On Swarming: Success and Failure in Multidirectional Warfare, from Normandy to the Second Lebanon War

Abstract

In recent years, the idea of ‘swarming’ – that is, simultaneous multidirectional attack or maneuver by large number of independent or semi-independent small units – became a subject of a heated debate. Some believe this is the future of warfare, while others see this belief as ridiculous and dangerous. In the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), specifically, swarming was heralded as the new way of war before the 2006 Second Lebanon War. But during and after the war, the word itself was turned into a derogatory term, symbolizing all that was wrong with the IDF’s performance: relying on new, untested and unrealistic concepts to pretend that the Army has a silver bullet which will solve its problems quickly and easily, ignoring reality in the process. This article draws on six historical case studies, from the American airborne operation in the Normandy Invasion to the Second Lebanon War, to examine the method of swarming, its relevance and its uses. Finally, the article concludes that Swarming is not a revolutionary method, and not ‘The future of conflict’. However it is a very useful method in certain situations, provided that commanders know and understand its possibilities and limitations.

Notes

1 Channel 10 News, 14 Sept. 2006, <http://news.walla.co.il/?w=/3850/974561>. See also Amir Rapoport, Friendly Fire: How We Let Ourselves Down in the Second Lebanon War,[Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Ma'ariv 2007) pp.231--2.

2 Also described as swarming after the fact were IDF actions which, if truth be told, had no connection whatsoever with swarming – not in the field and not in their operational objectives. See, for instance, Rapoport (note 1) p.176.

3 Compare, for example, Ofer Shelah, The Platter and the Silver: Why We Need a Revolution in the IDF [Hebrew] (Kinneret: Zmora-Bitan 2003) pp.39--49 with Ofer Shelah and Yoav Limor, Prisoners in Lebanon: The Truth about the Second Lebanon War [Hebrew] (Yediot Aharonot 2007) pp.196--200. There is no doubt that the problem with military language is particularly glaring when a comparison is made between two versions of the same task, the first given as an actual command, and the second a ‘classic’ version … as, for example, an operations order of the 91st Division from the last war which included ‘widespread, low-signature infiltration’ […] ‘pounce’ […] ‘rapid stabilization of the dominant areas and creating fatal contact with the constructed areas while creating shock and awe’ […] ‘freezing the operational zone and going over to dominationism while with systematic spatial dismantling of enemy infrastructure.’ This could be translated as ‘The force will advance in secret/will infiltrate the hills that dominate the target, will secure them, will isolate the zone of operations and will direct continuous fire at the village with the object of eliminating enemy fighters and infrastructures…’ It should be noted that what was actually done in Bint-Jabal was not precisely ‘low-signature infiltration’.

4 See, for example, my criticism of the book Decentralized Warfare by Yedidia Yaari and Haim Asa, Azure 25, Summer 2006, https://www.academia.edu/3818077/Confused_Warfare

5 John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000), p.vii, 21: hereinafter: Arquilla and Ronfeldt, The Future. On page vii, the writers explain the subject in a slightly more intricate manner: ‘Swarming is seemingly amorphous, but it is a deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions. It will work best — perhaps it will only work — if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units.’

6 Arquila and Ronfeldt, ‘Swarming: The Next Face of Battle’, Aviation Week & Space Technology, 29 Sept. 2003, http://www.rand.org/blog/2003/09/swarming----the-next-face-of-battle.html

7 Or, in the interests of accuracy, ‘expert systems using artificial intelligence technologies to coordinate accurate long-distance strikes with the decentralized and fragmented logistical maneuvering of the swarm units.’

8 James Blackwell, ‘The Dominating Maneuver’, in Tatspit 20, The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) – Proceedings of the Israel-American meeting, October '97 [Hebrew], (Tel-Aviv: Army Operations Department, Training and Doctrine Division 1998) p.43.

9 James Blackwell, ‘The Challenge of the Conceptual Confrontation with the Future’ – in note 8, p.62. Similarly, Major Eliezer Toledano, who was then deputy-commander of a paratroop regiment: ‘A decentralized type of maneuver that includes a large number of small units with an autonomous structure sharing a joint world view […] attacks its enemy from all possible directions with all the possible services [arms] simultaneously. (Eliezer Toledano, ‘Decentralized Warfare’, Glilot: the Tactical Environment Research Lab, 2003, IDF internal document, p.16. Toledano ‘defines the swarm tactic as a type of maneuver of all forms of fighting according to the nature and requirements of the tactical environment and acts on the tactic of locate and attack in anti-guerrilla operations.’ Ibid. p.17).

10 Gal Hirsch, ‘On Dinosaurs and Hornets – A Critical View on Operations Moulds in Asymmetric Conflicts’, RUSI Journal, Aug.t 2003, p.63.

11 Arquilla and Ronfeldt, The Future (note 5) p.viii.

12 David Howarth, Dawn of D-Day, (: London: Greenhill 2001 reprint of 1959 orig.) p. 79.

13 S.L.A. Marshall, Night Drop: The American Invasion of Normandy (1966). Unfortunately only the Hebrew translation was available to the Author, and the quote is translated from p. 403 of the Hebrew edition.

