February 2, 2026

Michael Cessna

Michael Cessna is a former Active Duty United States Marine, a long-time personal protection specialist, security and defense analyst, military subjects instructor, general information researcher and amateur historian. He has been contributing security and defense writing since 2015.
The Mozambique Insurgency – Unpacking the Terror Network Behind “Al-Shabaab”

The Mozambique Insurgency – Unpacking the Terror Network Behind “Al-Shabaab”

Michael Cessna October 31, 2025 0

 

 

Since 2017, a war has been raging. Chances are, you have never heard of it. This war, in a remote part of the world, is poorly reported because the goverment is humiliated by its failures, and refuses to allow too much access to report on the fighting.

This matters to you, and to your wealth – because if the Islamic State wins, you will know it…and then some. But in the proximate, there is a serious blind spot that hampers even professionals from understanding the situation fully.

When journalists and analysts discuss the insurgency devastating Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, they often go out of their way to clarify that the group locally called “al-Shabaab” has no connection to Somalia’s better-known terror organization of the same name. But this insistence on separation obscures a more complex — and much more alarming and troubling — reality about modern jihadist networks in Africa.

The truth is that while Mozambique’s Islamic State affiliate didn’t emerge from Somalia’s al-Shabaab, specifically, it operates within a sophisticated transnational network coordinated from an unlikely headquarters: the mountains of Puntland in northeastern Somalia.

Map of the Cabo Delgado insurgency; situation as of in March of 2024. Map by WikiUser BlookyNapsta. CCA/4.0 Int’l.

The Name Game

Understanding the confusion requires backing up to 2017, when armed militants first attacked the small ocean port town of Mocímboa da Praia. Locals and journalists needed something to call this nameless group, and many settled on “al-Shabaab” — Arabic for “the youth.” It was a descriptive term reflecting the insurgents’ demographics, not a claim of organizational affiliation. Some called them “Ahlu Sunnah Wa-Jama” after their ideological roots, but “al-Shabaab” stuck, creating endless confusion with Somalia’s al-Qaeda-affiliated terror group.

Here’s where analysts are technically correct: Somalia’s al-Shabaab pledges allegiance to al-Qaeda. Mozambique’s group — now formally called Islamic State Mozambique (ISM) — pledges allegiance to ISIS. These are rival international terror networks that actively fight each other. So no, ISM is not an offshoot or extension of Somali al-Shabaab. They’re on opposite sides of the jihadist world.

But that’s not the end of the story.

 

 

The Puntland Connection

What many casual observers miss is that ISIS restructured its African operations in early 2020, creating a coordination hub called the “Al-Karrar office” based in Puntland, Somalia. This office, embedded within ISIS-Somalia, was tasked with coordinating support across eastern and central Africa — including Mozambique.

According to the United Nations, ISIS-Somalia in Puntland began coordinating support to Mozambique as early as late 2019. That support included tactical training (documented by 2020), financial transfers routed through agents in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and strategic guidance that transformed ISM from a ragtag local insurgency into a formidable military force capable of capturing towns and threatening major infrastructure.

The impact became clear in 2020 and 2021 when ISM’s operational capabilities dramatically increased. The group launched increasingly sophisticated attacks, culminating in the March 2021 assault on Palma that killed dozens and forced French energy giant Total Energy to suspend its $60 billion natural gas project. The coordinated three-pronged attack, use of combined arms tactics, and disciplined withdrawal all bore the hallmarks of external training and coordination.

Buildings destroyed during the battle of Palma. April, 2021 image from Voice of America (VOA). Public Domain.

 

 

Foreign Fighters and Transnational Networks

The transcript of recent analysis on Mozambique mentions captured fighters with “foreign accents” and non-local origins — and this tracks with what researchers have documented. While ISM is predominantly staffed by recruits from northern Mozambique and Tanzania, it also draws fighters from the Democratic Republic of Congo (reflecting connections with ISIS’s Central Africa Province) and other parts of the Great Lakes region.

ISIS-Somalia itself has become remarkably international, with fighters from Ethiopia, Sudan, Tanzania, and even Arab Gulf states joining the Puntland-based operation. Some of these fighters have reportedly moved between ISIS’s various African franchises, bringing experience and expertise with them.

This is highlighted by ISM’s amphibious operations in the Quirimbas archipelago, beginning in 2020.

Quirimbas Islands. November, 2021 image from Earth Observatory/NASA. Public Domain.

The financial dimension is equally important. ISIS-Somalia has become one of ISIS’s most profitable branches, generating millions annually through extortion, smuggling networks, and taxation. Some of this money flows through the Al-Karrar office to support operations in Mozambique and elsewhere, creating a self-sustaining transnational terror economy.

 

 

Why the Distinction Matters (and Doesn’t)

Analysts aren’t wrong to insist that ISM and Somali al-Shabaab are distinct organizations. The distinction matters for understanding motivations, tactics, and potential diplomatic or military responses. ISM emerged from genuinely local grievances — poverty, government corruption, marginalization of Muslim minorities, and broken promises about natural gas wealth. Addressing those root causes requires different approaches than combating an externally imposed insurgency.

But the insistence on organizational separation can obscure the functional reality: ISM operates within a transnational ISIS network that provides coordination, training, funding, and ideological guidance from Puntland. The “local insurgency” framing risks underestimating the sophistication and resilience of this network.

What this insistence on pedantic nitpicking masks, is a terrifying reality: the remnants of the Islamic State — largely smashed in 2017-2019 — have reorganized themselves into distinctly Western-style “Combatant Commands“, semi-autonomous, regional commands that are all solidly aligned to the IS leadership, but plan and execute operations in their zones as they see fit.

This reorganization has made the organization far more resilient, more flexible, and far harder to attrit by direct military action.

 

 

The Bigger Picture

The Mozambique case illustrates how modern jihadist organizations operate in Africa. Rather than monolithic groups expanding from single headquarters, we see franchises that maintain local character while plugging into transnational support networks. ISIS’s pivot to Africa has created a web of affiliated groups that share resources, expertise, and ideological inspiration while adapting to local conditions.

For Mozambique’s suffering population — more than 700,000 displaced and 6,100 killed since 2017 — the organizational charts matter less than the ongoing violence. But for policymakers and analysts trying to disrupt these networks, understanding the Puntland-Mozambique connection is crucial. Cutting the financial and logistical links between ISIS’s regional hubs and its various franchises may prove more effective than treating each insurgency as an isolated local problem.

The insurgents in Cabo Delgado may not be the same “al-Shabaab” that terrorizes southern Somalia, but they’re very much part of the same global jihadist ecosystem—one that has successfully established deep roots in Africa’s most vulnerable regions.

 

 

Why This Matters

Mozambique, despite its remote location on the world map, sits on very important real estate…not because of the natural gas finds of Total Energies, but because of its physical location.

As we touched on briefly in 2022, the grounding of the container ship Ever Given in 2021 severely up-ended world shipping, with effects that extended far beyond the six days it took to clear the Suez Canal. Likewise, the explosion in the port of Beirut, Lebanon in 2020. As our 2022 article alluded to, while those incidents were accidents, should a group coordinate similar incidents, such an offensive would devastate world commerce.

More to the point, a deliberate closure of the Suez Canal — unlike the missile and piracy operations of the Houthis in Yemen — would force a rerouting of all ocean-going merchant traffic around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope…which has to travel right past the war zone in Cabo Delgado.

Indian Ocean area. Historic map (1993), Library of Congress, via the Central Intelligence Agency. Public Domain.

And, again as we theorized about in 2022, multiple deliberate strikes like this present a clear threat to the economic vitality of the world, and directly to you.

The question is, are the real professionals paying attention to the nuance?

 

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To

 

 

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The Arsenal of Democracy’s Empty Shelves

The Arsenal of Democracy’s Empty Shelves

Michael Cessna October 24, 2025 0

 

 

 

By and large, your humble author has largely avoided talking about the war between Russia and Ukraine that entered its “hot” phase in late-February of 2022, even though it actually began in 2014 – but don’t expect the mainstream media to talk about that too much.

Breaking the “Fourth Wall” a bit, I hate politics, in general. I have strong and rigid opinions, and I am not going to beat dead horses here. So, don’t expect political moralizing. I write about the technical aspects of defense and security – which are completely agnostic, until some idiot decides that their juice is better than that of the other guy across the river.

Moving on.

There has been a toxic fantasy in the West – especially in the United States – that has arisen in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Caused by a putrid mix of slavish devotion among politicians desperately wanting to look good to voters, greedy and craven defense contractors, and military officers looking to pad their retirement portfolios, all of whom adopted the idiotic ideas of Alvin Toffler – a subject we recently touched on – have combined to weaken the military capacity of the West to levels of incapacity not seen in nearly a century.

After the Cold War ended, there was a frenetic rush to make the “butter not guns” dream a reality. The problem? Like all utopian concepts – especially when backed up with “sciency”-looking graphs and densely written tomes filled chock-full of techy-sounding wording – that paradigm drove Western defense infrastructure over a cliff.

What all of those lofty hopes-n-dreams deliberately ignored, was that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the only enemies left – so it seemed – were minor states, like Serbia and Iraq, and later, against various terrorist groups like al-Qaeda as part of the grandiosely-named “Global War On Terror” (GWOT).

The idea of a massive conventional war in Europe was completely dismissed as a thing of the past. In this, to be both as blunt and honest as possible, was a level of “genteel racism” that has run as an undercurrent (and occasionally not so “under”) through the psyches of the Western establishment, as massive conventional wars happened throughout those parts of the world the mainstream media chooses to ignore since the Cold War’s end.

As a result, modern (i.e., 21st Century) Western militaries are barely-hollow shadows of their former selves.

