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At the opening of the first part of this two-part series, I wrote,
Once in awhile it’s fun to do some thought experimentation. I mentioned a few days ago that I was mulling over the similarities between the counterinsurgency problem in Iraq and how the American, Canadian and British navies finally defeated the U-boat threat in World War II.
The first part consisted of a short history of the Battle of the Atlantic of World War II, the most crucial campaign of the European war.
Here I’d like to explore what similarities, if any, the present insurgency in Iraq bears to the U-boat campaign of WW2, and what lessons, of any, can be learned for counterinsurgency from the tactics the Allied navies in winning the U-boat war.
Tacticians have written for many years of the similarities between war at sea and land war in deserts. Apart from the basic flatness of terrain, though, the counterinsurgency fight (COIN) in Iraq can’t bear the kind of direct comparison that conventional combat in the desert between conventional formations can uphold. Instead, COIN is a series of small-unit actions for which intelligence and precision are paramount. As well, psychological operations play a role in COIN that was had no part in antisubmarine warfare (ASW) of WW2.
Nonetheless, I think there are similarities between the insurgency and the U-boats. Like the U-boats, the insurgents are outnumbered by their foes. Even using wolfpack tactics, U-boats only rarely achieved numerical parity against warships. However, if the insurgents and U-boats alike were outnumbered by an armed opposition, they also always are (were) outnumbered by possible targets. During convoy ops, escort commanders found it was impossible to guard all approaches to the convoy at the same time. Similarly, allied commanders in Iraq cannot guard every possible target against insurgent attack, especially against suicide-bomber attack.
U-boats were able to escape detection, in the main, by submerging under the sea. Insurgents also attempt to “submerge” into the population by dress, language and using ordinary means of transportation. This tactic, of course, is by no means original to the Iraqi insurgents. Mao tse-Tung famously wrote that guerillas are fish that swim in a sea of people, so even my sea-war metaphor for insurgency is not original with me.
I recounted I part one how intelligence, technology and direct attack techniques formed the troika that turned the tide in the U-boat war. I say as well that these three items are key in counterinsurgency. But before addressing them, it would be well to point out some big differences between ASW and COIN.
In the Battle of the Atlantic there was obviously no concern for collateral damage. The only victims were fish, and their fate was of course never considered. So there was a liberty for attacking U-boats that is not found for attacking insurgents in Iraq.
The target of ASW efforts was the U-boat itself, the naval vessel. It was the destruction of the submarine that Allied ships sought, not the destruction of the U-boat’s crew, per se. At least 75 percent of German U-boat personnel died in the war; of the U-boat crews who actually saw battle the percentage is certainly more than 90 percent, according to former U-boat captain Herbert Werner. But killing sailors was not itself the object for it was the U-boat machine that was lethal to Allied vessels and so the U-boat machines themselves that were the real targets. Of course, a U-boat imploding at 250 meters or more beneath the sea carried the crew to the bottom with it and U-boats that, mortally wounded, managed to surface were almost always ferociously attacked. Nonetheless, it was not lack of crews that finally ended the capability of the German navy to wage undersea war after 1943, it was the lack of submarines.
That being said, the destruction of crews did matter in one important regard. Naval historians have pointed out that U-boat captains were like fighter pilots in that a small number of both accounted for the majority of kills. The US Navy and US Army Air Corps made a habit of bringing high-scoring aces home to teach new pilots and offer their expertise developing new aircraft; America’s ace of aces, Richard Bong, 40 aerial victories, died test flying a new aircraft. In all air forces, aces who scored five or more victories accounted for perhaps 80 percent of kills. The Luftwaffe’s relative percentage was even higher because it did not withdraw high scorers from battle to train new pilots. The number one fighter ace of all time, in any air force, was Luftwaffe pilot Erich Hartmann, who had 352 confirmed kills against the Soviet air force. The Soviets finally adopted a tactic of identifying skilled aces and forming their tactics around individual ace’s abilities. Sometimes whole squadrons of fighters would be assigned to support the attack of a single Soviet ace!
Herbert Werner recounted in his book of the U-boat war, Iron Coffins, that when the high-scoring U-boat commanders such as Korvettenkapitän Gunther Prien began to be lost, the U-boat flotilla’s scores of Allied tonnage sunk began a steep decline, even before U-boat losses themselves mounted.