14 Quoted from John M. Taylor, ‘World War II: 101st Airborne Division Participate in Operation Overlord’, Military History Quarterly, Summer 2004, <www.historynet.com/air_sea/airborne_operations/3036676.html>.

15 It was estimated that in the first 24r hours of fighting the paratroopers suffered 20 percent casualties.

16 Among the plethora of books on Normandy, two authoritative works are worthy of note –John C. Warren, Airborne Operations in World War II, European Theater. (Maxwell AFB: US Air Force Historical Research Agency 1956) and the official American volume of the History of World War II, Gordon A. Harrison, Cross Channel Attack (Washington DC: Office of the Chief Military Historian 1951), http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/007/7-4-1/index.html especially chapters 7--8. More modern sources dealing with the American airborne divisions, in the form of unit history, are Mark Bando, 101st Airborne: The Screaming Eagles at Normandy (Osceola : Zenith Press 2001) and Phill Nordyke, All American, All The Way: The Combat History of the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II (Osceola:Zenith Press 2005). Also notable is Joseph Balkoski’'s Utah Beach: The Amphibious Landing and Airborne Operations on D-Day, June 6, 1944 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole 2005), which presents a very detailed picture of the American airborne operation's first 24 hours.

17 There is disagreement about whether Khe Sanh was a preliminary diversion or whether the Tet Offensive was intended to pin down forces so that the Americans could not reinforce Khe Sanh. It could also have been about combined efforts to achieve the same objective.

18 Quoted in Arquilla and Ronfeldt, The Future (note 5) pp.21,37. According to them, in the war, the Vietcong made extensive use of swarming against personnel, whereas the Americans fought back with decentralized fire – ‘fire swarming’ that was not particularly successful.

19 Don Oberdorfer, Tet! (Baltimore: JHU Press 2001 reprint of 1971 orig.) p. 140.

20 Victoria Pohle, The Viet Cong in Saigon: Tactics and Objectives During the Tet Offensive (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 1969) p.9, <www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM5799>.

21 This datum was verified by NorthVietnamese sources after the offensive. See Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin 1997 reprint of 1983 orig.) p.547.

22 However, NorthVietnam initially considered the offensive to have been an expensive failure. It later related to its effect on American public opinion, in the words of the NorthVietnamese General, Tran-Do, ‘As for making impact in the United States, it had not been our intention – but it turned out to be a fortunate result.’ (Karnow, note 21, p.536). Whereas the standard approach argues that public opinion in the US turned the war into a Communist victory, I, like Stanley Karnow, would argue that the initial impact was on the United States President and only after he decided to halt the escalation of the war and look for a way out, public opinion finally turned against the war. See Yagil Henkin, ‘How Great Nations Can Win Small Wars’, Azure 24, 2006.

23 Russian estimates at the time claimed the Chechens had much larger force. However, Sergei Stepashin, at the time head of the Russian intelligence services, said later his estimate was between 5,000 to 7,000 Chechen fighters, regulars and irregulars combined.

24 The battle for Grozny is described in detail in many books, among them Sebastian Smith, Allah's Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya (new edition)( London: I.B. Tauris 2006) pp.156-66, and Yagil Henkin, ‘Either We Win or We Perish’: History of the First Chechen War, 1994--1996 [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Maarachot 2007) pp.239--309. It should be noted that in the Second Chechen War, after the Russian Army had learned many lessons from its experience in the first war, there were fewer ‘swarms’, in particular when the Russians prepared their forces to deal with what they called the Chechen ‘saturation tactics’; Zachar-Guy Stulz elaborated on the Russian handling of the second war in his thesis, ‘Urban Warfare in the Soviet Army’, Glilot: Israeli Command and General Staff College, 2002, unpublished.

25 The assault, the preparations for it, and the background are described in detail in Henkin (note 24) pp.465--503. Quotes are from interviews conducted by Prof. Marie Bennigsen-Broxup with the Chechen commanders, supplied courtesy of David Dillege.

26 Kobi Katz, ‘Command and Control in the Infantry Division in Limited Conflict’, Tevunat Ha'Ma'aseh, 2004 [Hebrew], IDF Internal Publication.

27 Ibid.

28 In an interview with the writer after the operation, a soldier in the paratroop brigade's reconnaissance unit recalled that some time after he had taken up his position, he saw Palestinian Police passing by him in the direction of the Israeli lines to ensure that they had not left any of their men behind.

29 1 Brigade, Debrief of Operation ‘Defensive Shield’, IDF internal document.