This particular Emperor’s lack of clothing became starkly apparently in 2022, as the war goaded into being by the “globalists”, led by Joe Biden’s autopen, revealed that there were no functional reserves of war material in the West, including within the United States…while Russia – with only minimal support from its allies – was able to easily maintain operations throughout the war, hysterical screaming from the Western/globalists.

Destroyed military vehicles on a street in Bucha, Ukraine, near Kiev, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, March 1, 2022. Picture by REUTERS/Serhii Nuzhnenko. CCA/2.0 Generic.

In a word – the “Arsenal of Democracy” is empty. And deliberately so, in the interests of greed.

 

Coming Clean

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte delivered a sobering assessment to London audiences in the summer of 2025: “Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO produces in a year” when it comes to ammunition. The statistic encapsulates one of the most profound strategic failures of the post-Cold War era – the systematic dismantling of the Western defense industrial base just as the world was returning to the high-intensity conflicts it was designed to support.

Three years after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine remains critically short of the basic ammunition needed to defend itself, despite receiving unprecedented Western military aid. The shortage isn’t due to lack of political will or financial resources, but something far more fundamental: the West simply cannot produce enough ammunition to meet the demands of modern warfare. What was once called the “Arsenal of Democracy” now struggles to keep a single medium-sized conflict adequately supplied.

 

The Arithmetic of Industrial Failure

The numbers tell a stark story. Before the war, [the United States produced approximately 14,400 artillery shells per month – roughly 180,000 annually. Europe’s combined capacity for 155mm shells ranged between 240,000 and 300,000 pieces per year. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces were using 2,000 to 9,000 shells daily in active combat – potentially consuming the entire annual Western production in a few weeks.

Russia, by contrast, ramped up to producing an estimated 4.5 million shells annually by 2024, supplemented by millions more from North Korean stockpiles. This allowed Russian forces to fire 10,000 to 80,000 shells daily at their peak – a volume that Western production couldn’t match even if every shell manufactured went directly to Ukraine.

The disparity became operationally decisive. The fall of Avdiivka in early 2024 occurred not because Ukrainian defenders lacked courage or competence, but because they lacked ammunition. Soldiers withdrew from a town successfully defended since 2014 simply because they couldn’t shoot back.

 

How We Got Here

The post-Cold War “peace dividend” seemed reasonable at the time. With the Soviet threat vanished and conflicts shifting to counterinsurgency operations requiring precision strikes rather than mass artillery barrages, Western militaries optimized for quality over quantity. Production lines closed, skilled workers retired, and long-standing supply chains atrophied. The assumption was simple: modern warfare would be short, decisive, and technology-intensive. Artillery-intensive wars of attrition belonged to history.

A recent academic analysis suggests deeper psychological factors at work. Western militaries over-invested in visible weapon systems – aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, advanced tanks – that could be showcased to signal military strength while neglecting unglamorous stockpiles of shells and propellant. Like luxury goods in consumer markets, these prestige platforms satisfied political and institutional desires for status while the mundane logistics of sustained warfare received inadequate investment.

The result: warehouses that looked full but weren’t. NATO’s own ammunition stockpile targets, set in 2014 to sustain a 30-day high-intensity conflict, were never met. When Ukraine needed support, European nations were drawing from “half full or lower warehouses,” as Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of NATO’s Military Committee, acknowledged in 2023.

 

The Response: Too Little, Too Slow

Western nations recognized the crisis early but struggled to respond effectively. The U.S. has invested billions to increase 155mm production from 14,400 monthly shells to 40,000, with targets of 100,000 by late 2025. Europe set goals of 2 million rounds annually by 2025. These are impressive percentage increases but remain inadequate to both supply Ukraine and replenish depleted Western stocks.

The problem isn’t just production capacity – it’s the entire industrial ecosystem. Explosive production, particularly TNT, relies on a single Polish factory. Specialized steel alloys, propellants, and precision components all face similar bottlenecks. It takes two to four years to establish new production lines for high-intensity military equipment, meaning decisions made today affect battlefield realities years hence.

European efforts face additional complications. The EU produces around 170 different weapon systems, with 16 different types of 155mm shells alone. Ukrainian soldiers call this diversity a “zoo,” forced to constantly recalibrate equipment as they receive incompatible ammunition batches. National defense industries resist standardization to protect domestic jobs and capabilities, creating inefficiency precisely when efficiency matters most.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy visiting the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania, where components for artillery and mortar shells are produced. Public Domain.

 

Strategic Implications

The ammunition shortage reveals uncomfortable truths about Western military power. The United States and its allies possess overwhelming technological superiority in sensors, precision weapons, and command systems. They can see the battlefield better, strike more accurately, and coordinate more effectively than any adversary. But modern wars – particularly wars of territorial conquest – still require mass. You cannot hold ground with satellites nor break fortified lines with precision alone, when the enemy can absorb losses and continue fighting.

Russia’s production advantage doesn’t reflect superior technology or efficiency – Russian shells are cruder and less accurate than Western equivalents. It reflects strategic focus and industrial mobilization. Russia maintained cold-war-era production capacity, kept supply chains intact, and prioritized ammunition stockpiling even when it seemed unnecessary. When war came, this unglamorous preparation proved decisive.

The West now races to rebuild what it spent thirty years dismantling. New contracts are signed, facilities are being constructed, and production targets are set. But wars don’t wait for industrial mobilization. Ukraine needs ammunition today, not in 2026 or 2027. Every month of shortfall translates to lost territory, casualties that might have been prevented, and strategic opportunities foreclosed.

The hollowed-out “Arsenal of Democracy” stands as testament to what happens when military planning assumes future wars will resemble preferred scenarios rather than probable realities. Preparing for the wars we want to fight while ignoring the wars we might have to fight is a luxury no serious power can afford – a lesson being relearned at terrible cost on Ukrainian soil.

Russia bet long, and is succeeding. The West bet short, and is failing….It’s as simple as that. The only good thing is that we are not in direct combat with Russia.

Yet.

I can’t tell you how we’re going to fix this, because there are entrenched actors in the West – in government, industry and military departments – absolutely unwilling to bend the knee to take the actions needed to fix the problems outlined above.

Not least, when the United States Army can only seem to feed its troops lima beans and toast on Thanksgiving.

Take note.

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To

 

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Continuing Disintegration – No Honor Among Thieves

Continuing Disintegration – No Honor Among Thieves

Michael Cessna October 17, 2025 0

 

 

 

 

The more things change, the more they stay the same. As we wrote back in January of 2025, the various terror, drug and insurgent groups in Afghanistan – not content with fighting each other- are poking what they see as a weakened tiger, in the form of a highly dysfunctional Pakistan.

With Pakistan clearly on the losing end of it brief – and terrifying – war with India in May, the various jihadist groups north of the Hindu Kush smelled weakness, and a steady intensification of attacks have been quietly growing, an intensification largely ignored in the wider world press, in favor of Israel v. Hamas, Ukraine v. Russia, and the “Gen-Z – Discord” revolts erupting in states from Morocco to Nepal.

 

Landscape of Afghanistan, with the Hindu Kush range in the background, and a T-62 MBT in the foreground. 2007 Public Domain photo by WikimediaUser davric.

 

The 2025 Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict that erupted in earnest in mid-October represents more than routine border skirmishes—it signals a fundamental breakdown in one of the region’s most consequential relationships. After decades of Pakistan supporting the Taliban as a strategic asset, Islamabad now finds itself conducting airstrikes on Kabul and trading artillery fire with forces it helped bring to power. The bitter irony is impossible to miss: Pakistan’s former proxy has become its primary security threat.

 

October Escalation

The immediate catalyst arrived on October 8, when militants killed 11 Pakistani military personnel, including a lieutenant colonel and a major, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Orakzai district. Pakistan’s response crossed a critical threshold — airstrikes not merely in border regions but directly on Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, targeting Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leadership allegedly sheltering under Afghan Taliban protection.

The fighting that followed was the deadliest since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. Pakistan claims it killed over 200 Afghan Taliban and allied fighters while losing 23 soldiers. Afghanistan counters that it killed 58 Pakistani soldiers while suffering only nine deaths. Both sides claim to have captured or destroyed dozens of enemy border posts. Independent verification remains impossible, but satellite imagery and verified drone footage confirm significant damage to Afghan military compounds.

The violence forced a 48-hour ceasefire brokered by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but border crossings remain closed and tensions simmer. More ominously, Pakistan has adopted what analysts call a “new normal” doctrine: any attack originating from Afghan territory will trigger immediate cross-border retaliation, regardless of diplomatic cost.

 

The TTP: Pakistan’s Self-Inflicted Wound

At the conflict’s core lies the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, formed in 2007 during America’s “War on Terror.” The TTP seeks to overthrow Pakistan’s government and impose strict Islamic law, demanding the release of imprisoned members and reversal of tribal area integration into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. What makes the TTP particularly dangerous is its ideological alignment with and sanctuary provided by the Afghan Taliban.

The numbers tell a grim story. The TTP conducted at least 600 attacks against Pakistani security forces in the past year alone, with 2025 activity already exceeding all of 2024. August 2025 marked the deadliest month of militant violence in over a decade, with 194 people killed and more than 200 injured in 143 attacks across Pakistan. Pakistani security force casualties in 2025 are on track to be the highest ever recorded.

The TTP has evolved beyond “simple insurgency“, threatening to expand attacks against Pakistan’s military-run commercial enterprises — fertilizer companies, construction firms, housing authorities, and banks. This represents a significant escalation, potentially bringing urban areas into a conflict previously concentrated in remote borderlands.

