i think unconvetional warfare is the new military doctrine. It allows smaller nations to go up against larger ones, and if a world power (such as china) developed these tactics the US, could be knocked off it's throne as the only world hyperpower. Nobody has come up with effective countermeasures against unconventional warfare. Any thoughts?

You are right.

Why go heard to heard when you can back stabe them.

Go after their infrastructure, oil, etc.

Frank

you are both right. the USA should develop unconventional warfare units that are a lot larger than special forces. if you have unconvetianol forces coupled with conventional forces and air support that would be a knock out combination.

Unconventional warfare is as old as the first thrown rock. Rarely has a military solution sufficed. It sure didn't work in Vietnam and it is not working now. Insurgencies have to be managed over a long period of time (years, decades, whatever) and with military and non-military resources.

China wrote the book on unconventional warfare. Actually several books. Mao and Sun Tzu. It is not workable if you are a nation state that can be targeted. The only reason it works in Afghanistan and Iraq is they blend in with the innocents. I don't know of many countries where the native population looks Chinese other than China. You can nuke China and you'd be pretty certain that 99.99% of the people you nailed were Chinese. If you did that with Taliban in Kandahar you'd kill off a couple of Taliban, a lot of innocent Afghanis and a bunch of Canadians. Petraeus is starting to do things the way they should have been done in Iraq.

you are right he is. you can't fight and expect to win if you fight convetionally against an uncovnetional enemy. look at all of the fighting in vietnam including american and french forces. the chinese civil war. the terrorist don't have to win the war, they have to break our will to fight. just like the american revolution. washington didn't have to win the war just fight a defensive war that he wouldn't lose. washington could have won without winning some of the battles he did win. washington's only victories that i would say were necassary would be trenton and yorktown. saratoga was won by gen. gates and cowpens was won by gen. green. as long as washington's army was still fighting the britishcouldn't claim victory. and the anti war segment of the british population was quite large and growing larger every day.

Yes it is a battle of attrition. Each time the British lost a man they had to go six thousand miles to replace them, where as Washington could recruit locally plus his solders where fighting for their homes.

The key is are you being supported by the local population. Sun Tzu had something to say about that, something to the effect you need the support the of the people. Alexander the Great was successful because in many cases those countries he conquiried supported him which meant he did not have to leave troups behind.

One of the first things he did was lower taxes as well as release policical prisoners.

We are facing the same problem today, we lose a man and it cost an estimated 4 million to replace him.

You spend a billion a month and capture 55.

As long as they are being supported by the populations we are fighting a war we can not win.

Frank

the tide is turning though. sectarian violence is the lowest it has been in a long time, the terrorists are losing ground in sunni areas, the casualties are dropping, and security is improving. i think that the troop surge coupled with paetreaus' tactics will win this war.

Are you trying out for the job of Bush's press secertry?

History is on thier side. You can not defeat the will of the people my force.

You need a political solution agreed upon by all parties. Ask the Russians they found out just as we found out as well as the English and French and South Africa all have lost to people that one day were terrorist and the next day where hero’s.

In fact one of Israel’s prime ministers was responsible for the bombing of a hotel occupied by the English in thier fight for freedom.

Frank

Frank

Unconventional warfare is perfect against Western Democracies (like the US) because the general public can't stand a long war and that's exactly what an insurgency is. If the US people can accept the fact that this is going to be a long war than the US can win.

totally agreed. and we can't just settle for iraq and afghanistan. we need to take down the terrorists through out the world.

your absolutely right

I think to rate Assymetrical Warfare you need to define it.

Assymetric Warfare is a tactic based on using smaller _not necessarily_ technologically inferior forces to deny the enemy an F2T2EA 'kill chain' target set.

This in comparison to Alinear warfare (literally, you occupy my dirt, I reach beyond your forces to blow up yours) which IMO, is the greatest threat of Terrorism and other Desultory warfare tactics.

The difference is that while both systems are components of 4GW or 'Ideologic' warfare, assymetrical combat usually requires a safehaven recovery area where conventional forces can't or won't chase it along with modern technology access to enable it's forces.

While true alinearism attempts to -create- such advantages by essentially striking where there is no conventional force presence.

In this, it can usually be said that every insurgent, terrorist, rebel, revolutionary or 'freedom fighter' which fights assymetrically is in fact performing the role of standin for a state actor whose presence is never acknowledged but which MUST be present to enable the use of effective assymetric tactics against more conventional armed forces.

