Category: Theory and Practice

It’s said, too often, that the US military is the most powerful the world has ever seen. To be sure, that’s true in the sense of sheer destructive power, but it’s not true in terms of relative dominance.

The most dominant army in history, compared to its peer competitors, in my opinion, was the Mongols. (The Germans studied Mongol campaigns when they created blitzkrieg doctrine.)

The Mongols did not lose a war until they ran up against the Mamlukes, who defeated them by copying them, with a horse archer army of their own. Mongol armies moved faster than WWII tank armies, coordinated multiple armies across hundreds of miles, arriving at the same time at pre-chosen points. Their tactics in battle tended to inflict disproportionate casualties.

A large part of Mongol dominance was genius-level leadership. I can’t think of any major historical figure who was better at picking subordinates than Genghis Khan: not only was he never betrayed by any of his generals, his administrators were brilliant, and his generals were almost all, themselves, great generals.

More than that, the Mongols did not rely on battlefield supremacy alone. Genghis Khan used traders as spies, and before he invaded anyone, he knew who within that country was unhappy and ready to rebel as well as who the enemies of that nation were. Any internal or external weaknesses were exploited. After cities were captured, if they had resisted, he rounded up the men and used them as the first wave in the next city assault. His genocidal activities were terrible (though a reading of the actions of many of his foes shows him no worse than them, just more effective), but they were militarily sound: he did not leave large, hostile, unpacified populations in his rear.

The Mongols also often brought enemy military units into their own ranks, reorganized them, and retained their loyalty. Mongol armies, even in Genghis Khan’s time, were made up more of non-Mongols than Mongols. Even so, the Mongols won battles against fores who outnumbered them regularly: they were not a horde at the beginning, but were fighting more populous countries with larger armies.

The key weakness of the Mongols was, in fact, Genghis Khan. His particular genius at choosing brilliant subordinates and earning their loyalty was not shared by any of his heirs. When the last general Genghis picked himself, Subotai, dies, there are no more great Mongol generals.

Nonetheless, the Mongol successor states wound up controlling the largest chunk of the world before the British Empire, and unlike the British, conquered the core civilized parts of the world: China, Persia; indeed, virtually all of continental Asia. Europe was only saved by the death of the Genghis Khan’s heir (I remain unconvinced by arguments that the fragmented, easily played against each other, backwards Europeans would have been able to stop Subotai short of the Channel.)

Note further that the Mongols were able to rule those they conquered. They were able to create law and order; to put down rebellions, and so on.

The US army is a blunt instrument, incapable of winning what its masters want it to win (Iraq, Afghanistan); and it hasn’t been tested in main battle against a peer foe in a long time (China/Russians/Europeans). Theoretical overwhelming power is all very nice, but lets see how that fleet with its big, clumsy, exposed aircraft carriers (for example) does against someone like China who has been specifically gearing to destroy it, rather than against tribesmen or 3rd rate powers (Saddam’s Iraq) which had no means of fighting it.

A military must be judged by what it can do. The American military can destroy countries, it can blitz countries, but it can’t hold them. Dominant? Sure. Most dominant in history? No. And we’ll see what happens to its dominance when it is really tested.

Osama bin Laden had a thesis: his theory was that the Americans could be defeated if they could be convinced to occupy a Muslim country where they could actually be fought. He was right.

Which General or Military Theorist today will turn out to have had the theory that the US military can be defeated in conventional non-occupation war, who is right? Is it a Chinese theorist?

We’ll find out. All periods of military dominance end. The Mongols did, the British did, the Romans did, the Greeks did, and so on. The question is just when, and how.

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The Future of War in the Developed World

By Ian Welsh

On January 23, 2014

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I’ve been meaning to write about the fact that people don’t understand the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan and Mexico for some time.

In simple terms: the US military, the most expensive, most powerful military in the world, lost in Iraq (they had to pay bribes to leave). They are losing in Afghanistan. In Mexico the state has been unable to control drug gangs. In Lebanon, the IDF, the most powerful military in the Middle East, was defeated by Hezbollah. Hezbollah also won the e-lint war against the IDF.