Briefly, a “simple insurgency”, as defined by Google’s AI search tool can be described as:

 

A simple insurgency is an armed rebellion by a small, lightly armed group against a more powerful, established government. Because they lack the strength for a conventional military conflict, insurgents use guerrilla tactics and rely heavily on the support of the local population to challenge the ruling authority. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Key characteristics of a simple insurgency • Asymmetric warfare: A simple insurgency is defined by the severe mismatch in power between the rebels and the government they oppose. Insurgents, often called guerrillas, compensate by using hit-and-run attacks and avoiding direct, pitched battles.
• Irregular tactics: Instead of traditional army maneuvers, insurgents employ a variety of tactics to weaken the government and increase their own control and legitimacy. These can include:

• Guerrilla warfare
• Terrorism
• Sabotage
• Propaganda and recruitment

• Protracted struggle: Insurgencies are not short, decisive conflicts. They are typically protracted political-military campaigns designed to outlast and exhaust the government through persistent, focused violence.
• Focus on the population: The ultimate target of an insurgency is not just the government’s military forces, but the loyalty and support of the civilian population. Gaining popular support is the key to success. Insurgents accomplish this by:

• Providing services
• Discrediting the government
• Gaining the trust of people in rural or remote areas

• Driven by ideology: While some rebellions are a temporary revolt, insurgencies are often fueled by a powerful ideology that explains people’s grievances and provides a vision for a new political order. This can include motivations based on religion, ethnicity, or politics.
• Control over territory: Unlike purely terrorist organizations, a central objective of an insurgency is to control resources and eventually establish an alternative government in a particular area. [1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

Simple insurgency vs. other conflicts • Revolution: A simple insurgency lacks the widespread, organized structure of a full-scale revolution, even though it may share the same goal of overthrowing the government.
• Coup d’état: This is different from a coup, which involves a swift, elite-driven seizure of government power. An insurgency, by contrast, relies on a protracted struggle for popular support and does not have the resources for a quick power grab.
• Terrorist organization: While insurgents may use terrorism as a tactic, their ultimate goal is different from purely terrorist groups. Insurgents aim to build an alternative government and control territory, while terrorist groups typically do not. [6, 7, 9, 10, 11]

Notes:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurgency
[2] https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/insurgency
[3] https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/insurgence
[4] https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/mr-history-page/MR-Categories-Guerrilla-Warfare/Daskal-1986/
[5] https://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/B4S5499XQ%20CounterInsurgency%20Measures.pdf?ver=2016-02-10-114636-310
[6] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP87T01127R000300220005-6.pdf
[7] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insurgency
[8] https://publications.armywarcollege.edu/News/Display/Article/3890242/the-challenges-of-next-gen-insurgency/
[9] https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/119629.pdf
[10] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/military-history-and-science/revolt-rebellion-and-insurgency
[11] https://www.britannica.com/topic/insurgency

 

Pakistan’s Strategic Blunder

The current crisis exposes Pakistan’s catastrophic series of miscalculations of the past. For decades, Islamabad’s military establishment pursued “strategic depth” in Afghanistan as a hedge against India, covertly supporting the Taliban even while publicly backing America’s War on Terror. The assumption was straightforward: a friendly Taliban government in Kabul would provide strategic advantage while ending Pakistan’s internal insurgency problems once American forces departed, by exerting control over the “Pakistani Taliban”.

Of course, the opposite promptly occurred. Since the Taliban’s 2021 return to power after the Biden Administration’s disastrous withdrawal from the country, the TTP has grown dramatically more capable and aggressive. Pakistan now faces an irreconcilable contradiction: the same Afghan Taliban it supported for decades now provides sanctuary to Pakistan’s primary internal security threat. Having invested enormous political and military capital ensuring Taliban victory, Pakistan cannot effectively pressure Kabul to eliminate TTP sanctuaries without undermining its broader regional objectives.

When Pakistan demands the Taliban eliminate TTP safe havens, Kabul either urges negotiations with the militants or claims inability to control them—sometimes both simultaneously. Pakistan’s leadership increasingly believes the Taliban deliberately weaponizes the TTP, either to expand Taliban-style governance into Pakistan or enable an allied Pashtun entity to control northwestern Pakistan.

 

The India Factor

Complicating matters further, India has pursued normalization with the Taliban precisely as Pakistan-Taliban relations deteriorate, almost certainly for that very reason – the brutal calculus of ‘realpolitik‘ usually wins, afterall. Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi visited New Delhi in October, with India announcing plans to reopen its Kabul embassy and calling the meeting “an important step in advancing our ties.” For Pakistan, which fought its brief war with India in May, this Taliban-India rapprochement represents strategic encirclement…which India well-understands.

Pakistan’s military noted the “serious provocation” of the fighting’s timing during Muttaqi’s India visit. The rhetorical shift is stark: Pakistan no longer refers to the Taliban as an “interim government” but as a “regime,” questioning their legitimacy to govern and calling for a more inclusive Afghan government. This represents a near-suspension of diplomatic ties between former allies.

 

Strategic Dead Ends

Pakistan’s options appear uniformly unattractive. Military operations against the TTP face fundamental constraints: the militants operate from Afghan territory beyond Pakistani reach, enjoy Afghan Taliban protection, and can simply retreat across the disputed Durand Line border when pressured. Localized clearing operations may temporarily displace militants but cannot hold territory without massive troop deployments that remain deeply unpopular among border populations.

Durand Line Border Between Afghanistan and Pakistan. CIA Image, 2007. Public Domain.

Negotiations offer no better prospects. Previous ceasefires collapsed when the TTP refused to compromise on core demands fundamentally incompatible with Pakistan’s constitutional order. The TTP’s demand for sharia law implementation and tribal area autonomy restoration cannot be reconciled with Pakistan’s governance structure. Moreover, the TTP’s track record of breaking agreements makes any deal inherently unstable.

Cross-border airstrikes — Pakistan’s current approach — risk escalating into broader conflict while failing to address root causes. The strikes humiliate the Afghan Taliban publicly, potentially driving them closer to the TTP and other anti-Pakistan groups. Pakistan is adopting tactics it vehemently criticized when India employed them against Pakistan itself earlier this year—a dangerous precedent that normalizes cross-border military action in a nuclear-armed region.

 

Regional Implications

The conflict’s reverberations extend beyond bilateral relations. China, with massive “Belt and Road” investments in Pakistan, watches nervously as infrastructure becomes militant targets. Regional powers including Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have urged restraint, recognizing that instability along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border threatens broader security. The Kremlin’s Moscow Format Consultations specifically pressed the Taliban to eliminate the TTP threat – pressures Kabul shows no inclination to heed.

Perhaps most troubling, the conflict validates Pakistan’s historical paranoia about strategic encirclement while simultaneously demonstrating how that paranoia drove the very policies that created current threats. By backing the Taliban as a hedge against India, Pakistan helped create a government that now shelters Pakistan’s most dangerous internal enemy while courting Pakistan’s primary external rival.

And this, in a nuclear-armed nation with a very shaky government.

 

No Good Options

As the temporary ceasefire holds precariously, at least for the moment – the fundamental problem remains unresolved: Pakistan faces an emboldened insurgency operating from sanctuary areas it cannot easily eliminate without destroying relationships it spent decades building. The Afghan Taliban, meanwhile, must balance protecting ideological allies against managing fallout from Pakistani military actions — a calculation complicated by its own limited control over remote regions and internal pressure from hardline factions…in public, at least.

History suggests leaders within the Taliban understand that Afghan governments ending up on Pakistan’s wrong side rarely survive. Yet the Taliban’s public posture suggests they believe they can continue supporting the TTP without triggering Pakistani countermeasures sufficiently severe to destabilize their regime. Whether this calculation proves correct may determine the region’s stability for years to come.

What seems certain is that Pakistan’s investment in the Taliban as a strategic asset has become a strategic liability of the first order — a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on militant proxies as instruments of state policy. The militants Pakistan once cultivated have become the militants Pakistan can no longer control, operating from territory Pakistan helped them secure. The tragic irony would be complete if it weren’t so dangerous.

…But.

The most important thing to remember in this swirling morass of barely concealed knives, is that the two main players – India and Pakistan – are both nuclear-armed powers…and no one, including them, is quite sure how steady are the hands on those launch keys.

Prepare yourself accordingly.

 

 

 

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The Myth of the Surgical Strike: Precision, Promises, and Reality

The Myth of the Surgical Strike: Precision, Promises, and Reality

Michael Cessna October 10, 2025 0

 

 

 

 

 

For the longest time, at least fifty years, military forces in the West – and especially in the United States – have held fast to the dream of “clean” warfare, where civilian casualties are greatly minimized, if not eliminated. This dream grew out of the nightmare of World War 2’s “Strategic Bombing” campaigns, which were not simply failures, overall, but verge into war crimes territory, if one looks too closely.

While technically requiring fewer weapons dropped, as “smart bombs” are certainly more accurate, the dream of airpower alone ending wars is still a phantasm of science fiction – for all the damage precision munitions can inflict, airpower alone stopped neither Saddam Hussein, nor the Taliban, nor the “Islamic State”. Those forces were definitely damaged by technology, but that damage did not stop those forces on their own, by any stretch of the imagination, or suspension of disbelief.

Modern militaries have spent decades cultivating an image of warfare transformed by technology — conflicts resolved through clean, precise strikes that eliminate threats while sparing innocent lives. Defense contractors promote weapons that promise “one target, one bomb” accuracy. Military briefings showcase grainy video footage of munitions threading through windows and down ventilation shafts. Politicians assure anxious publics that twenty-first century warfare has evolved beyond the brutal arithmetic of earlier conflicts.

The reality on the ground tells a different story.

 

The Promise of Precision

The evolution of precision-guided munitions represents genuine technological achievement. During the 1991 Gulf War, only 9% of munitions were guided, yet they accounted for 75% of successful hits, proving 35 times more effective per weapon than unguided ordnance. Modern systems like the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) can achieve circular error probabilities of approximately 20 feet, transforming standard “dumb bombs” into satellite-guided weapons for roughly $20,000 per kit.

