DEFENSE
The Military's New Hybrid Warriors
Some military analysts predict that future forces will increasingly face a hybrid of 'conventional' and 'unconventional' warfare.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
When you set out to win hearts and minds, sometimes you have to show up in a 70-ton tank.
Joseph Rosen commanded a company of 88 soldiers during the much-debated "surge" in 2007 that sent 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq. During their first three months in Baghdad, Rosen's troops performed the kind of militarized community policing traditionally used against insurgents, moving on foot and in Humvees among the local population. Then, in January 2007, they were reassigned to a mostly Shiite area. Their new sector was rife with the powerful roadside bombs called EFPs, short for explosively formed penetrators, that shot high-velocity slugs of molten copper that could gut even the latest up-armored Humvee.
"Our company had about 200 EFP strikes," Rosen, recently promoted to major, told National Journal. "We almost altogether abandoned our Humvees in favor of the tanks and Bradleys" -- M2 Bradley fighting vehicles -- "because they could survive the EFP hit, for the most part."
The only soldier killed in action in his company was riding in an up-armored Humvee. But some roadside bombs were powerful enough to kill his men even inside a 35-ton Bradley troop carrier. So Rosen routinely led his patrols with the 70-ton M1 Abrams tank. His unit never fired the M1's main cannon, but the troops needed its armor to soak up explosions. "We were willing to accept a hit on the tank before we'd accept a hit on a Bradley," Rosen explained. The M1 "definitely could sustain hits -- not to say that we didn't lose any tanks."
Rosen and his soldiers were not waging the "high-intensity" armored blitzkriegs across open ground for which the M1 tank was built. They were executing classic urban counterinsurgency tactics. Living in a small, single-company outpost in a Baghdad neighborhood, they went out every day for a year to talk to residents, search houses, and conduct raids. But their experience contradicts the notion that such a "low-intensity" conflict is not lethally violent. Mortars hit Rosen's outpost day after day for months on end. Roadside bombs made it too dangerous to go out the front gate on foot. And the Iraqi informants on whom Rosen relied for intelligence risked death, or worse: After the teenage daughters of one friendly Iraqi were murdered, Rosen would meet with an informant only after cordoning off the entire block with armored vehicles and then sending troops into every house to talk with every family, so that watching militia members could not tell who the Americans' real source was.
Rosen was waging the "war among the people" prescribed by counterinsurgency theorists. It was just that to survive long enough to build those relationships he had to ride down the street in 70 tons of steel. His experiences, like those of many other Iraq veterans, blur the lines between the U.S. military's new-school emphasis on counterinsurgency and its traditional focus on combat power. Washington should pay heed.
The Great Debate
As the fighting in Afghanistan escalates, seemingly as fast as the war in Iraq winds down, policy makers remain badly divided over what kind of military America needs. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has blasted the Pentagon bureaucracy for what he calls "next-war-itis." Instead of prioritizing expensive, long-term weapons programs to prepare the force for high-tech, firepower-intensive but essentially conventional conflicts against nation-states sometime in the future, Gates wants to focus on quicker, cheaper fixes for the low-tech, manpower-intensive guerrilla wars that the United States is fighting now. Traditionalists respond that the all-consuming demands of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq have already left the military unprepared for very different threats, such as North Korean nuclear brinkmanship or Chinese pressure on Taiwan, that could erupt at any time.
Some of today's dividing lines follow old interservice rivalries. The Marine Corps has a 200-year tradition of waging "small wars" against irregular enemies, while the Air Force and Navy historically fight well-armed nation-states -- after all, Al Qaeda has no aircraft carriers. But the debate splits the Army down the middle.
The Army is increasingly schizophrenic. It is spending an estimated $70 billion to recruit, train, and equip 65,000 additional soldiers for six new brigades of light infantry -- low-tech foot sloggers best suited to guerrilla warfare -- while requesting $160 billion for 15 brigades' worth of high-tech armored vehicles designed for rapid deployment by air, the much-maligned Future Combat System. (See "Fate Of The Future Combat System.") At bases around the country, Army units struggle to find time to train in both traditional fighting skills and cultural sensitivity.
