Isegoria

The troops and officers from some of the least belligerent nations in the world — namely, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway — turned out to be quite adept at both using force and playing the odds in the high-stakes political game played in Bosnia:

In late 1993, a reinforced Swedish-Danish-Norwegian mechanized battalion (Nordbat 2) deployed to Bosnia as part of an ongoing UN peacekeeping mission, known as UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force). The battalion was under Swedish command, and with the exception of a Danish tank company and a Norwegian helicopter detachment, was comprised of Swedish former conscripts, led by active-duty officers. The former conscripts had volunteered to return from civilian life to serve in a professional capacity. These Swedish troops, coming from a nation that had not experienced war for almost 200 years, faced a rigid UN bureaucracy, an unclear mandate, and the UN-imposed rules of engagement bordered on the absurd. However, the Swedes had one thing the others didn’t: a culture of mission command that had grown and developed for decades.

[…]

The Swedish Armed Forces were consequently trained to respond to a massive Soviet invasion force, which was expected to attack over land (via Finland), across the Baltic Sea, and by deploying airborne units. The Swedish Army estimated that a breakdown of command and control was a likely scenario as the Soviets would inevitably disrupt communications, destroy command centers, and seize territory, thereby isolating segments of the Swedish Army. In order to cope with this contingency, all units were trained to engage in what was known as “the free war,” (i.e. autonomous operations against local targets, without centralized command). The free war was intended as a last resort, which would only end when the invader had finally retreated. The official doctrine stated that all Swedish citizens were to, without exception, consider any order to surrender to be false, regardless of its origin. This was even printed in all phone books, which also contained instructions for the civilian population in case of war.

Considering that all Swedish Army units were expected to be able to operate autonomously, the culture of mission command completely permeated the entire organization. The officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs), all the way down to the lowest-ranking enlisted men, were taught that the only truly mortal sin was to hesitate. To seize the initiative and act was the primary imperative. There was no priority higher than that of achieving the mission objectives at hand. Orders could be disobeyed, rules could be broken—as long as the mission was successful.

The battalion commanders who deployed to Bosnia to take charge of Nordbat 2 had spent their entire professional lives in this culture, and their men had known it since the earliest days of their own military training. To them, it was as natural as breathing.

[…]

Shortly after it had been deployed to Bosnia in December 1993, Nordbat 2 found itself in its first serious hostile encounter. A Swedish platoon was sent to relieve a Canadian company which was providing security for a mostly abandoned hospital compound in a remote area. As soon as the Canadians left, a Croatian battalion-sized unit showed up and promptly mined the only road leading to the compound, ensuring that the Swedes would be unable to receive reinforcements.

Then they issued an ultimatum: hand over the three Muslim nurses, and we will leave you alone. The Swedish platoon leader, Captain Stewe Simson, radioed battalion command, and was told that it was his call to make, since he was the one in charge at the location. Captain Simson refused to hand over the nurses and instead ordered his men to prepare for combat.

Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, Captain Simson realized that it was unrealistic to expect that his unit would survive a full-out assault. Nevertheless, he was determined not to give in. The Croats started to fire mortar rounds, but the Swedes held their positions. After a few hours, the Croats issued a new ultimatum: the nurses could stay if the Croats were granted free passage to the compound. Again, Captain Simson refused. The situation remained tense throughout the night, with the Swedes maintaining full combat readiness. In the morning, the Croats negotiated with the Swedes and eventually left, quietly dropping their ultimatums. Nordbat 2 had shown resolve even in the face of hopeless odds, achieving a strategically important victory as a result of a decision made by a platoon commander.

Other incidents followed. When fired at, Nordbat 2 often shot back, frequently disregarding the UN rules of engagement. Colonel Henricsson made it clear that he would not respect rules and regulations that threatened to prevent him from achieving his mission objectives. When his own government tried to rein him in, he simply told his radio operator to pretend that the link was down until he had a fait accompli to present to Stockholm.

