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ADAPTIVE ENEMIES

War, however, is not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass . . . but always the collision of two living forces. The ultimate aim of waging war . . . must be taken as applying to both sides. Once again, there is interaction. So long as I have not overthrown my opponent I am bound to fear he may overthrow me. Thus, I am not in control: he dictates to me as much as I dictate to him.¹

—Carl von Clausewitz

Once the dogs of war are unleashed and the shooting starts, conflicts follow unpredictable courses. The nineteenth-century philosopher of military strategy Carl von Clausewitz warned that wars are contests between two active, willing enemies, both of whom expect to win. Once begun, war—with its precise planning and cerebral doctrine—quickly devolves into a series of stratagems and counter-stratagems as each side seeks to retain advantages long enough to achieve a decisive end, by collapsing an enemy’s will to resist.²

Over the last seventy years, Western militaries—particularly the U.S. armed forces—have been remarkably consistent in how they fight. They have an extraordinary ability to translate technological innovation, industrial-base capacity, and national treasure into battlefield advantage. But no sooner had Western powers accepted and copied the American way of war than lesser states from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East began in earnest to learn from the sinister wisdom of Colonel Yahara. The colonel and his intellectual progeny are still watching, learning, and adapting. We, on the other hand, have been slow to perceive the growing effectiveness of an asymmetric enemy, partly because of the characteristic Western arrogance that presumes that an enemy, to be a threat, must mimic the Western way of war.

Colonel Yahara was freed from U.S. custody in June 1945 and returned to his homeland, just in time to witness Japan’s former enemy, China, begin to learn from, adapt to, and eventually defeat an enemy who sought to win in the American fashion. Yahara’s old enemy continued to prosecute its way of war in subsequent conflicts and its serial failures suggest a pattern that should disturb us all.

THE CHINESE CIVIL WAR

An effort to redefine and codify an Eastern approach to defeating the Western way of war began in the mountain fastness of Manchuria, immediately after World War II. Mao Zedong and his marshals adapted doctrine from their wartime guerrilla campaigns to fit a conventional war against an enemy superior in technology and matériel. Mao perfected his new way of war against the Nationalists between 1946 and 1949. His simple concepts centered on three tenets, the most important of which was area control. To succeed, Mao’s army first needed to survive in the midst of a larger, better-equipped enemy.³ He divided his troops into small units and scattered them. Maintaining cohesion thus remained his greatest challenge.

Once his own forces were supportable and stable, Mao applied the second tenet—to isolate and compartmentalize the Nationalists. The challenge of this phase was to leverage control of the countryside until the enemy retreated into urban areas and to major lines of communications.⁴ The final act of the campaign called for finding the enemy’s weakest points and collecting and massing overwhelming force against each sequentially, a process similar to taking apart a strand of pearls one pearl at a time. Mao’s new style of conventional war, though effective, demanded extraordinary discipline and patience under extreme hardship. It also sought quick transition from an area-control force to one capable of fighting a war of movement.

STALEMATE IN KOREA

Within a year of the Chinese Civil War, America severely tested Mao’s methods in the mountains of Korea. Initially, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) badly misjudged the effects of U.S. artillery and tactical airpower. Pushed quickly into maneuver warfare, the Chinese massed in the open, often in daylight, to expand their control over the northern Korean Peninsula. They extended their narrow lines of communications farther down the mountainous spine of Korea as they advanced. However, they soon found their logistic support exposed to U.S. airpower and paid a horrid price for their haste. The spring 1951 offensive mounted by the Chinese sputtered to a halt as U.S. artillery and aerial firepower slaughtered PLA Soldiers in masses and air interdiction cut their lines of supply and forced a retreat back across the Han River.

Brutal experiences led to the relearning of sober lessons from the civil war. The Chinese quickly adjusted to a new situation. Over the following two years their attacks were limited and controlled. The high command learned to keep most key logistic facilities north of the Yalu River, out of reach of U.S. air strikes. South of the river they dispersed and hid, massing only to launch attacks. Soldiers moved at night and chiseled their front lines of resistance into “granite mountains.” U.S. casualties mounted while the Chinese stabilized their own losses at a rate acceptable to Beijing. Many more Americans died during the stability phase than in earlier days of fluid warfare. What was an acceptable human toll to China was unacceptable to the United States. The result was operational and strategic stalemate. To the Chinese, stalemate equaled victory.

THE VIETNAM EXPERIENCE

Over the next two decades, the Vietnamese borrowed from the Chinese experience and found creative ways to lessen the killing effect of firepower, against first France and then the United States. They also proved skilled in adapting to the new challenges posed by their Western enemies. The Viet Minh based its tactical and operational approach on Mao’s unconventional methods. Its conduct of the battle was remarkably reminiscent of siege operations conducted by the PLA during the Chinese Civil War. In both cases, the secrets of success were dispersion and preparation of the battlefield. The Viet Minh remained scattered in small units to offer less detectable and lucrative targets and to allow its troops to live off the land. Fewer supply lines and logistic sites offered even fewer opportunities for interdiction fires.

