Attrition Warfare - You Can't Avoid It

ComNavOps has frequently extolled the virtue of numbers, even over quality.  As the old adage says,

“Quantity has a quality all its own.”

When I advocate greater numbers, one of the common counter arguments is that we no longer engage in attrition warfare.  Supposedly, we now engage in maneuver warfare to paralyze our enemies and bring them to their knees with no casualties on either side.  Ahh …  the ideal war!  Or so the story goes.

The reality is that war is all about attrition.  We’ve just forgotten that.  You know, there’s another old adage,

“The enemy gets a vote.”

The enemy gets a vote, yes.  Sometimes, though, we can minimize or marginalize the enemy’s vote.  Iraq got a vote in Desert Storm but it didn’t amount to anything.  However, when it comes to attrition warfare, the enemy’s vote trumps ours.  Huh???  What does that mean?

It means that if an enemy is willing and determined to engage in attrition warfare, it’s almost impossible not to become inextricably involved in attrition warfare.  When the enemy sends a human wave attack at your troops, you ARE engaged in attrition warfare whether you want to be or not.  When the enemy is willing to send waves of aircraft at your ships to wear down your defenses and, eventually, sink your ships, you ARE engaged in attrition warfare whether you want to be or not.

Maneuver warfare will only work until you come into contact with the enemy and then, if the enemy so chooses, it becomes attrition warfare.  The hope is that your maneuvering put you into an advantageous position so that you’ll win the attrition phase of the battle but, barring Saddam Hussein type stupidity, you can’t avoid an attrition battle if the enemy wants it.  I don’t think China or Russia are going to be that obligingly stupid.

Speaking of China and Russia.  What are their single biggest military advantages?  That’s right … numbers. 

The biggest numbers advantage Russia and China have is manpower.  They have, literally, billions of people to throw at our forces and they have the required inhuman insensitivity to actually do it.  Such a tactic is abhorrent and almost unimaginable to us.  I say “almost” unimaginable because we actually saw the Chinese do it as recently as the Korean War and the Russians did it during WWII.  Given China’s uncaring attitudes towards human rights, as demonstrated repeatedly in modern times (recall the massacre of several hundred protesters in the Tiananmen Square incident), does anyone really believe that China wouldn’t hesitate to employ attrition tactics?  Given Russia’s uncaring attitude towards human rights as evidenced throughout their history (Stalin, KGB, Siberian camps, etc.), does anyone really believe that Putin wouldn’t hesitate to employ attrition tactics?

In fact, from a purely military perspective, China and Russia would be foolish not to employ attrition warfare.

For China, their numbers advantage will soon extend to aircraft and ships, if it doesn’t already.  And, unlike us, they tend not to early retire and throw away perfectly serviceable aircraft and ships.  For example, they have a very large contingent of second and third line aircraft that would work quite well as attrition fodder.  If they can throw early generation MiGs at us and destroy, say, a single F-22 for a loss of 10 second/third line aircraft, that’s a win for them.  Yeah, but that can’t happen, you say.  Even 10 MiG-21’s can’t match a single F-22.  Well, they don’t have to match the F-22, they just have to soak up the F-22’s missiles and distract the F-22 so that the first line Chinese aircraft can destroy the F-22.  Consider …  the Chinese have reportedly (Wiki) built 2400 MiG-21s and they are still operational.  That’s a LOT of aircraft to conduct attrition warfare with!  We have 150 or so combat-capable F-22s.

Warfare IS attrition.  We’ve just forgotten that in our desire to pursue clean, neat wars where everyone goes home at night, takes a hot shower, eats a good meal, watches some TV, and then gets up the next day and goes to work to conduct another neat, clean patrol or aerial strike while carefully avoiding collateral damage or casualties to either side.

Russia and China are going to come at us hard and attrition will be one of their major tactics.  We need to recognize this and begin preparing for it.  We need to stop pussyfooting around with networking, distributed lethality, jeep-based mobility, LCS, and the like and start developing massively effective cluster munitions, hugely increased artillery and self-propelled artillery, heavy armored personnel carriers, amphibious tanks, ships with serious AAW and ASuW capability and armor, and the like.  We need to start focusing on killing people in the most efficient manner possible.  We need to build up massive inventories of bombs, missiles, and rockets.  We need to prepare the framework to absorb hundreds of thousands of new soldiers (war draft) so that they can fight effectively without having to spend years learning the latest networking technology just to talk to the guy in the next foxhole over.  And so on and so on.

We need to start imagining what the next war will really be rather than what we wish it would be.  Brutal, ugly, and lethal.  That’s what it will be and that’s what we need to be.