In one particularly infamous incident, the Bosnian Serb Army set up an ambush for the battalion’s Danish tank company. By launching a feint attack against a remote outpost, the Bosnian Serb Army lured a detachment from the tank company to drive straight into a trap. Anti-tank missiles and heavy guns opened up from concealed positions. Once the Danes started to take fire, their response was furious. The detachment commander simply told his crews to neutralize the anti-tank positions. The Leopard tanks directed accurate and deadly fire against the Bosnian Serb Army positions, using up no less than 72 main gun rounds. One by one, the anti-tank missile batteries and gun positions fell silent. During the fight, a Bosnian Serb Army ammunition supply was hit, resulting in a large explosion. After the engagement, Nordbat 2 estimated that as many as 150 troops may have been killed, although the Bosnian Serb Army denied this.

The incident greatly upset the UN regional command, which threatened to relieve Nordbat 2′s battalion commander and have him sent back to Sweden. Nevertheless, Nordbat 2 had once again refused to let the parties to the conflict dictate the terms of its deployment. In several other incidents, Nordbat 2 personnel intervened to protect refugees and took action to prevent the cover-up of ethnic cleansing operations. On several occasions this took the form of forcing passage through roadblocks. During one such event, the battalion commander himself forced a sentry to remove the anti-tank mines used to block passage by threatening to blow the sentry’s head off with a heavy machine gun.

(Hat tip to Dominic Cummings.)

The CIA is better at creating foreign armies than the U.S. military:

Since the days of its Office of Strategic Services forebearers, the CIA has been able to get two core principles of covert training and support missions right: Politics is local, and people fight for their families, beliefs, and survival. Obligation to community — or for many, religion — trumps flags and oaths to relatively new constitutions of artificial states ratified by distant strangers to whom these soldiers have no personal or communal loyalty. Training and support, therefore, isn’t an off-the-shelf solution but rather a custom fit.

Even the most conservative estimates suggest Washington spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Lebanese Armed Forces in the early to mid-1980s and billions building national armies in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11, only to see these forces collapse in the face of what Americans perceived to be their enemies. The reality, of course, was that these national armies comprised soldiers who were being ordered to face opposing forces, in some cases from their own communities, or to sacrifice their lives in contests that had no meaning for themselves, their families, or their clans. And they were often led by officers to whom they felt no loyalty or connection apart from a common uniform.

Politically, bureaucratically, and logistically, the U.S. military blueprint tends to assume an integrated force in which the fighters are loyal to the central government and the officers under whom they serve, regardless of their superiors’ ethnicity, religion, or clan. Order of battle, strategy, and tactics are likewise aligned to U.S. strengths and norms, rather than tailored to cultural, historic, geographic, educational, or topographic local realities. Washington then proceeds to arm such troops with weapons too complex and expensive for their use and often unsuitable for the terrain or the enemy’s tactics (for example, Bradley Fighting Vehicles to the Lebanese army or MD 530 helicopters to the Afghan army). Furthermore, there is often no way to measure effectiveness or monitor corruption.

In 2016, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) acknowledged to Congress that, in many cases, “U.S. funding dedicated to the ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] was wasted, whether inefficiently spent on worthwhile endeavors or squandered on activities that delivered no apparent benefit.” Moreover, SIGAR listed five major challenges confronting U.S. efforts to develop the ANDSF that were never overcome: 1) limited oversight visibility; 2) questionable force strength numbers; 3) unreliable capability assessments; 4) limited on-budget assistance capacity; and 5) uncertain long-term sustainability.

The CIA is by its own culture focused on people and relationships. Whereas the U.S. defense establishment is replete with unrivaled experts in their vocational fields, the CIA assigns people to such programs who blend technical prowess with interest and depth in the local history and culture and whose approach is informed by intelligence. The drawback of this approach is that there aren’t enough personnel with Arabic- and other foreign-language skills to scale the program. Nevertheless, CIA officers work more intimately with their foreign counterparts and often remain in such programs, rotating repeatedly with the units they support. Rather than being separated in distant fortresses, CIA teams are more typically collocated with their partners without walls or other barriers between them.

