14 September 2020

How to forecast armies’ will to fight

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In june 2014 around 1,500 partisans of Islamic State (is) attacked Mosul, a city in northern Iraq. They were outnumbered almost 15 to one by government troops defending the place. The result was a rout. But not in the direction those numbers might have suggested. In the face of the enemy, the government soldiers ran away. Reflecting shortly thereafter on America’s failure to foresee what would happen, James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence (and thus America’s top spy) described a force’s will to fight, or lack thereof, as an unpredictable “imponderable”.

Many in the past have felt the same. Military history is, as a consequence, littered with disastrously wrong assumptions about belligerents’ will to fight. America, for instance, famously underestimated the determination of Vietnam’s National Liberation Front when it involved itself in that country’s civil war in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, in 1916, during the first world war, Germany underrated France’s will to defend its fortress at Verdun against what the Germans hoped would be a war-winning assault. Casualties in that battle exceeded 300,000 on each side.

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