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