(Kicking this to the top again, I want more people to see it. – Ian)

Technology is not necessarily on the side of the great powers, of the big armies. IEDs are cheap, any halfway competent mechanic can make them with materials that are readily available even in Afghanistan. Weapons are widely available everywhere, and soon it will be trivial to 3D print most of them. Drones, which people are so scared of (with reason) are essentially remote controlled airplanes, they are not hard to make, and they will spread to guerillas, resistance movements, terrorists and so on.

These are, yes, terror weapons, as the US, in its use of bombing and drones, well understands. They are also area denial weapons, weapons that prey on the psyche of the opposition, leaving them no peace and quiet.

They are weapons whose widespread use can and will destroy nations by destroying the peace and stability required for prosperity and normal life.

But they are very, very effective. They will work in virtually any nation if a large enough portion of the population wants them to work.

Do not think that the more intelligent members of current elites don’t know this. They understand what many on the left don’t: that first world militaries can be defeated, have been defeated, and that it can happen in their own countries.

And I suspect they are very very scared. The surveillance state, routine assassinations by the executive, the loss of habeas corpus, and so on, are their response. Total surveillance, and the ability to take people out anywhere, any time, is their answer, which is why I keep saying that I will know people are serious about revolution when they take out surveillance systems as a matter of routine, when surveillance becomes ethically anathema.

Be scared, not because those on the left who insist that modern militaries are unbeatable and all anyone can do is supplicate the powerful are right, but because militaries are very fightable, but such fights leave countries in ruins. If the elites continue on their current course, in many first world countries, Iraq and Afghanistan and Mexico are the future. People with no future will fight, and too many people now know how this form of war works.

This is the future of war. If elites continue on their path of unaccountability, their insistence on destroying the future, and their crushing of prosperity, this is what will happen.

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Women in combat

By Ian Welsh

On December 27, 2013

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prompted by this Atlantic article on integrating women into combat, I thought I’d run through the basics (as I understand them), on this issue.

Let’s start with capability. On the con side, women generally:

have less upper body strength;
suffer stress fractures more easily;
run more slowly.

On the plus side, women generally:

have more long term endurance under adverse conditions. The list of endurance swimmers is as dominated by women as the list of weightlifters is by men: there are no male distance swimmers who can come even close to the best women. This translates into military jobs such as forward observing and sniping.
Appear to have far better fire control than men.

On the even side:

As best I can tell from looking at Olympic shooting and sniper records from WWII (where Russian female snipers feature on the list of top snipers), as well as anecdotally from gun-clubs, women are just as good a shot as men. A common joke runs that husbands try to convince their wives to shoot, then are upset when their wives are better than them.

In terms of capability, I don’t see a ton of argument for keeping women out of combat.

There are, however, social realities. The Israelis, who have a lot of experience with this, decided that the problem with women in combat wasn’t women, it was men: the men couldn’t get over the possibility of harm, or worse, coming to women. On the flip side, in the US military, rape by fellow soldiers is far too common.

And rape is likely to be the reality for women who are captured, as well. Do we want that? Men may be raped if captured, but they will not become pregnant as a result.

I do firmly believe that everyone in society should be combat trained. I think it ups the compliance costs for governments who wish to head in authoritarian directions for combat training to be given to the sort of people who normally wouldn’t have it. People who have authoritarian personalities are, generally, more comfortable with violence and more likely to be trained in its use. It’s good for society for everyone to have that training so authoritarians don’t have a near monopoly. It is for this reason that despite all the problems with it, I support the draft: when the US moved to a volunteer army, made up primarily of southerners, it created a dangerous situation: an army that is not representative of the population, which considers itself (and is considered) superior to civilians.

Combat training, however, is not the same as being combat troops. Everyone may receive Basic and even some advanced training, without being expected to fight except in the most desperate of situations.

Finally, if a nation does want to go down the route of female combatants, I tend to think that combat units should be gender segregated: this protects women from both men’s concern in combat, where it is inappropriate, and from their predation back on base.

