Rethinking Military Strategy: The Primacy of Exposure in Combat Attrition

Abstract

How do military capabilities transform into victory on the battlefield? By answering this question, we could get useful insights into but also be able to inform the process behind the risky decision to escalate a diplomatic crisis into war. The existing political science literature has viewed the combat conditions that feed this risky decision as static and through the prism of power preponderance. While under certain conditions this assumption is justified, empirical evidence suggests that almost in half of the violent crises it fails to explain conflict outcomes. Moreover, the weakness of power preponderance argument is increasingly accepted by policy experts and practitioners, while trying to replace it through various heuristics. Besides its policy importance, the question has considerable implications for academic research on war. Most of strategic analysis efforts, employing contest success functions to build strategic interaction models explaining war, have preferred to base them on military capabilities. This is problematic, provided that it does not accurately capture the proper data generating process. A field that extensively studied combat dynamics – the military operations research – has preponderantly used, out of convenience, the military capabilities approach, as well. I argue that the algorithm guiding how military capabilities transform into victory is determined by the level of combat exposure of troops, and not firepower. I define exposure as being the degree to which a combat force both intersects the set of lethal fire of the opponent and is known by the opponent to be there. By varying the value of exposure, we can directly control the effect of capabilities and their fire accuracy – at low exposure levels these decrease, being able to achieve zero effect. At high exposure levels the impact of capabilities and firepower can manifest their full lethal capacity. I determine these effects by building a combat dynamics model, through a system of nonlinear dynamic equations, which assesses the degree and speed of troops’ attrition. As an important contribution to this model is the theorizing of exposure role in combat, by exploring the intuition of the Shannon information entropy, in the effort to capture the combat uncertainty. I am able to show that exposure, as a manifestation of combat entropy, is indeed the atomic factor, that has primacy in driving combat attrition. Thus, contrary to largely-hold view that power preponderance is essential for determining combat outcomes, I show it is instead completely dependent on exposure. Moreover, I identify that the number of capabilities only serves as the carrying capacity – the reservoir, from which belligerents draw troops for the fighting engagements. I illustrate the manifestation of exposure both in conventional and insurgency wars, by examining two main respective cases, while also exploring micro-evidence from a wider range of tertiary cases. I show that exposure effect dominates the effect of capabilities in any type of combat, the difference being in the degree. The logic of the model allows to show that some non-material factors such as morale, do not affect war outcomes the way conventional wisdom poses. By revealing the causal relationship between attrition and exposure and emphasizing the role of the speed of attrition in offsetting the supplies received by insurgent from its supporters, I build a better understanding of both insurgency war dynamics and involved actors' incentives.