Center of Gravity

Night Stryke

The following slides show a hypothetical framework for operational-level raids against ISIS in Iraq and Syria (although it could also be used in other areas.) I call it Night Stryke. For the last ten years, U.S. Special Operations have been conducting raids against high-value targets, of which the attack against Osama bin Laden in Pakistan was most notable. These attacks, for the most part, were against individuals or small groups of people, perhaps a few dozen at most. Night Stryke envisions attacking ISIS facilities containing perhaps 100 fighters deeper than most of the attacks so far, and as proficiency increases, so would the prospective size of the target and the size of the attacking force that might ultimately be reinforced battalions or tailored brigades.

Below are the five facets of the intent of the raids. Because of their scope, both special and conventional forces would be required. Because the transportation is by air, attacks could be launched deep behind the forward progress of ISIS forces. U.S. combatants would be on the ground for only hours (maybe a day at most), leaving no residual footprint to attack. Finally, the ability to strike anywhere at any time would almost certainly add a disturbing psychological burden on ISIS veteran fighters as well as recruits.

The following is the center of gravity (in my opinion) for ISIS forces. Every battle plan must attack an enemy’s center of gravity or else it is wasted effort. You defeat this center of gravity by killing existing fighters and reducing new recruits. There are non-combat strategies, such as turning a majority of Muslims against the militants and encouraging Islam to conduct its own reformation to eliminate it’s warlike tendencies, but those are strategies for the diplomats; this is a strategy for the warriors.

You don’t “take out,” you don’t “degrade,” you kill the enemy in large numbers until you break his will to fight. It has been that way for millennia and despite a recent political penchant to fight bloodless wars, you have to be ruthless or the enemy will be. Additionally, striking the enemy throughout the operational depth of the theater causes the defender to try and defend everywhere, and it is a proven military axiom that he who would attempt to defend every where, adequately defends no where.

Here is the basic concept. Intelligence assets locate a remote ISIS site occupied by perhaps several dozen up to several hundred jihadist fighters — perhaps a logistical support area for ISIS convoys carrying oil, or an ISIS-controlled oil field. Special operations forces locate and secure a forward operating base that includes terrain on which C-17 airlift aircraft or other platforms can land. As this is 25-75 miles from the target, the ISIS defenders have no idea of an impending attack.

Airlift assets then land combat troops and vehicles, such as Strykers, and this force, perhaps a reinforced battalion, drives to, surrounds and begins to attack the enemy village. Using direct observation, they pinpoint targets for attack aircraft (fixed wing, helicopters, drones, etc.) Air platforms must serve as artillery in this fight because adequate ground artillery simply cannot be transported in enough quantity as they (and their ammunition) take up too much haul space. If the defenders manage a call for help, the same air assets can hammer ISIS columns trying to come to the rescue of their comrades.

Once the ISIS force is eliminated — and the U.S. military simply must change its impotent rules of engagement if it wants to seriously prosecute this war — the force emplaces denial munitions and intelligence sensors to make enemy reoccupation of the facility dangerous. I would argue that the enemy dead should be removed from the target for “proper” burial elsewhere; such a disappearance would further degrade the moral of ISIS fighters who may have signed up to die for their caliphate, but may not have come to terms with disappearing for their caliphate. The ground strike force then rapidly returns to their FOB, boards their aircraft and departs for a secure base hundreds of miles away, perhaps even in another country. Any subsequent media inquiries as to what happened should be met with operational security silence.

How much lift we have available must be balanced against world-wide requirements. Conducting raids to achieve operational gains have been quite successful throughout military history, whether that was Union cavalry raids deep into the Confederacy, or the old Soviet Operational Maneuver Groups that terrorized German rear areas on the Eastern Front in World War II and that kept NATO war planners up at night for forty years in the Cold War. Time to get inside the enemy’s decision cycle, make him defend everywhere. And keep ISIS fighters up at night wondering which of their outposts will be the next one to disappear.

