Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Number of troops not the only consideration in defeating insurgency

Mackubin Thomas Owens:

...Operational considerations differ from conflict to conflict and depend on a number of factors that are difficult to quantify. How strong are the insurgents? Do they have popular support? What kind of organization do they have? What is their source of supply? What is the quality of guerrilla leadership? What is the character of the terrain? What are their tactics? Answers to these questions should drive force levels, organization, and tactics. As I argued in an NRO piece criticizing the penchant of so many commentators to equate Iraq and Vietnam, Iraqi guerrillas lack many of the advantages that have fueled successful insurgencies in the past.

One of the points I made is that guerillas traditionally have been most successful when they serve as an auxiliary to a "force in being," a conventional military formation that concentrates the main effort of their enemy. After all, the term "guerrilla" was first used to describe the Spanish partisans who, in conjunction with a British force, harried Napoleon's army during operations in Spain in 1810. The guerrillas were effective only because the French had to focus on Wellington's army. Because they always had to contend with the British main force, they could not organize their forces in such a way as to pursue and kill the guerrillas. That is essentially what the Viet Cong guerrillas did in Vietnam as well. But the guerrillas in Iraq are on their own. This means that we can optimize our force structure for counter-guerrilla operations.

The key to success in Iraq is killing or capturing the guerrillas. We have had substantial success in doing so in such places as Fallujah and Ramadi. But while we have plenty of conventional military firepower in Iraq — enough to kill the guerrillas many times over — we often lack actionable intelligence. It is intelligence that indicates what targets must be struck or safe houses raided. This is the real constraint we face today in Iraq.

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...Consider the even more controversial Phoenix Program of Vietnam War fame (or infamy). This approach used South Vietnamese agents, trained by U.S. military personnel, to penetrate Vietcong operations in the South and arrest or kill Communist cadres. According to Stanley Karnow, certainly no fan of the war, the Phoenix Program almost wrecked the Communist infrastructure in South Vietnam. As Karnow writes in Vietnam: A History,

...I was inclined to discount the claim advanced during the war by William Colby, the CIA executive who ran Phoenix, that the endeavor as a whole, despite it flaws and excesses, eliminated some sixty thousand authentic Vietcong agents. My perspective changed after the war, however, when top Communist figures in Vietnam confirmed Colby's assessments. Madame Nguyen Thi Dinh, a veteran Vietcong leader, told me that Phoenix had been "very dangerous," adding: "We never feared a division of troops, but the infiltration of a couple of guys into our ranks created tremendous difficulties for us." Ro Colonel Bui Tin, a senior officer, it had been a "devious and cruel" operation that cost "the loss of thousands of our cadres," and the deputy Communist commander in the south at the time, General Tran Do, called it extremely destructive." Nguyen Co Thach, Vietnam's foreign minister after 1975, admitted that the Phoenix effort "wiped out many of our bases" in South Vietnam, compelling numbers of North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops to retreat to sanctuaries in Cambodia.

Having the right approach is more important than raw numbers of troops. Success in war depends a great deal on what those troops are doing. In a guerrilla war, a smaller force on the offensive is more likely to achieve success than a far larger one that is in a defensive posture. Phoenix II would enhance our offensive orientation.

It should also be pointed out that Israel's targeted killings of Hamas leadership has resulted in significantly fewer successful terrorist attacks on Israel.

As discussed here recently, the Soviets were able to defeat a much more popular insurgency in Eastern Europe by penetrating British Intelligence as well as the insurgent forces.