wars. (Clausewitz was a Prussian general, and served as chief of staff of the Prussian III Corps during the Waterloo campaign.) But his most important insight has been distilled over time into the aphorism that War is diplomacy by other means.

In any violent war, there are five elements. Four of those are objectives, logistics, strategy and tactics. I will discuss the fifth later.

According to Clausewitz, ideally objectives will be set by political leaders. Objectives are the political or diplomatic goals which could not be achieved peacefully and which were considered to be sufficiently important to justify resort to force. For the most part, generals should accept the objectives and attempt to achieve them.

Strategy is the high level plan formulated by the generals to achieve the objectives assigned to them. Tactics refers to low level plans formulated by lower-ranked officers to implement that strategy. One of Clausewitz's great insights is that strategy and tactics not only are intended to achieve the objectives, but may be affected by the objectives in other ways. A given strategy or tactic may be possible and useful in one situation based on the objectives but not in another situation with other objectives. Sometimes a given strategy or tactic can have consequences or side effects which are unacceptable (e.g. genocide). Sometimes a given strategy or tactic (e.g. suicide attacks) may only be possible because of the objectives.

When wars are fought on large scales, sometimes you'll see reference to a tier between strategy and tactics referred to as grand tactics. In practice, the dividing line between strategy and tactics is somewhat fuzzy, but overall the two are distinct. For instance, part of the strategy for defeating Germany in WWII was to take advantage of the fact that the Allies could put more forces in the field than Germany could. Therefore if enough operational fronts could be opened at once, Germany would run into limits on men and matériel before the Allies would, and would ultimately have to be weak somewhere. That strategy required that the US and UK fight in Italy. If a major allied army was unopposed in Italy, it could move north and either go left around Switzerland through France to Germany, or go right through Austria. But as long as a significant German force opposed them, that could not happen.

However, as long as the Allies had a force there, the Germans had to as well. On the level of strategy, the goal of the Italian campaign was to tie down German forces. That was also the primary strategic purpose of the Normandy invasion and the subsequent battle in France.

Tactics, in turn, was concerned with how to carry out those operations so that they had the maximum chance of success. Grand tactics concerned itself with the planning of the Normandy invasion itself, and with such large scale operations as Cobra, the breakout from the Normandy pocket, or Market-Garden, the airborne/armored strike which attempted to capture a major bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem. And low level tactics is concerned with things like "Now that we're here, how do we assault that bridge over there to capture it?"

It doesn't always work. Operation Cobra was a spectacular success, breaking open a wide hole in the German lines and permitting the Americans to move several divisions through it. Some then attempted to envelop a large part of the German force while other divisions moved out into France. Operation Market-Garden was not a success. The Rhine bridge was not captured. It turned out that there were two German SS panzer divisions in Arnhem resting and in reserve which had not been detected by Allied intelligence, and the British 1st Para division, which dropped into Arnhem, was not able to hold against them. (Over three quarters of the division became casualties, killed or wounded or captured by the Germans.) And the amphibious landing at Anzio in Italy was a debacle.

But all of this relies on the fourth element of war, logistics. It's a truism in military circles that "amateurs debate strategy and tactics, professionals debate logistics." Logistics refers to everything which is involved in creating military forces, moving them to where they are needed, and keeping them supplied with everything they require in order to operate militarily against the enemy.

You can't fight with what you don't have, and you can't fight with what you do have if it's in the wrong place. Logistics is the operational art of making sure there's enough of what you need, and that it's where you need it to be so that it can be used tactically, to accomplish the strategy which will achieve the objectives for the war.

Logistics has always been an important aspect of war, but it became the most important element in the transition to industrial-era warfare, beginning with the American Civil War. And as the technology of war has progressed, logistics has grown in significance.

Both sides in war have objectives, strategy, tactics and logistics. Inevitably, each side tries to screw up the other side, and it is possible to win over an enemy on any of these levels. Napoleon's early victories were mainly tactical; his enemies maneuvered their armies to the right places, but when they met Napoleon in battle he was better at utilizing his units and they kept being defeated. On the other hand, Germany in WWII was defeated strategically. Once enough fronts had been opened up by the Red Army, the British Army and the US Army, Germany no longer had the ability to field adequate forces to face them all in sufficient strength to prevent defeat.

Japan was defeated logistically. The single most important and largely unheralded element to the defeat of Japan was operations by American submarines against Japan's merchant shipping carrying vital raw materials from conquered possessions in the south back to the home islands, and finished war matériel back out to where the fighting was taking place. In particular, the flow of petroleum to Japan was seriously disrupted, which not only impeded Japanese industry in production of war goods but also seriously limited the amount of training that could be given to the Imperial Japanese Navy, and even more critically to Japanese pilots. By the end of the war, Americans going through pilot training spent three or more times as much time flying before entering combat than Japanese pilots did, and this was one of the major factors contributing to such Japanese defeats as the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Hundreds of Japanese planes were sent to attack an American fleet, and it should give you some idea of how it went to know that Americans informally started calling it the "The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot".