To win, the Chinese—and eventually the Viet Minh—needed to attack. That demanded the ability to mass temporarily. The Viet Minh had to exercise great care in massing under the enemy umbrella of protective firepower. Superior intelligence indicated the right time and place. The ability to collect and move tens of thousands of Soldiers at the right moment allowed attacking forces to collapse French defenses before firepower could regain the advantage. This capacity to “maneuver under fire,” perfected against the Nationalists and now the French, reached new levels of refinement during the second Indochina War, against the United States.

The North Vietnamese architect of victory, General Vo Nguyen Giap, quickly accommodated his strategic plans to the new realities of U.S. firepower. The North Vietnamese relearned the importance of dispersion and patience. They redistributed their forces to keep their most vulnerable units outside the range of U.S. artillery while moving their logistic system away from battle areas into sanctuaries relatively safe from aerial detection and strikes. Thus, they dusted off and applied many of the same methods that had proven useful in previous Asian wars against Western-style armies.

THE RUSSIANS IN AFGHANISTAN

Half a decade later and half a continent away, in Afghanistan, the Soviets learned the same harsh firsthand lessons of overconfidence, when a first-world military once again confronted third-world forces that had the will, tenacity, and skill to remain effective despite firepower inferiority. Year after year, the Soviets arrayed themselves for conventional combat and pushed methodically up the Panjir Valley, only to be expelled a few months later by a seemingly endless and psychologically debilitating series of methodical and well-placed ambuscades and skirmishes. Borrowing a page from the American textbook in Vietnam, the Soviets tried to exploit the firepower, speed, and intimidation of armed helicopters. They employed them principally as convoy escorts and to provide fire support. At times, Hind helicopters proved enormously lethal, particularly early on, when the mujahideen were psychologically unprepared. The guerrillas eventually turned back to the Vietnam experience, employing heavy antiaircraft machine guns and then Stinger shoulder-fired missiles to shoot down the gunships, and in increasing numbers. Military frustration and defeat in Afghanistan presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union.

ISRAEL AND LEBANON THE FIRST TIME: 1982

Beginning in 1982, after nearly three decades of failure in open warfare, an alliance of Arab state and nonstate actors pushed Israeli mechanized forces out of Beirut. Back streets, tall buildings, and other urban clutter provided the Arabs just enough respite from intensive firepower to wear away Israeli morale in the field and at home. Unable to bring superior maneuverability and shock effect fully to bear, the Israelis paused just short of their operational objectives. Excessive casualties and the public images of bloody excesses on both sides eventually resulted in Israeli withdrawal. This success provided Israel’s enemies with a promising new method to offset its superiority in open, mechanized combat. Today a spectrum of low-tech threats, running the gamut from weapons of mass destruction delivered by crude ballistic missiles to acts of terrorism, to children throwing rocks at Soldiers, confront an increasingly frustrated Israeli military and public. An irony of the recent wars in the Middle East is that Western-style militaries have had great success against non-Western enemies who mimic their own firepower doctrines. The Gulf War is the most recent example of such failed efforts by Arab states, stretching back to 1948. In 1973, Arab armies enjoyed some measure of success applying Western methods, but that was in large part a result of Israeli overconfidence and limited Arab objectives.

THE GULF WAR

Despite extraordinary incompetence on the part of its leadership, the enemy displayed considerable capacity to adapt on the battlefield during Operation Desert Storm. As the U.S. air campaign began to focus on destroying Iraqi ground forces in the Kuwait theater during early February 1991, the Iraqi army quickly adapted. By scattering their tanks across the desert and then constructing berms around them, they ensured that aircraft dropping precision-guided bombs could at best destroy only a single vehicle per pass. Burning tires next to operational vehicles spoofed attackers into missing real targets. Moreover, effective antiaircraft fire kept numerous coalition planes too high to do substantial damage. The best-trained Iraqi units endured weeks of coalition air bombardment with unbroken will and combat capability intact. The most impressive indication of the Iraqi ability to adapt came in the operational movement of a substantial portion of the Republican Guard during the first hours of Desert Storm. Elements of two divisions shifted from a southeastern defensive orientation to defensive positions that faced southwest along Wadi al-Batin. There, the Tawakalna Division and the 50th and 37th Armored Brigades would be destroyed by VII Corps.⁵ Nevertheless, these units’ sacrifices allowed the rest of the Republican Guard to withdraw. Significantly, the Iraqi Republican Guard ultimately escaped to save Saddam despite overwhelming coalition airpower.