The divide is not just generational. Even veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan interpret their experiences in diametrically different ways. Some young officers become acolytes of Gen. David Petraeus, the architect of the surge and the associated emphasis on the classic principles of counterinsurgency. Others, such as Col. Gian Gentile, a West Point instructor who fought in Baghdad in 2006, speak angrily of the decline in traditional combat skills.
In Iraq, Gentile told National Journal, "you go from a stiff, short little firefight to talking to the sheik or imam about what kinds of things he needs for his community, [like] laying new concrete on the street. So our platoons and companies could make a transition very quickly from counterinsurgency to a [high-intensity] conflict." But at higher levels, he said, commanders and their staffs spend their time managing occupied provinces from static headquarters. "If you told a division in Iraq, 'Hey, in two days, you're going to have to pick up all of your stuff and do [an attack] east into Iran,' those brigades and divisions haven't had to do anything like that for the last six or seven years."
Working with informants, reconstruction contracts, and local allies to secure one neighborhood at a time, as in the 2007 surge, is every bit as complex as coordinating tanks, infantry, artillery, and airpower advancing rapidly across an entire country, as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But the two skill sets are hardly interchangeable, and there are not enough hours in the day to master both.
"It's tough," conceded Maj. Mark Reeves, chief of operations at the Army's tank school at Fort Knox, Ky. "We're dealing with it here." Before his unit deployed to Mosul in 2006-07, "We really did very little maneuver at all with tanks and Bradleys because we just didn't have time," Reeves recalled. "In the last few years, our lieutenants and our captains have lost a lot of the skills, or never even really gained the skills... in how to conduct large-scale operations."
So if today's young officers had to switch suddenly from counterinsurgency to conventional combat, would they stumble as badly as their predecessors did when the blitzkrieg on Baghdad gave way to guerrilla warfare? "Probably, yes," Reeves said with a rueful laugh, "although it's easier, probably, to go from a counterinsurgency to a high-intensity conflict. In counterinsurgency, you don't know who the good guy is, who the bad guy is."
Nor will the next "conventional" war be a pristine duel in the desert like the Persian Gulf War, free of "unconventional" complications such as cities full of innocent civilians. "In Desert Storm, I don't think we worried too much about the media; we didn't worry too much about the local populace," said Reeves, a veteran of the 1991 war. "In the future, if we get into a high-intensity conflict, we'll have to worry about the things we have to worry about in Iraq."
Reeves is not alone in this prediction. A growing number of analysts and officers speak of the future as a blend of characteristics once neatly categorized as either "conventional" or "unconventional." One of the most prominent is Marine Gen. James Mattis. He's a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who now heads the U.S. Joint Forces Command, which is in charge of training and equipping all of the military services so that they work together. "We are not superior in irregular warfare," he said in a February speech in Washington. "And that's what we've got to be.... Really, we're going to have to be able to fight hybrid enemies."
Frank Hoffman, a retired Marine Reserve officer and leading "hybrid warfare" theorist who has briefed Mattis, says, "The current debate is terribly simplistic and counterproductive. I don't think we're likely to face clean-cut examples of anything. Preparing for hybrids is a better posture."
For the hybrid-war theorists, the most alarming model for the future is not America's struggles in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is Israel's 2006 defeat in Lebanon.
Hezbollah As Hybrid Threat
In July 2006, while the U.S. military struggled to contain sectarian violence in Iraq, the vaunted Israel Defense Forces invaded Lebanon. The Israelis had unilaterally withdrawn from southern Lebanon in 2000, hoping to end their slow bleeding at the hands of Hezbollah, but the Iranian-sponsored Shiite militia had simply moved south to launch raids and rockets across the Lebanese-Israeli border. After six years of occasional but interminable casualties, both military and civilian, the Israelis struck back to silence Hezbollah's long-range rockets.
They failed. The rockets kept coming, in ever-greater numbers: more than 4,000 over the course of the 34-day war, an average of more than 125 a day. Escalating Israeli airstrikes punished Lebanese civilians without crippling the dug-in militia. And Israeli ground troops sent in to finish the job instead ran into unexpectedly stiff defenses; 119 of them died.