The Allied navies made no concerted effort specifically to find U-boats commanded by top commanders, even though the top commanders were easily identified along with their U-boats. U-boats were, for the Allies, always targets of opportunity and they were attacked with fury wherever they appeared.
So to the troika of intelligence, technology and attack should be added the deaths of key enemy commanders.
Because locating insurgents and U-boats alike is so difficult, intelligence always plays the predominant role. Neither insurgents nor U-boats could be targeted unless Allied operators knew where they were. For this purpose, signals intelligence plays the leading role. However, insurgents enjoy an advantage that U-boats never did: the ability to hand carry orders or information to one another. U-boats could receive orders only via radio but insurgents can, and do, send paper orders to one another via courier.
Yet that permits a tactic that as far as I know was never employed by Allied naval commanders in the U-boat war, even though it could have been attempted: the insertion of bogus communications. I don’t know whether Coalition intelligence operatives are trying to cause disarray and distrust among insurgents by inserting “chaff” into their communications chain, such as false orders, bogus missives or poison-pen letters; I would guess they are.
There is another huge advantage that the Coalition has over WW2 ASW: the fish would never fink out a U-boat, but they do fink out insurgents. Remember, according to Mao the fish are the people, on whose support (voluntary or not) the insurgents depend. But the people of Iraq are finking out al Qaeda insurgents with a frequency that has been rising across the country for a year, and finking our even Iraqi insurgents with increasing vigor as well. Iraq the Model reports, for example,
The Anbar tribes’ campaign to rid the province of Zarqawi’s terror organization, al-Qaeda in Iraq is in its 2nd day and so far, 270 Arab and foreign intruders have been arrested.
[…]
Usama Jad’aan, the leader of Karabila tribes in Qaim told al-Hayat that “the operation will continue to eliminate terror elements according to a quality plan” and added “270 Arab and foreign intruders have been arrested, in addition to some Iraqis who were providing them shelter”.Sheikh Jad’aan added “the operation is conducted in coordination between the tribes and the minister of defense Sa’doun al-Dulaimi and since we arrested hundreds of terrorists, I don’t expect the operation to take a lot of time”.
After my Marine son’s firefight of Jan. 12, in which (I infer) he and his fellow Marines killed about three dozen insurgents, he told me that the Iraqi people in his sector are turning in the bad guys more and more. Most of their successes nowadays are actually gunfire free, such as the raids he took part in on Christmas day.
One effect of this increasing amount and quality of intelligence is that the insurgents are suffering key losses they cannot replace, just as the U-boat flotilla did. Unlike during the U-boat war, Coalition forces are specifically targeting key enemy personnel. Every time a senior terrorist leader is captured or killed, or a skilled combat leader or bomb maker is removed from action, the chances of future successes fall more than mere numbers would indicate. More than any other kind of land warfare, insurgency is personality driven. America can replace a division commander much easier than al Qaeda can replace a first-rate super-cell commander.
Part of the Allied intelligence effort in the Atlantic was what we would today call combat information. Reconnaissance and target detection were essential to finding U-boats and lining them up for attack. The B-24 Liberator bomber was the manned equivalent of today’s Predator armed UAV; the Liberator with a crew of 10 carried the electronic means to find U-boats and the weapons to attack them. In Iraq, when intelligence identifies locations of likely terrorist activity we have the technical means to surveil the area day or night for days on end and attack terrorists in real time. Furthermore, “battle hand off” with fully integrated electronics among different platforms is a reality, just as Allied ASW squadrons seamlessly relived one another when a U-boat was located and attacked.
“Intentional lethality.” One of the ways the Allies turned the tide in the U-boat war was the command decision to attack U-boats ruthlessly with the aim of sinking them, however long it took. Beforehand, warships principally intended to spoil the U-boats’ attacks against convoys. Likewise, once terrorists and their cells are identified they must be targeted with the idea of removing them from battle permanently. This doesn’t always mean lethal attack; capture is just as good and often better from an intelligence perspective. It does mean, though, the ruthless pursuit against insurgents should be a central tactic.
