Principles of War

Every army observes principles of war, which are general rules or principles that commanders use to organize and clarify their thinking when planning and executing military operations. They aren't always the same from one country to the next - the Red Army, for example, placed much less emphasis on the principle of economy of force than the US Army, and the US Army placed less emphasis on the principle of a high tempo of combat operations than the Red Army did. This reflects the reality that the Red Army, being relatively unskilled, would have to rely on superior numbers, high-speed offensive shock, and a certain willingness to sustain heavy casualties to prevail in the face of smaller but more skilled opponents.

But the point is that if you canvas the principles of war as defined by most of the major industrialized states, you'll find that most of them observe certain basic principles. The one I wish to speak about here is Mass: Having enough forces to complete the objective.

Mass makes up for a great many military sins. If you just flat outnumber the enemy, you can get things done that you couldn't otherwise. Consider major Soviet victories in World War Two like Stalingrad, Kursk and Bagration. They didn't win these battles by being better than the Germans man-for-man or tank-for-tank; they won by outnumbering the Germans in every conceivable measure of combat power and simply working the Germans into the topsoil with a plowshare of artillery, armor and numbers. It aint pretty, but it gets the job done.

Even the US Army relied on mass in World War Two. Not to the extent that the Soviets did, but if the opportunity presented itself for the US Army to make use of superior numbers (and especially superior weight of artillery) the Americans were not loathe to do so. US commanders rarely, if ever, turned down opportunities to add more forces to their operations and were much more likely to claim they were undermanned, even though by VE Day there were a couple of million GIs in Europe, not to mention substantial numbers of British and Commonwealth troops to boot.

But since World War Two, the MBAs in the Department of Defense have started to toy with the principles of war. Some of them even argue that "flexibility" should be considered a principle of war, up there with mass and maintenance of the objective and unity of command. I argue that flexibility is an important quality for an army to have, but it is subsumed within simplicity and is an operational concern in any event, not a principle of war (such as the Bundeswehr's scary fascination with beweglichkeit, or agility. It's one of those things that either makes you look like a genius, or makes you look like MacMahon at Sedan in 1870).

What does this have to do with anything?

We invaded Iraq and defeated the Iraqi Army, which wasn't a surprise. We brought down Saddam Hussein's regime, which wasn't a surprise. We lost control of the streets because we didn't have nearly enough men in-theater, which wasn't a surprise. So what is a surprise?

That the MBAs of the war continue to screw with the notions of mass and objective. The situation gets out of hand, so we send in 30,000 more men. The situation improves slightly and the political cost of the "surge" grows. We take them back out, mostly to save political pain. And the situation will of course decay again. And this is all wrong.

There are only two possible courses of action. The first is to send enough men to Iraq to achieve the objectives quickly and decisively. In other words, to apply the principle of mass. Maintaining order in a mess like Iraq is more like a law enforcement operation than a military operation, and the only way to really do that is to have so many men patrolling the streets that the insurgents are if nothing else cowed into immobility. Granted, this kind of "troop icecap" can't go on forever, but it can provide stability and security while the government and society transition into something new and different. Give people stability, a halfway functional economy and security from car bombs and they'll start to develop a mild preference for the status quo.

The other course of action is to withdraw. If we cannot afford, politically, emotionally, financially, or strategically, to commit enough forces to the theater to achieve the military objectives, then we cannot afford to be there at all.

But this in-between state is lunacy. It doesn't come close to achieving realistic objectives as measured by real things, not 3D bar charts on some staffer's PowerPoint chart. But it doesn't protect US troops from attack. It leaves us exposed to enemy attack without us being able to really do anything about the enemy in the long run because we can't dominate all of his centers of gravity simultaneously. We beef up Baghdad, and they go to the provinces. We man up the provinces and they go to Baghdad. But we don't have enough men to man up everywhere, so the enemy can always find quiet sectors where he can tinker with car bombs and recruit suicide bombers.

How many men do I think it would require? Before the war started I thought a half a million men was a reasonable estimate. But I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq in the first place and felt from the very beginning that the decisive theater was Afghanistan, which was al Qaeda's center of gravity. But alas, we blew our opportunity in Afghanistan by, once again, not having enough men on the ground to achieve the stated objectives. And I think this shabby outcome can be attributed, at least in part, to the transformationalists in the Pentagon who read too many brochures about modern weapons and too few history books.

But then again, we're not so good at defining objectives any more either. What was the defined objective of the ETO in World War Two? Force Germany into unconditional surrender. That's pretty simple. But what's the defined objective of our occupation of Iraq? I'm sure I don't know. Do you?