A militia best known for suicide attacks, such as the truck bomb that killed 241 U.S. marines in Beirut in 1983, Hezbollah had stood up to the Israelis in pitched battles after the regular armies of Arab states could not. "Hezbollah outperformed the Egyptians in 1956 and 1967, and the Syrians in 1967, in terms of the number of Israelis they were able to kill per combatant in fairly orthodox, conventional war-making," defense scholar Stephen Biddle said at a roundtable to discuss his study of the 2006 war. "They're as conventional as many states."
Well supplied by Iran and the black market, Hezbollah used high-tech weapons historically seen only in the arsenals of nation-states. Anti-tank guided missiles launched from ambush at long range knocked out Israel's 65-ton Merkava tanks, a vehicle equivalent to the American M1 Abrams. An anti-ship cruise missile crippled an Israeli corvette 10 miles offshore. Hezbollah even put weapons on their own remote-controlled drones, crude counterparts to the American Predator.
More important than the weapons were the skill and determination with which Hezbollah wielded them. "Somebody taught them to systematically lay out defenses," said Army Col. Patrick Lang, the retired chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East section. Hezbollah had spent years preparing to stand and fight: building bunkers, digging tunnels, reinforcing civilian buildings, and selecting ambush sites along the Israelis' potential lines of advance. More than one analyst has compared the resulting web of well-hidden positions not to traditional guerrilla tactics but to the Japanese defense of Okinawa in World War II. And like the Japanese regulars, Hezbollah's militia members not only held their positions under heavy fire but even moved forward to stage some small-scale counterattacks, according to Biddle's study. Instead of brief flurries of gunfire in hit-and-run attacks, the Israeli officers who spoke to Biddle reported firefights lasting hours. "We're not talking IEDs and the occasional ambush," said Richard Sinnreich, a retired Army colonel. "We're talking about high-intensity fights."
By contrast, Israeli skills at conventional warfare had decayed. "Over the previous five years, the army had been engaged in a low-intensity urban conflict [in the occupied West Bank] and had retrained itself into sort of a large urban SWAT team," said Michael Oren, a professor at Georgetown University who, as an Israeli reservist, was himself called up in 2006.
After six years of counterinsurgency in Iraq, have U.S. forces lost their edge in the same way? Col. Gentile and officers like him fear that they have. Certainly, neither Saddam Hussein's regulars in 2003 nor the Iraqi insurgents since then have ever successfully stood their ground over a large area as Hezbollah did in southern Lebanon. But just like in Lebanon, the low-intensity conflict in Iraq has seen pockets of high-intensity fighting -- nowhere more so than in the city of Falluja in 2004.
Falluja And Beyond
The nature of a war can change from day to day and from place to place. Failure to recognize the difference can be fatal.
In November 2004, Marine Corps Maj. Kris Faught and his co-pilot were flying their Cobra attack helicopter over Falluja in support of slowly advancing U.S. ground troops. When the insurgents fire back at the helicopter, Faught recalled, the muzzle flashes "look like flashbulbs, like when you're at an air show and people are taking pictures" -- except they're not. Over most of the city, enemy fire was so intense that the helicopters could not fly low enough to fire their rockets or guns and had to rely on guided missiles instead.
As the battle raged, reinforcements flew in to help. "We were out of ammo; this other flight checked in [and I radioed], 'We're up here on 3,000 [feet], recommend you come up' -- they were down much lower," Faught recalled. "He just said 'Roger,' and then he started shooting." In minutes, the lower-flying newcomer was shot down -- and not by some lucky gunshot but by a heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile. (Amazingly, both crew members survived.)
"They were all very good, competent guys," Faught said, "but they had been used to flying around low because there's a much lower threat up at al-Asad," where the reinforcements had been operating before. "They came down to augment us during Falluja with four [helicopters] and lost two of them in the space of a day." When the reinforcements flew from al-Asad to Falluja -- a distance of less than 100 miles -- they had unwittingly moved from a low-intensity guerrilla conflict into something much closer to a high-intensity conventional war.