Bin Laden’s insights and the Egyptian Coup

By Ian Welsh

On August 3, 2013

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This is the sort of post that makes people mad, but in light of what’s happening in Egypt it’s necessary to talk about bin Laden.

Most people who hate bin Laden have never read read his writings. They’re quite extensive, and they’ll reward your time in reading them. (Obligatory bin Laden is a bad man, just like George Bush Jr. disclaimer.) Bin Laden was very smart, and and he understood America very well, and had a good take on the world system. He was not stupid, he was not a coward (he lead troops from the front line against the Soviets), and he was very effective at accomplishing many of his goals. Along with George Bush Jr, who was his greatest ally and enemy, he was was one of the first great men of the 21st century. Great men, of course, do not need to be good men. Hitler and Churchill and Gandhi were all great men, they weren’t all good men.

Let’s start in relation to Egypt. A lot of people in Egypt and elsewhere see the Egyptian coup (it was a coup, don’t tell me otherwise) as being US backed. Add to this the fact that they see the defeat of the Muslim brotherhood in the past as being aided by the US, they believe that Egypt is ruled by its current oligarchy (an extension of the Mubarak era oligarchy, and again, don’t even try and lie and say otherwise), because of the US.

What bin Laden said was that despotic regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere are backed by America in specific, and the West in general. That backing is powerful. In Islam there is an idea that you should deal with your local tyrant, your local problems, first, and not worry about the far enemy. Bin Laden believed that, in the current circumstance, you could not do that. Revolution at home was close to impossible because of the far enemy, because of the United States. Even if you did, by some miracle succeed, as long as the US was the global hegemon, your success would be undermined and destroyed by the US by crippling your economy, escalating, if necessary, to economic sanctions backed by force. If you don’t believe this, see what was done to Iraq in the 90s and what is being done to Iran today. A lot of children and adults are dying and suffering because of these sanctions.

Bin Laden’s argument, then, was that the US had to be defeated. That the evils being done by local regimes (such as the extensive use of torture and routine rape in Egypt under Mubarak) could not be ended by simply fighting the local regime, but that the far regime, the US, must be defeated.

This is a pragmatic argument, and it is an ethical argument. When Madeline Albright said that half a million dead Iraqi children from US sanctions was “worth it”, bin Laden’s response was to ask if the lives of Muslim children were not equal to those of Christian children. Rhetorically, he asked, “is our blood not red too?”

Whatever you think of bin Laden, this is a powerful ethical statement.

What this leads to is that the US is responsible both for the suffering it causes directly, and the suffering it causes indirectly, by keeping monstrous regimes in power, or, in many cases, helping create them.

This critique is not just a critique from an Islamic perspective, it strikes to the heart of the West’s ostensible ethics, to the equality of all humans, to the right of self-determination, and even to the western theoretical preference for democracy. Democracy is a powerful idea, but bin Laden (and others) have observed that the West only believes in elections when the right people win. This was best on display when Hamas, in Palestine, won elections the US had insisted occur (over Israeli objections) and the US then backed a Fatah coup to make sure that Hamas did not take power. (Hamas later kicked Fatah out of Gaza, leading to the current divided rule of Palestine.) It doesn’t take a genius to see that this applies to the current Egyptian situation. Whatever one thinks of Morsi’s government, it was elected in what seem to have been fair elections.

So, if you play the West’s rules, if you win fair and square in elections, and the West doesn’t like who came to power, they will help undo the results of the elections. If you try and get rid of a regime you don’t like through violence, the West will support the regime, making it unlikely you will win, and if you do win despite all that, they will undermine or destroy your regime through economic sanctions. All that failing, as in Iraq, they may well invade.

The problem with this critique is that it is, substantially, accurate. Hate bin Laden or not, this is a model of the world which has predictive and analytical utility. It explains the past, it predicts the future, and it does both well. The fact that bin Laden’s critique is fairly similar to various left-wing critiques is not accidental. It is not because bin Laden and the left are fellow travellers (Islamists are strongly opposed to genuine leftists), it is because any set of model that track reality fairly well will tend to look alike. Of course, that they look the same is used to discredit people by association. “You agree with bin Laden” they say, and shut down discussion of how the world actually works.