Japan was also defeated in detail logistically. Once the US fleet built up at the end of 1943, when we chose to take an island we also totally dominated the seas around it. The defenders had to fight with what they had, with no hope of resupply or reinforcement.

It's possible to win at the level of objectives, but that's much different since it's essentially political. North VietNam won against the US that way. The Tet Offensive won the war. By the time the battle was largely over, there had been a permanent change politically in the US.

The Tet Offensive made President Johnson decide not to run for reelection, and strongly contributed to Nixon's victory over Humphrey. Nixon's new mantra was "peace with honor", which meant that he was looking for a way out. The Tet offensive thus began a process which ultimately caused the US to change its objectives for the war, and that's how Chairman Ho won, even though he didn't live to see the final victory. Tet was a military debacle, but a strategic masterstroke. After that point, the North VietNamese only had to wait out the increasingly desperate Americans.

In general, if one side is drastically better at any of these levels than its enemy, it has a good chance of winning, though superiority at the level of objectives is harder to leverage than the others. (Nonetheless, that's what we're trying to do in Iraq.)

And it is by no means the case that all practitioners of war are equally skilled at any or all of these. The history of war is replete with bumblers and fools, who have demonstrated their incompetence at every level. It's been said that all sides in a war make mistakes, but the side that makes the fewest and least critical mistakes is the one which usually wins.

Violent war can be fought at many scales, from actions involving a handful of men completed in a couple of hours up to mass armies of millions who fight for years, but objectives, strategy, tactics and logistics are always factors. With the rise of industrial warfare and the dominance of logistics over strategy and tactics as the primary factor in war, the primary strategies of war became attrition and interdiction.

Attrition refers to the strategy of trading some of what you have for some of what the enemy has. You make an attack on the enemy and some of your men die and some of his die; some of your supplies are consumed and some of his are consumed.

The amount you use up compared to the amount the enemy uses up is referred to as the attrition exchange rate, and what you hope to do is to manage combat operations so that the attrition exchange rate will cause your enemy to run out before you do. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he consumes more than you. If you have three times as much of something as your enemy, you might be willing to trade two for every one he has, because he'd run out first. General Grant led the US Army to victory over the Confederacy primarily by waging a war of attrition, and among other things that meant he was willing to accept an objectively unfavorable rate of casualties because he knew the South would run out of men first even if the North lost two casualties for every one lost by the South.

But attrition doesn't have to be about casualties. Men aren't the only thing you can run out of. If you know that in certain kinds of situations your enemy consumes some vital kind of supply at a rate far faster than it can be replaced, it may be to your advantage to engage in that kind of operation even if it has no other objective value. For instance, forcing an enemy who is short of fuel to engage in large scale mechanized maneuvers can run him out of fuel. You could start shifting your forces from place to place on the front, forcing him to move his reserves to match them.

It's arguable that this is how the West won the Cold War. When Reagan was elected, he began a massive buildup of American military power. The leadership of the Soviet Union felt obliged to try to match it, but the economy of the USSR wasn't able to support that level of military expenditure, and it began to falter. That made a major contribution to the eventual collapse of the USSR.

But even when it doesn't involve casualties, attrition is extremely expensive. It's better if you can make your enemy's logistical situation worse without having to use up your own stuff. That's why you engage in interdiction.

Logistics is a pipeline, and the flow of logistics reaching the battlefield is gated by the narrowest bottleneck in that pipeline. Interdiction refers to operations intended to interfere with any element of enemy logistics with the goal of reducing the flow of matériel to the enemy's field forces. It's always been an aspect of war, but in large scale industrial wars it has usually been one of the central strategies. Germany in WWII tried to employ its submarines to interdict supplies reaching the UK, and it is my opinion that the Battle of the Atlantic was the single most important battle of WWII. And what Kriegsmarine U-boats failed to do to the UK, the US Navy submarines succeeded in doing to Japan.

In one sense, successful interdiction is attrition with a hugely favorable exchange rate. One submarine might sink an enemy troop transport using a handful of torpedoes and may kill a battalion of enemy soldiers that way. (An American sub actually did that in WWII in the Pacific.) And if enemy factories can't run because of shortages of raw materials, they can't produce anything which is useful to the field army.

Interdiction is a matter of degree. It's not whether you are interdicting his logistics, it's how much. You don't have to cut the flow completely; even as little as a 10% drop can be ruinous if you handle it properly.

The flow of logistics to the enemy's field force is the limiting factor on his rate of sustained operations. If he wants to operate at a higher level, he'll consume supplies faster than they arrive, and that's only possible if he's built up a stockpile, which is only possible by operating below that sustained rate and letting the excess pile up. If you have initiative and can use it to force the pace of war, you may be able to force your enemy to operate at an unsustainable level. If you can interdict his logistics, that can only make his situation worse. The more successful your interdiction, the greater his supply problem will become if you force a high pace of operations.

But if he has big stockpiles built up, it may not be apparent for a long time that you're hurting him. You will operate at a high level which is logistically sustainable, and he'll seem to pace you. It may take a long time to burn down his reserves, and during that time there won't necessarily be any obvious progress. An outsider may claim you're in a quagmire, pointing out your ongoing losses and the fact that you don't seem to be making any progress. But if you are successful, the enemy will reach a breaking point and suddenly things will start going your way. Successful attrition is a painful and slow build up to what may seem like a very sudden victory.