It has already worked at the tactical level and by purely special operations forces. In October 2015, U.S. and Afghan commandos, backed by scores of American airstrikes, attacked an al Qaeda training camp in the southern part of Afghanistan. The assault, which took place over several days, pounded two training areas — destroying elaborate tunnels and fortifications, and killing as many as 200 fighters. Because of the proximity to U.S. bases, C-17s were not needed.

It is time to take it up to the next level in size and scope. It is time to go deep against ISIS and use all special operations and conventional forces at our disposal in even larger raids.

Night StrykeFrench MacLean2023-10-08T15:31:58-05:00

Finding a Strategy to Defeat Militant Islam

Strategy to Defeat Militant Islam

To develop a strategy to defeat ISIS, we must first identify the center of gravity of this enemy. For competent strategists, the center of gravity, be it the bulk of the enemy’s army or other capability (although seldom an enemy leader), is the hub of all power and strength. Destroy it and the enemy collapses. The strategic center of gravity of every militant Islamic organization, from small terrorist cells to large conventionally formed and equipped armies, is the magnetism of certain tenants of Islam that attract an almost inexhaustible number of recruits that are prepared to do violence to non-believers and even die for their cause in their quest to expand their religion into a caliphate under Islamic Law. Given that, the attached chart shows what must be done. These actions are not sequential; they will often overlap and several may take decades to accomplish. However, if we can follow these guidelines, we will prevail in the end.

Finding a Strategy to Defeat Militant IslamFrench MacLean2021-06-27T16:22:52-05:00

ISIS

Wars with religious undertones have occurred over recorded human history. Many of these conflicts have been characterized by acts of significant brutality, recorded all-too-frequently by chroniclers as “putting the population to the sword.” Today, these shocking accounts have morphed from the pages of history text to graphic beheadings and burning to death on videos on the internet.

The Peace of Westphalia signed in 1648 resolved the Thirty Years’ War, one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history – and initially a war between Christian Protestant and Christian Catholic states in the fragmenting Holy Roman Empire. Christians continued to brutally fight one another, most recently evident in the civil wars in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Islamic factions – Sunni and Shia – have fought each other almost from the start of Islam and continue to this day. Finally, the era of the Crusades (1095-1285) demonstrated the ferocity of Christian-Muslim conflict.

Western historians seem to fall into three categories concerning the character of this two-century medieval clash: some see the Crusades as part of a purely defensive war against Islamic conquest; others view the struggle as part of long-running conflict at the frontiers of Europe; a third tranche has concluded that the wars were caused by aggressive, papal-led expansion attempts by Western Christendom. Muslim historians – and more importantly the average Muslim man or woman on the street – have quite a different view. As far as the Muslims in the Middle East during those two centuries believed, the Crusades were simply the latest stage in Frankish imperialism that had already manifested itself in North Africa, Sicily and Spain.

However, what is most important is not what Christians and Muslims thought 800 years ago, but how they continue to view these events today. The Christian West has quite simply forgotten the Crusades. They are an event that happened, but not one that still elicits emotion. Almost no Christian holds a public grudge that a distant relation fighting in the Crusades was killed by Muslims. In short, there is no utility in modern western life to be concerned with just another increasingly distant chapter in a dusty history book. The opposite occurred in the Muslim world. Initially – at the time of these events – Muslim scholars believed that there was nothing of value to learn from the Christian/Frankish barbarians who came from Central and Western Europe. Not only were Muslim historians uninterested in what Christians did, there were also indifferent to what Christians thought. Muslim feelings – in the exact obverse of Christian views – seem to be more concerned with the Crusades today than they were in the centuries immediately following the wars. Today, Muslims recall the Crusades as an offensive Christian undertaking with one or more goals of: humiliating Islam; defeating Islam; eradicating Islam. The Muslim view of the Crusades is that it is the wound that will not heal; it is original sin that no Christian may wash away.

Relations between Islam and Christianity did not improve to a brotherly love level over the last several hundred years, but for the most part did not involve attempting to destroy the other en mass, although periodic religious wars in the Balkans were certainly extremely violent. However, the fire between Islam and Christianity/Judaism rekindled with the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. In fact, one could easily argue that the current war by militant Islam against Christianity and Judaism – now 66 years old – began on this date.