The ad hoc "Shura council" that coordinated the insurgents in Falluja lacked the clear hierarchy, strict discipline, and geographic reach of Hezbollah's defense of southern Lebanon. But on a smaller scale, at least some of the Falluja fighters showed just as much tenacity and skill. They used sewer tunnels to move unseen by U.S. spy drones overhead, knocked holes in the walls between adjoining houses so they could redeploy without exposing themselves in the street, shored up civilian houses with sandbags and bricks, and cached supplies in fallback positions around the city.
"As we got farther south, the fighting intensified," said Carin Calvin, a Marine captain and veteran of Falluja, "and you started running into blond-haired, blue-eyed insurgents," who were Chechens, Islamic radicals from the rebellious Russian province. "They had basically layered a defense so as they dropped back they had another house full of weapons, full of ammo." At some of these strong points, he said, "we had units pinned down for a couple of hours."
Falluja in November 2004 is the most famous hot spot in the Iraq war, a time and place -- like Hue in Vietnam in 1968 -- where an enemy that normally would hit and run instead stood and fought savagely for days. But there are countless other examples of localized high-intensity fighting in what is generally considered a low-intensity war. Like the 36 Israeli officers who spoke to Stephen Biddle about the 2006 Lebanon campaign, many of the more than 140 soldiers and marines who have spoken to National Journal for an ongoing oral history of Afghanistan and Iraq described stiff firefights lasting many hours. In these protracted battles, the enemy was subdued not by foot soldiers winning "hearts and minds" but by the full array of U.S. combat power: infantry and armor working closely together, backed by airpower and artillery.
As recently as June 2007, for example, Al Qaeda in Iraq felt strong enough to declare the city of Baquba the new capital of its "Islamic State of Iraq" and to make a Falluja-style stand. Dispatched to retake the city was one of the Army's six Stryker brigades, medium-weight forces that fall between traditional light infantry and heavy armor. These units' combination of 1,300 infantry -- more than in any other type of Army brigade -- and armored vehicles mounted on huge rubber tires that can travel long distances over dangerous roads have made them the favorite rapid-reaction force for U.S. commanders in Iraq. (The first Stryker brigade to deploy to Afghanistan will arrive there this summer.) A Stryker unit focused on reconstruction and institution-building in one area might have to pick up and move to an all-out battle in another.
"We moved around a whole lot," said Lt. Col. Adam Rocke, a battalion commander in the 3rd Stryker Brigade, but the Baquba mission was unique, "a pitched battle in an urban environment ... house to house, block by block, street by street." When Rocke's troops first attacked, he said, "in a day [of fighting], they would gain a couple blocks at most."
In addition to calling in artillery and airstrikes, the brigade augmented its namesake Stryker vehicles, relatively lightly armored 20-ton transports, with 35-ton Bradleys and 70-ton M1 tanks -- and even some of the M1s were destroyed in the battle. Baquba's defenders used weapons refined over years of guerrilla warfare, from roadside bombs big enough to kill a tank to entire houses rigged to blow up when Americans stepped inside. But they deployed these weapons not in isolated ambushes but in a citywide defense of territory they had claimed as their own.
This is not how guerrillas are supposed to fight -- in theory. In reality, insurgents throughout history have proven surprisingly capable of seizing and holding ground.
Vietnam As Hybrid War
Hours-long firefights between determined defenders and American armored vehicles hardly match the mental image of guerrilla warfare. The idea of counterinsurgency as all patrolling by light infantry, however, is a misreading not only of Iraq but even of Vietnam.
People tend to say that defeating an insurgency is all about hearts and minds, "but when you look at Vietnam, that's a hybrid war," said T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and the author of The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century. "You had the South Vietnamese guerrillas, the Vietcong, but you also faced NVA regiments" -- uniformed soldiers of the regular North Vietnamese army.
Those NVA units were tough and disciplined, said Col. Lang, who began his military intelligence career in Vietnam. "If you captured them -- and I captured a lot of them -- the Vietcong would sit around on the ground scratching themselves. The North Vietnamese army, they would stand up at attention, they all had their nice green uniforms and their pith helmets with a red star on the front, and they would say, 'Yes, sir; no, sir.' "
The differences went beyond appearance. "The NVA were much more persistent," Lang said. "If they were going to be anywhere more than a day or two, they were like the Roman army, they would start digging": first simple foxholes, then bunkers, then a whole ring of bunkers, then concentric circles of bunkers with machine guns sited to cover each other's flanks and mortars protected in the center. "I saw 52 [Americans] killed in one day trying to break into a position like that," Lang said.
