Asymmetric Warfare: What is It, How to Fight It, How Not To Fight It

Asymmetric warfare - commonly taking the forms of guerilla wars and insurgencies - is something the US is dealing with now in Iraq, and considering its overwhelming military superiority to all other nations armies, will deal with in the future uses of our military.

Asymmetric warfare, as a subject, has been an area that I've devoted some time and energy studying. As a student of international relations, I have spent time, took part in classes, and researched on subjects such as asymmetrical warfare as well as on terrorism. The reasons for this lay on the very real importance and relevance this subject has for the United States.

As we speak, we are now engaged in a war against an guerilla insurgent force in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its important to know what one is dealing with, as well as to know how to run a counter-insurgency, and how not to run one. For the curious, I recommend the book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, for a detailed account - from interviews with 3000 military sources themselves - of what went wrong in Iraq (from the planning stages on) and for concrete examples of how not to plan an invasion & occupation, and how not to run a counter-insurgency.

Read this for a good rundown on what asymmetric warfare is, what ingredients it needs to thrive, how they success, how they fail, how they can be defeated. I couldn't of written it better myself if I tried.

If you know gung-ho, destroy them all, I'm a bad-ass muthafucker types who think everything can be solved by blowing something (or one) up, than you know someone who would fail miserably at putting down - or preventing - insurgent movements. In fact, these types (of which there are too many in our civilian government, as well as too many in the military) are likely the reason that guerilla movements grow and succeed. Read the whole thing though, its good.

Here's a good passage:

-----------

When Losers Don't Quit

Asymmetric warfare happens when it's obvious who the winner of a symmetric war would be - maybe a symmetric war has already been fought and decisively won - but some core group on the losing side is not willing to give up and get on with life. Replaying the game of civilized symmetric warfare would just get them slaughtered to no purpose, but the issues of the war are so important that they cannot simply accept defeat. And so they fight on - outside the game, outside the rules.

Asymmetric warriors don't wear uniforms and fight pitched battles. Rather than defending territory, they accept that the opposing force can go where it wants, killing and destroying at will. They hide among civilians, they hit and run, and they attack whatever targets their enemy values but has left undefended. Often those targets are non-combatants.

To the winners of the symmetric war (and all others who remain locked into the game mentality of symmetric warfare) the asymmetric warriors just look like sore losers. If the asymmetric warriors were civilized and honorable, they would wear uniforms and face their opponents' soldiers on a battlefield - and get slaughtered like vermin. The asymmetric tactics - attacking civilians and running away from soldiers - look cowardly, even when they lead to certain death.
And because the decisive war is already supposed to be over, an asymmetric attack looks like pointless destruction, killing for the sake of killing.

And it would be, if not for one fact: Sometimes the asymmetric warriors win. How on Earth does that happen?

How Insurgents Win

Asymmetric warfare works in a very specific situation: The winner of the symmetric war wants to govern the region (or hand it off to a local client government) at a finite cost. If the asymmetric warriors - in this setting let's call them insurgents and their opponents occupiers - can make the territory ungovernable and establish themselves in such a way that they cannot be crushed within the cost parameters of the occupiers, then eventually the occupiers will have to give them at least part of what they want.

In other words, insurgents win by not losing. If the occupiers find the status quo unacceptable, but have no acceptable way to bring the insurgency to an end, then it is only a matter of time before they realize their goals cannot be achieved. It's up to the occupiers to decide when to stop the bleeding and admit defeat, but they have lost. This is the story of the Americans in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, and white settler governments in various parts of Africa. It is arguably the story of the Americans in Iraq as well. (It is worth noting why this is not - at least not yet - the story of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza. The difference is that the Israeli level of commitment very nearly matches that of its opponents. Israel is unable to crush the Palestinian insurgency, but seems ready to bleed at this level into the indefinite future.)

Americans have a hard time grasping this basic fact: Right up to the day the occupying power admits defeat and pulls out, it continues to wield overwhelming force. It may never lose a pitched battle. It may - right up to the end - be able to go where it wants, killing and destroying at will.

That doesn't mean it's not losing.

