The mathematics of war, or why I'm hopeful that Obama's right.

[backscatter712]

Don't mistake my being hopeful for a lack of ambivalence. I'm uncomfortable with President Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, and if that's done without an actual winning strategy, the only result will be yet more destruction. That said, here's a link to an interesting article that gives me some hope that we could actually find a way to dial down the violence in Afghanistan, and has an explanation why the violence has been dialed down in Iraq.

Morning Feature: The Science Behind the Strategy

In essence, the point is that the level of violence in a war, especially a guerilla war, can be predicted mathematically, and one of the big variables in the equation is the organizational structure of the insurgency. In short, is the insurgency composed of a large number of little groups, or a small number of big groups, or is it somewhere in the middle?

If the insurgents are grouped too small and too numerous, they're too weak to even try to take on the military, and if they come out of the woodwork at all, they can be rounded up with law enforcement.

On the other hand, if the insurgents group into a small number of large groups, then they're too powerful for law enforcement tactics to cope with, but then they get organized more like a conventional military or government. At that point, our side can choose to either use our own superior military forces to kick their sorry asses, as guerilla tactics no longer work when they're that big, or they can negotiate, cut a deal that ends in a truce, and stop the fighting that way.

Right now, we're in that ugly middle ground where the groups are too big for law enforcement to fight, but so small and numerous that the military's caught playing Guerrilla Whack-a-Mole, and will keep playing that game until they get tired and give up.

Since the country's too big and mountainous to control with brute force, and the Taliban's in that middle ground, we have two choices:

Take our ball and go home. (Obviously, Obama chose not to do this.)

or

Change our strategy to force the Taliban to alter their grouping behavior. If we succeed, either the Taliban goes big, becomes more like a conventional organized political/military force, in which case we can either kick their sorry asses, or negotiate a war-ending truce with them, OR, they fragment, each fragment becomes too small to take us on, and we mop them up with law enforcement tactics. Either way, the math predicts that the violence level gets dialed down.

I'm hoping some gearhead from the Pentagon explained this to Obama and that's his strategy right now.

I could be wrong on this, but I hope that I'm not and our President is not, in which case we could see what happened in Iraq. Yes, I know it's not in the news, but the Iraq War is winding down. Our troops are chilling out in barracks, we're packing up all our equipment, we're getting ready to go home, the Iraqis literally partied in the streets when we ceased most of our patrols, and the violence level last month is the lowest it's ever been since the invasion began in 2003. Assuming there aren't any derailments (don't count chickens yet), the Iraq War is on track to be OVER! And about damned time too. Let's hope the same thing happens in Afghanistan.

[GodlessBiker]

1. Now, how about some math on how we are going to pay for all of this.

[backscatter712]

2. Therein lies a problem... n/t

[backscatter712]

3. More seriously, I think we have some room yet in terms of deficit spending.

That's not just me, but economists like Paul Krugman.

Now granted, I would prefer that any deficit spending would be better used on things like stimulus to pull us out of this recession from hell - jobs programs, rebuilding of infrastructure, more schools, hospitals, that sort of thing.

Spending it on a war just strikes me as insane.