NATO AND KOSOVO

Despite its video-game public image, the NATO campaign against Serbia was no exception to the Clausewitzian construct. Belgrade sought to overcome a tremendous matériel and technological disadvantage by capitalizing on its strengths: the ability to gain operational objectives quickly and then disperse to avoid the inevitable aerial assault. The Serbs thought that patience, tenacity, guile, and ground forces sequestered throughout the countryside would provide an interval long enough to outwait the resolve of NATO. The political will of the alliance proved stronger. But skill and perseverance on the part of the Serbian army in the face of a thousand aircraft with precision-guided weapons is a compelling example of how an adaptive enemy can foil the best-laid plans of a superior force, by capitalizing on its own inherent strengths while minimizing those of the enemy.

Placed in historical context, the Serbian response to the NATO onslaught is simply another data point on a continuum of progressive, predictable adaptations by technologically dispossessed forces willing to challenge Western militaries having superior precision firepower. Like their Asian fellow travelers, the Serbs sought victory by avoiding defeat. In a similar fashion, they conceded the vertical dimension of the battle space to NATO. They were content to shoot down a few aircraft using ground-mounted guns and missiles. This hope was underscored by an expectation that a few dead or captured alliance airmen would gradually degrade NATO resolve. Even if a shoot-down was impossible, the Serbs would seek to keep their antiaircraft assets robust, knowing that ground targets would be difficult to spot from high altitudes.

The surest way to avoid defeat was keeping the army in the field viable—both as a defiant symbol of national resolve and as a legitimate Serbian guarantor of sovereignty over occupied territory. To maintain an effective army in being, the Serbs likewise depended on historical precedents. Units quickly went to ground and dispersed widely. They rapidly computed the pace at which the allies could find, target, and strike uncovered assets and then devised ways to relocate mobile targets inside the alliance’s sensor-to-shooter envelope. They replicated camouflage, decoys, and spoofing techniques proven effective by Asian armies. As the allies became proficient at spotting troops, Serbs sought greater dispersal and went deeper into the ground.

Toward the end, the coalition gained a significant airpower advantage with the emergence of a rudimentary ground presence in the form of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). This force was not very effective in open combat against the better-armed Serbs, but the very presence of large-scale KLA units among them forced the Serbs to come out of protective cover and to mass. The results were remarkably consistent with past experiences against China and North Vietnam. Troops moving, massed, and in the open present the most lucrative targets from the air. Yet the Serb forces were never severely damaged, because they were too large and well protected to be erased by aircraft. Since total destruction was not feasible, the contest in Kosovo, like all battles of attrition, soon devolved into a test of time and will. Victory went to the side that could endure the longest without a collapse of will. Once it became evident to President Slobodan Milosevic that NATO resolve would not be broken before a threatened ground assault could materialize, he ceded Kosovo to ensure his own political survival.

THE SECOND IRAQ WAR

Fourteen years of American adventures in the Middle East have provided the surest evidence yet of the vacuity of our fighting doctrine that minimalizes the ability of the enemy to endure our killing power as they adapted to find new and creative ways of killing us. We all remember the euphoria that accompanied the “March to Baghdad” in March 2003. Again, Saddam Hussein was too stupid and fixated on his mechanized forces to realize that two U.S. divisions supported by overwhelming airpower would destroy his military in less than three weeks.

Unfortunately, the victory dance was premature. With Saddam out of the way, the Iraqis, particularly the Iraqi Sunnis, were quick to apply the lessons they had learned in the past when fighting against Western militaries. U.S. leadership failed to heed the signs of a shift from conventional to irregular warfare. By the end of the summer of 2003, as the George W. Bush administration tried to find a means to withdraw from the fight, a combination of mostly Sunni ex-Baathist officers and a newly formed Shia militia army started to fight back by killing Americans and each other. In time, during the “surge” of 2006–7, the U.S. command in Iraq adapted to the enemy’s adaptation and transformed the military in Iraq into an effective counterinsurgency force. But none of this happened until the chaos induced by an adaptive enemy had resulted in the deaths of thousands of U.S. Soldiers, principally from a tactical system that relied on roadside bombs and carefully orchestrated small-unit engagements in places like Fallujah and Ramadi.

Tragically, the chaos of Iraq created the strategic vacuum that allowed Osama bin Laden’s small terrorist organization to morph into larger and more deadly terrorist surrogates and franchises, to include Al Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS, as well as many others spawned from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Hindu Kush.

THE SECOND AFGHAN WAR

The first year of successful combat by special operating forces in concert with the Afghan Northern Alliance showcased what U.S. Soldiers can do if they give up on big-machine warfare and practice the art of war among the people. Speed, shock, and surprise combined to break the back of the Taliban. I recall a particularly poignant moment in the early months when my television showed images of Special Forces Soldiers wrapped in native Talib shawls and leggings, mounted on horseback, calling in precision fires from B-52 bombers making “lazy eights” in the skies high above. It was a moment when those of us who had been calling for exactly such an imaginative melding of unconventional and high-tech warfare felt vindicated.

