Iraq Kill Rate Analysis
For the first time, the Iraqi Ministry of Defense is releasing fairly comprehensive fatality estimates for its own forces, American and other international forces, and a kill rate for the insurgent forces. The Iraqi MOD is claiming that 261 or more insurgents were killed in May. However, the Iraqi police lost 151 cops, and the Army lost 85 soldiers (recruits seem to be excluded). So Iraqi government forces are running slightly ahead of unity kill rates.However, when you factor in American, British and contractor deaths (via Iraq Coalition Casualty Count,) you need to add 72 more combat deaths so the insurgents lost 261 or more men to inflict 308 combat fatalities on the counter insurgent force.
Additionally, we must adjust for the difference in medical care; Iraqi military units sustain one death for roughly every two men hit. It is reasonable to assume that the insurgent units sustain the same casuality rates (3 men are hit by fire; 1 dies, 1 is out of action permanently, 1 can recuperate). So looking soley at Iraqi forces, the incapacitiation ratio still works slightly in the favor of government units.
However, US forces, due to superior armor and medical care, sustain roughly five incapacitating woundings for every fatality (on average) and four or five more minor woundings. The approximately 70 US combat deaths means that 330 other troops are also incapacitated (evacuated or removed from their units for at least 72 hours due to combat wounds). This increased resilency masks some of the effectiveness of the insurgent operations. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the insurgents lost roughly 500 men to any future combat operations in the month of May while inflicing roughly 450-500 permanent direct losses on the Iraqi government forces and another 400 US soldiers are out of action due to death or serious combat injuries. Therefore the incapacitation ratio is roughly 1.8:1 in favor of the insurgents. Against US forces only, the ratio is near unity.
So is this good or not?
The naive answer is that this is a good result as you would point to the charts I posted yesterday and argue that the counter-insurgent force has roughly 20 soldiers for every insurgent and therefore the correlation of forces are in the favor of the anti-insurgent force as time moves on.
However, as Stirling Newberry argued in a diary from December, 2004 this is not good news:
Now for the bad news, an occupying army losing at 1:4 against insurgents, in general, is treading water. They are not making any progress against the rebellion, and while they will be able to maintain power as long as they can recruit new troops, they are locked in what can be called "quagmire"......
If the Coalition is treading water, the technical term for the Iraqi Security forces is "fresh meat". The very same guerilla attack which failed against the coalition, would have driven out an Iraqi security group.
The guerilla command, and it is clear that there is some nominal form of networked control, must take a great deal of satisfaction that ground for ground they can fight the best defenses in country, and are superior to the Iraqi security forces.
Why do I argue that a smaller force (even if compared only against the international troops) that is taking near unity fatalities is winning? Simply because it has always been far cheaper, easier and quicker for an insurgent force to regenerate than for a counterinsurgent force to regenerate. Additionally, it is highly probable that the vast majority of insurgent fatalities and incapacitations are coming from direct combat with American combat units. In this arena, the insurgents are trading roughly 5 total insurgents killed or incapacitated for every 4 US soldiers killed/incapacitated.
If we are to assume that 70% of the guerilla fatalities are from direct combat with US forces, it gives an incapacitation ratio of 1 insurgent removed from combat operations for every 3 Iraqi government security trooper removed from combat due to wounds.
Given that the insurgents are operating on their home turf and are able to maintain successful cohesion despite high levels of pressure, it is highly probable that at these kill ratios that they can sustain their force through natural birthrate replacements without increasingly mobilizing their population for combat operations.
A short term draw that continues to undermine the effectiveness of the US Army and Marines to project combat power is a long term win for the insurgency as they have the staying power that the US does not have unless we institute a draft or decide to completely mobilize and stoploss the entire uniformed military for four to five years with the probable cost of destroying the all-volunteer force for at least a generation.
Time is not on our side.
UPDATE: I changed the language on the US wound:fatality ratio to clarify my point. Thanks to Harkenndogg for bringing up the murkiness of the language
Labels: insurgency, iraq
posted by fester @ 17:11
5 Comments:
Hi Fest,
What about captured insurgents? Or did you count those and I missed it? Also, what about insurgent desertion rates? Is there any way to figure this out?
"It is reasonable to assume that the insurgent units sustain the same casuality rates (3 men are hit by fire; 1 dies, 1 is out of action permanently, 1 can recuperate)."
Why is this reasonable? I mean the insurgents don't have the same access to medical care, do they?
Also, I think you are leaving out the non-Iraqi security forces. I mean individual tribal groups in Iraq are killing insurgents, especially Al Quaeda and other foreigners, too.
"herefore it is reasonable to assume that the insurgents lost roughly 500 men to any future combat operations in the month of May while inflicing roughly 450-500 permanent direct losses on the Iraqi government forces and another 400 US soldiers are out of action due to death or serious combat injuries."
Am I reading the above wrong, doesn't this assume only a tiny %, or even 0% of the 400 wounded US soldiers return to action? Is there a good reason to assume this?
Finally, that 20-1 insurgent vs. Iraqi security number- I find this to be the key- how are those numbers trending?
cheers!
Hark
Hark:
Really good set of questions. Let me start with the easy answers first:
Data source for US fatalities and woundings Iraq Coalition Casualties and severely wounded/incapacitated is categorized as the "Wounded" column which is defined as "wounded in action, not return to duty within 72 hours" There is also a wounded-returned to duty within 72 hours column with roughly the same number of minor wounds as major wounds. So in actuality it is about eight or nine Americans wounded to some degree for every fatality but four incapacitation wounds for every fatalitiy.
20:1 insurgent v. security forces can be found in a previous post of mine with the data pulled from the Brookings Institute Iraq Index. That ratio is combined anti-insurgent force v. estimated insurgent force and the trend on that is a slow increase. However the quality of that force is getting to be questionable.
Now onto the harder questions:
I am leaving out captured insurgents for a couple of reasons. First we know that the US ability to seperate chaff from wheat is pretty damn poor -60-70% of security detainees in 2004 were false positives so it says nothing about what happens on a sweep pulling in X amount of prisoners. Secondly, I can not find the countermetric of Iraqi security force desertion. This is a good question but I am hitting data limits.
As to why I believe it is reasonable to assume that 1 in 3 wounded insurgents dies of their wounds this is reasonable for both historical reasons assuming they have access to post WWI levels of medical technology. Recent evidence suggests that the insurgents are more likely to go into battle with some body armor which would shift both the severity of wounds and location of the wounds, thereby making them more survivable.
For non-governmental security forces, if you can dig up a source I would love to see this information but this was a data constraint issue.
But with all of this said, let's do a quick thought experiment, add in 1,000 legit security detainees, no Iraqi security force desertions, increase the incapacitation ratio from 2 out of 3 hits to 4 out 5 hits then we are only looking at a counter insurgent attrition rate advantage of 2 counter insurgent removed for every 3 insurgents removed. Even with favorable assumptions, the removal rate greatly favors the insurgents.
Interesting analysis, although I disagree with some of your conclusions. I blogged it at my place, http://pawpawshouse.blogspot.com with appropriate attribution.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Thanx, Fest. Good answers.
Pawpaw,
Really intersting take on Fest's numbers. thanx
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