GBU-31/32 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). 2006 photo by USAF. Public Domain.

These capabilities have fundamentally changed how militaries plan operations. Where previous generations of commanders compensated for inaccuracy through overwhelming volume — dozens, if not hundreds, of aircraft dropping hundreds or thousands of bombs to ensure target destruction — contemporary planners can theoretically strike with surgical economy. The technology exists, and in controlled conditions, it performs as advertised.

But technology is only one variable in an equation that includes intelligence, decision-making, environmental conditions, and the fog of war. These factors, environmental and otherwise, have not changed for millennia, and are unlikely to change anytime soon.

 

“Accuracy” Is Not “Effectiveness”

The critical distinction between “accuracy” and “effectiveness” undermines much of precision warfare theory. A weapon might strike precisely where it was aimed while failing utterly to achieve its intended effect, a phenomenon researchers call the “Precision Paradox“.

Consider the 2003 strike against “Chemical Ali” — Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein’s cousin and a high-value target. Two JDAM satellite-guided bombs hit his residence exactly as planned. The strike was accurate. It was also completely ineffective — Chemical Ali survived and remained active for months. When targets are hardened, mobile, or simply more resilient than anticipated, accurate strikes create a destructive feedback loop: the initial precise attack fails, requiring follow-up strikes, then more strikes, with each iteration expanding the circle of destruction and increasing civilian casualties.

This pattern repeated throughout recent conflicts. In battles like the siege of Mosul, accurate but ineffective strikes accumulated, generating precisely the widespread destruction and civilian harm that precision warfare was supposed to prevent.

 

The Intelligence Problem

Even perfect weapons cannot compensate for imperfect information. Precision-guided munitions hit their designated coordinates with remarkable consistency — but those coordinates are only as good as the intelligence providing them. One USAF officer notes that “the term ‘precision’ does not imply, as one might assume, accuracy. Instead, the word precision exclusively pertains to a discriminate targeting process.”

A view of an Iraqi Su-25 fighter aircraft destroyed in a Coalition attack during Operation Desert Storm. March 1991 photo by US Army SSGT D. Wagner. Public Domain.

This distinction matters profoundly. Military spokespeople describe “precision strikes” knowing that civilian audiences will interpret this as “accurate strikes” — a deliberate misunderstanding military force have little incentive to correct. Yet targeting failures remain common: the 2015 Kunduz hospital strike that killed 42 people, the 1999 Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade, repeated incidents of strikes on Afghan weddings and Iraqi civilian gatherings.

 

The Hidden Costs

The gap between precision warfare rhetoric and empirical evidence manifests in sobering statistics. Between 2002 and 2020, U.S. strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen killed between 10,000 and 17,000 people — with 800 to 1,750 confirmed civilians among the dead. More recently, drone strikes across six African countries killed over 943 civilians in just three years — casualties that governments either disputed or attributed to “terrorists.”

These figures understate the full toll. Collateral damage — the antiseptic military euphemism for dead civilians and destroyed homes — extends beyond immediate blast effects. Infrastructure destruction cascades into humanitarian crises: a “precision strike” on a power station is “surgical” in execution but indiscriminate in consequence when hospitals lose electricity, water treatment fails, and disease epidemics follow.

 

Environmental and Technical Realities

The technology itself faces inherent limitations that military public relations rarely acknowledge. GPS-guided munitions are vulnerable to electronic warfare—jamming and spoofing that can render satellite guidance useless. Laser-guided weapons struggle in adverse weather, smoke, and dust—precisely the conditions created by ongoing combat operations. An Australian military study found that 45.5% of laser-guided weapons used in early Desert Storm operations missed their targets due to weather, technical malfunction, or pilot error — hardly the “near-unerring accuracy” promised by manufacturers.

Extended Range Interceptor (ERINT) launch, c.2006. US Army Photo. Public Domain.

Moving targets compound these challenges exponentially. While military marketing showcases successful strikes against vehicles, such footage represents carefully selected successes, not typical outcomes. The failure rate for strikes against mobile targets remains classified, a telling omission.

 

The Attrition Reality

Perhaps most damning for precision warfare theory: history provides no clear example of precision strikes hastening wars to swift conclusion. Instead, conflicts like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine demonstrate that precision-capable forces still find themselves mired in grinding wars of attrition. When strikes prove accurate but ineffective, belligerents escalate to saturation bombardment — the very approach precision warfare was meant to supersede.

The U.S. military now formally institutionalizes procedures for civilian harm mitigation, acknowledging what operational reality has long demonstrated: even with advanced technology and genuine efforts to minimize casualties, modern warfare remains fundamentally destructive. Recent policy shifts — including the 2025 dismantling of offices dedicated to addressing civilian harm — suggest this institutional knowledge remains fragile and subject to always shifting political winds.

 

Beyond the Mythology

None of this argues that precision-guided munitions offer no improvement over unguided ordnance. They do, significantly. The problem lies not with the technology but with the mythology surrounding it — the dangerous fiction that modern militaries can wage “antiseptic” wars where force is applied with surgical precision at minimal cost.

This mythology serves multiple audiences. It reassures domestic populations that their military operates with restraint and discrimination. It provides political cover for interventions that might otherwise face stronger opposition. It allows defense planners to minimize discussions of civilian casualties by framing them as aberrations rather than inevitable consequences.

But for those living beneath the drones and missiles, the distinction between precise and imprecise warfare often proves academic. The “smart bomb” that destroys a wedding party because faulty intelligence identified it as a terrorist gathering is no less devastating than a “dumb bomb” that misses its military target. The family killed when an accurate strike proves ineffective and requires three follow-up missions experiences no comfort from knowing that each bomb hit exactly where planners intended.

The path forward requires abandoning comfortable fictions in favor of uncomfortable truths. Precision-guided munitions are powerful tools, but they remain tools of war — and war remains, as it has always been, inherently destructive and unpredictable. Acknowledging this reality doesn’t diminish efforts to minimize harm; it makes those efforts more credible and more effective by grounding them in operational truth rather than technological fantasy.

Until military and political leaders stop marketing “surgical strikes” and start acknowledging the messy, costly reality of modern warfare, the gap between precision rhetoric and bloody fact will continue to undermine both strategic effectiveness and moral credibility.

To restate what should be the obvious, war is inherently destructive; it always has been, and always will be. Sometimes, war is a necessary evil…

…Because sometimes, “peace” is merely another word for “surrender”.

 

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To

 

Bayesian Inference: A Framework for Skeptical News Consumption

Bayesian Inference: A Framework for Skeptical News Consumption

Michael Cessna October 3, 2025 0

 

 

 

 

The world of 2025 is a highly confusing place. For years, if not decades, the news has been a confusing morass, frequently presenting as “news” what the average person clearly understand to be propaganda, only to be denounced and shouted down if they dare to question the Newspeak. It can be both upsetting and confusing.

What is happening?

It’s not so much some overarching conspiracy, for the most part. Some of it certainly is, but the vast majority is news organizations following the dictum of, “If it bleeds, then it leads“. Certain reference sites, like Snopes and Wikipedia, frequently engage in “gray propaganda”, gently seeming to tell you one thing, but in a very carefully curated way, that actually tells you the opposite.

But – how can the average consumer wade through the haze? Below, I will briefly present the method I relay on, for the most part, in writing.

In an era of information overload and competing narratives, the average news consumer faces a challenging question: how should we evaluate new information when we already hold prior beliefs about a subject? The answer does not lie in abandoning skepticism, nor blindly accepting every claim at face value, but in applying a mathematical framework that has served scientists and intelligence analysts for centuries: Bayesian inference.

The Bayesian Approach: Updating Beliefs With Evidence

Named after 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, Bayesian inference provides a structured method for updating our confidence in a hypothesis as new evidence emerges. Unlike binary “true or false” thinking, Bayesian reasoning recognizes that most real-world claims exist on a spectrum of probability. We start with a prior belief — our initial assessment of how likely something is to be true — and systematically adjust that belief as we encounter new information.

The fundamental insight is deceptively simple: the credibility we assign to new information should depend on both the quality of that information and what we already know about the subject. Strong evidence should shift our beliefs significantly, while weak or contradictory evidence should barely move the needle. Recent research has shown that humans can be understood as performing Bayesian inference with systematic biases, suggesting our cognitive processes follow probabilistic rather than purely logical patterns.

Prior Probabilities: What You Think Before The News Breaks

Before evaluating any news story, Bayesian thinking requires honest assessment of your starting position. What did you believe before this new information appeared? This “prior probability” shouldn’t be arbitrary — it should reflect your accumulated knowledge, the base rates of similar claims, and the historical track record of comparable situations.

For instance, if a news outlet reports that a politician has been caught in a scandal, your prior probability should consider: How common are such scandals generally? What is this politician’s past record? What is the news source’s track record on similar stories? A claim that would be extraordinary for one politician might be entirely mundane for another, and Bayesian reasoning accounts for this context.

 

 

The challenge is that humans often have poorly calibrated priors. We overestimate the likelihood of dramatic events, underestimate mundane explanations, and let confirmation bias inflate our confidence in beliefs that align with our preferences. Studies have demonstrated that cognitive biases can distort public understanding and contribute to the rapid dissemination of false narratives, with misinformation spreading faster than accurate news because it aligns with existing beliefs and triggers emotional reactions. Bayesian thinking forces us to make these priors explicit rather than leaving them as un-examined assumptions.

Evaluating the Evidence: Likelihood Ratios

Once you’ve established your prior belief, the next step is evaluating how much the new evidence should shift that belief. This is where likelihood ratios enter the picture. Ask yourself: if the claim were true, how likely would I be to see this specific evidence? Conversely, if the claim were false, how likely would I be to see this evidence anyway?