If the enemy's supply lines are secure, then the limiting factor will be production. But if you've been successful in interdiction, then his logistical bottleneck will be the rate at which he can deliver supplies to the combat force, and you may be able to exhaust front level supplies even as those same supplies rot in piles elsewhere. You can't fight what with you do have if it's in the wrong place. This can happen even at the level of small forces; you may be able to cut off supply for an enemy platoon and then run it out of ammunition, or you might be able to do that to an enemy division, or for his entire field army.

With the primacy of logistics beginning about 150 years ago, it began to look as if God would always fight on the side with the biggest guns (and, more importantly, the largest pile of shells for those guns).

If I can field a poorly supplied force of 500 men and you can field 10,000 well-supplied ones, I would have to be a jackass to try to face you in a conventional battle unless there was some other reason why doing so would be to my advantage. (Of course, the history of war is also replete with jackasses, and this kind of thing has happened many times.) If I'm not a jackass, and if that's all the force I have, I want to try to fight you in a way which gives me a chance of winning. I don't want to have to give up just because you're bigger than I am.

Smaller forces and powers developed two new doctrines for violent warfare intended to let a small force with poor logistics contend with a larger better-supplied enemy, which gave them a chance of winning. Those are guerrilla war and terrorism, and the goal of both is to nullify as much as possible the advantages of enemy superiority in logistics.

As with interdiction, there are historical precedents for both of those going back millennia, but they were developed as more formalized doctrines and explored more thoroughly in the 20th century, mainly by Communist insurgencies in various parts of the world.

Terrorism has one meaning in common use, but the military doctrine of terrorism covers many kinds of campaigns that we don't ordinarily think of that way, such as the campaigns led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Terrorism doctrine is used by extremely small forces, who have few resources of any kind. The goal of a terrorist campaign is to build support and to increase the flow of resources so that the small force can become larger and more powerful. It is possible in some cases for terrorism to win directly, but the usual goal of a terrorist campaign is to transition to guerrilla action or some other more direct form of operation against the enemy.

I've written at length about the basic theory behind terrorism here, so I will only briefly summarize it. The strategy is to motivate the uncommitted to join the fight or to support it, and the tactic is to engage in acts against a much more powerful enemy which will provoke reprisals from that enemy. Usually the goal is to cause the enemy to make massive reprisals against the large mass of the uncommitted, angering them. Some of them may then join your cause; many others will at least become more sympathetic to it.

Violent attacks against enemy targets, especially civilian targets, are one way to do that, and that's what most people think of as being "terrorism".

But sometimes, in very special cases, peaceful demonstrations of resistance can win directly by bringing about a loss of political will by the enemy (which is how Gandhi won in India).

That's relatively rare, and is only possible against unusual enemies. Gandhi was able to win because of British sensibilities; if the occupiers had been Russian and the enemy leader had been Stalin, Gandhi's campaign would have been a failure, and Gandhi would have been executed early on without a trial.

What is far more common for successful terrorist campaigns is that they gradually transition into guerrilla war as support builds up. There's a distinct difference between the two. According to the doctrine, terrorist attacks are primarily designed to provoke reprisals, but guerrilla actions are directly intended to harm the enemy militarily.

However, in both cases it's common for the combatants to hide amongst civilian non-combatants when they are not directly engaged in operations against the enemy, and that is the primary way by which they nullify the enemy's superiority. They form up just prior to making an attack, and disperse afterwards and vanish into the crowd. Thus they prevent the enemy from gaining initiative; he has a stronger force but no target to attack. If he attacks civilians, that helps recruitment; if he attacks nothing, he looks weak and his morale suffers, and perhaps the enemy nation's determination and objectives may weaken.

The goal of a guerrilla action is to keep initiative and to control the pace of operations at a level that is sustainable with the restricted logistics supporting the guerrilla force, preventing a larger and better supplied enemy from forcing a pace of combat operations at a higher level which the guerrilla organization cannot sustain. The guerrilla force tries to fight a long, slow war, perhaps making small gains, with a low level of attrition by both sides, and hopes to wear out the enemy.

A guerrilla war has the best chance of victory if it has a powerful outside patron and ready access to a friendly border over which supplies can be smuggled. North VietNam was able to maintain a sustained guerrilla war in South VietNam because it was supported by China and the USSR and because it could smuggle men and supplies through Laos and Cambodia. The US tried to interfere with those supply lines with bombing and ground operations but never reduced the flow enough to affect the overall course of the war.

All of the preceding discussion is intended to lead up to Wretchard's post about Iraq titled "Follow the Money". Though the insurgency in Iraq has used low level tactics we associate with terrorism, it is in fact a guerrilla operation. The attacks are not intended to provoke American reprisals so as to gain sympathy among Iraqi civilians and induce them to join the insurgency or to support it. If anything, Iraqi support for the Coalition has continued to strengthen since