Image courtesy of Flikr user US Army. By Major Matt Cavanaugh It’s been a bit of a crazy past few days here; my wife and I just had our second daughter on Friday evening. So this will be a bit of a short post – but...
Read MoreIn his famous 1998 set of BBC Radio Reith lectures, military historian Sir John Keegan described war as a “protean activity” that “changes form, often unpredictably” like a “disease” that “exhibits the capacity to mutate and mutates fastest in the face of efforts to control or eliminate it.” Today, some have used similar themes in describing ISIS. Columnist Maureen Doud has noted that ISIS “has rampaged like a flesh-eating virus through the region,” while her colleague at the New York Times, Tom Friedman, writes about ISIS that we can only “contain these organisms, until the natural antibodies from within emerge.” And, ISIS certainly can seem like a horrible malady that will not end. Particularly when coupled with all the writing on the 100th anniversary of WWI. We’re told that our modern world bears many similarities to that of a century ago – Margaret MacMillan of Oxford has argued that we’re complacent, while Christopher Clark of Cambridge has assessed that we could be “sleepwalking” into another global conflagration. When we think about war in our world, we can’t help but consider that ISIS might be a catalyst for a much larger war.
But it’s worth wondering – when we compare ISIS and the Ebola outbreak – what is the more likely and more dangerous threat to the United States and world? It has been estimated that ISIS numbers approximately 30-40,000, with roughly 100,000 supporters. Consider that ISIS can only coerce so many people into their ranks – they are limited by what they can “infect” by religion and geography.
In comparison, the current Ebola count stands at 7,400 infections and 3,400 deaths, which admittedly is lower base rate than ISIS. Yet it has much greater growth potential. In Liberia the virus is doubling every 15-20 days while in Sierra Leone it takes 30-40 days (Global Public Square with Fareed Zakaria, 28 September). The CDC has said that the worst case scenario puts the spread at 1.4 million by January. And it could get much, much worse. An epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota believes that it could go airborne. Moreover, it could get “airborne” another way. Were Ebola to make its way into a megacity like Lagos, then there would be eight daily chances for the disease to make the flight to the United States. This potential might compound what is clearly a growing threat and turn it into a durable one.
So far, this has all been quantitative – we ought to consider the qualitative description of what we’re facing. First, Ebola can infect anyone. It is truly indiscriminate and will strike regardless of religious or tribal affiliation, which enables it a wider spread than ISIS. With ISIS, we can target that organization’s material capabilities (i.e. the current airstrikes); Ebola is a much more problematic “target set” in this regard – what good are our strike capabilities? Of course, ISIS shocked the conscience of the world by killing journalists; Ebola would literally kill everyone as “it” has no conscience. And what is perhaps most worrying – as bad as they are, most members of ISIS have some morale that we can potentially degrade. In comparison, Ebola has no will to erode.
So, consider this thought experiment – what if we knew for certain that ISIS would double in a month? Then again. And so on. That’s the Ebola outbreak’s track record. One could think of this Ebola outbreak like a persistently growing earthquake – shaking first for a month at 3.0 on the Richter scale, then a month at 4.0, then 5.0 – until, like the 3-11 quake that hit Japan, eventually we get to 9.0 and catastrophic strategic effect.
Read MoreThis past week, while reading and thinking about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), two figures jumped out at me. The first comes from an interview with the head of (Iraqi) Kurdish intelligence, who said he believes that ISIS “generates something equivalent to $6 million a day by the selling of oil, wheat, taking taxes from people, ransoms, and still getting donations.” The second figure, just released by the Pentagon, is how much the American component of the bombing campaign against ISIS costs US taxpayers per day: “7 million to $10 million per day in Iraq and Syria.”
As we spend so much time considering military effectiveness (which is, admittedly, a terribly important measure), one underestimated component to any strategy is efficiency. In essence, how sustainable are your military actions? Consider for a moment, the expense incurred to combat the threat in Afghanistan, as related by The Washington Post’s George Will in a 2011 column:
Jim Lacey of the Marine Corps War College notes that General David Petraeus has said that there are perhaps about 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. “Did anyone,” Lacey asks, “do the math?” There are, he says, more than 140,000 coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, or 1,400 for every Al Qaeda fighter. It costs about $1 million/year to deploy and support every soldier – or up to $140 billion, or close to $1.5 billion/year, for each Al Qaeda fighter. “In what universe to we find strategists to whom this makes sense?”
