Who Would You Rather Fight?
Try out this theory I’m working on: the chance of the US, or modern western power, defeating a numerically smaller and militarily inferior force is inversely proportionate to the amount of time and effort the average “soldier” of the opposing force puts into fighting. Put simply, the less overtly military active the opponent is, less likely he is to be defeated. Great military minds have struggled with this concept for centuries and more books than even Rodrigo could assign during an IR have been written about strategies to defeat a smaller but dedicated insurgent force and an entire school at NPS is focused on insurgencies and low intensity conflicts. However, I’ve not found any significant study on the concept that the difference in the activity levels, often wrongfully perceived to be tied to dedication, of opponents being co-relational to the likelihood of the superior force prevailing or failing in its struggle. One interesting fact I did find was the frequency of militarily superior forces failing against “inferior” fighting forces.
Patricia L. Sullivan, writes in her book Who Wins: Predicting Strategic Success and Failure in Armed Conflict that dominant firepower is not a determining factor in wars where the “superior” force is trying to change the behavior of an opponent (stop offering sanctuary to a terrorist group although it is a deeply held societal obligation) not simply making them do something they may not want to do (make the Iraqi army get out of Kuwait, push the Nazis out of France, etc). She claims that since WWII, 30 percent of US military actions did not achieve their primary objective and each military action of the 30 percent pitted the US against a smaller and weaker adversary.
Also, the difficulty of defeating a part-time army isn’t just a concept that is recent, a US-only problem, or somehow linked to our 24 hour news cycle. Winston Churchill wrote in 1897 about his time fighting in Afghanistan trying to deal with today’s Taliban’s great-great grandfathers, “[f]inancially it is ruinous. Morally it is wicked. Militarily it is an open question, and politically it is a blunder.”
Because I am rarely able to understand concepts that aren’t relayed as sports metaphors, I tried to find one that captured the idea. After some hard thinking (drinking) at my local library (bar) of how to best convey and understand this concept of a superior force being increasing frustrated in efforts to fight an opponent that really has little impetus to press the battle, I came up with this: How Would You Fight a Young Mike Tyson? Mike Tyson shows up at your house maybe insults your wife, takes your kids toys and sets up a ring in your front yard. He tells you that you wronged him and that you’re fighting until one of you is knocked out or the other one quits. Here were the first three strategies that came to mind of how I would handle the situation:
1) While Mike has to stay in the ring, I’m going to continue on with my day-to-day routine and continue living in my house. There’s no reason for me to quit since the inconvenience of him being in my yard is nominal. Also, because I live in a very sketchy neighborhood he’s the one who is exposed to my criminal neighbors who I’m going to tell he’s really there to fight them and steal their stuff.
2) I’ll decide when I feel like fighting. The fight may have the normal 45 minutes of fighting of a championship bout but I will be spreading that 45 minutes over the course of a year or two, and I won’t be telling him when the couple minutes fighting will be so that he has to always be on guard. Also, if I try to surprise him with a minute of fighting but the surprise is lost, I will stop the attack and run.
3) Even when I’m not fighting, I will keep telling everyone that I’m winning but that I really don’t know what we’re fighting over. I’ll also have my neighbors keep telling the media that Mike is stealing their stuff and roughing up their wife and kids. He’s Mike Tyson, everyone will be inclined to believe it.
What it all is going to come down to is that as time goes by, I’m going to try to devote less and less time to fighting but just taking little actions to make sure Mike didn’t ever feel like he could let down for a minute. My hopes are Mike will realize there are better ways to spend him considerable time and resources and he will move on to a more lucrative opponent.
If I’m Mike, unless I can get my opponent in the ring to land an uppercut, patience, vigilance, and treachery are all I have.
