How the weak win wars: A theory of asymmetric conflict [pdf] (2001) | Hacker News Reader

How the weak win wars: A theory of asymmetric conflict [pdf] (2001)

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59 pointsbutterNaN60 comments

..."The development and deployment of armed forces specifically equipped and trained for COIN operations."

Right now, the US has too much of that. Wars against peer or near-peer enemies need less counter-insurgency operations and more heavy equipment.

The US has become used to operating in environments where air superiority was total, and secure base camps were possible. That's over.

The US Army takes this seriously. Read Parameters, the War College journal, which has many articles on this subject. Here are two.[1][2] It's a major argument within the US military.

There are some serious mismatches in preparation. The USMC has a great concept of a MAGTF - a Marine Air Ground Task Force, usually carried in an amphibious assault ship. This is great for COIN - the ship can go somewhere in a hurry, park offshore, and send out landing craft and air support, while acting as a mobile base. This works great against an enemy with nothing capable of attacking such a ship. Less well against an enemy with truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.

The Army has too many vehicles intended to resist improvised explosive devices, and not enough heavy artillery and tanks. The Army is also used to being able to set up rear area bases in the open, and fortified fire bases in hostile territory. Those now look like soft targets.

The USAF is used to being able to fly cargo planes such as C-130s into combat zones. This now looks suicidal where everybody has anti-aircraft missiles. Today, if it flies over a combat zone, it had better be able to dodge, jam, and fight. Or be expendable, like a drone.

One of the lessons of the Ukraine war for the Navy is that you can't bring naval vessels near a hostile shore any more. Not since the Moskva.

[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol46/iss4/3/

[2] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol47/iss1/13/

Sounds like being able to launch a swarm of killer drones from a submarine is the next evolutionary step to superiority

That's something that's been around since the 1950s. Since a sub can't be expected to meaningfully recover a drone it launches, there's no functional difference between a 'drone' and a 'cruise missile' in this scenario.

Do cruise missiles have the ability to loiter very long before target acquisition? In my limited observation that has been one of the game changers in the war in Ukraine.

To me it looks like we’re rapidly nearing the point where we can target off of a shared coordinate system instead of painting targets or seeking RF/heat at which point the loitering munitions become much more useful even with small warheads.

Little loitering munitions like Switchblade don't have the range to be usefully fired from a sub; which wants to be hiding in deep water. Bigger UCAVs like Shahed or Bayraktar are essentially small ground-attack planes and behave like one, so if you're launching them from a sub what you're really making is a submarine aircraft carrier. All the evidence suggests that nobody wants a submarine aircraft carrier.

Take Bayraktar and try to fit it into a VLS cell so a sub can launch one: you first have to make the wings smaller because that wide lifting body won't fold up into the allowed diameter. But now that you've made the wings smaller, its optimal cruising speed is going to be higher, but you can't add a second engine or make the existing one bigger, so that means replacing the prop engine with a turbofan. And you've just designed Tomahawk.

>what you're really making is a submarine aircraft carrier. All the evidence suggests that nobody wants a submarine aircraft carrier.

The Japanese thought they wanted one in WWII: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400-class_submarine

this thing is kinda interesting (though maybe not for sub use):

https://www.anduril.com/article/anduril-unveils-roadrunner-a...

Can't use GPS much in war zones any more. Too much jamming.[1]

[1] https://ops.group/dashboard/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/GPS-S...

There’s a similar debate about how to fix the industrial complex, when shown to be lethargic at 155mm artillery and small missiles.

Eg, this.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/rebuilding-us-inventories-six-...

And when this was written in 2001, we had the opposite problem.

No doubt there's a cuneiform tablet somewhere with a priest complaining the generals are always preparing to fight the last war instead of the next?

I would be careful conflating the fate of the Moskva with the ability of the USN to survive an ASCM attack. The USN has been working on this particular issue since the 1960s. And the Moskva was an old, poorly maintained and poorly operated ship.

It's only in war that you truly find out what is poorly maintained or poorly operated. That said, the USN had multiple incidents of ramming other vessels down to basic failures in seamanship, so I'm not sure I'd be entirely as confident as you are..

The one fundamental thing we didn't account for is the willingness of a massive industrialized nation in the modern age to burn off young men like cordwood by the hundreds of thousands to achieve their war aims. Just about every last bit of military thought in the past 70 years needs to be thrown out and rewritten with that in mind, as it invalidates everything we hold as common sense and viable strategy.

Successfully waging an asymmetric war relies on the assumption that in a conflict of choice, the agressor can be inflicted enough pain to quit. The Soviet failures in Afghanistan, and the Americans in Vietnam, convinced the world of this fact. But that breaks down entirely when your agressor treats their own people as cattle for the slaughter, and has the viable means to maintain power regardless. We are entering a dark new age where the answer to "what would WWI look like with modern technology" is now being answered.

> The one fundamental thing we didn't account for is the willingness of a massive industrialized nation in the modern age to burn off young men like cordwood by the hundreds of thousands to achieve their war aims.

Classic Russian strategy. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII.

People being an important word here. Russian woman fought well.

>Classic Russian strategy. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII.

Sure. But there was a sense that that was a relic of a bygone age. The role of Russian mothers helping to shame the CCCP into capitulation during Afghanistan is well known. We thought that people would never stand for that kind of bloodshed again.

You even see it still in the western response. "They can't keep this up", or "The people will overthrow Putin!". It's a total failure to comprehend that we are in fact facing an evil that the world has not seen in many generations.

Russia has held some amount of indirect control over those lands for hundreds of years. It cannot stomach the thought of losing dominance over them, and the presence of Russian speakers in those territories means that backing down would be seen as a complete betrayal. They'd rather burn it down and ruin it completely than lose control.