The North Vietnamese regulars were capable of fighting as guerrillas, moving in small bands through the jungle to ambush or evade U.S. patrols. Indeed, as Communist casualties mounted, especially after the bloody Tet offensive of 1968, Hanoi sent ever larger numbers of regulars south to fill out decimated Vietcong units. But these same soldiers were also capable of coming together in large forces for pitched battles lasting days and weeks: Dien Bien Phu in 1954 against the French, Ia Drang in 1965, the Tet offensive and Hue City in 1968, and the Easter -offensive of 1972, when North Vietnamese tanks rolled down the main roads into the South. It was another such armored force, not guerrillas in sandals and black pajamas, that ultimately took Saigon in 1975.
At first, U.S. commanders wrote off Vietnam as a "little jungle war" best suited for light infantry on foot or in helicopters. But when American armored vehicles were deployed, they proved effective from Hue City to the Pleiku Valley. A study by retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales suggests that these armored troops took casualties at one-fifth the rate of the more exposed infantry fighting on foot beside them.
Hearts and minds certainly mattered in Vietnam, but so did brute combat power, on both sides. Like Lebanon in 2006 or Falluja in 2004, Vietnam was neither a purely guerrilla war among the people nor a purely conventional duel between regular armies but a hybrid of both. At least some forces that Western analysts dismissed as "irregular" or low-intensity threats proved capable of switching to more regular, high-intensity tactics when the time was right.
The reverse is true as well: The conventional armies of nation-states can adopt distinctly unconventional tactics. The Chinese in particular have a tradition of the same troops alternating between "regular" and "irregular" tactics that dates back to the warrior-sage Sun Tzu in the fifth century B.C. In 1950, the People's Liberation Army surprised U.S. forces in Korea by crossing the Yalu River on foot in widely dispersed units with little heavy equipment; but once they had surrounded the unwitting Americans, the Chinese massed for a decisive fight, crushing U.S. "constabulary" units trained for peacekeeping in occupied Japan. Today, while U.S. hawks use the Chinese threat to justify big-ticket weapons, Chinese officers speak of neutralizing America's conventional power with "unrestricted warfare," combining everything from ballistic missiles to cyber-sabotage. Even the notoriously rigid Russians used civilian computer hackers and ragged Chechen paramilitaries to support their regular units in attacking Georgia last year.
"Is 'conventional' conventional anymore?" asked Rickey Smith, a retired Army colonel who works on future-warfare programs. "Will there ever be a time where you see something that's conventional the way we thought about it at the end of the Cold War? It's clear the answer is no."
In hindsight, the 1991 Gulf War was a fluke, kept pristinely "conventional" in part because U.S. civilian and military leaders cut the ground war short at 100 hours with the enemy largely intact. When the Army returned to Iraq a decade later to finish the job against Saddam, it found out that "conventional" could turn "unconventional" in a hurry.
Fluidity And Flexibility
On the morning of April 5, 2003, Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz was waging all-out war. Wounded by shrapnel from an exploding Iraqi tank the day before, Schwartz led his battalion of armored vehicles in the first "Thunder Run" through the streets of Baghdad. "We were firing everything we could fire," recalled Schwartz, since promoted to colonel and awarded the Silver Star for valor. "Most tanks were hit by a rocket-propelled grenade of some sort. My tank personally that I was on was hit right in the soft spot between the turret and the hull with an RPG." So intense was the threat that he left his battalion's foot soldiers behind and kept the troops he did bring inside their armored vehicles and on the move -- except for one agonizing 21-minute pause to rescue the crew of a burning tank -- for the entire two-hour, 10-mile running battle through the city.
Six days later, on the morning of April 11, Schwartz looked out from his battalion's defensive positions in downtown Baghdad and realized that the fighting was over. After several days of ever-weaker Iraqi counterattacks, "it was like an epiphany," he said. "I realized exactly what was happening -- that we were transitioning from Phase III to IV, from 'major combat operations' to 'stability operations' -- and it was not good." Schwartz had 800 soldiers to secure one-third of Baghdad, a city of 9 million people, and no idea how to do it. "I didn't have a plan. I was not given a plan," he said. "That city erupted in a Mardi Gras fashion like you can't imagine, millions and millions of people that were looting everything."