It has become popular to attribute current unrest in the Mideast to a lack of good governance by many nation states in the region (i.e. lack of adequate health care, rampant corruption, inability to protect citizens from crime, substandard education, lack of jobs, etc.) While problems in good governance certainly are a contributory factor, they are not the root cause of the violence. England has good governance and they have a large number of jihadists, and it is becoming evident that so does the United States.

The root cause of the death and destruction throughout an alarmingly high proportion of the Muslim world are the beliefs of a substantial number of the faithful that the Qur’an (Koran) calls on them to subjugate and kill non-Muslims as part of the expansion of Islamic faith and culture.

The idea of fighting for God, although not confined to Islam, has given service in Muslim terrorist organizations a special attraction, which leads to a discussion of the Center of Gravity of ISIS, Al Qaeda and all other militant Muslim groups, regardless of their name or home location. For our purposes, let us define militant Islam as either Muslim nation-state sponsored terrorism or non-nation state terrorism, directed at non-Muslim targets. Muslim on Muslim violence (Shia-Sunni) is certainly violent, but it is something a little different.

Prussian military strategist, Carl von Clausewitz, believed that a fundamental requirement in war was to identify the enemy’s Center of Gravity and attack it vigorously. He stated in part, “the force at which our blow is to be aimed requires that our strength be concentrated to the utmost… therefore a major act of strategic judgment to distinguish these centers of gravity in the enemy’s forces and to identify their spheres of effectiveness.” This center of gravity, be it the bulk of the enemy’s army or other capability (although seldom an enemy leader), is the hub of all power and strength. Destroy it and the enemy collapses.

Listening to the Secretary of Defense and senior military generals talk about ISIS but never mention the term “center of gravity” is troubling. War is governed by certain tenets and principles and its nature is unchanging (although the character and conduct do change.)

It is this paper’s opinion that the strategic center of gravity of every militant Islamic organization, from small terrorist cells to large conventionally formed and equipped armies, is the magnetism of certain tenants of Islam that attract an almost inexhaustible number of recruits that are prepared to do violence to non-believers and even die for their cause in their quest to expand their religion into a caliphate under Islamic law.

Attacking this strategic center of gravity is a multi-faceted process. Over the long term, these select violent tenants of Islam must be “demagnetized” in an effort by which they lose their appeal to potential recruits. It will be a complex process, as we must create the conditions in which they will convince themselves that violence is not the answer. A second way to attack this hub of all power, which should begin immediately, is to simply kill the jihadists in as large numbers as possible. Unfortunately, that brutal solution may extend to succeeding generations seeking to emulate their elders, if these young jihadist “wannabees” cannot be convinced to drop the sword.

However, there is an additional course of action to only killing current jihadists and that is in the realm of psychological warfare. We must discover that which frightens the jihadist. What causes him to wake up in the middle of the night screaming in terror? Most religions and cultures have their own boogie men, infant-snatchers and vampire lore; how can we use these legends to psychologically dislocate the jihadists and their core supporters?

We must additionally separate the foot-soldier jihadists from their leaders. Our information campaign must create the story that the sons of these leaders rarely become suicide bombers (that is only for the lesser value men) and that the leaders often skim millions of dollars of wealth from the cause for their own personal benefit. More importantly, we must study with responsible Imams those terrorist acts that will cause the jihadist to be “excommunicated” from the faith and that there is no heaven for these men – and ensure that information is widely disseminated, if only to peel away some of the less-radical foot soldiers.

Not all jihadist groups are created equal and we must prioritize the levels of danger presented by each. Concerning the current iteration of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL), the center of gravity at the operational level is the group’s ability to generate significant funds to procure weapons, supplies and influence; the group is thought to have at least $2 billion and the sum is growing daily. Whether this is destroying or capturing oilfields under ISIS control, hacking into ISIS financial accounts or closing the flow of the Hawala money transfer system, it is imperative that ISIS be deprived of significant funding. This is because the leaders in militant Islam understand that while they can use a strategy of attrition to possibly defeat U.S. and western forces operating in the Middle East (and thus wearing down the American home front with seemingly endless casualties) – ISIS needs nuclear weapons to truly go on the offensive and actually expand the caliphate. This means purchasing such weapons, as ISIS does not have the scientific or technical ability to make their own. Make no mistake; when terrorists, with an end of days’ Yawm al-Qiyāmah philosophy, obtain nuclear weapons, it is only a matter of time before they gladly use them.