However, unlike the U-boats, there is more than one variety of insurgent. Al Qaeda foreigners are the deadliest and most active, but also the smallest group. Baathist and Sunni insurgents form the majority of the insurgency and this fact requires some finesse. Politics also complicates COIN in Iraq in ways that did not pertain in the U-boat war. Although the sovereign Iraqi government is willing to kill Iraqi insurgents when and where necessary, it would much prefer them to abandon the insurgency. Unlike the U-boat war, there is present in the COIN fight in Iraq elements of civil war. This is a major difference that shapes the battle in ways that should not be underestimated.
The same troika, intelligence, technology and attack, that served Allied naval commanders so well against U-boats in World War II is still at work in fighting insurgents in Iraq. To it we should add the intentional targeting of key insurgent commanders. Another advantage COIN commanders have over their ASW predecessors is that the sea was neutral in the Battle of the Atlantic, but the sea of people in insurgencies is not neutral. The people always take one side or the other. Today the insurgents are having to cope with an increasingly hostile sea in which to submerge for protection.
Comments policy
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January 27th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
The Iraqi insurgents are simple to categorize, Vichy French.
January 28th, 2006 at 1:37 am
Mr Sensing
The fish do fink out the submarines. Apparently the best way to find a totally quiet submarine is to find the acoustic “hole” in the fish around….wayyyy too much discovery channel…
January 28th, 2006 at 1:37 am
I think it worth noting that compared to the U-Boats, the Iraqi insurgents have been utterly incapable of inflicting serious harm to any of the Coalition partners actual warfighting capacity.
That, plus it takes a lot more skill and courage to operate a U-Boat than it does to get stoned and drive a car for an hour until you find a convoy or a bunch of kids to detonate on.
January 28th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
“the insurgents are suffering key losses they cannot replace”
On what do you base the contention that they cannot replace lost key personnel? Iraq has a population of 28 million, which means there will be several million of the right age to join the insurgents. I see no indication that the skills that make a successful insurgent are rare in the population, or that any great skill or brilliance is operating in their actions. As Patrick Lasswell said above, it doesn’t take a George Patton to blow up a convoy with IEDs.
The insurgents have maintained a pretty consistent level of success for nearly three years now, with no indication that the losses of their “key” personnel during that period have reduced their effectiveness. You proclaimed back in September that they were beginning to lose effectiveness; since then our military fatalities have averaged 2.44 per day, slightly higher than the average over the entire war. I’d suggest that your current posting is based entirely on hope, not fact.
Mr. Lasswell also contends that the insurgents are incapable of significant impact on our warfighting capacity. In fact, they are exhausting our active and reserve manpower, our equipment reserves, and the willingness of our population and political establishment to continue to fight. You don’t have to blow up a tank to render it useless; you can also persuade a politician to refrain from buying gasoline for it. That’s how a war of insurgency works, and that’s why the insurgents generally win.
January 29th, 2006 at 2:58 am
BM: the insurgents generally win
Actually, insurgents generally lose, and Uncle Sam has won all of his counter-insurgency campaigns, including Vietnam. The problem in Vietnam was that he did not finish the job and topple the North Vietnamese government, which mounted a conventional invasion of South Vietnam just under three years after the US withdrew. North Vietnam did not win a guerrilla war - it won a large-scale blitzkrieg that became necessary to win after its guerrilla force in South Vietnam was wiped out. Other examples of American victories against insurgents include the Indian Wars, the campaigns against Pancho Villa, various Latin American operations, the Filipino campaign and the crushing of the Huk Communist rebellion in the Philippines.
January 29th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
BM:
Perhaps one of the best examples of a relatively modern, successful war against insurgents was the British campaign against Communist guerillas in Malaya from about 1948 to 1962. There are plenty of on-line references to this campaign.
January 29th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
The American Indians were insurgents? In what sense? They had nations and national governments, organized armies, recognizable uniforms — warpaint, headdresses, etc. Certainly they were the established government well before we were.
An American victory over Pancho Villa? You’re not thinking that Black Jack Pershing beat Villa, are you? He never even saw him. “Villa is everywhere, but Villa is nowhere.” Villa was a revolutionary, but he and Zapata pretty much won, before being ultimately defeated by another revolutionary group.
As for our victory in Vietnam, I guess that would explain the victory parades, our annual celebration of Vietnam Independence Day, etc. The idea that we won in Vietnam before we lost was invented quite recently by die-hard prowar types.
A better example of an insurgency where our side won might be the Revolutionary War. Of course, we were the insurgents.