We can divide what went wrong in Afghanistan into three decision-making failures, John Robb says, each owing to an inability to update operating assumptions:

First, a failure to accept that the Taliban had won the guerrilla war and adapt to the situation once it was apparent. Second, a failure to adapt to the speed of the Taliban’s offensive by building contingencies to protect the U.S. evacuation effort. Finally, a failure to appreciate the dangers of being besieged in Kabul and to take steps to protect U.S. troops and civilians.

[…]

The leadership’s unshakable attachment to the viability of the Afghan government and the success of nation-building wasn’t based on evidence. It was a belief based on a political and institutional need that it be true. It was necessary to maintain the illusion that the U.S. was there to modernize and globally integrate Afghanistan at the political level. Institutionally, it was needed to justify the losses (thousands of U.S. lives) and vast expense (trillions of dollars) already consumed by the venture and protect the careers of those involved with it. As a result of these imperatives, dissenting voices were ground into dust by the national security bureaucracy and by political factions committed to the social-reform effort there.

[…]

Guerrilla wars are slow-moving conflicts fought in the moral sphere. You can picture a guerrilla war as opposing planets competing through gravitational attraction. The way you fight it is to create the highest gravity possible (a moral pull that attracts: incorruptibility, moral integrity, altruism) while causing the competing planet to break apart (moral repulsion: corruption, unpopular social changes, selfish abuses). Because of the dynamics of this type of warfare, when victory arrives, it often does so suddenly, with the complete disintegration of the opponent. That’s what happened in Afghanistan, and we should have quickly accepted this fact.

[…]

When it became clear in July that the Taliban had won the guerrilla war and were conducting a maneuver-based offensive to take the country, the U.S. should have responded by deploying contingencies. Chief among them should have been retaking the abandoned and defensible (not surrounded by a heavily populated city) Bagram airbase north of Kabul to ensure air support and evacuation missions were always available, particularly if the single runway at Kabul’s airport was damaged or denied. With Bagram swiftly reopened, stepped up air-support missions for the Afghan army could have been provided, slowing the Taliban’s advance. Additionally, special operations units could have been employed to evacuate civilian personnel stranded by the rapidity of the Taliban’s advance. And the leadership should have radically sped up the evacuation of U.S. civilians and accelerated the awarding of visas to Afghan nationals who might be at risk. It didn’t: the State Department was still forcing citizens to pay a $2,000 repatriation fee—more for non-citizens—and sign promissory notes if they didn’t have the cash, up until August 20, five days after the fall of Kabul.

Instead of adapting, the U.S. leadership froze — overloaded by a fast-moving ground campaign that constantly shifted priorities and disoriented by deceptive Taliban diplomacy that promised a return to the status quo. While the U.S. talked, the Taliban acted. The result: textbook maneuver warfare. It was so effective that when the Taliban began to take major cities in early August, all American leaders could do was plead with the Taliban for mercy.

[…]

As the evacuation dragged on, it became increasingly evident, even to a U.S. leadership unwilling to admit it, that the Taliban could turn the U.S. mission into a hostage crisis within hours. To prevent this outcome, the U.S. was undoubtedly forced to make concessions to the Taliban. On the surface, this took the form of government public messaging that increasingly depicted the Taliban as reformed and reasonable rulers of a new Afghanistan — trustworthy partners who would help protect the U.S. mission from harm and assist in evacuations. Behind the scenes, there may also have been concessions on removing the Taliban from terrorist watch lists, removing trade restrictions, and providing access to Afghan government funds. Announcements on such concessions, if they occurred, would obviously be delayed due to the political costs of revealing them now; by the end of 2021, we’ll probably know the extent of the capitulation.