Sadly, the moment passed. A defeated Taliban retreated into Pakistan to fight another day. The Taliban, like all of our successful enemies in the past, knew that American patience in war was lacking. It was just a momentary failure for Afghan insurgents whose ancestors had been evicting enemies for 2,300 years. In time, patience and cunning replaced active resistance. Within a year of victory, the Bush administration had decided to fight two wars, with priority given to the one in Iraq, creating another strategic vacuum, which would be filled by a resurgent Taliban . . . and yet another war fought against an adaptive enemy, a war that is with us still.

ISRAEL AND LEBANON THE SECOND TIME: 2006

Contemporary history teaches about the firepower addiction of a Western-style military, unused to fighting against adaptive enemies. Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the first air force officer to be appointed head of the Israeli Defense Forces, said upon assuming his duties in 2005 that he believed the American experience in Kosovo demonstrated that a carefully planned, orchestrated, and technologically precise air campaign could collapse Hezbollah’s ability to threaten Israel.

Halutz fell prey to the same demons that were at that very moment confounding his American friends in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hezbollah’s demons appeared most decisively in the small village of Bint Jbiel, just over the Israeli-Lebanon border and nearby in the defile of Wadi Saluki. There Hezbollah fighters ambushed and destroyed a battalion’s worth of Israel’s blitzkrieg-era heavy tanks. The parallel disasters of Bint Jbiel and Wadi Saluki became laboratories for teaching how a well-trained insurgent force—exhaustively drilled, carefully dug in, camouflaged, and armed with the first-rate, Soviet-era precision antitank weaponry—could utterly devastate a modern, technologically superior Cold War force, even if that force commanded the air absolutely. These battles strongly suggest that older-generation portable antitank and antiaircraft weapons in the hands of diabolically skilled infantry fighting what theorists now term “hybrid warfare” can win against heavy, mechanized forces if they meld just enough technology with an irregular force whose members are willing to fight to the death.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE

Non-Western militaries are increasingly internalizing the lessons of wars against technologically superior enemies. Recent works on the operational and tactical problems of fighting Western-style militaries suggest clear warnings. First, non-Western enemies understand Western military vulnerabilities: aversion to casualties and collateral damage, sensitivity to domestic and world opinion, and lack of commitment to conflicts of durations measured in years rather than months. They also perceive that Americans in particular retain a style of war focused on the single offensive dimension of a firepower battle. Moreover, they are already considering how to target Western vulnerabilities while capitalizing on their intrinsic advantages: time, will, and the inherent power of the defensive. Borrowing from Mao and Giap, future enemies have learned the value of time and patience. From their perspective, swift success is not essential to victory.

Future enemies have also realized the advantage of interfering with an intruder’s intention to end a conflict quickly and at minimum cost. Moreover, non-Western armies have learned to limit the effect and duration of air campaigns by dispersing not only their forces but their telecommunications, logistics, and transportation infrastructures. They also understand that sophisticated air defenses—whose effectiveness depends on airfields, surface-to-air missile sites, and vulnerable command-and-control nodes—have become liabilities more than assets and must be dispersed, hidden, or eliminated.

Once the ground conflict begins, enemies must, they understand, use superior mass to offset the lethal firepower and precision technology of Western armies. They will capitalize on the positional advantages of the defensive in or near their own territory. As they gain confidence, they will search for opportunities to mass sufficient force to achieve local successes. As in the Kosovo air campaign, they will seek to frustrate Western ground forces with just enough modern weaponry to extend the campaign indefinitely. A few precision cruise missiles against major logistic bases will add to the casualty rates that Western militaries must explain to their citizens. The object will not be decisive victory but stalemate. A prolonged stalemate will erode Western political support for the conflict.

As non-Western militaries develop concepts for defeating the U.S.’s firepower-centered method of war, the character and composition of their forces are changing. The Cold War impulse to clone Western force structures is disappearing. Foreign militaries are taking on their own identities. The mountains of metal, consisting of expensive yet often second-rate land, sea, and air machines that serve as lucrative targets are rapidly vanishing. In particular, non-Western armies are becoming lighter.

Evidence of this trend can be found on the shopping lists of emerging militaries. Instead of sophisticated aircraft and blue-water navies, most are pursuing cheap weapons of mass destruction and the methods of delivering them. Acquisition of sea and land mines, as well as distributed air-defense weapons, suggest that the intent of these militaries is to keep potential enemies at bay. Most expenditures and attention go to land forces, because in nondemocratic states armies provide political legitimacy. They are also useful instruments for waging regional wars of aggression, and they are sure means for suppressing internal dissent and thwarting troublesome outsiders.