Abstract
“Mission Accomplished” said the banner on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln from which in May 2003 the then US President, George Bush, declared the conclusion of the military operations against Iraq. Nothing could have been further from the truth, which was highlighted when, in the fall of 2006, the security deterioration in Iraq peaked.
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Notes
- 1.
These are the costs estimated for both OEF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and OND (Operation New Dawn) (Belasco 2014). Bilmes and Stigliz (2008) estimated the economic costs going forward the Iraq and Afghanistan war would reach the three trillion dollars. Later, Bilmes and Stigliz (2011) concluded that the costs going forward would surpass their first estimations. Their estimations are built taking into account economic costs including medical care, paying disability compensations for Veterans, the costs of the escalation war in Afghanistan and the ones attributed to the Iraq War part of causing the Great Recession.
- 2.
Just less than 1 month before, the ambush of a convoy from the private military company “Blackwater USA” shocked the public opinion were the images of the event were released by the press, showing Iraqis posing with the corpses before being hung over a bridge crossing the Euphrates river.
- 3.
See, e.g., the Sadrist movement (Cochrane 2009).
- 4.
The FM 3-24 often refers to the “lessons learned” in Malaya, assuming the “winning of hearts and minds” together with the British Army as a “learning organization” was what finally ended up with the insurgency. Nevertheless, authors like Hack (2009) argue that the credit of this strategy to explain the victory may be exaggerated, as the high-level insurgency was already broken—incapable of turning the advantage of the British forces around—in 1950-1952, while the winning of hearts and minds was still in an early stage (Hack 2009, p. 384).
- 5.
“Currently, US military strategy is really nothing more than a bunch of COIN principles, massaged into catchy commander’s talking points for the media, emphasizing winning the hearts and minds and shielding civilians. The result is a strategy of tactics and principles” (Gentile 2009, p. 15).
- 6.
“[T]he killing stopped because there was no one left to kill” (Cockburn 2008, p. 14).
- 7.
For a statistical and geospatial analysis about the connection between increases on troops and increased security in Iraq, see Thiel (2011).
- 8.
“The guerrilla wins if he does not lose” (Kissinger 1969, p. 214).
- 9.
As observed e.g. with China and North Vietnam in South Vietnam or Syria and Iran in Iraq.
- 10.
The amount of troops in Afghanistan back then was the smallest US keeping force since World War II and the aid per capita much lower than the one received by Bosnia in the 1990s (Friedman 2014, p. 87).
- 11.
Additional information on the costs of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is available from Markowski and Hall (2011).
- 12.
Note that this payoff distribution is identical to the one discussed in the previous model.
- 13.
As the payoff distribution for the COIN forces is identical to the one in the previous model, its expected payoff by mixing the strategies will again never be higher than B 2. Likewise, for the Insurgents; E W∕DRAW AQI = p ⋅ R 2 + (1 − p) ⋅ R 4 < R 4; because R 2 < R 4.
- 14.
Note that in the model described in Sect. 7.3 any long lasting solution to the conflict would also be preferred to the rest of the options (i.e. all strategies with CHB) but because of the people-centric approach, a solution in these terms avoiding confrontation would be even better.
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Ordóñez, L.M. (2017). Modelling Specific Aspects of COIN Operations: On the Possibility of a First Mover Advantage. In: Military Operational Planning and Strategic Moves. Contributions to Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56108-0_7
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