January 30th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
[…] : General Pol-Mil Military — chap @ 6:01 pm
Colonel Sensing groks the connection between antisubm […]
January 31st, 2006 at 9:55 pm
The comparison is a poor one at best. The ASW battle was not about sinking submarines it was about insuring convoys got through. The resources spent hunting submarines were wasted which explains why the initial effort to form hunter killer groups were abandoned to provided better convoy protection. Only when adequate protection was available were such killer groups formed.
You are on the mark that sub and fighter aces accounted for perhaps 85-90% of all kills. But aces were born they couldn’t be trained so most pilots were simply cannon fodder. The terrorists in Iraq will be defeated as all insurgencies have been defeated-when their sanctuaries are eliminated and their outside succor destroyed.
January 31st, 2006 at 10:06 pm
It’s an interesting and useful analysis, Don, but it suffers from a few misconceptions about the Battle of the Atlantic. Kapitan Werner’s book is a vital view of that battle, but there are some things he got wrong. I’d recommend you counterbalance Iron Coffins with a book called Black May, by Michael Gannon, about the great Allied naval counteroffensive of spring 1943 that broke the back of the U-boat Force in the North Atlantic.
You wrote: “Yet that permits a tactic that as far as I know was never employed by Allied naval commanders in the U-boat war, even though it could have been attempted: the insertion of bogus communications.”
This most certainly could not have been attempted. All communications to and from the U-boats were in code, using the Naval Enigma cipher machine. Bogus messages that weren’t properly encoded would have been ignored. Bogus messages that were properly encoded would have betrayed the fact that the Enigma code had been broken by the Allies. The “Special Intelligence” derived from reading the U-boats’ code was too valuable to be risked that way.
You wrote: “One of the ways the Allies turned the tide in the U-boat war was the command decision to attack U-boats ruthlessly with the aim of sinking them, however long it took.”
This is true, but not the whole truth. On the convoy routes, escort warships concentrated on one thing only: driving away U-boats so the convoys got through safely. The tactic of “smothering” contacts was only adopted after there were enough available escort ships to form roaming hunter-killer units.
Overall, though, I like your analysis. There’s a lot of truth in it.
May 10th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
Naomi Klein’s analysis of what economic philosophy the
US has wrought on Iraq, led by utterly inexperienced
if not incompetent Republican Party stalwarts, passed
without much comment and is worth reading:
http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html.
Recently, a study by the Iraqi Ministry of Labor and
Social Affairs concluded that, since American forces
“liberated” Iraq in 2003, poverty has increased in
Iraq by 30%, many families living on $2 per day.
http://www.health-now.org/site/article.php?articleId=556&menuId=14
A recent survey that was done a few days later showed
that 93% of Iraqi Sunnis consider the elected
government illegitimate. Possibly the economic reasons
underlying the lack of political civic culture are not
considered by those baffled by such ill-regard for the
government this faction of the Iraqis voted for last
December. Similarly, Amb. Khalilzad’s efforts to
establish a Government of National Reconciliation may
be suffering from a lack of popular enthusiasm, not
because of political cynicism amongst Iraqis, but
because of the depressing economic woes, including
over 60% unemployment and a sense of helplessness in
the face of a never ending occupation.
Nevertheless, our “reconstruction” funds for Iraq have
been consumed and there are no plans to ask for more.
Congress is only asked to appropriate billions of
dollars to maintain our occupation force, though our
role now is said to be only the training of Iraqi
security forces and police. Our military force has
done little to abate the deteriorating security
situation in Iraq, despite our loss of men and
materiel. Yet my encounter with Iraqis over the last
several decades convinces me that Iraqi nationalism is
a strong motivator that will drive them to bring
non-sectarian order to the nation; they share a
nationalism such as that of the Da’awa type of Iraqi
Shi’ites, overwhelming any submission to foreign
ideologies, such as SCIRI’s to the Iranian Shi’ite
Revolution. Poverty and foreign occupation go hand in
hand to give a non-materialist and extremist character
to the Iraqi crisis. On our current course we can only
aggravate it by convincing Iraqis that we only want an
Iraq we can dominate.