This was the essential “Long War” (or “War on Terror”) imbalance. Extremely lofty ends – ending terror and remaking the Middle East – without correspondingly sustainable means with which to achieve these generational-length tasks. The great domestic fear in the middle of the last decade was that the US was “waging war on the cheap,” and so spent enormous sums of money on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It seems that experience is correcting/tilting the balance to a more stable expenditure. And “war on the cheap,” in the right circumstances, can be beneficial.
In comparison, taking on ISIS seems to be a bargain at the $7 million/day mark (or, as a car salesman might put it, “price point”). Moreover, Thomas Schelling has helpfully pointed out that military force can be used to “destroy value.” In this case, ISIS derives most of its revenues for support of military operations through oil (all those black flags don’t just pay for themselves!) – not unlike the American Confederacy’s heavy reliance on “King Cotton.” In that conflict, General Winfield Scott’s initial “Anaconda” plan was one of broad concentric pressure that slowly constricted the opponent into submission. It was political pressure that forced President Lincoln to ask Scott to speed it up through aggressive and active landpower, which will definitely not be the case today. Attrition is clearly sustainable here – spending $7-10 million/day (a very reasonable sum for a country with a $15 trillion GDP) to destroy a significant amount of ISIS’s entire GDP (roughly $6 million/day). But sustainability is not the only consideration.
Read MoreOn a research trip to London this past spring, while in the British Museum I came across a pretty neat story about the Rosetta Stone and its important connection with landpower. I was dawdling in the bookshop, picking up random books that I never would have considered had I been any place other than a museum and came across John Ray’s The Rosetta Stone And The Rebirth of Ancient Egypt. I started to skim and found that Ray is a Professor of Egyptology at Cambridge. The book is meant for mass consumption, but as it clearly comes from a learned source, I trust it’s accuracy.
More than having come from a proper scholar, the book taught me about the critical role landpower played in securing this key to unlocking an ancient civilization (Egyptian hieroglyphs). For those who wish a bit more on the stone in general, Wikipedia’s entry on this subject is fantastic. What follows, however, are selections from Ray’s book about how the Rosetta Stone made its way to the British Museum in June 1802 as a spoil of war with the French.
The French had been at war with the British since 1793; Napoleon led a French force to invade Egypt in 1799…
Read MoreInstead of writing about the “white flag” of surrender – feats of heroism make for a more enjoyable and standard military affairs subject. That way we avoid the necessary slog through cowardice; who wants to read about people running away?
In the interests of “warming in” to what could be a bit of an ugly subject, the essay will commence with an authoritative source. Colin Gray in The Strategy Bridge, has written about the “ingredients that make for high enough morale” (p. 215). These can be “chemical (vodka, rum, indeed anything alcohol), spiritual (trust, inspiration, self-confidence) or a lack of alternatives (desperation).” Though the list seems a bit grim, it does provide a usable hypothesis (and gives additional meaning to the phrase “liquid courage”). Gray describes where he believes morale comes from. An equally useful endeavor might be to consider the opposite – what causes morale to fail? How does “anti-morale” grow? For the purposes of this essay, “anti-morale” is defined as the “inability of a group’s members to maintain belief in an institution or goal, particularly in the face of opposition or hardship.” So, what causes soldiers to run, retreat, and even surrender?
There are several places we could look for help to answer these questions. We might start with General Ulysses S. Grant, who coerced and compelled the surrender of three Confederate armies in the American Civil War (Forts Henry and Donelson, 14,000 prisoners; Vicksburg, 28,000 prisoners; and Appamatox, 25,000 prisoners). With these on his resume, we could fairly refer to Grant as the “Patron Saint of Anti-Morale.” Of course, we have to go beyond Grant – military morale is not so simple a matter. It might be if militaries were comprised of the obedient guard dogs that Plato counseled in Republic. Consider the only two qualities WWI-era military dog trainer British Lt. Col. Edwin H. Richardson listed as necessary to propel the canine forward in battle: “affection for master and the love of reward.” (Rebecca Frankel, “The Dog Whisperer,” Foreign Policy, Sept/Oct 2014). As armies are certainly not comprised of Plato’s dogs – the challenge of maintaining morale is ever present. Based upon a quick survey of available resources, this essay finds three broad categories of anti-morale: inability to see the connection between tactical action and policy objectives; failure of belief in military and political leaders; and, tactical action is perceived as ineffective, meaningless, or counter to desired objectives.
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