30 Interview Aviv Kokhavi with Eyal Weizman, 24 Sept. 2004. Eyal Weitzman, ‘Lethal Theory’, Roundtable: Research Architecture, Sept. 2006, pp. 56--7, http://www.urbain-trop-urbain.fr/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Weizman_lethal-theory.pdf

31 I have particular difficulty in agreeing with Kohavi's argument that ‘the meaning of the area no longer has any importance […] there is no longer any value in standing in the center and proclaiming “I have won”’ (Ibid.). Even in ‘Defensive Shield’ in Nablus the surrender of the Palestinian fighters was achieved because, among other reasons, the IDF forces gained control of the area, even if they did not use conventional methods. Major Eliezer Toledano, deputy commander of the 890th Battalion in Operation ‘Defensive Shield’, explained in a treatise he wrote that ‘the meaning of holding an area has lost almost all its importance – the occupation of Nablus does not provide a guarantee that terrorists will be totally prevented from going from there to Tel Aviv and the occupation of Jabal Tayr Harfa [In Lebanon] does not prevent mortars being fired from the nearby village. A presence inside an enemy area […] does not guarantee the outcome as we learned from the classic confrontations of World War II.’ Toledano (note 9) p.8. There seems to be some confusion here between being in an area and controlling it – the problem of control in an area is nothing new, and even the Germans in Yugoslavia in World War II would have been able to testify then that ‘ A presence inside an enemy area does not guarantee the outcome.’.

32 See, for example, FM-90-10-1, An Infantryman's Guide to Combat in Built-Up Areas, (Washington DC: Department of the Army 1993).

33 It was said that a decisive contribution to establishing the operational idea used in Nablus was raised by a company commander and a sergeant, both apparently without any comprehensive knowledge of post-modern terminology. Weizman (note 30) p.57.

34 Barbara Opall, ‘Marines to train at new Israeli combat center’, Marine Corps Times, 25 June 2007, <www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2007/06/marine_israel_combattraining_070624/>.

35 Such a photograph can bee seen in Haaretz of 9 April 2002.

36 Weizman, (note 30) p.57.

37 Ibid.

38 Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, The Seventh War [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Mishkal 2004) p.252. According to Opall (note 34) the number was in fact 74. In the IDF’s own final report on Operation ‘Defensive Shield’ the tally is 79 Palestinian dead and 127 injured, IDF Internal report.

39 Amira Hess and Amos Harel, ‘IDF forces advanced slowly in the Nablus casbah; 5 soldiers injured’, Haaretz, 7 April 2002.

40 For example, in the First Lebanon War, an inferior Palestinian force (several hundred men in a crowded refugee camp with 30,000 residents) succeeded in holding up the IDF for a week in the Ein Hilwe Palestinian camp near Sidon and causing it casualties, in the face of an attack supported by armor, artillery and assault planes. See Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, Israel's Lebanon War (Jerusalem: Schocken 1984) pp.174--7; James D. Leaf, ‘MOUT and the 1982 Lebanon Campaign: the Israeli Approach’, Armor, July—Aug.2000, p.9. Whereas in Ein Hilwe the Palestinians had more RPG rockets than in Nablus, in the Casbah area armor was hardly used (apart from isolating the arena), not to mention artillery and attack planes, and the battle was almost entirely of infantry forces. In April 1945, a modest defending force of German cadets, managed to kill or injure three officers and 66 soldiers from the 6th Regiment (Highlanders), although the only weapons they had were rifles. John Ellis, Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (New York: Scribner's 1982). Unfortunately the Author had access only to the Hebrew version of the book, where this story appears on page 74.

41 The number of dead civilians was relatively small – Harel and Issachroff (note 38) p.252, record eight civilians killed when their house collapsed, with some sources claiming their house was hit by tank fire, and others – that it was bulldozed and buried them alive. There was no report of injured in ‘ neighbor procedure’ – that is, sending a civilian to persuade a terrorist to surrender (in the B'Tselem site, in the part dealing with the ‘neighbor procedure’ only one death was recorded as a result of the procedure – in Aug. 2002, and not during Operation ‘Defensive Shield’, <www.btselem.org/Hebrew/Human_Shields/Neighbor_Procedure.asp>, accessed 15 Dec. 15 2008.)

42 I am inclined not to agree with the approach according to which the employment of fire is an additional dimension, at least not from the planning point of view. And infiltration by fire is an oxymoron.

43 Apparently, ‘systemic demonstration’ is a kind of conscious activity; the use of firepower to create an impression.

44 Maariv, 21 July 2007, quoted in Shelah and Limor (note 3) p.197.

45 Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch (Ret.), phone interview with the Author, July 2008.

46 In Normandy, while most paratroopers did not fight in urban areas, the terrain was extremely limiting.

47 It is, obviously, doubtful if the Chechens would have devised the same plan if they had been faced by a different enemy …

48 Jon T. Hoffman, Chesty: The Story of Lieutenant-General Lewis B. Puller, USMC (New York: Random House 2002) pp.399, 588 n.18. A different version of the same story relates that Puller declared: ‘They are in front of us, behind us, to the right, to the left. They’ve nowhere to run!’

49 Blackwell, ‘The Challenge of the Conceptual Confrontation with the Future’ (note 9) p.62.

50 Toledano (note 9) p.30.

51 Blackwell, ‘The Dominating Maneuver’ (note 8) p.43.

52 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Lionel Giles (1910, reprint Blacksburg:Thrifty Books, 2009) p. 13

53 In the nature of things, the attempt to infer from a naval or aerial method to a land method is problematic.

54 Arquila and Ronfeldt, The Future (note 5) pp.23—36.