Whether it be U.S. Stingers hitting Hinds over the Panjshir valley, EFPs taking over as roadside bombs or Chinese C-701 missiles striking gunboats shelling Lebanese powerstations, when high tech enables small forces, it takes away from the perceived omnipotence of nationalist warfare as the sole prosecutors of high tech combat.

But it does not remove the requirement for those states to exist to /arm/ the guerillas.

Once we get past this illusion of standalone forces we need to look at some consequences to their increasingly assymetrical leanings.

1. If the only way to stop someone from supplying weapons is to decisively prove their involvement in the act, then 'everyone is open to oversight'. Which is itself anethema to the arms trade because 'if the world only knew' how many /billions/ of dollars were spent each year on weapons, it would quickly intervene to effectively outlaw war by outlawing the trade in advanced arms which enabled it. And the U.S., as lead pony in the dog show would be the worst hurt because our diplomacy is largely about reaching out with a gun to sell.

2. Once destabilization has occured (i.e. once you have acknowledged the supremacy of assymetric tactics) the state sponsorship effect becomes obvious as the guerillas now must face their backers who have no qualms about not only killing them but killing their families, friends, town, tribe or sect to gain control over what has been 'liberated' (approximately 30 trillion dollars worth of Iraqi oil for instance). Combine this with say Iranian nuclear and IRBM ambitions and the ability to overtly take away from a state actro what he has middle-man 'freed' from you becomes infinitely harder to achieve. Such being the penalty of every cheaper, easier to build, _non nuclear triggered_ atomic weapons.

3. Appeasement is an alternative to common ground alliance. When the enemy of my enemy is not my friend but my banker, you have to consider the extremes to which a line of credit may be taken as a function of favors owed and deals done. As an example of this, take Petraeus' 'grass roots approach'. In the SOF world what he is doing by reaching out to the Sunni chieftains is called 'engagement' and largely comes down to high ticket bribes and pledges of support so that one agency will NEITHER overtly act against you. Nor enable an outside party. Yet it is only by holding the threat of allowing forces like Islamic Council Of Iraq and Al Qaeda in Iraq to operate in their controlled areas against U.S. forces that the (Western) Sunni minority were able to hold onto power to begin with. Once that situation 'stabilizes' (and here it should be noted that the cost of getting the Iraqis to pay attention to us again has been the highest casualty rates since the war began), the Sunnis lose power as a function of what else they can hostage. Something they are all too aware of in their inferior 'demographic, not democratic' position against the Shiia government which itself seeks to create a bogeyman named Baathist and Sunni Insurgency while covering up their own connections with the Iranians (why they have refused to do anything about Parliamentary amnesty, revenue sharing or hold new elections to replace the transitional government). Effectively buying influence with one side to offset the excesses of another _or a third party_ is thus asking BOTH to indulge in their darkest impulses, simply to maintain the status quo. Something which will inevitably have backlash effects against your own forces, 'grass roots' or no.

ARGUMENT:
While the perception of revolution is one of redressing wrongs and forcing a reckoning for old hurts and a leveling between the haves and have nots, the essence of 4GW is one of _despoiling these ideas_ by denying them a forum of organized (state) representation. Instead using a system of externally controlled anarchy to 'representatively' (middle man) engage in what amounts to mafia like influence pedalling.

Any analysis of Assymetric Warfare that fails to see this overriding (follow the money) motivational driver and inherent limiter to 'amateur tactics and expert weapons' desultory exploitation as much as attack also fails to understand the basics of what causes AW as a subset of 4GW to both evolve and devolve based on who controls the external tap that equips and supplies the exponents of this tactical warfare form.

Where Tactics will thus always fall to Strategy and Strategy is itself one of exploitation as much as ennoblement or 'containment' (because nobody does nothin' for free) the absolute need is for _denial_ of the target set, logistics and mobility by which an enemy is allowed to engage in desultoryism.