Unfortunately, this current war may well last into the next century. This is because breaking the magnetism of those violent tenants of Islam will require a Muslim “reformation,” whatever that looks like, powerful Fatwas and active dissuasion of violence from “the pulpit.” Islam must go through a self-generated process to eliminate the violent portions of its theology, while at the same time healing the rift between Sunnis and Shiites and that will take time – decades at the least.

To begin a strategic campaign, we must first be able to identify the enemy in order to tailor a strategy that will be successful. Militant Islam is not workplace violence; it is not a tiny minority unsupported by the vast majority of Muslims. Militant Islam cannot co-exist. It is not primarily a law enforcement issue; it is war. At the current time, militant Islamic prisoners of war cannot be reliably “cured” of violent tendencies; they are killing machines. That is why terms such as degrade are imprecise and dangerous. Despite the protestations of the barstool brigadiers and armchair admirals that never fired a shot in anger, the nature of war is violence and the character and conduct of this war will also be violent. It is no coincidence that Islam never spread northeast. In 1219, Genghis Khan invaded Khwarezmia, which was governed by Shah Ala ad-Din Muhammad, and during the conquest killed millions of people across the land. The Mongol adversaries took a back seat to no one in their application of violence and Islam never forgot. In most wars, the victor actually does kill his way out of it, inflicting so much pain on the enemy that the opponent surrenders or agrees to terms.

The second objective of this initial strategic campaign is not to lose before we have marshalled the will and resources to win. There are four conditions that could cause a situation that would preclude ultimate victory. The United States loses if it simply quits the fight and withdraws inward, sustains a significant weapon of mass destruction (WMD) attack that puts the national economy in peril, fails to support Israel to such a degree that Israel is destroyed, or seeks to accommodate the tenants of militant Islam such as Sharia Law. The current administration may feel that it does not have the time left or the stomach to do what must be done offensively. However, it can still make a contribution defensively: to protect the country from a WMD attack over the next two years, by first stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The next administration and the next generation of political leaders have their own roles to play and will have to ramp up the struggle. First, both major political parties must go against their own petty self-interests and work to unify the country as one. Second, taking counsel of sound senior military advice, they must rebuild the U.S. military to provide those capabilities that will prove successful in the fight – such as an even greater increase in special operations forces and intelligence gathering capabilities. Both support the operational Center of Gravity of the United States military – the ability to quickly and accurately place overwhelming fires anywhere in the world on land, sea and air across the spectrum of conflict.

Finally, as we contemplate a lengthy war, we must consider the composition of the military. The nation made a mistake after Nine-Eleven and did not implement actions to elicit shared sacrifice from our population. The last dozen years of war have been fought by the volunteer professional military, often described as the one-half of one percent. Nothing like the old Victory-Bond drives came into being after that fateful September morning. No special war taxes were implemented. No common, shared sacrifice was demanded. To a great degree, the conflict has been fought with a very small tip of the spear, albeit a razor-sharp one.

The nation needs to debate returning to a draft. We currently have numerous ethnic and racial groups that have little contact with or understanding of other groups; this leads to senseless mistrust and disunity. Societal evolution has led to many children raised in one-parent families and having no sense of either authority or of the collective good. Militant gangs replace absent fathers. Violence on America’s streets is rampant; Chicago, based on dozens of gang-related shootings every weekend, has acquired the new deadly moniker of “Chiraq” and this viciousness is not confined to large cities. Returning to the draft – and this does not mean deploying draftees overseas to fight jihadists; the character of the conflict is such that we can do that with a professional core – would produce shorter-term soldiers, who can assist with natural disasters at home, guard the borders of the country and ensure that all Americans have a stake in the outcome of the war. Equally important, we might be able to save what is appearing to be a lost generation.