The power of bin Laden’s critique is its accuracy, the elements of it which are true. What bin Laden added (though I’m sure others have as well), was one main thing: the directive to attack the US.

Bin Laden was, in certain respects, born of the Afghan war against the USSR. Those of you who are young tend to view what happened to the USSR as inevitable. Creaky, economically broken, it was going down. Nothing is so inevitable as what has already happened. You’re not wrong, the USSR had real internal problems it couldn’t fix, but you’re not quite right, either. Absent Afghanistan, the USSR might have toddled on for a lot longer. Decades, perhaps.

Looked at from the outside, even in the 90s (heck, even in the 80s, with some prescience), the US does not look healthy. It looks economically sick, with stagnation of wages even in the 90s, a gutting of real productivity, soaring inequality, and political sclerosis leading to the creation of an elite detached from the actual economy, but instead playing financial games which do not track real economic power. It looks, like the USSR did, like a society which, with a push, could collapse.

Bin Laden set out to give the US that push.

Let’s go back to the USSR. The Soviet military was not a joke. It was large, powerful, had good equipment (especially compared to Afghan tribesmen). Even the post Soviet Russian military is no joke (take a look at what they did to Georgia, recently.) The USSR was POWER.

And in Afghanistan, the USSR was worn down. All that power died in the grave of Empires. And soon thereafter, the USSR ceased to be.

Bin Laden was there. He saw it. He participated in it as a fighter.

He looked at the West, and the US in specific and believed that the US was ripe for something similar. As with the USSR the US in the 90s had a very scary reputation. Remember how decisively Saddam was defeated in the first Gulf War. The US looked undefeatable. And, in certain respects it was, and still is.

But bin Laden saw, accurately, the US weakness. He believed that while the US was good at open field warfare, American troops were nothing special at the sort of guerrilla warfare that had occurred in Afghanistan. He believed that if they could be brought into Afghanistan, and kept there, instead of coming in and leaving quickly, they could be defeated. He believed that the legend of American invincibility, as with that of the Red Army, could be shattered.

9/11 was about getting the US to overreact. About getting it into Afghanistan. It succeeded in doing that, but bin Laden must have known some despair, because at first, Afghanistan wasn’t proving to be much of a graveyard at all. The majority of Afghans hadn’t liked the Taliban, didn’t mind them being blown over, and were willing to give the US and the West, a chance.

Then Bush stepped in, used 9/11 as the de-facto pretext, and invaded Iraq. And in Iraq, much of what bin Laden wanted to have happen in Afghanistan happened, with the bonus that Hussein (whom, as a secular Arabist, bin Laden was an enemy of) was gotten rid of too. Win/win. And meanwhile, in Afghanistan, coalition forces managed to alienate the Afghan population and ensure the return of the Taliban, while destabilizing Pakistan in addition. Bonus!

(Bush was able to rewrite the unwritten US constitution, however, and his victory in changing the nature of America has been confirmed by the fact that Obama has institutionalized almost all essential Bush policies and extended many of them.)

Now one can say that bin Laden lost (not because he was killed, that’s irrelevant and people who think it matters much are fools), because the US is still around, still powerful, and hasn’t collapsed.

But it isn’t over yet. The cost of the Iraq war, of 9/11, was huge, both in financial terms and in the changes wrought to the American psyche, unwritten constitution and society. Those lost years, and they were lost, should have been used to transition the US economy. Instead the money that should have done that was used to fund the Iraq war, and to keep money flowing a housing bubble was not just allowed, but encouraged, both by the Fed and by actively turning a blind eye to illegal activity.

The US economy has never recovered. Five to six years out, the absolute number of jobs hasn’t recovered, the actual standard of living for most people is dropping, income and wealth inequality is worse, and unsustainable spending is occurring without any plan to create an economy which can pay for it. Political sclerosis is worse, not better, the economic plan is to frack, frack, frack (which won’t work in the long run) and the US and the West are doubling down on a surveillance state and continuing to erode freedoms, which not only has much larger economic effects than most people realize, but weakens Western ideological power.