I call this approach 'COE' or Contempt Of Engagement. And it is itself a subset of the Five Laws of Firepower by which ground forces DO NOT act under their own prerogative but rather as an enabler for airpower in setting the field into motion and then attriting it to the point where lockdown of all further maneuver phase combat is impossible. With this in mind the Five Laws-

1. Shoot Shoot Shoot.
The more you shoot, at legitimate targets, the more you impress upon primitive forces a sense of omnipresence and the more SSPK kill conditions you fulfill, the fewer of those opfor live to spread the word of any success.
2. Mass Fires Not Forces.
Particularly true when there is no effective air defense system, it makes no sense to have multiple forces 'on patrol', looking to generate contact when airpower in SMALL segments can provide an overwatch capability that offsets the typically much smaller assymetric attacker with precision fires, well targeted. Systems like the GBU-44, the GBU-39 and the LCPK all offer the ability to hit enemy small forces without major (heavy) airborne system commitments which are too expensive as much as numerically limited in their ability to provide sortie counts sufficient to 'cover everything'.
3. Maneuver to Target, not to Engage.
Whereby no ground force should ever sit-under, walk into or allow an enemy to leave an ambush condition for which they have no prior knowledge of approaching threat. Where you can SEE the forces arriving to engage your people, you can /preclude/ their doing so without extensive risk in the closure to contact phase while leaving yourself the option to either directly attack or trail back their flight to whatever staging point is being used by a larger force elment.
4. Always Separate Your Fires From Your Targeting.
As a function of both secure bandwidth control and the ability to be discreet in applying fires, airborne assets have an ENORMOUS edge in separating themselves from the immediacy of combat so that they are never compressed (for time) frictioned for secondary threats or fogged out for understanding over ground units who 'whereever they go, that is where they are'. This is particularly relevant to the notion that once an assymetric threat is bled-off the temptation of direct attack on friendly forces, he may well decide to slaughter his own to embarrass you or a rival.
5. Always maintain a COE understanding of battle.
While one should never die for nothin' (allowing a threat a free trophy kill), nor should one bleed for dirt. A primitive tribal psychology enemy fighting a foreign invader on his home turf has an enormous 'no bad karma' advantage to free coup kills of those 'outside the system' of his own my-brother, my-cousin, my-village, my-tribe, my-country, my-Islam understanding of trickledown loyalties and inhibititions. But at the same time he HAS to attack you for a chicken and road sense of your simply being there so that he can stand tall in his own and his people's eyes while effectively denying the process of nation building as a profitable alternative. If you remove from his available options list the notion that there will always be (human soldiers) walking or driving about to continue to demonstrate his 'one skill' against, while at the same time killing his command, logistics and transport enablers, you effectively interdict an Assymetric Warrior's ability to continue and escalate the very tit for tat desultory battle by which the status quo of chaotic anarchy that AW promotos and devolves to is characterized.

CONCLUSION:
'Back in the bad ol' days' U.S. forces would bring in an Indian Scout to play CSI whenever a single settler was slaughtered by the preeminent unconventional warfare killers: the Native Americans. That scout's job was not to tell tribe or numbers or even method of killing but simply _total days_ since the event had happened. The uniformed 'conventioanl force' would then engage in a little assymetric warfare of their own, killing every tribe within horse radius who could have supported the attackers and thereby both 'Opening The West' and destroying the home and hearth logistics by which an 'assumed innocence' covered for covert cheerleadership.

We can't do that today. Largely because the use of ethnic, economic and religious labels to 'define the evil' of an opponent died after WWII without being replaced by an honesty of inherent need for certain resources of which the poor-and-oppressed more often than not are unconsciously gifted.

To replace genocidal cleansing as a method of counter AW and ultimate 4GW victory in 'changing their minds' we must instead use ground forces to enable ROBOTIC airpower, much the same way that cops in police cruisers offer a constant surveillance presence to interdict riots in bad neighborhoods today. By locking down the approach and denying the free getaway, we give COP (Continuous Overhead Airpower) the means to SEE the maneuver phase, spot the approach to contact, deny the separation to disengagement and detect the means of resupply and retasking by which particularly the Arab/Islamic AW system works.

Unfortunately, it will most likely never happen because the USAF and USN have invested considerable funds and political clout to separate themselves from the dirty consequences of ground battle and fight 'purer wars' in the sky. While the ground force component will never admit to their own obsolescence in essentially becoming decoy attractants for airpower enabled kills.

But that is the reality of assymetric warfare in which the main forces operate like guerillas and the guerillas use main force technologies and _nobody wants to ask as much as admit_ where the funds, the motivation and the desired outcomes that drive the actors and effectors of the tactic are headed towards, strategically.


CJ