For too long we have used terms such as target servicing, degrading capabilities and incarceration so as not to offend the ill-placed sensibilities of some in the media and the general public. Again returning to Clausewitz, the theorist wrote, “Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds; it is a fallacy that must be exposed: War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst.”

We must contemplate unpleasant measures if we are to defeat an enemy that is as brutal and tenacious as militant Islam. CIA estimates go as high as 31,000 active enemy fighters, while Kurdish sources put the number at 200,000. On the legal front, we must engage the international law system to emplace laws that take away as many human rights of terrorists as possible; we should attempt to deny the terrorists all rights under the Geneva Conventions. Given that on the battlefield jihadists often pretend to surrender only to attack when our guard is lowered, that we are often loath to use the death penalty in judicial proceedings, that terrorists recruit new terrorists in prison and that released terrorists from Guantanamo confinement are likely to return to violence, we must examine our own procedures and rules to determine when it is simply too dangerous to capture them.

We should also contemplate closing confinement facilities, not because of the tired arguments that these centers serve as recruitment propaganda, but rather that the prisoners in them remain in the public eye. They write letters; they are potential bargaining chips such as the five Taliban leaders that were released at the stroke of a pen in 2014. We need to develop a system where uncertainty creeps into the minds of the terrorists. We should never return the remains of deceased terrorists to their relatives; in fact, we should never confirm what has happened or not happened to them when they disappear from the battlefield. We should not even give them a Muslim burial or place them in marked graves; their brutal acts caused them to forfeit that consideration (we did that with executed Nazi war criminals.) Additionally, since it is only a matter of time before the terrorists figure out how to create biological suicide “bombers” infected with Ebola, Small Pox or other deadly contagious diseases, we should assume that every dead terrorist is already infected and his remains should be handled accordingly.

Along these lines, we must immediately stop telling the jihadists what we will or will not do and where we will do it. We must refrain from explaining in the public forum, for example, why ISIS troops massing at the Kurdish town of Kobani in Syria are becoming lucrative targets for attacks from the air; let the enemy find out the hard way that his tactics are in error. Uncertainty is our friend, causing the enemy to believe they must defend everywhere. As strategist Sun-Tzu opined: “To defend everywhere is to defend nowhere.”

ISIS/ISIL and Al Qaeda, left to their own devices, became killing machines. It will take a superior killing machine to drive home the terrible conclusion to every jihadist and every jihadist-supporter that there will be no glory in murdering innocents and no glory in dying for a hateful God. There will be no jail cell or halfway house, from which they might someday be released, for the purveyors of evil. There will only be a certain, agonizing, lonely, pointless death in the shadows of darkness in a manner that precludes even their memory from being cherished by their family and friends…their entire corporal and spiritual self will simply disappear for all time.

ISISFrench MacLean2015-11-16T18:29:33-06:00

The Best Military Theorist

Many students at the National War College – and even a few folks today – have asked me who my favorite military theorist is. Many scholars of military history, strategy and politics have heard of Carl Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and both were indeed influential thinkers.

Carl Clausewitz was a German officer and military theorist in the early 1800s, who stressed the moral and political aspects of war; we would say today that this included the psychological aspects of warfighting. His most notable work, Vom Kriege (On War), has been studied by thousands of military officers around the world; ironically, the book was unfinished at his death and may have been completed by his wife. He stressed the dialectical interaction of diverse factors, noting how unexpected developments unfolding under the “fog of war” (i.e., in the face of incomplete, dubious, and often completely erroneous information and high levels of fear, doubt, and excitement) call for rapid decisions by alert commanders. These special commanders were said to have a finger-tip feeling for war.

Clausewitz also discussed the relationship between three elements that later became known as “Clausewitz’s trinity.” These are “composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason.”

