How death lengthens the OODA Loop

I wrote yesterday that merely counting American casualties in Iraq is fruitless in discerning whether we are winning the war. Comes now Wretchard at Belmont Club who points out that body counts do indeed matter. Why and in what way? The US and Iraq are having increased successes in pinpointing senior terrorist leaders and then killing them. Consider al Qaeda’s number-two man in Iraq, Abu Azzam, shot to death during a raid early Sunday morning:

Abu Azzam was the operational commander for al Qaeda in Iraq and was responsible for the recent upsurge in violent attacks in the city since April 2005.

Multiple intelligence sources and corroborating information from a close associate of Abu Azzam led Coalition and Iraqi security forces to the terrorist safe house where the al Qaeda in Iraq leader was hiding. A combined operation was conducted with the intent of capturing the wanted terrorist; however, Abu Azzam fired on the forces, and their return fire killed the al Qaeda in Iraq leader.

“We continue to decimate the leadership of the al Qaeda in Iraq terrorist network and continue to disrupt their operations,” said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, Multi-National Force-Iraq spokesperson. “By taking Abu Azzam off the street, another close associate of Zarqawi, we have dealt another serious blow to Zarqawi’s terrorist organization.” [Italics added]

As Wretchard points out, defending against this kind of raid is very difficult, as is defending against precision-guided munitions such as killed Abu Nasir, al Qaeda’s main coordinator of foreign fighters, and Abu Ali, who was killed by a precision airstrike on September 18. The reason is that such a defense,

… requires preventing any unvetted person from viewing your movements. Abu Nasir, the late Emir of the Qaim region, may have had twenty or more bodyguards or companions with him; but they simply perished with him because his security measures failed to prevent some person, perhaps a man in the employ of America, perhaps someone with a grudge against him, perhaps even a rival in his own organization from making a cell phone call which brought down a guided weapon on his head. … The insurgents [must] keep the man with the cellphone or miniaturized American radio in his pocket from reporting on them. … [D]efending against a precision strike means embargoing information.

This kind of information security is al Qaeda’s greatest vulnerability not because they cannot do it, but because it realistically cannot be done. The extreme measures that al Qaeda’s Iraq chief, Musab al-Zarqawi, is forced to take to hide himself cannot help but badly degrade his ability to command his troops. Access by subordinates to their commander (in any organization) and fast communications to and from the top are critical to getting inside an enemy’s OODA Loop. The longer the information “float” between an event and its report, or between an order’s issuance and its execution, compared to your enemy’s float time, the more surely you will lose. The longer this disparity continues the greater it will become. Finally - to use a football analogy - the other team will be hiking the ball while you’re still figuring out your starting lineup, unaware that play has commenced.

One thing making al Qaeda fall behind us in the OODA Loop is the fact that more and more of its experienced fighters and senior figures are being killed. Having to replace them with greenhorns facing a serious learning curve does not an efficient, effective outfit make.

Those who write that body counts are a meaningless metric to apply against the insurgency ignore the fact that formations which sustain heavy casualties lose their organizational memory while those who suffer lightly retain them. [US Marine battalion commander] Lt. Col. Joseph L’Etoile is on his third and half of his men are on their second tours of Iraq . For Abu Nasir and many of his foreign fighters, the memory of what to avoid next time has been lost on this, their last tour of Iraq.

That is probably one reason US casualties have been falling all year long compared to last year.