So bin Laden hasn’t lost yet. The reaction to 9/11 may yet be seen to be the precipitating event that made it essentially impossible for the US to reverse its decline, and made that decline far faster and far worse.

We started with Egypt, so let’s bring it back there. If you’re an Egyptian who believes (accurately) that there was a coup which overthrew a democratically elected government, and that the US was complicit at best, and actively involved at worst (John Kerry constantly insisting there was no coup is not in America’s interests here), then the basic critique still resonates. Even if you don’t want bin Laden’s end goal of a new Islamic caliphate, if you want independence, if you want to be able to defeat your local tyrants, well, the US is your enemy, the far enemy whose existence makes defeating the near enemies impossible. It is not a country you feel you can make peace with, a devil you can ignore because it is far away, but a country whose ability to intervene in your country must be somehow destroyed.

This basic analysis of the situation remains extremely powerful and convincing.

Bin Laden was the first great man of the 21st century. George Bush Jr. was the second (Obama is important, but is a secondary figure to Bush.)

And as long as bin Laden’s insights seem to explain the world, someone is likely to act on them.

May God, should he or she exist, aid us. We’re going to need it.

(Oh, and part of the opportunity cost of the Iraq war may well be hundreds of millions of deaths from climate change. You’re welcome.)

Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return—and so the wheel turns.

Why I’m Against Current Wars—and Most Foreseeable Wars, Too

By Ian Welsh

On January 12, 2011

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No, I’m not against all wars. But I’m against the Afghan war, the “secret” war in Yemen, the occupation of Iraq, and any war with Iran under any circumstances I can imagine.

Why? Because:

They are moronic (in the sense that they cannot be “won” and I oppose unwinnable wars);
The US is in steep decline in an economic/industrial sense and needs to spend its money on other things.

As noted, I’m not opposed to all wars. Hell I even supported the Afghan war up to the point where it became clear that it was destabilizing Pakistan, polls of Afghans indicated they wanted us out, and it become obvious it couldn’t be “won” in any meaningful sense.

Anyone who supports the current wars is not someone I have much time for, I’m afraid. I regard them as fundamentally stupid wars and significantly immoral to boot, plus on pragmatic terms I believe they are doing more harm than good to the US, not just economically, but in terms of real security and in terms of the erosion of civil liberties. States at permanent war cannot and do not maintain their liberties. Permanent occupations are particularly corrupting and badly damage the real war fighting capacity of the armies doing them (see Army, Israeli).

Anyone who’s in favour of imperial wars and permanent war can’t really be on the left in any meaningful fashion, because the cost of permanent war is:

every domestic priority that left wingers claim to care about
plus the gutting of civil liberties in the core.

To a liberal, military spending is a necessary evil, and as such you do only as much as is necessary to:

actually defend the country. (I.e., hardly any. Who is going to invade the US?)
hold open necessary trade lanes. (I.e., the navy would be smaller than it is now and differently organized, but it would be the primary US military arm.)

And that’s about it. Every dollar spent on the military is not spent on actual economically productive activity. Yes, there are some exceptions, but there are other ways to do R&D spending, and more and more military R&D is not applicable to civilian matters.

(I’m sure Vladimir Putin laughs himself sick every night that the US pays him off to help America stay in Afghanistan. The irony must be one of the great joys of his life.)

In terms of dependence on foreign commodities, the progressive solution is to move the energy basis of the US economy off of oil and onto a basis which is much more domestically available (and built). That way you don’t need to be able to knock around middle eastern nations.

While many lefties wouldn’t agree with me, I would also move to mandatory service, everyone serving 2 to 4 years. Most wouldn’t serve in the military, but every male and any woman who wants it would get military training. A militarily trained population tends to concentrate the minds of politicians and other elites and I also believe that the military should be much more representative of the population as a whole, for a variety of reasons.

What do you do with all those people in national service? Rebuild the country: teach them skills and put them to work on broadband, infrastructure of various kinds, refitting all buildings for energy efficiency, etc… Why? Well, because that makes the country more secure and safer by reducing dependence on foreign oil, etc… (Well, that’s one reason.)