The Recruitment Pipeline

If insurgents win by not losing, then the question shifts: How do they lose?

They lose by wasting away. Their numbers diminish by death, captivity, or discouragement and they are unable to replenish themselves with new recruits. Recruiting is an essential part of any insurgency, because the occupiers will always appear to be winning the battle of attrition.

Occupying soldiers are trying to kill insurgents while insurgents are trying to avoid occupiers, so any body count will favor the occupiers - right up to the day they admit defeat and pull out.
In a successful insurgency, warriors are only the tip of a large iceberg. Even though the number of active warriors may be small, a much larger segment of the population is at some earlier stage of recruitment. Some sympathize with the insurgents silently; they know who the warriors are, but chose not to tell the occupiers. Some help in small ways, by delivering messages, holding money, or even hiding weapons. Some harbor warriors and help them hide from the occupiers. Some will not fight, but will act as look-outs and report the movements of occupying troops. A successful insurgency is always losing warriors (sometimes by intentional suicide attacks), but the pipeline of recruitment is full of people moving to ever greater levels of commitment.
Occupiers who continue to think in a symmetric, conventional-war mindset (with its sharp distinctions between soldiers and civilians) do not see these flows of sympathy and commitment. If the insurgency has, say, ten thousand warriors, then these occupiers believe they win by removing ten thousand insurgent pieces from the board.

But they don't win, because in the course of removing those ten thousand pieces the occupiers push some number of sympathizers further down the path of commitment to the insurgency. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand insurgents may die or be captured, and still the war goes on. A man who stays out of the war for fear of losing his house will join it when his house becomes "collateral damage." Each family that loses a member in an occupier attack - especially an innocent member like a child - will move further down the path of recruitment.

In the beginning, an insurgency is a small group of warriors moving in a large sea of people who are waiting to see what happens next. Maybe the occupier will be gentle. Maybe life will go on in some acceptable way. The insurgents' first goal is to goad the occupier into using its overwhelming force so that life cannot go on in an acceptable way. A foolish occupier swats flies with hammers, creating disproportionate damage and forcing the previously ambivalent population to choose sides.

Once the insurgency's pipeline of recruitment is well established, the only exclusively military solution available to the occupier is genocide, or some form of ethnic cleansing that will move the insurgent-sympathizing population somewhere else. An occupier who is unwilling to go that far must accept the fact that overwhelming force alone is not enough. Military force must continue to play a role, but only in support of a political solution that gives the asymmetric warriors a reason to lay down their arms.

Occupier Strategy

If a direct kill-the-insurgents strategy is doomed to failure, what can the occupier do?

The Vietnam-era notion of "winning hearts and minds" is not just a way for guilt-ridden liberals to feel better about themselves. It deals with the real problem: the whole pipeline of sympathy and recruitment, not just the comparatively small number of active insurgent warriors. Every policy of the occupier - and especially any use of force - must be examined in light of its effect on insurgent recruitment. A search-and-destroy operation may kill dozens of insurgents with only minor occupier casualties, and still be a net loss if it pushes the general population further down the recruitment pipeline. A lawnmower may cut down dozens of dandelions, but if it scatters their seeds hundreds more will pop up.

All effective anti-insurgent strategies involve drying up the supply of recruits by isolating the insurgents from the larger population. In the so-called "ink spot" strategies the isolation is geographic: a small area is pacified and reconstructed to the point that it becomes governable. The population, seeing the benefits of peaceful governance, resists insurgent efforts to infiltrate. The surrounding areas come to envy the pacified area, and the governable "ink spot" spreads. Other kinds of isolation can also work, as long as the population comes to see a clear separation between itself and the insurgents rather than a slippery slope.

Insurgency by its nature is a low-lifespan occupation. Lenin's line about revolutionaries - that they are dead men on furlough - applies even moreso to insurgents. They must take action to stay relevant, and any action they take carries great risk. Without a constant resupply of recruits ready to die, an insurgency withers.

In order to disrupt that supply, the occupier need not be loved. It need only convince the population that ending the occupation is not worth dying for.

---------------[End Excerpt]

Well...read the whole thing will ya!!