Assessing War : The Challenge of Measuring Success and Failure

375 Pages·2015·3.097 MB·English

by  Leo J. Blanken, Hy Rothstein, Jason J. Lepore

ASSESSING WAR
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ASSESSING
WAR
THE CHALLENGE OF MEASURING
SUCCESS AND FAILURE
Leo J. Blanken, Hy Rothstein,
Jason J. Lepore, EDITORS
Foreword by Gen. George W. Casey Jr. (USA, Ret.)
Georgetown University Press / Washington, DC
© 2015 Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Assessing war : the challenge of measuring success and failure / Leo J. Blanken,
Hy Rothstein, Jason J. Lepore, editors.
pages cm
Summary: Are we winning? Combatants often find themselves asking this question,
especially during today›s protracted asymmetrical conflicts where victory and defeat are
not clear or easy to measure. Also, too often politics or wishful thinking take the place of
objective assessment. Assessing War explores how the trajectory of war has been analyzed in
conflicts throughout American history. The book brings together military historians, political
scientists, and military officers to examine wartime assessment in theory, in practice through
historical and contemporary cases, and through alternative dimensions of assessment such as
justice and proportionality, the war of ideas, and economics. The cases start with the Seven
Years’ War and cover all major US conflicts through the war in Afghanistan. There are also
unique examinations of how Al Qaeda has assessed its war on the United States and how
assessment might be conducted in cyber war. Wartime assessment is critical because forming
an accurate picture is essential to developing the right strategy. This book concludes with
advice for practitioners about best approaches, though it also offers sobering conclusions
about the difficulty of assessing war objectively and without politicization or self-delusion.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62616-245-7 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-62616-246-4 (pb : alk. paper)
— ISBN 978-1-62616-247-1 (eb)
1. Military planning—United States. 2. War—Decision making. 3. Strategy. 4. United
States—Military policy. 5. United States—History, Military. I. Blanken, Leo J. (Leo James),
editor. II. Rothstein, Hy S., editor. III. Lepore, Jason J., editor.
U153.A87 2015
355'.033073—dc23
2015007438
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American
National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
16 15 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First printing
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design by Faceout Studio, Charles Brock. Cover images courtesy of sergeyskleznev/
Thinkstock (aged vintage calipers) and Albert Smirnov/Thinkstock (weapon).
CONTENTS
Foreword by Gen. George W. Casey Jr. (USA, Ret.) vii
Introduction: The Challenge of Wartime Assessment ix
Leo J. Blanken and Jason J. Lepore
I. Theory
1 Principals, Agents, and Assessment 3
Leo J. Blanken and Jason J. Lepore
2 Civil-Military Relations and Assessments 16
Hy Rothstein
3 Wartime Strategic Assessment: Concepts and Challenges 30
Scott Sigmund Gartner
II. Historical Cases
4 Assessing Proxy Forces: A Case Study of the Early Years
of the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) in North America 49
John Grenier
5 Assessing War: The Revolutionary War 65
Edward G. Lengel
6 Assessing Enemy Civilian Will: The United States
Goes to War, 1861 81
Brooks D. Simpson
7 “Keep ’Em Moving”: The Role of Assessment
in US Cavalry Operations against the Plains Indians 96
Michael Richardson
8 Assessing the Philippine War 111
Brian McAllister Linn
9 Putting the Fuse to the Powder: Strategic Assessment
in the First World War 127
D. Scott Stephenson
v
vi Contents
10 Assessment in World War II 142
Gerhard L. Weinberg
11 Measuring Gains on the Battlefield and at the Peace Table:
Shifting Assessments during the Korean War 154
Conrad C. Crane
12 Choosing Progress: Evaluating the “Salesmanship”
of the Vietnam War in 1967 173
Gregory A. Daddis
III. Current Cases
13 Assessing Counterinsurgency: The Iraq War, 2004–5 197
William C. Hix and Kalev I. Sepp
14 Circular Logic and Constant Progress: IW Assessments
in Afghanistan 214
Alejandro S. Hernandez, Julian Ouellet,
and Christopher J. Nannini
15 Monitoring from Afar: How Al-Qaeda Assesses Its Progress 234
Mark Stout
IV. Alternative Dimensions of Assessment
16 Assessment, Proportionality, and Justice in War 255
Bradley J. Strawser and Russell Muirhead
17 Assessing Cyber War 266
Dorothy E. Denning
18 Assessing the War of Ideas during War 285
Robert Reilly
19 Assessing Economic Outcomes in Nation-building Operations 301
Aric P. Shafran
Conclusion: Can We Learn from the Assessment of War? 319
Anthony H. Cordesman and Hy Rothstein
Contributors 333
Index 339
FOREWORD
Like strategic leaders in past eras, today we live, compete, and lead in a
volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world in which we constantly
struggle to stay abreast of our rapidly changing environment. This will be
even more true in wars in the twenty-first century—a fact that I can attest to
from my time in Iraq. It will continue to be even harder for leaders to antici-
pate opportunities and challenges in conducting military operations.
The extraordinary value of Assessing War: The Challenge of Measuring Success
and Failure is its focus on the challenge of assessing military operations during