In my opinion anyone who’s for the current war is delusional or attached to the military industrial complex and willing to betray their country’s real interests for money. The US cannot afford war. Period. To be for war right now is to be for the ruin of America.

Why Pakistan’s Decline Is Almost Inevitable

By Ian Welsh

On April 27, 2009

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Image by takebackpackistan

Benazir Bhutto’s niece, Fatima Bhutto, lays out the reasons for decline as succinctly as anyone I’ve read:

The Taliban and their ilk, on the other hand, are able to seat themselves in towns and villages across Pakistan without much difficulty largely because they do not come empty-handed. In a country that has a literacy rate of around 30 percent, the Islamists set up madrassas and educate local children for free. In districts where government hospitals are not fit for animals, they set up medical camps—in fact, they’ve been doing medical relief work since the 2005 earthquake hit Northern Pakistan. Where there is no electricity, because the local government officials have placed their friends and relatives in charge of local electrical plants, the Islamists bring generators. In short, they fill a vacuum that the state, through political negligence and gross graft, has created.

To combat the Taliban’s incursions further into poverty-stricken parts of the country, Pakistan’s government only has to do its job less leisurely. That’s the frightening truth.

Napoleon once said that the moral is to the physical as ten is to one. My simple rule of thumb for determining who will win civil and guerilla wars is “who is the government?” Now if I were to ask 100 people who the government of northwest Pakistan is, 99 would probably say “the government of Pakistan.”

No. Government is what government does and Taliban is the government in most of that region. The organization which supplies security, social services and law is the government, and it doesn’t matter who is recognized by foreign powers. This is a mistake which the West makes over and over and over again, most recently in Somalia when the US greenlighted and aided in the destruction of Somalia incipient government, the Islamic Courts Union, plunging the country back into even worse anarchy than before, and pretending that the foreign chosen “interim government”, which had no popular support, was actually a government.

Now Napoleon didn’t say the moral is to the physical as infinity to one. If you’re badly enough outgunned and outnumbered, well, being the government may not be enough, especially if you’ve only been the government for a brief time.

This is why a lot of analysts believe that Pakistan can never “fall”, because the Pakistani army is very powerful.

I am far less sanguine. The army has shown very little willingness or ability to fight the Pakistani Taliban. It is unclear to me that the Pakistani army is willing to fight the Taliban, at least all out and if ordered to do so that it would obey that order, either at the top level, or at the operational level. Which is to say, just because the “President” orders it to do something, doesn’t mean it will, and even if the military took back over through another coup (quite likely) that officers and even line soldiers are willing to be used against the Taliban, when the Taliban is actually a more effective government than they one they ostensibly serve.

The legitimacy of a government comes from doing what a government does. The Pakistani “government” is less of a government to most of the country than the Pakistani Taliban. The danger is that it will continue to expand into places where the Islamabad government is not actually acting as a government, till it controls most of the countryside and some of the smaller cities. From there it will likely reach an accommodation with the army.

Although they aren’t communists, this is classical Maoist style countryside to city guerilla strategy. By the time the major cities fall, they will be all that is left, completely isolated from the rest of the country.

The Pakistani army is powerful, but it is only an army, not a government.

Government is as government does. If the current Pakistani government wants to stay in charge, Fatima is right, it needs to do its job. If it doesn’t, those who are willing to do the job will take over.

Endnotes:

1. Fatima does have an axe to grind with the other faction of her family, but that doesn’t make her statements inaccurate.

2. Certainly Juan Cole is correct that the government is not likely to fall in the next 6 months to a year. In fact it might never fall, per se. Despite the fact that Hezbollah is more powerful than the Lebanese central government, that government still exists.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Theory and Practice

Comparative Military Dominance and the End of American Hegemony

The Future of War in the Developed World

Women in combat

Bin Laden’s insights and the Egyptian Coup

Why I’m Against Current Wars—and Most Foreseeable Wars, Too

Why Pakistan’s Decline Is Almost Inevitable