Analysis: Asymmetric warfare

Analysis: Asymmetric warfare

By Gary Eason
BBC News Online

From David and Goliath onwards, asymmetric warfare is not a new concept.

Iraq's regular forces are no match for superior US firepower

Nobody should be surprised that the Iraqis are using unconventional military tactics in defending their country.

Analysts say that the US' military dominance means its opponents are likely to fight it "asymmetrically" - avoiding its strengths and attacking its vulnerabilities.

But likewise, nobody should presume that the US-led coalition had not expected the Iraqis to do so - though it is not clear how much they have put into practice the lessons they have learned in recent years.

Tactical switch

Both sides had plenty of time to prepare for the fighting in Iraq.

And although Western media attention has focused on Iraqi guerrilla-style attacks on coalition supply lines, the tactics cut both ways.

US Brigadier General Vincent Brooks on Monday said US special forces had attacked and destroyed two convoys of Iraqi vehicles, including 10 tanks.

They were also "facilitating attacks against regime targets and death squads" in urban areas.

"These attacks are enabled by information provided by the local populations," he said.

Forward units of the US forces closing on Baghdad might appear to have over-reached their supply lines and left them vulnerable.

But Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC said that at a briefing long before the war began, the US Army's vice chief of staff, General John Keane, signalled a change of tactics.

He said the idea was to use joint air and land operations to drive an armoured "spearhead" forward quickly "and deliberately take the risk of problems in the flanks and rear areas".

Mr Cordesman said it was clear the Army understood the risk that its opponents would use asymmetric warfare.

'Out of the box'

In a paper just published by the US Army War College, an army major, Robert Cassidy, analyses the unhappy Soviet and Russian military experiences in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

He attributes their failures to "the paradoxes of asymmetric conflict" which come into play whenever a great power faces "a pre-industrial and semi-feudal enemy" who is forced to use "cunning and asymmetry".

He says great powers often do badly in small wars because they are locked into a "big war" way of doing things.

So "thinking outside the box" must become a reality, "not just a popular but meaningless bumper sticker in the Army vernacular".

"Most of our potential or real adversaries know our template - combined manoeuvre warfare, very mobile armour and airmobile formations, and massing effects with our technological superiority."

In Somalia US troops lost 18 dead - and killed hundreds - in a botched raid

Dr Alice Hills of the UK Joint Services Command and Staff College said any intelligent adversary would be bound to use irregular forces, faced with the overwhelming US military superiority.

But she detects what she calls "a strange disconnect" between US military thinking, with its awareness of these risks and of the need to understand an enemy's culture better, and what she sees happening in practice.

Drawing on their experience in Somalia in particular, US doctrine says civilians will behave in unexpected ways and there will be irregular forces to contend with.

"Then lo and behold they go into Iraq and it's just as if they have completely forgotten - judging by what we see on television anyway - all the basic lessons."

Israeli experience

Probably the hardest enemy to fight - and one the coalition is not going to emulate - is the suicide bomber.

Buildings in Jenin were wrecked in the Israeli attack last year

Alex Fishman, military analyst for the best-selling Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot, said Iraq had been urged to use suicide bombings by the Palestinian Islamic group Hamas.

He said Israel would provide vital experience of the problem to its US ally - albeit probably in a low-key way.

"The Americans are going to have to learn how to cope with that problem, and they have good teachers: the allies that they so very much do not want to mention by name."

He said US personnel had been to the West Bank town of Jenin to see how to work with a military bulldozer - used on buildings Israel suspects of housing militants - and Israeli experts had been to the US to pass on some of their experience of dealing with suicide bombers.

Concerns at possible suicide bombings are high

On Saturday, a suicide bombing by an Iraqi officer in civilian clothes killed four American soldiers near the southern Iraqi city of Najaf.

This did not come out of the blue. Before the fighting began, top Iraqi officials had vowed that there would be such attacks, and coalition forces had been on the alert for some time.

The Iraqi army said afterwards that more would be carried out, both by Iraqis and by volunteers from elsewhere in the Arab world.

But BBC reporters with US units in Iraq say the suicide bombing left the troops "very nervous" and taking no chances.

In an apparent indication of this, on Monday US soldiers shot dead at least seven Iraqi civilians whose vehicle apparently failed to stop at a checkpoint near Najaf.

'Poisoned pill'

Former Nato supreme commander, General Wesley Clark, said a problem was that although US forces were good at protecting themselves they would do it by "exporting the risk" onto civilians - making it harder to get close to them.

"This makes it more difficult to build the kind of supportive relationship with the Iraqi populace that's one of the goals of the operation."

The ultimate threat was a kind of "poisoned pill defence" in which an occupying force was plagued by terrorism even though the regime had been "disassembled" - converting Iraq to something like the West Bank.

"But the best remedy to that is to move quickly and promptly through the war plan," he said.

"Let's get to Baghdad quickly, let's get this regime disestablished, let's get a follow-on force in there with United Nations involvement, and start the reconstruction of Iraq."