Consider a news report citing “anonymous sources” claiming a major policy shift. If the policy shift were real, would we expect to see anonymous leaks? Almost certainly — major policy changes rarely remain largely secret until they are released. But if the policy shift were not happening, might we still see such reports? Also yes — media organizations sometimes run with unreliable tips, and disinformation campaigns deliberately plant false stories.

The key is that strong evidence is evidence we would expect to see if the claim is true, but not expect to see if the claim is false. Weak evidence is information that would be equally likely under either scenario. A photograph of an event is stronger evidence than an anonymous quote about the event. A leaked internal document is stronger than a second-hand account. Research on misinformation receptivity conceptualizes the problem as weighing the reliability of incoming information against the reliability of prior beliefs.

Common Pitfalls: Where Bayesian Reasoning Goes Wrong

Even when applying Bayesian principles, news consumers make predictable errors. Confirmation bias leads us to treat evidence supporting our existing views as stronger than it actually is, while dismissing contradictory evidence as weak or suspect. Studies show that people fail to update enough when truly strong evidence appears, remaining anchored to their priors even when they shouldn’t be.

Another common mistake is ignoring base rates—the background frequency of events. The base rate fallacy causes people to focus on specific case information while neglecting crucial statistical context. Dramatic claims about rare events require dramatically strong evidence, because the prior probability is low to begin with. A report of political corruption in a notoriously corrupt system requires less evidence to be credible than the same report in a historically clean government.

Media coverage frequently falls prey to this fallacy. If a person is shown a series of news stories about a particular crime, they may overestimate the frequency of that crime, even if it is actually quite rare.

Practical Application: A Daily Discipline

Applying Bayesian inference to news consumption doesn’t require complex mathematics. It requires disciplined thinking: acknowledge your starting beliefs honestly, evaluate evidence quality rigorously, and update your confidence proportionally. When multiple independent sources corroborate a story, your confidence should increase substantially. When evidence is ambiguous or sources are unreliable, your beliefs should barely shift.

The Bayesian framework doesn’t eliminate uncertainty—it manages it. In a media environment designed to generate clicks through certainty and outrage, thinking probabilistically is an act of intellectual resistance. It allows you to remain open to new information while maintaining appropriate skepticism, to change your mind when evidence warrants it, and to resist manipulation by those who exploit cognitive biases.

The news will always be noisy, biased, and incomplete. Bayesian thinking provides a rational method for navigating that noise without succumbing either to cynical dismissal of all information or credulous acceptance of comfortable narratives.

Conclusion

As I point out above, Bayesian methods are not foolproof – they can still lead to mistakes. However, overall, it is a good yardstick to start from. Why is this important? Because if you are reading this in the United States, you have the ability to effect change by voting – and if your thinking is skewed by those seeking to manpulate you, you need to be aware of how those parties are trying to manipulate you, because your vote counts.

This stuff seriously impacts your personal “bottom line”.

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To

 

Is Cyberwarfare Ready For Primetime?

Is Cyberwarfare Ready For Primetime?

Michael Cessna September 26, 2025 0

 

 

 

 

Within the military sphere, there are two constants: the idea that newerr is always better, and that a good goal to shoot for is to risk as few of your own people’s lives as possible…Neither of these things are true, but they do remain constants.

As we pointed out last week, the “newer is always better” mantra is fundamentally flawed, both in concept and in execution. The perfect example of this is a situation this author was made aware of just a couple of days ago: there is now, apparently, an offering out there for a belt-fed AR-15 type upper receiver chambered in .300 Blackout. To be clear, this is basically a toy for big kids with big bank accounts – it has zero utility for any real-world tactical application. The .300 Blackout cartridge is designed for a very specific role, at which, it does very well…but for anything outside that role, it is basically dead weight.

But it is neat.

This is not a digression – the .300 Blackout perfectly fits the “newer is always better” paradigm…but ignores the “general use” nature required of almost every type of “tactical” system. And, in line with that idea, is various drives for incorporating “cyberwarfare“.

The evolving landscape of modern conflict has fundamentally altered how nations project power and pursue strategic objectives…in the public eye, at least. As military and political leaders grapple with the complexities of 21st-century warfare, the integration of conventional kinetic operations with cyber capabilities has indicated the possibilities of both a strategic imperative and a source of significant operational challenges. This seeming convergence may represent a paradigm shift that demands careful analysis of the distinct advantages and limitations of each domain…or, it could be simply a re-branding of older, traditional tool kits, with eye-wateringly expensive toys.

The Traditional Foundation: Conventional Warfare’s Enduring Strengths

Conventional warfare retains several critical advantages that cyber operations cannot fully replicate or counter. Physical destruction remains the ultimate form of military persuasion — when infrastructure is physically destroyed, it requires substantial time and resources to rebuild. The psychological impact of conventional military action is immediate and visceral, creating clear demonstrations of state capability and resolve. Moreover, conventional forces operate within well-established legal frameworks under international humanitarian law, providing clearer rules of engagement and attribution mechanisms.

The command and control structures of conventional military operations have been refined over centuries, offering predictable hierarchies and time-tested operational doctrines. When NATO recognized cyberspace as a domain of operations alongside air, land, and sea in 2016, it acknowledged that traditional military structures provide the foundational architecture for multi-domain operations.

Additionally, a little-spoken of aspect of conventional warfare is that it requires little in the way of advanced communications, power systems or satellite support – those things all certainly help, but plenty of lower-tier conventional forces repeatedly fight and win without them.

The Digital Revolution: Cyber Warfare’s Strategic Appeal

Cyberwarfare, however, offers unique advantages that conventional operations cannot match. The speed of digital operations allows for near-instantaneous effects across vast distances, while the relatively low cost of entry democratizes access to sophisticated capabilities. Research indicates that cyber attacks have become increasingly prevalent, with Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine jumping by nearly 70% in 2024, surpassing 4,000 incidents targeting critical infrastructure.

The important thing to remember, though, is that cyberwar campaigns have to be targeted for maximum and immediate impact in support of the conventional battle, versus the “pre-kinetic” oeprational phase.

Perhaps most significantly, then, cyber operations excel in the “gray zone” between peace and war, enabling states to pursue strategic objectives out of public sight, while maintaining plausible deniability about what could be viewed as actual acts of war. This ambiguity complicates adversary response calculations and allows for persistent, low-level campaigns that can achieve strategic effects over time without triggering conventional military responses.

Integration Challenges: Technical and Operational Complexities

The convergence of conventional and cyber warfare presents substantial integration challenges. The UK’s establishment of CyberEM Command represents one approach to addressing the fragmentation of cyber and electromagnetic capabilities across different military units. However, coordinating across multiple government agencies and military branches requires overcoming significant bureaucratic hurdles and distinct organizational cultures.

At the same time, technical integration poses equally complex challenges. For states dependent on legacy military systems, those systems must interface with cutting-edge cyber capabilities, creating potential vulnerabilities and incompatibility holes while demanding substantial investment in both personnel and infrastructure. The military cyber security market, valued at $17.0 billion in 2025, reflects the significant resources required to achieve effective integration.

This creates a significant divide, where wealthier nations with stronger economies potentially have a distinct advantage over poorer nations. However, the inverse is also true, where the perception of dominance is not actually the case, because the poorer nation’s electronic systems cannot be directly impacted by the richer state’s cyber systems.

Strategic Advantages of Hybrid Integration

When successfully integrated, conventional and cyber capabilities create magnified effects that exceed the sum of their individual contributions. Cyber operations can disable enemy communications and sensors immediately before conventional strikes, while kinetic operations can destroy hardened targets that resist digital infiltration. This combined approach enables more efficient resource allocation and creates multiple dilemmas for adversaries who must defend across both physical and digital domains simultaneously.

Recent exercises like Cobra Gold 2025’s CYBEREX demonstrate the value of integrating cyber capabilities into multinational military training, building interoperability and collective defense capabilities essential for modern warfare.

The caveat, of course, is that the targets must be dependent on systems that can be attacked via cyber tools. This is the fundamental flaw in Tofflerian-derived concepts, because cyber advantages do not work in reverse.

Limitations and Vulnerabilities

Despite these advantages, integrated warfare approaches carry inherent risks, as noted above. Cyber weapons can be unpredictable, potentially causing unintended collateral damage or being reverse-engineered by adversaries. Analysis suggests that in sustained conflicts, cyber attacks tend to be “scattershot, unfocused and ineffective against hardened systems“, particularly military command-and-control networks designed with cyber resilience in mind.

The attribution challenge in cyberspace can complicate escalation management, while the interconnected nature of modern military systems creates new vulnerabilities. A successful cyber attack on integrated systems could potentially cascade across multiple military functions, creating systemic failures that purely conventional forces might better compartmentalize. Worse, cyberattacks, as happened with the STUXNET virus, can easily spread far outside the “cyber battlespace”, directly attacking the deploying nation’s own computer infrastructure.

Future Implications

As hybrid warfare continues to mature with AI-enabled operations and increasingly sophisticated state and non-state actors, military organizations must develop comprehensive strategies that leverage the strengths of both conventional and cyber domains while mitigating their respective weaknesses. This requires not only technological investment but also doctrinal evolution, training adaptation, and international cooperation frameworks that address the borderless nature of modern conflict.

The path forward demands careful balance – embracing the transformative potential of cyber-conventional integration while maintaining realistic expectations about what digital operations can and cannot achieve in the broader context of national security strategy.

“Newer“, as stated, is not necessarily “better“. Like any software implementation, careful thought needs to be applied to any new injection into the calculus, because there are “do-overs” in a “digital Blackhawk Down“.

