Scenario: Acceptable US Casualties Against 3rd World Armies

[shahadi]

Originally Posted by shahadi

I believe this discussion really is appropriate when talking about a dominant power vs a non-peer adversary, as we'd find in the most recent SEAL operation in Yemen. There, we had Senator McCain of Arizona decrying the raid as a failure using the following language: "When you lose a $75 million airplane and, more importantly, an American life is lost and wounded I don't believe you can call it a success...” Collins, Eliza, USA Today 9 Feb 2017.

So, I'm thinking in game terms, can losses be expressed as a ratio against the force value.

FL/FV

Where, FL is force losses and FV is the force value. The FL then would be determined by FVa - FVb. Such that, FVa is the initial force value at start of battle and the FVb is the force value at end of game.

(FVa-FVb)/FVa

Now, if we could evaluate the ratio in an expression.

if (FVa-FVb)/FVa < 4%

We could say, for example that this battle earned (in jp10's language) "global acclaim."

=====

I am changing FL from (FVa-FVb) to SCb/FVa, where SCb represents the Standard Score of player B and FVa is the Force Value of player A.

Now, we may easily get the forces lost of player A, as the standard score of player B from the Battle Report screen at end of game. The force value of player A is obtained from the Editor in the Deploy screen at the end of game (to keep yourself honest) as well.

With such a tool, we may talk about the military outcomes as taken from the Battle Report and political outcomes as taken from manual calculations, to be determined by the scenario designer, or between players in a PBEM game.

=====

[shahadi]

Finally, after playing several scenarios whilst in the process of authoring a few, I turned my attention to the Battle Calculation Sheet to develop a tool whereby players may account for political consequences, in particular where dominant forces engage non-peer adversaries.

The Excel worksheet is self explanatory. I have protected Columns C, D, and K as these cells contain formulas. The other cells are open to insert data.

The political results are coded from suggestions from this thread as follows:

GA Global Acclaim
PG Prestige Gain
AP Apathy
CD Citizen Dissension
WC World Condemnation


The Data tab houses the settings for the political and military outcomes.

[Steves308]

This spreadsheet is pretty fun, I like it!

Steves308

[shahadi]

In Avi Kober's (2008) 'The Israel defense forces in the Second Lebanon War: Why the poor performance?' frames a compelling discussion whose nexus is that Western soldiers fighting a "non-existential" war are not willing to scarifice fellow soldiers to accomplish the unit's mission.

According to IDF’s Chief of the Manpower Branch Major General Elazar Stern, part of the explanation for the IDF’s failure in the war was over-sensitivity to casualties.

An investigation committee headed by Major General (res.) Yoram Yair found that during the war commanders’ sense of responsibility for the lives of their troops over shadowed their commitment
to fulfill their missions.

The ‘post-heroic’ style of warfare, which characterized the Israeli conduct of the Second Lebanon War, is not a new innovation. Post-heroic warfare has two main rules: (a) the avoidance of casualties to your own troops, and (b) the avoidance of killing enemy civilians.

Its roots are demographic, social and moral, and it is characteristic of Western democracies conducting non-existential wars in which their readiness to sacrifice is relatively low, as per Edward Luttwak who penned the term "post-heroic warfare." Accordingly, when an IDF company attacked the mountain town of Bint Jbeil in the Second Lebanon War, losing eight men in one night, that number was perceived in Israel and broadcast around the world as a disastrous loss.

Juxtapose the scarifice of American forces on D-Day, an operation deemed "existential" where most reports put fatalities at 29000 while all of Iraq war we find reports of 4800 deaths.

Or, consider the lines of Americans during the weeks following December 7, 1942 against the paltry number of volunteers following 9/11.

Hence, we may have an additional tool, "non-existential" or "post-heroic" warfare to understand the complexities of what are acceptable casualities today.

Kober is from the Department of Political Studies and, BESA Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.