Clausewitz also wrote at length about the concept of center of gravity. This process was to identify the enemy’s hub of all strength, in other words, what characteristic or element led him to victory. It might be a strong alliance in support; it might be the enemy’s ground forces, etc. Very rarely was the enemy’s center of gravity a single person or leader, although many intelligence efforts in the past focused on eliminating that one “indispensable” person. The U.S. was caught in that trap when Seal Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden and many high-ranking leaders opined that this was the end of Al Qaeda; of course we know it was not. Whenever you see a politician, or a senior military leader for that matter, not address the center of gravity of the enemy, you know that you are listening to a rank strategic amateur, regardless of his pay grade.

Sun Tzu was a Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher who lived in the Spring and Autumn Period of ancient China, about 500 BC. He is traditionally credited as the author of The Art of War, an extremely influential ancient Chinese book on military strategy. Sun Tzu has had a significant impact on Chinese and Asian history and culture, both as the author of The Art of War and as a legendary historical figure. The Art of War presents a philosophy of war for managing conflicts and winning battles and is accepted as a masterpiece on strategy, frequently cited and referred to by generals and theorists.

The work very succinctly presents the tenets for developing and executing a strategy that will defeat the strategy of your opponent. It is presented in lists and recommendations such as: “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

Perhaps Sun Tzu’s most famous quotation has been: “It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

While both these theorists have been extremely influential in modern history (and for Sun Tzu much longer), and while I have re-read each numerous times, my absolute favorite military theorist is Colonel Ardant Du Picq, a French Army officer and military theorist of the mid-nineteenth century whose writings – as they were later interpreted by other theorists in the First World War period – had a great effect on French military theory and doctrine.

Ardant du Picq was born at Périgueux, France on October 19, 1821. On 1 October 1844, he graduated from the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, the French equivalent of the U.S. West Point and was commissioned a sub-lieutenant in the 67th Regiment of the Line. As a captain, having previously transferred to the 9th Battalion of Foot Chasseurs, he saw action in the French expedition to Varna during the Crimean War, but he fell ill with cholera and was evacuated to France. Upon recovery, he rejoined his unit in front of Sevastopol and was captured during the storming of the central bastion of the fortress in September 1855. Released in December 1855, he returned to active duty, first with the 100th Regiment of the Line and later as a major with the 16th Battalion of Foot Chasseurs. He later served in Syria from August 1860 to June 1861, during the French intervention to restore order following Maronite-Druze sectarian violence.

Du Picq saw extensive service in Algeria from 1864 – 1866, and in February 1869 was selected colonel of the 10th Regiment of the Line. At the outbreak of war with Prussia on July 15, 1870, he led his regiment to the front. Directing his men along an elevated road on August 15, 1870, an overhead burst by a Prussian artillery shell fatally wounded him in both thighs and his stomach near Longeville-les-Metz. He died four days later at the military hospital in Metz from his wounds. Ardant du Picq’s last words were, “My wife, my children, my regiment, adieu!”

Before his death in 1870, du Picq had already published Combat antique (Ancient Battle), which associates later expanded into the classic Etudes sur les combat: Combat antique et moderne, most often referred to by its common English title of Battle Studies, which was published in part ten years later, although the complete text did not appear until 1902.

His analyses stressed the vital importance, especially in contemporary warfare, of discipline and unit cohesion. Du Picq believed that the human element is more important than theories. War was still more of an art than a science. One popular quote demonstrating this conclusion drawn from numerous battle studies stated, “Nothing can wisely be prescribed in any army… without exact knowledge of the fundamental instrument, man, and his state of mind, his morale, at the instant of combat.”

Du Picq also thought that great strategists and leaders of men are marked by inspiration. “Generals of genius draw from the human heart ability to execute a surprising variety of movements which vary the routine; the mediocre ones, who have no eyes to read readily, are doomed to the worst errors.”

All of du Picq’s thinking, in my opinion, boils down to one of his fundamental truths:

“Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely.”

Training, discipline, bravery, teamwork, independent action – everything a young leader needs to know to create a successful organization can be found by reading Ardant du Picq.

The Best Military TheoristFrench MacLean2015-12-04T11:52:26-06:00