[…]

Despite this failure, it’s likely that nothing will be done to ensure that it doesn’t happen in the future. Politicized analysis of the retreat will depict it as a victory for diplomacy. Few U.S. soldiers were killed, and over 100,000 people were evacuated. Further, claims will be made that any analysis that doesn’t support this narrative is the equivalent of delusional disinformation. The institutional failures that prevented successful adaptation, from recognizing the failure of nation-building to the danger of relying on a single point of failure during a military evacuation, will be glossed over and forgotten. From the start of the effort decades ago to its ignoble end, nobody responsible for the venture will accept any accountability for it. No one will suffer damage to his career or incur reputational damage, except those brave souls who tried to stop it.

I recently read William Shirer‘s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I had been vaguely aware of and interested in since childhood, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb got me interested in Shirer’s Berlin Diary a couple decades back, when he made this point in his own first book, Fooled by Randomness:

I was brought up in Lebanon, where we always recreate memories, revise experiences and read more into them than necessary. During the war there, when I was 15, I wanted to be a philosopher. While I was hiding in basements I read William Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The journal of a foreign correspondent 1934 to 1941. It made me realise three things about the people around me: that they were always predicting (wrongly) that the war was going to be “solved” soon; that they seemed confident about their estimates for the future even though crazy events were happening all the time; and that after the crazy events had happened, people acted as if they were predictable. I realised that you can find an infinity of narratives to fit your data.

After citing the introduction to Bevin Alexander’s How Hitler Could Have Won World War II, I naturally had to go ahead and read the whole book, in which he explains how, after it had achieved the most spectacular, rapid, and overwhelming military victory in the twentieth century, the Reich destroyed itself by attacking the Soviet Union directly:

Hitler came to this decision by an incredibly convoluted and illogical process. Since Britain refused to sign a peace treaty, and since invading Britain would be extremely hazardous given the strength of the Royal Navy and the weakness of the German navy, Hitler concluded that the only way to overcome Britain would be to destroy the Soviet Union. Hitler decided that Russia was Britain’s chief remaining hope for assistance, its “continental dagger,” and once the Soviet Union was destroyed, the British would see reason and give in.

[...]

A war against Russia would be nothing like the war in the west, where distances were limited, populations concentrated, objectives close, and the Atlantic Ocean a finite boundary.

When I recently noted that Hitler’s strategy through mid-1940 was almost flawless, it wasn’t because I had just read How Hitler Could Have Won World War II, but because I was reading William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and it kept making points that seemed familiar from my long-ago skimming of the intro to Bevin Alexander’s book:

In truth neither Hitler, the High Command nor the general staffs of the Army, Navy and Air Force had ever seriously considered how a war with Great Britain could be fought and won. Now in the midsummer of 1940 they did not know what to do with their glittering success; they had no plans and scarcely any will for exploiting the greatest military victories in the history of their soldiering nation.

This is one of the great paradoxes of the Third Reich. At the very moment when Hitler stood at the zenith of his military power, with most of the European Continent at his feet, his victorious armies stretched from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from the Atlantic to beyond the Vistula, rested now and ready for further action, he had no idea how to go on and bring the war to a victorious conclusion.

[...]

The Germans, despite their vaunted military talents, lacked any grand strategic concept. Their horizons were limited — they had always been limited — to land warfare against the neighboring nations on the European Continent. Hitler himself had a horror of the sea and his great captains almost a total ignorance of it.

[...]

There was of course another alternative open to the Germans. They might bring Britain down by striking across the Mediterranean with their Italian ally, taking Gibraltar at its western opening and in the east driving on from Italy’s bases in North Africa through Egypt and over the canal to Iran, severing one of the Empire’s main life lines. But this necessitated vast operations overseas at distances far from home bases, and in 1940 it seemed beyond the scope of the German imagination.