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To

 

Toffler Delenda Est

Toffler Delenda Est

Michael Cessna September 19, 2025 0

 

 

 

 

There is a cancer at the heart of the United States Armed Forces, and therefore, Western military thought, a cancer that first appeared in 1970, and slowly wormed its way into the minds within the Pentagon. Those minds, desperately seeking to rationalize the failures of relying on “logic” and statistical analysis to frontline, “real world” combat developed by Robert McNamara and his “Whiz Kids”, swiftly absorbed the writings of an academic “futurist” couple, who had never been faced with the reality of any form of military service.

The toxic influence of Alvin and Heidi Toffler on US military thinking over the past 35 years represents one of the most consequential intellectual failures in modern defense policy. Through their seductive but fundamentally flawed “waves of warfare” theory, the Tofflers provided Pentagon planners with an oversimplified framework that has repeatedly led American forces astray, contributing to strategic disasters from Somalia to Afghanistan.

This has manifested into what Colonel Michael Pietrucha, USAF (Ret.) called the “Death of Military Strategy”, an apt appelation that has – unintentionally – contributed to the skyrocketing suicide rate among both serving members of the military, as well as in the veteran community.

The Tofflers’ central premise, outlined in their 1993 book “War and Anti-War,” posited that warfare evolves through distinct “waves”, corresponding to economic development:

  • First Wave: agricultural warfare
  • Second Wave: industrial warfare
  • Third Wave: information-age warfare

However, critics noted from the beginning that “the Tofflers have suffered some critical reviews of their work, especially concerning their selective historical perspective.”

The Seductive Appeal of Technological Determinism

The Tofflers’ influence coincided with America’s post-Cold War search for military transformation and “the American way of war’s fascination with technology and the search for that technological ‘silver bullet’ that will deliver victory quickly and with a minimum of loss of life.” Their theory, echoing McNamara’s insistence on the superiority of logically and emotionlessly applied statistical analysis and comparison, offered Pentagon leaders exactly what they wanted to hear: that American technological superiority would render traditional military concerns obsolete.

Their ideas became particularly influential among political figures like Newt Gingrich, who called “The Third Wave” one of the “great seminal works of our time,” and among military leaders seeking to justify massive investments in information warfare capabilities. By the early 1980’s, “the Tofflers’ work had begun to influence the thinking of some influential members of the U.S. military. And by the early 1990’s, the transforming U.S. military had begun to influence the thinking of the Tofflers.”

No doubt, this has been a massive boon to the defense industry, who were suddenly handed every excuse necessary to produce all the “latest and greatest” toys, at staggering prices…like the M1301 ISV.

The Fundamental Flaws

Military analysts began identifying serious problems with Tofferian thinking. Academic critiques argued that “the Tofflers’ concepts of First, Second, and Third Wave warfare are overgeneralized and distort historical understandings of Western warfare,” urging “military leaders to reassess these theories and explore the necessity for more nuanced frameworks that better reflect the complexities of modern warfare.”

Critics noted that while the Tofflers’ “approach is fundamentally sound, it fails to address transitional forms of warfare and omits conceptual changes in warfighting introduced by Gustavus Adolphus, Napoleon Bonaparte, and others.” The theory’s rigid categorization ignored the persistent importance of geography, culture, politics, and human factors in warfare.

And those last four factors are just the tip of the iceberg. Any “theory of war” that ignores – or worse, dismisses – those factors is guaranteed to fail, every time…as recent history has amply demonstrated.

Strategic Consequences

The Toffler-influenced Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) led to several catastrophic strategic miscalculations. The Pentagon’s obsession with “Third Wave” information warfare and precision strikes created a dangerous overconfidence in technology’s ability to solve complex political problems. This thinking directly contributed to:

  • The belief that shock and awe tactics in Iraq would create rapid political transformation
  • Underestimation of insurgent adaptability in Iraq and Afghanistan
  • Over-reliance on surveillance technology while neglecting human intelligence
  • The mistaken assumption that information dominance could substitute for adequate troop levels

Military historians noted how “RMA proponents over-emphasize the importance of technology in driving revolutionary change,” arguing that “leadership along with institutional, organizational, and intellectual initiative are equally, if not more, important than technological innovation.”

The Persistence of “First Wave” Realities

The ultimate irony of Toffler influence is how consistently “primitive” opponents have outmaneuvered America’s high-tech military. From Somali militias to Taliban fighters to Iraqi insurgents, adversaries using decidedly “First Wave” tactics – guerrilla warfare, improvised explosives, local knowledge – repeatedly frustrated America’s “Third Wave” military machine.

As one analyst observed, “It is the great equalizer, you don’t have to be big and rich to apply the kind of judo you need in information warfare. That’s why poor countries are going to go for this faster than technologically advanced countries.” The Toffler’s failed to anticipate how their own theories would be turned against American forces.

The bottom line is that in the 60 years from 1965 to 2025, the vast majority of land-based conflicts have been won by guerrilla or insurgent forces, using rudimentary uniforms, organization, weapons, vehicles, tactics, and propaganda strategies that are not far removed from World War 2. These forces – whatever their political or religious leanings – know what they want to accomplish, know their target audiences, and know how to use their available resources to maximum effect.

This is not a function of “disruptive” technologies like mini-drones or the Internet. Those are just democratized tools, all of which have countermeasures that can be quickly developed and deployed, as is now happening across the conflict zones map. Whet the Toffler’s ignored, is that technology disperses, eventually. The damning part of this, is that it was recognized as early as 1940 by professional officers of the United States Marine Corps – something the Toffler’s could have easily found, had they been doing actual “research”:

“…If marines have become accustomed to easy victories over irregulars in the past, they must now prepare themselves for the increased effort which will be necessary to insure victory in the future. The future opponent may be as well armed as they are; he will be able to concentrate a numerical superiority against, isolated detachments at the time and place he chooses; as in the past he will have a thorough knowledge of the trails, the country, and the inhabitants; and he will have the inherent ability to withstand all the natural obstacles, such as climate and disease, to a greater extent than a white man. All these natural advantages, combining primitive cunning and modern armament. will weigh heavily in the balance against the advantage of the marine forces in organization, equipment, intelligence and discipline, if a careless audacity is permitted to warp good judgment…” – FMFRP 12-15 Small Wars Manual (1940)

 

Screenshot of FMFRP 12-15 Small Wars Manual (1940). USMC. Public Domain.

 

Lasting Damage

Three and a half decades later, American military culture remains infected by Toffler-style techno-optimism. Despite repeated failures, Pentagon planning still prioritizes platform acquisition over strategic thinking, information dominance over cultural understanding, and technological solutions over political wisdom. The Tofflers provided intellectual cover for avoiding warfare’s fundamental realities, creating a generation of military leaders who confused gadgetry with strategy.

The time has come to recognize the Toffler influence for what it was: a seductive but dangerous distraction that cost American lives, squandered resources, and undermined strategic effectiveness when it mattered most.

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To

 

Ghosts of Victory Rising

Ghosts of Victory Rising

Michael Cessna September 12, 2025 0

 

 

 

 

Old things rarely go away forever. In military terms, many things are frequently relegated to museums. But sometimes – things lay dormant, “sleeping” if you like, waiting for someone to need them again.

Like, for example, old air bases.

Eighty years after B-29 Superfortresses thundered down its runways carrying atomic bombs toward Japan, the airfield complex at Tinian, in the Northern Marianas Islands, is awakening from its jungle slumber. What was once the world’s busiest airport in 1945 — with 40,000 personnel and four 8,500-foot runways — has become ground zero for America’s most ambitious Pacific military infrastructure project since World War II.

The U.S. Air Force has committed nearly half a billion dollars to restore this historic airfield in the Northern Marianas, with satellite imagery showing dramatic progress as over 20 million square feet of degraded pavement emerges from decades of tropical overgrowth. Fluor Corporation received a $409 million contract in April 2024 to complete the restoration within five years, transforming what Pacific Air Forces commander General Kenneth Wilsbach called an “extensive facility” back into operational readiness.

But this isn’t nostalgia driving American bulldozers through Tinian’s jungle. This is strategic necessity in an era of renewed great power competition. The reclamation project is part of the U.S. military’s Agile Combat Employment (ACE) strategy, which shifts operations from centralized physical infrastructures to a network of smaller, dispersed locations that can complicate adversary planning. Translation: China’s expanding missile arsenal can now reach America’s major Pacific bases like Andersen Air Force Base on Guam and Kadena in Okinawa, making distributed basing a survival imperative rather than strategic preference.

The timing is no coincidence, either. The Pacific Deterrence Initiative, established in fiscal year 2021 and modeled after the European Deterrence Initiative created following Russia’s 2014 Crimea invasion, represents the largest regional deterrence investment since the Cold War, with congressional authorizations totaling over $40 billion from fiscal years 2021-2024. Tinian sits at the heart of this investment, positioned strategically in what military planners call the “Second Island Chain” — a defensive arc spanning from Japan through the Marianas to Australia designed to project American power deep into the Western Pacific.

The Pacific Ocean is massive. Most people don’t think of this on a daily basis, as if it comes up at all, it is in the form of air travel, measured in hours. A modern United States Navy supply ship, moving at 20 knots (about 23 mph) will require a minimum of 13 days to move from San Francisco, California to Manila in the Philippines. For modern armed conflict, this is a crushingly long distance. As a result, maintaining bases across the wide expanse of the Pacific is not an optional decision. It is for this reason, that the Second and Third Island Chains have been defined, and why real money is being spent to fortify both strategic lines.

Pacific Island Chains Map, 2024. US Navy. Public Domain.

 

Recent analysis by the Hudson Institute suggests just 10 missiles with cluster munitions could neutralize all exposed aircraft and fuel facilities at major U.S. airbases, underscoring why dispersion has become doctrine. Tinian’s restoration provides what one Pentagon official described as critical “divert capability” if primary bases become “unusable” — a euphemism for what happens when Chinese missiles start flying with any accuracy.