It is just a Russian propaganda. Russians mostly didn't give a shit what happens in Ukraine before 2014. There were internet armchair battles, but I never knew a single person who really thought that Russia had any claims on Ukrainian territory.

All this talk about history is no more than a central pillar of a Russian propaganda. It needs to justify what state is doing, it needs to find some moral grounds, and it uses history for that. And it is Russian history, which was rewritten for ~1k years each time when tsar changed. It never stopped. So to speak even in 1990s history was in a process of rewriting to show how bad USSR was. And now it is being rewritten to show that Russia didn't failed once, and all its fails are responsibility of "collective West".

Just don't listen when Russians talk about history, and you'll be fine.

> They'd rather burn it down and ruin it completely than lose control.

Yeah-yeah... Putin has no other choices left if he wants to die peacefully. There is a risk for him to end as Muammar Gaddafi did, if he loses this war. No one is happy elites included, give them one chance and they will play a spectacle of brutalizing Putin, freeing Russia from under a heel of a merciless dictator.

> It cannot stomach the thought of losing dominance over them

Historically, there is a reason for that. Those countries are used as a buffer against an invasion from Western Europe. US and EU officials have tried to convince Putin that this was no longer the case over the years, but he never bought it since NATO continued to expand despite Russian protests.

This is just ends in a circular argument because in the end NATO has expanded into the areas bordering Russia precisely because those countries (the Baltics, mainly) have a history of having their sovereignty violated by Russia, and continue to have serious and probably legitimate worries about that happening again.

So you have to ask exactly why Russia protests so strongly about NATO expanding? And why countries on Russia's borders were so eager to join it?

The only way Russia gets "invaded" by the "west" is by redefining its borders to include chunks of Ukraine... and now Ukraine defending itself and its internationally recognized borders is an "invasion" of "Russian sovereignty." Preposterous.

I agree with what you’ve written. Basically, Russia has used Eastern Europe the same way China uses North Korea, Xinjiang, Tibet, and parts of Mongolia: as a defensive buffer. Im not trying to ignore that occupations by authoritarian regimes tend to not be nice. I’m just stating the cold logic of it. I totally also get why the Ukrainian people want to fight for their freedom from authoritarian corruption.

as for the larger “reason” it’s simply human nature. We’ve gotten better over the centuries, but game theory’s core idea is still in play.

They even sang Офицеры at the concert to open the "anti-fascist special military operation". Oh the irony:

    I sing to the officers who took pity on the mothers
    Я пою офицерам, матерей пожалевшим

    By returning their living sons back to them
    Возратив им обратно живых сыновей

>Classic Russian strategy. The USSR lost 20 million people in WWII.

They didn't have a choice. It was a war for their civilizational survival. If they surrendered to Germany, the Western part of the country would have been killed/enslaved, with the rump Eastern part carved up at Germany's leisure.

If they walk out of Ukraine, nothing happens except the killing stops.

The conflict in Ukraine looks like WWI trench warfare because conflict in the air has been made impossible. By Ukraine having western anti-aircraft systems but also lacking a serious air force of its own.

So all that's left is just to hammer each other over the head with artillery and poke at each other with drones.

I am not convinced that other conflicts will look like this.

These things take time. The Soviets held all the major cities in Afghanistan for 10 years. The Americans had a major presence in Vietnam for 9. World powers can certainly take a punch and keep going. Ukraine does not disprove the idea that at some point they'll throw in the towel.

>Americans in Vietnam

>But that breaks down entirely when your agressor treats their own people as cattle for the slaughter

That sounds like victim blaming. We had to massacre the Vietnamese, they didn't have to fight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties

(2001), actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38758187

Curious how this strategy updates now that drones make war even more asymmetric. A drone worth $100 can destroy a tank worth $1 million or a helicopter worth $10 millions. It's theorized that a drone swarm can sink an aircraft carrier group, which costs billions of dollars.

New technology used for war such as lasers or AI will only make war even more asymmetric.

So essentially, big-countries can't attack other big-countries because of nukes and MAD (mutually-assured-destruction). Big-countries can't attack small-countries because of asymmetric war. Small-countries can't attack big-countries for obvious reasons. So, the only war left is small-countries vs small-countries.

> So, the only war left is small-countries vs small-countries.

That sounds like a recipe for Oceania/Eastasia proxy wars in the Disputed Territories?

Big countries can still level a small country, they just cant try to occupy without huge risk and expense

interesting that this was written in summer-2001, a bit before 9/11, which inspired one of the biggest asymmetric conflicts by the US. the power ratio was extremely skewed in US's favor, and yet resulted in a "forever war".

i'm curious how the author felt knowing that his paper would be so relevant only a few months after publication.

'Every time an international relations professor wishes that their work was ‘policy relevant,’ another stubby, desiccated digit uncurls on the monkey’s paw.'

from https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/my-time-in-the-torment-...

It doesn't seem particularly relevant to modern conflicts where both sides resort to both direct and indirect strategies simultaneously as soon as they are available.

One side fights to survive, the other to make a few billionaires a little richer. Their motivations are not the same.

To the privates on the battlefield, it's a fight to survive on both sides

Yet the consequences of "if only my side would lay down their arms" are are radically different.

a fight to survive is not the same as a fight to achieve operational goals; a bunch of men trying not to die, when they see their colleagues doing the same, generally achieve that by not being at the front line at all

Billionaires exist on all sides.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/07/news/hamas-leaders-worth-11bn-...

That does make a difference to recruitment and morale, but tactics count for a lot more than ideology.

Needs a (2021) tag.

It was downloaded in 2021 but published in 2001

https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-abstract/26/1/93/11698/H...

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