their execution. The editors—Leo J. Blanken, Hy Rothstein, and Jason J. Lep-
ore—have assembled contributions from scholars and practitioners, many of
whom are leading experts in their fields and some of whom are veterans of our
most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They provide a wide-ranging anal-
ysis of assessment processes across almost three centuries of armed conflicts,
from colonial North America to Afghanistan today.
The historical cases of successes and failures in wartime assessment have
direct and immediate application in twenty-first-century conflict. British
flexibility in using colonial militias in the Seven Years’ War (French-Indian
War) holds lessons for proxy forces today. There is a strong cautionary mes-
sage in the examination of the optimistic assumptions and dogmatism that
undermined German strategy in World War II. The United Nations faced a
formidable task of calibrating the effect of combat operations on truce negoti-
ations during the Korean War. The assessment task became only harder in the
subsequent series of limited wars and counterinsurgencies as regular military
forces were forced to assess political, economic, and informational impacts on
their military efforts. This volume’s accounts and analyses comprehensively
reveal both the difficulties of assessment amid the chaos of war and the value
of this essential endeavor.
From my own experience in Iraq, I used assessment processes to help me
“see” myself and my enemies, to evaluate and communicate the progress of
the campaign, and to identify the need for and to drive change. I cannot
overstate the importance of commanders establishing formal and informal
assessment processes concurrently with the development of their campaign
plans. In war the only constant is change, and without effective assessment
vii
viii Foreword
processes, commanders are unable to effectively measure and report progress,
identify opportunities, anticipate challenges, and adjust their effort. I felt that
this process was the commander’s business, and I worked painstakingly with
my assessment staff to identify and measure the key elements of success. It
took a year, and continuous adjustments after that, to build an assessment
process with which I was satisfied.
While military assessment processes should focus on the military cam-
paign’s progress toward achieving national strategic objectives, military lead-
ers will be called on to provide candid assessments to their civilian superiors
and to the American public on the progress of the campaign. The book also
looks at the civil-military dynamics of assessments, an area that serious mili-
tary and civilian leaders cannot ignore.
This exceptional volume provides insights for military and civilian security
professionals and leaders. Its breadth, detail, clarity, and relevance commend
it to required reading lists at service staff and war colleges. I believe Assessing
War: The Challenge of Measuring Success and Failure will also serve policymak-
ers charged with the oversight of military operations. It is a very useful hand-
book for leaders who hope to be successful at sustained efforts in our volatile,
uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.
Gen. George W. Casey Jr. (USA, Ret.)
INTRODUCTION
The Challenge of Wartime Assessment
Leo J. Blanken and Jason J. Lepore
Assessment during war is critical, and in the wake of the frustrating—and
often bewildering—conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan there should come a seri-
ous reappraisal of this aspect of modern conflict. What constituted progress?
Which units performed well? What lines of operation were effective? What
aspects of victory, if any, were achieved? How do these issues impact our pol-
icy, force structure, strategy, doctrine, and technology choices? The seemingly
inscrutable nature of these particular conflicts raises the deeper issue of how
wartime progress has been measured in the past and, more important, how it
should be measured in the future. Some conflicts, such as the Second World
War, seemed to have been “simple” in retrospect while others, such as Vietnam,
consistently befuddled observers at the time. Why was this the case? What
explains this variation? And how can we move forward from the assessment
challenges of current conflicts to craft better policy and strategy in the future?
The challenge has grown far beyond the simple metrics of combat. As
current conflicts expand to “military operations other than war”—peacekeep-
ing, cyber warfare, and information campaigns—the tasks of operational and
strategic assessment may change and expand in kind. As a result, evaluating
the ethical, social, and human development dimensions of such campaigns
further complicates the assessment challenge. This work seeks to address the
issue in several ways. The first goal is to generate recommendations to assist in
establishing future policy, strategy, and doctrine. Another goal is to compile
a rich set of in-depth historical accounts of a crucial, yet neglected, aspect of
military history. The final goal is to refresh our current understanding of the
assessment problem in an academic sense by refining our general models in
light of the evolving wartime environments we observe today and are likely
to see in the future.
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