The island’s compact 39 square miles and sparse population of 3,000 residents belie its outsize strategic importance. Located less than 1,500 miles from both Tokyo and Beijing, Tinian still offers the same geographic advantages that made it invaluable in 1945. The difference now, is that instead of targeting Imperial Japan, American planners are positioning combat power to deter — or if necessary, directly combat — Chinese aggression across multiple potential flash points from the Philippines to the South China Sea.

Work that began in January 2024 has already achieved significant milestones, with a groundbreaking ceremony in August marking “one of the most extensive rehabilitation projects in Air Force history”. RED HORSE engineering squadrons — specialists in rapid runway construction — have been clearing jungle and restoring infrastructure that lay dormant since 1946, when the last American units departed what was then the world’s most formidable air base.

The symbolism is inescapable: where atomic weapons once departed to end one world war, conventional deterrence now prepares to prevent the next one. History may not repeat on Tinian, but it certainly echoes in the roar of returning American aircraft engines.

Tinian Island, 1982, Northern Mariana Islands (MNP). USAF Photo. Public Domain

But…why? Why are both the United States and Communist China struggling so hard over the regions off the Asian eastern coast? In a word – money. Ocean commerce currently accounts for between $2.5 and 3 trillion of revenue, yearly, providing around 150 million full time jobs. Look around your house – chances are nearly certain that at least one expensive item within your sight came from overseas, unless you are living in a wooden hut – and even then, at least one of the tools used to build that hut probably came to you via ship, whether you realize it or not.

The world is getting progressively more dangerous as 2025 winds onwards. It is neither hyperbole nor paranoia to chant “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” when one goes to bed at night, because things have a tendency to creep up on you in the dark. It is for this reason that smart military’s only throw things that work away very slowly.

Including real estate…something that the BRAC should have paid more attention to.

 

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To

 

The Aluminium Taxi – The M113

The Aluminium Taxi – The M113

Michael Cessna September 5, 2025 0

 

 

 

 

 

Military vehicles develop slowly, and not in very predictable ways. Most of the time, the requirements for a military vehicle are largely divorced from what manufacturers actually come up with. However, sometimes, the stars align, and magic actually happens.

Case in point: the M113.

M113 crew firing their .50-caliber machine gun during South Vietnamese training exercise. US Army photo by PFC J.C. Rivera. Public Domain.

 

As World War 2 developed, the United States developed the M3 Half-Track, an odd – but highly effective – hybrid, with a wheeled front axel much like a truck, in front, with a “tracked” rear drive system that used what amounted to a very large rubber tire, stretched over a huge span.

While very strange, the M3 proved highly effective at everything from delivering infantry right behind the tanks, to light artillery, anti-aircraft and logistics, doubtless why some 38,000 ended up being produced. But, the half-track wasn’t perfect, and by the beginning of the 1950’s, the Army needed a replacement.

The M113 Armored Personnel Carrier stands as one of the most widely produced and utilized armored vehicles in military history, with its operational footprint spanning over six decades and more than 80 countries worldwide. The M113 is the unlikely gold standard for “battle taxis” arounf the world.

Since its introduction by Food Machinery Corporation (later United Defense) in 1960, the M113 has become synonymous with versatility, reliability, and adaptability in military operations across diverse theaters and conflict zones. While it can technically carry 11 troops, plus its 2-man crew, most current operators use an 8- or 9-man squad.

Originally developed to meet the U.S. Army’s requirement for a lightweight, amphibious armored personnel carrier, one light enough to be air dropped, the M113 quickly demonstrated its value well beyond its initial design parameters. Two prototypes were initially produced, the aluminium-hulled T113 and the steel-hulled T114. The aluminum hull construction provided substantial weight savings compared to steel alternatives while maintaining adequate protection against small arms fire and artillery fragments. In contrast, the steel hulled design, owing to the severe weight restrictions set by the design targets, offered no greater protection than the aluminum hull. This lightweight design enabled the vehicle to achieve speeds of up to 42 mph on roads and maintain mobility across various terrains, from jungle environments to desert conditions.

US Army infantrymen armed with M16A1 rifles unload from an M113 armored personnel carrier during a training exercise, 1985. US Army photo. Public Domain.

The Vietnam War marked the M113’s combat debut and established its reputation for durability under harsh conditions. American forces employed thousands of M113s in Southeast Asia, where the vehicle’s amphibious capabilities proved invaluable in the Mekong Delta‘s waterlogged terrain. The “Green Dragon,” as it became known, served not only as a troop transport but also as a command post, ambulance, and fire support platform. Its aluminum armor, while initially questioned, demonstrated remarkable resistance to mines and improvised explosive devices, contributing to crew survivability rates that exceeded expectations.

International adoption of the M113 family has been unprecedented in armored vehicle history. Countries ranging from NATO allies to Middle Eastern nations, Asian powers, and African states have incorporated various M113 variants into their military arsenals. Australia, for instance, has operated M113s since the 1960’s and continues upgrading these platforms for modern operations. Similarly, nations like Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands have maintained M113 fleets for decades, a testament to the platform’s capabilities in severe environments showing its enduring utility and cost-effectiveness.

The M113’s modular design has facilitated extensive variant development, with over 40 different “official” configurations currently documented. These include the M106 mortar carrier, M577 command post vehicle, M901 Improved TOW Vehicle, and M163 Vulcan Air Defense System; one variant, the M752, was built to launch the MGM-52 Lance tactical missile, which could launch nuclear warheads. This adaptability has allowed military forces to maximize their investment by utilizing a common chassis for multiple mission requirements, simplifying logistics, maintenance, and training procedures.

Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment drive an M-163 20mm Vulcan self-propelled anti-aircraft gun system to a refueling area during Operation Desert Shield, c.1990-1991. US Army photo by SPC. Samuel Henry. Public Domain.

Production numbers underscore the M113’s global impact, with over 80,000 units manufactured across multiple production lines in the United States and licensed manufacturing facilities internationally. Countries including Italy, Turkey, and South Korea have produced their own variants, often incorporating indigenous modifications to meet specific operational requirements. This distributed production model has enhanced the platform’s accessibility and sustainability for allied nations.

Contemporary operations continue to validate the M113’s relevance in modern warfare. During conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, various nations deployed upgraded M113 variants equipped with enhanced armor packages, digital communication systems, and improved weapon stations. The platform’s relatively low signature and proven mechanical reliability have made it suitable for peacekeeping missions, border patrol duties, and domestic security operations.

The M113’s influence extends beyond traditional military applications. Law enforcement agencies, particularly SWAT teams and tactical units, have adopted surplus M113s for high-risk operations. Emergency services have converted these vehicles for disaster response, leveraging their mobility and protection in hazardous environments. This civilian adaptation demonstrates the platform’s fundamental design soundness and operational flexibility.

Modernization programs worldwide continue extending the M113’s service life well into the 21st century. Upgrade packages typically include improved armor protection, digital battlefield management systems, enhanced powertrains, and modernized weapon systems. Countries like Australia have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in comprehensive M113 upgrade programs, indicating long-term confidence in the platform’s viability.

Canadian Air-Defense, Anti-Tank System (ADATS), built on an M113 chassis, on display during the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo, 2008. Photo by Jonathon A.H., 2008. CCA/3.0

The M113’s legacy encompasses not only its direct military impact but also its influence on subsequent armored vehicle development. Design principles established with the M113 – including aluminum construction, amphibious capability, and modular architecture – have informed modern infantry fighting vehicle development programs worldwide.

Today, despite being supplemented or replaced by newer platforms in some applications, the M113 remains actively deployed across numerous conflict zones and operational theaters. Its combination of proven reliability, operational versatility, and cost-effectiveness ensures continued relevance in military inventories globally.

The M113’s near-seven decades of service represents an exceptional achievement in military vehicle design, establishing standards for durability and adaptability that continue influencing contemporary armored vehicle development. This enduring success reflects not merely engineering excellence but also a fundamental understanding of operational requirements that transcend technological generations.

Try as it has, the US Army has not been able to completely retire the M113, although it has, yet again, announced its imminent demise. Why is this the case? After all, the M113 was designed in the 1950’s, right? well, so was the AR-15, from which we got both the M16 and the M4, neither of which have been fully replaced, either.

The answer, then, is:

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

 

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To

 

Only Dropped Once…

Only Dropped Once…

Michael Cessna August 29, 2025 0

 

 

 

 

 

In the military sphere, there is a great deal of ribbing and catcalling, both between different services of a nation’s armed forces, but also between the forces of different countries. For the most part, this ribbing is good-natured fun, especially when it is based on actual reality.

However, there has been a highly toxic level of mocking applied to the armed forces of France, a situation that has been getting worse over the last forty years.

The jokes abound – the beret being designed to facilitate surrender by not getting in the way of raising one’s hands; the notion of French tanks having more reverse gears than forward one; the idea that French genes could not be improved after World War 1 because American troops widely used prophylactics; and the idea that French rifles are excellent as surplus…because they were “only dropped once“…something applied to the Army of South Vietnam, as well.

It’s one thing, to make these jokes in actual jest. It is another thing entirely, when they become statements. Then, it’s no longer funny, but suicidally insulting.

In fact, the French military has maintained a track record of success on the battlefield for centuries. The source of these juvenile statements of inability only date from the Franco-Prussian War, and its catastrophic cost to the country. The military’s troubles in World War 1 came from holding the Imperial German Army at bay for three years, at a cost of 1.4 million casualties.