The U.S. force that took Baghdad in a brilliant high-intensity campaign was unprepared to contain the low-intensity chaos that followed. But the next wave of U.S. troops went into Iraq expecting to do police work and reconstruction only to be caught off guard by an escalating insurgency.
"We thought the war was over, or some folks did," said Army Col. David Hubner, an old comrade of Schwartz's, who deployed to Iraq in early 2004. His battalion left most of its heavy armored vehicles behind, he said, but "we got in there and [then] Najaf cooked off, Falluja cooked off, Samarra cooked off, and we were in a fight. The decision was then made to bring a second company of tanks down."
The U.S. military's problem in Iraq was not only that it went in focused on conventional warfare and unprepared for counterinsurgency. The Pentagon was also caught out by the speed and fluidity with which a high-intensity conflict could turn into a low-intensity fight and then go high again.
Some analysts argue that the U.S. military needs to split the difference between high and low by splitting itself in two. "The current approach leaves you a rather mediocre jack-of-all-trades Army and a master of neither of these kinds of military operations," said Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who now leads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Krepinevich calls for not only adding more light infantry units to the Army -- as the service is doing -- but also preparing those units for counterinsurgency by forming specialized "Security Cooperation Brigades" trained primarily to hunt guerrillas and support local allies. The remaining heavy armored forces would be able to focus their training on all-out combat. In a fluid situation like Iraq, the heavy brigades would go in first to smash the enemy defenses and the light brigades would follow swiftly in their wake to restore order, with a few heavies staying on to stamp out any Falluja-style outbreak.
But as stories like those of Schwartz and Hubner show, America's enemies can switch from high to low to high again faster than Krepinevich's bipolar Army could bring in the proper set of specialists. "The stability guy might get his clock cleaned and take some casualties if you get into a Hezbollah-like situation," said hybrid-warfare theorist Frank Hoffman, because the light infantry brigades would lack armored vehicles, heavy weapons, and the training for all-out battle. Conversely, a Krepinevich-style heavy force will end up "operating in an urban environment with a lot of noncombatants," Hoffman said, "and they're not going have the civil-affairs [specialists] or the training" to deal with civilians.
In 1997, Marine Corps Commandant Charles Krulak coined the term "the three-block war," which envisioned troops fighting fiercely on one block, policing a second, and conducting humanitarian relief on a third. In 2004, Marine Capt. Scott Cuomo experienced just that in Najaf. Over by the city's sprawling cemetery and its nearby mosque, a shrine treasured by Shiite Muslims around the globe, Shiite militia were fighting U.S. troops, with both sides using heavy weapons. "We dropped bombs right next to the mosque, precision-guided bombs.... We never touched the mosque," Cuomo recalled with pride. In return, he estimated, "our tank platoon was probably hit by a hundred RPGs [about 25 rocket-propelled grenades per tank]. We could leave those vehicles sitting in an intersection, and they would get pounded, and nothing would happen to them," he said. "If you put a Humvee in that position, it would have been destroyed." And yet, within earshot of the explosions, Cuomo went on, "there were also times when I was doing patrols in the middle of this, talking to people all of the time, handing out water bottles, handing out candy."
It is difficult to train, organize, and equip a military unit to do both of these missions simultaneously. But some veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan say that it is unwise to expect the two missions to separate themselves so tidily in time and space that the military can assign a different, optimized force to each. The United States does not need light infantry specialized for low-intensity conflicts and heavy armor specialized for high-intensity war. It needs more armor in the infantry units, more infantry in the armor units, and, above all, the training for both to adapt to changing situations as quickly as the enemy does. Not every future conflict will be a hybrid war, but the future will require a new generation of hybrid warriors.
"What amazes me even to this day is the flexibility of the American soldier," Col. Hubner said. "We act, the enemy reacts, and we counteract -- and that's a continuous process."
Copyright c2009 by National Journal Group Inc.