What Trumps Tech in War?

While they seem to come from different centuries, the makeshift IED of an insurgent and the cutting-edge aerial assets of the world’s largest military powers can be seen as flip sides of the same COIN (if you’ll pardon the counter-insurgency pun): both weapon systems provide battlefield control with devastating violence while minimizing friendly forces’ ground exposure. To be effective, both weapon systems need actionable ground intelligence. But, in the current conflict against the so-called Islamic State, the COIN’s aerial weapons are always at a strategic disadvantage because the air assets are controlled by forces removed from the tactical battlefield, either thousands of feet overhead or in remote locations flying via satellite. The insurgency’s IED operatives are swimming in Mao’s sea and can target precisely–either avoiding or targeting civilians as they choose. In this case, high tech superiority provides only an illusion of strategic superiority.

Each tool can be used the same ways, including to attack an enemy’s industrial base, support ground forces or target an enemy’s supply lines. Want to wipe out a population, as ISIS is doing in Ebril, Iraq? The use of IEDs will be similar to widespread bombing. Want to subdue a population, by reducing citizen morale and degrading their military? The Islamic State uses IEDs in Kurdish areas to bring them into compliance (or exterminate them), along with targeting all opposing militarily forces, assets and supply lines (including American military embedded within the Kurdish population). Want to govern a target population? ISIS can use IEDs more in line with the U.S. military’s COIN population centric approach to bombardment. The insurgency will use IEDs to target a military’s high-value personnel, supporting infrastructure and logistics – bases, patrols, roads, rails, bridges, waterways, and other vital centers-while avoiding injury to the population. Working from the ground, and not from the air, those planting IEDs can be more precise, increasing their potential for political mobilization.If the idea of Black Friday crowds makes you want to stay home and curl up with a good book instead, New America’s got you covered with a cornucopia of amazing reads for this holiday season.

America’s military prides itself on overcoming strategic deficits with technological innovations, and this IED mismatch seems to be no different. However, insurgents have proven that they can react with new IED innovations to defeat any counter-IED defensive technological solution. When the U.S. produces better armor and IED resistant trucks, the insurgents respond with bigger and better targeted IEDs, turning America’s twenty-first century wars into wars of the wounded and maimed. Technology alone cannot defeat the IED threat. It only provides temporary safety, while inspiring more IED innovation, leaving the COIN force always in reactive mode. The other advantage for insurgents is more strategic: the IED is a technological product of ingenuity developed by the people who are fighting for political change.

UAV’s and fighter jet squadrons require support networks of enablers that live on isolated bases and on aircraft carriers, guarded from the populations that bear the brunt of their aerial assaults—and these are exactly the people whose hearts and minds COIN theory seeks to win. IEDs require a similar supporting logistical network of enablers, except these enablers exist within the contested population. These enablers are the skilled and unskilled of the target population — engineers, chemist, market traders and transporters, taxi drives and the unemployed who need work. This means IEDs are an economic enterprise for the local populace. Once an insurgency establishes an IED capability within a population, a COIN force must eradicate the population’s enablers to dismantle the IED networks. The enablers are part time insurgents, from local families and communities, not outsiders. Killing part-time insurgents and enablers is how a COIN forces loses the population’s support and loses the political war.

Last month, United States military aircraft dropped bombs on a convoy of armed trucks and a gathering of suspected Islamic State leaders in the city of Mosul, Iraq, which is home to an estimated 1.5 million citizens of the new Islamic State caliphate. This aerial bombardment is being touted as a success; bombs dropped from thousands of feet above translated America’s political will into political violence with surgically violent hell fire. It is rumored that the strike killed the Islamic State’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and a few armed trucks were removed from the battlefield. But is this winning the war? America’s military cannot rely on superior technology to kill its way out of this conflict. The last thirteen years have seen America’s military capture and kill numerous enemies using superior military capabilities, yet the counter-state insurrections have metastasized and have globally diffused.

Since 2001, the American government has spent trillions of dollars on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, attempting to defeat counter-state insurgencies and defend against their persistent IED innovations. Despite America’s efforts, well over two divisions of military personnel have been killed and maimed by IEDs, and 287,000 personnel have suffered traumatic brain injuries. These numbers suggest that the counter-state insurgencies are effectively using IEDs against America’s superior military. Globally, from 2011 to 2013, an an estimated 53,000 civilians have been wounded from or killed by IEDs across sixty-six countries. War is fundamentally a contest of wills. And in the 21st century, thus far, wars are fundamentally contests between insurgencies that want political change and twentieth-century nations that want to preserve the political status quo. Aerial assets and superior military technologically represent the weapons of the status quo, and the IEDs are the weapons of political change.