While the disaster of the opening of World War 2 led to France’s conquest by Nazi Germany, France’s military plan was not a bad plan, just a plan poorly executed…and the British did not do very well, then, either. The collapse of France’s colonial empire after World War 2 did come from overly ambitious military plans formed by not understanding that colonial warfare had changed…something the United States also failed to grasp, in the exact same place as Dien Bien Phu, a decade prior.

The fact is that, for all of it’s messy problems in the last century, the French military remains one of the most capable armed forces on the planet – if their leaders allow their generals to do their jobs.

The French Army’s reputation for military professionalism, despite its dramatic fluctuations over the past two centuries, has created a complex narrative that defies simple description. From the revolutionary fervor of the Napoleonic era to the post-WW2 colonial campaigns and modern peacekeeping operations, France’s military has continually demonstrated both exceptional competence and notable – but recoverable – failures that continue to shape perceptions today.

The Napoleonic Foundation

The modern French Army’s professional identity was forged in the crucible of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815). Napoleon’s Grande Armée established standards of tactical innovation, logistical organization, and battlefield leadership that influenced military thinking across Europe, down to today. The army’s meritocratic promotion system, revolutionary at the time, created a professional officer corps based on ability rather than aristocratic birth. This period saw the development of combined arms tactics, the corps system, and sophisticated staff work that demonstrated clear military professionalism.

Vive l’Empereur! Charge of the 4th Hussars at the battle of Friedland, 14 June 1807. 1891 painting by Édouard Detaille. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Public Domain.

 

However, even during this golden age, the French military exhibited characteristics that would later prove problematic. The cult of offensive action (offensive à outrance) and the emphasis on élan over methodical planning became deeply embedded in French military culture, later contributing to both spectacular victories and catastrophic defeats.

19th Century Trials and Adaptations

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 exposed serious deficiencies in post-Napoleonic French military professionalism. Poor intelligence, inadequate logistics, and outdated tactical thinking led to decisive defeat and the collapse of the Second Empire. The subsequent creation of the Third Republic saw significant military reforms, including the establishment of improved staff colleges and the modernization of equipment and tactics.

The colonial period (1830s-1960s) presents a particularly complex chapter in French military professionalism. The conquest of Algeria, the expansion into West and Equatorial Africa, and campaigns in Indochina demonstrated considerable tactical adaptability and logistical capability over vast distances. French colonial forces also developed expertise in irregular warfare, cultural adaptation, and civil-military cooperation that proved valuable in diverse environments, although these advantages rarely translated into warfare on the European continent, which was common to all the major European powers.

Yet this same period saw the development of what critics term “colonial habits” – reliance on superior firepower against less-equipped opponents, acceptance of harsh methods, and a certain detachment from metropolitan oversight that would later create problems in conventional conflicts.

World War I: Staying Power

The Great War stretched French military professionalism to its limits. Initial disasters, including the failure of Plan XVII and massive casualties from adherence to offensive doctrine, gave way to remarkable adaptation under pressure. The French Army demonstrated institutional learning capacity, rapidly developing new tactics for trench warfare, integrating new technologies, and maintaining cohesion through four years of unprecedented carnage.

French infantry pushing through enemy barbed wire, 1915. Agence de presse Meurisse. Public Domain.

 

The performance of French commanders like Ferdinand Foch and Philippe Pétain, along with the army’s ability to absorb and integrate lessons from the battlefield, demonstrated core professional competencies. However, the trauma of the war also reinforced defensive thinking that would prove problematic in the next conflict.

1940: Collapse and Recovery

The defeat of 1940 represents perhaps the most significant challenge to claims of French military professionalism. Despite having numerically superior and often technically advanced equipment, the French Army was comprehensively outmaneuvered by German forces employing innovative combined arms tactics. Analysis reveals multiple professional failures: inadequate intelligence, poor communications, inflexible command structures, and outdated operational concepts.

Yet the same period saw examples of French military professionalism in different contexts. The Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle, though small, maintained military traditions and eventually contributed significantly to the liberation of France. The French Resistance, while not strictly military, demonstrated tactical innovation and operational security that impressed Allied observers.

Colonial Wars and Professional Dilemmas

The post-war colonial defeats in Indochina (1946-1954) and Algeria (1954-1962) present perhaps the most controversial chapters in assessing French military professionalism. In Indochina, French forces demonstrated remarkable tactical competence in difficult conditions, developing techniques counterinsurgency and showing considerable adaptability. However, strategic failures and political constraints ultimately led to defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

The Algerian War proved even more problematic. While French forces achieved significant tactical successes against the FLN, the conflict saw disturbing breakdowns in professional conduct, including widespread use of torture and involvement in attempted coups against the civilian government. The Battle of Algiers (1956-1957) exemplified this tension between tactical effectiveness and questionable methods.

Since 1962, the French Army has undergone a significant revamping of its professional nature. The end of conscription in 1996 created an all-volunteer force with higher educational standards and improved training. French forces have demonstrated competence in various international operations, from peacekeeping in the Balkans to counterterrorism operations in the Sahel region of Africa.

Operations like Serval (2013) and Barkhane (2014-2022) in Mali showcased French capabilities in rapid deployment, intelligence gathering, and coordination with international partners. These operations demonstrated institutional learning from previous colonial experiences while maintaining focus on legitimate military objectives.

And it is here, that a more detailed look at Operation Serval is instructive on just how adaptable French forces can be.

Strategic Challenges of Operation Serval (2013)

Operation Serval presented the French military with a complex array of strategic challenges that tested every aspect of modern expeditionary warfare capabilities. The intervention in the war in Mali, launched on January 11, 2013, required France to project power across 4,000 kilometers into the heart of the Sahel region under severe time constraints and with limited initial international support.

Geographical and Logistical Complexity

Mali’s vast territory — larger than France and Germany combined — posed immediate strategic challenges. The northern regions under jihadist control encompassed over 800,000 square kilometers of desert and semi-arid terrain with minimal infrastructure. French forces faced the fundamental problem of securing lines of communication across this enormous space while maintaining operational tempo against a mobile enemy well-adapted to the local environment.

The logistical challenge proved particularly acute given Mali’s landlocked position and limited transportation infrastructure. France had to establish supply chains through multiple African partners, primarily using bases in Ivory Coast, Chad, and Niger. The single major airfield at Bamako created a critical vulnerability, while the absence of reliable road networks forced heavy reliance on air transport for sustained operations. This logistical complexity demanded unprecedented coordination between French forces, African partners, and international allies.

Map of the conflict in Northern Mali, c.2013, by WikiUser Orionist. CCA/3.0.

 

Time Sensitivity and Strategic Surprise

Perhaps the most critical challenge was the compressed timeline. Intelligence indicated that jihadist forces were preparing to advance south toward Bamako, Mali’s capital, potentially within days of the French decision to intervene. This left no time for the deliberate planning and force buildup typical of major military operations. French planners had to balance the immediate need to halt jihadist momentum with the longer-term requirement to establish sustainable operations across northern Mali.

The rapid deployment requirement meant accepting significant strategic risks. Initial French forces numbered fewer than 1,000 troops — inadequate for controlling territory, but sufficient to provide a rapid response capability. This created a dangerous window where French forces operated with minimal reserves while still building combat power in theater.

Coalition Building Under Pressure

France faced the delicate challenge of building international legitimacy while maintaining operational flexibility. The African Union had authorized the African-led International Support Mission to Mali (AFISMA), but this force remained months from deployment. France needed to demonstrate that Serval was not another unilateral European intervention in Africa, while simultaneously retaining command authority essential for rapid operations.

The diplomatic challenge extended to securing overflight rights, basing agreements, and logistics support from multiple African and European partners. Each agreement required careful negotiation to balance French operational needs with partner nation sensitivities about sovereignty and post-colonial relationships.

French officer making contact with the population in southern Mali. 2016 photo by WikiUser TM1972. CCA/4.0 Int’l.

 

Enemy Adaptation and Asymmetric Threats

The jihadist coalition in northern Mali presented a sophisticated opponent that combined conventional capabilities with insurgent tactics. Groups like AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) had years to prepare defensive positions and supply caches across the region. They possessed advanced weaponry captured from Libyan stockpiles, including anti-aircraft systems that threatened French air operations.

More challenging was the enemy’s ability to blend into local populations and exploit grievances against the Malian government. French forces had to distinguish between ideological jihadists and local groups with legitimate political grievances, while avoiding civilian casualties that could undermine popular support for the intervention.

Strategic Success Despite Constraints

Despite these formidable challenges, Operation Serval achieved its strategic objectives within weeks. French forces halted jihadist advances, secured major population centers, and degraded enemy capabilities sufficiently to allow AFISMA deployment. The operation demonstrated sophisticated understanding of modern warfare’s political dimensions—achieving military objectives while building conditions for successful transition to international peacekeeping forces.

The strategic challenges of Serval illustrate the complexity of contemporary expeditionary operations and highlight the French military’s capacity for rapid, effective intervention in challenging operational environments. This success provides compelling evidence of institutional competence that deserves recognition in serious strategic analysis.

Contemporary Assessment

Today’s French Army exhibits many characteristics of a professional military force: clear command structures, standardized training, integration with NATO allies, and adherence to international laws of war. However, debates continue about the persistence of certain cultural traits from earlier periods, particularly regarding operations in former colonial territories.

The French military’s professional reputation ultimately rests on its demonstrated capacity for adaptation, institutional learning, and technical competence across diverse operational environments. While historical controversies remain, the modern force has largely addressed the systemic issues that plagued earlier generations, creating a military organization that generally meets contemporary standards of professionalism.

Conclusion

The French military faces challenges, to be sure. But other, larger forces – usually with highly inflated perceptions of their own ability – face whose same challenges, as all armed forces try to navigate the swirling tempest of the emerging “One-N-Twenty“.

Don’t write off an army because of some bumps over the course of several centuries: You make mistakes, too.

 

 

 

 

The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To

 

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