Perhaps then, Amb. Khalilzad’s efforts to convince the
Iraqis of the urgency of unity would be better served
if we demonstrated that liberation, not domination,
was our sole motive and that Iraqi nationalism must
overwhelm sectarianism for the sake of national
security. Seeing our forces begin to withdraw would
drive that point home and would produce rather quick
effects. Furthermore, withdrawal would liberate large
sums of money that could be devoted to Iraq’s
reconstruction. Such assets would give Amb.. Khalilzad
tremendous powers of persuasion setting standards to
be met for ongoing aid.
Clearly the issue now is undoing the “thousands of
mistakes”- per Sec. Rice- made over our years
occupying Iraq by ending the shedding of American
blood in order to impose the status quo. National
unity they can better achieve on their own as we
gradually withdraw. They can then concentrate on
repairing the damage our invasion did to the country,
we conditionally rewarding with aid a real government
of National Union constructed by the Iraqis devoid of
our taking their responsibility from them through
armed occupation.
Daniel E. Teodoru
May 10th, 2006 at 6:04 pm
The fact is that this political administration sought
to politically exploit the 9/11 crisis as much as to
do something about it. It happens that both vectors
were moving in the same direction, thus, America found
itself accelerating without looking. As one who just
had to pass his driving test after 40 years of
driving, I realized that the greatest problem of an
“experienced” driver is that he/she rushes to get it
over with- get every step done, automatically and
with desired results every time. In the same way, the
“experts” in this administration felt compelled to
acquire results, fast and spectacular. Errors and
failures seemed so catastrophic that they could
neither be realized nor openly recognized. The
pressure at a personal level was near breaking of the
human soul. Security had to be accomplished within the
framework of a “war president” desperate to garnish
public support through “action.” The pressure for “act
now” was tremendous, given the public eye on the
government of totally inexperienced and unfamiliar
neophytes coming to command. Without going into the
politics of the Pentagon, it can be asserted that
nowhere else was the pressure for action greater than
in Rumsfeld’s DoD. Rumsfeld felt himself in
competition for dominance of the “war on terror” with
the CIA. Since the latter is always there first to
tacticalize its strategic intel acquisition for the
President, Rumsfeld felt compelled to put “special”
forces on the ground in order to stake his turf and
dominate the President’s attention.
Alas, though poor definition of the problem was
Israel’s first criticism of the US force projection
into the Middle East post-9/11, it became a battle of
wills between the urgency of the big and the patience
of the knowing. Also, the public “Action Jackson” face
Mr. Bush gave to the struggle once engaged, put a
premium on tactical intel so as to fix and exterminate
the enemy within the schedule of the elections cycles.
Infrastructural issues- the key to all Israeli intel
operations- was somewhat disregarded and the enemy
was destroyed instead of observed once spotted. But,
as the enemy morphed adaptively, his flexibility
proved greater than ours. As a result, we are still
blindly responding to his actions while he runs and
hides his infrastructure for use on the next action.
Shin Bet made it very clear to the US that
suicide-terror Shaheeds presented a whole new kettle
of fish in that we should go after the kettle rather
than the fish. While many Israel actions of late have
been mechanized of late (air and helicopter action
rather than commando), in the past it always attacked
the top while leaving the bottom to police forces. It
also exploited a Palestinian information network of
some 33,000 informants, more for strategic than
tactical intel so as not to incriminate them quickly.
Our supply of Islamic terrorism operatives is far
slimmer and totally unreliable, being associate with
the US only through cash transactions. We never
managed to work the family and tribal roots; why?
Because that takes time and produces no results that
can be translated into instant political payback when
needed.
The tragedy of our war on terror is seen from Daniel
Byman’s recent inching towards suggesting that the US
resort to “targeted killing.”
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85208/daniel-byman/do-targeted-killings-work.html?mode=print
Of course, his article in FOREIGN AFFAIRS in no way
indicate how well he knows that side of Israeli
action, nor its history. But the fact is that the
33,000 informant base laboriously and patiently
plugged into its strategic infrastructural intel over
several decades is the key to minimizing its errors
and political backfire.
A “war on terror” is therefore only a term, in my
view, that betrays ignorance about the infrastructure
we were up against on the day it was invoked. As a
result, though we trumpet all sorts of captures and
kills, we still are not in a position to define and
value these targets withing an infrastructural context
because strategic intel had the lowest priority in a
Pentagon based Action Jackson vague “war on terror.”
One is made to think of the classic example offered up
in Nosology courses in medical school: treating the
anemia eradicates all the symptoms but does not cure
the disease.