Taraki's Column

19th April 1998

Wanni: where numbers don’t count

By Taraki

The army is made up of nine divisions. Of these Div.1 and Div. 2 are not full strength ones. Therefore, we can say that the regular fighting capacity of the army, in numerical terms, is limited to seven divisions in the field.

Out of these, six divisions are stationed in the northern province. Jaffna has two -51 and 52 and four- 54,55,56 and 53- are concentrated in the Wanni, committed mainly to opening the Kandy road between Mankulam and Kilinochchi. ( Here I have not accounted for the Sri Lanka Army Volunteer Force and HQ units for obvious reasons).

This concentration of forces was achieved in accordance with the strongly held belief that the UNP government had let the LTTE thrive in the north by having the armed forces spread in ungainful holding operations mostly in the eastern province. Many western and some Indian defence specialists forcibly argued at that time that the best way to weaken the LTTE was by achieving a concentration of forces in the north "and hit hard".

This view, according to its enthusiastic proponents, among whom were some RAW officials, was proved absolutely correct (or so they earnestly believed) when the army was 'victorious' in Jaffna, bringing the peninsula under the government's control after a gap of more than eight years.

The next natural step therefore was to concentrate forces once again, even at the expense of losing large chunks of real estate in the east to the LTTE, to open the Main Supply Route to Jaffna through the Wanni.

All this is much hacked stuff. True. But what we are looking at here, critically in hindsight, is the conventional wisdom of achieving overwhelming numerical superiority over the opponent by concentrating one's forces as the PA has done in the north .

The advantages conferred on infantry by the mass production of guns and the spectacular successes of Napolean in Europe and the victory of the northern forces in the American civil war, endeared the twin, inter-related concepts of numerical superiority and the concentration of forces to most western strategists.

Historically the skilled warrior was unwittingly considered extinct as the key factor in deciding the outcome of battles.

Prof. Archer Jones, the military historian at the US Army Command and General Staff College notes in his magnum opus -

"The size of the armies was assuming greater importance in combat. In battles between Greek Hoplites of equal strength, skill counted more than numbers........ Through the sixteenth century and for some time after, skill continued to have more significance than quantity: fronts remained equal as generals carefully anchored their flanks on obstacles.

But the use of musket and artillery gradually involved more men than the front rank alone, and when turning and enveloping movements extended battle lines, numbers became increasingly important. Not only could a larger army lengthen its front more readily, but could easily bring more men into action.

Thus on a discontinuous front or as a result of a movement against the flank, the greater force might engage two battalions against one. A commander using his numerical superiority in this way attained an advantage that was more than proportional to his greater numbers."

F.W Lanchester, a military theorist, formulated a rule called the 'N-square law' to explain the advantage of numerical superiority which is often achieved through the concentration of forces.

The rule gives one an insight into the nature of the kind of theoretical kernels which lie unconsciously embedded in much of the military strategy of the Sri Lankan army officer corps of which is inevitably imbued with conventional western military wisdom and the numerous assumptions which underlie its science.

Lanchester's law says "If all men of two forces, equal in skill but unequal in size, could fire at one another, each combatant would suffer losses proportional to the quantity of bullets received. Thus if force A had double the men of force B, B's would receive twice the bullets and have twice the casualties of A.

If A had 2000 and B 1000 men and, in the first moment of combat, A had lost one soldier, B would have lost two. The ratio between the two forces would no longer be 2 to 1. A would have 1999 and B 998, a ratio of 2 to 0.9985. A now would have relatively greater strength than at the beginning. As the battle progressed, A would gain relative strength until A annihilated B."

And according to Lanchester's differential equation to solve for casualties, A would have losses not of 1000 men as in conventional shock action, but only 268 men while at least one bullet (from A's forces) would have hit each of B's soldiers."

Operation Jaya Sikurui is a classic example of the concentration of forces in a field where the battlelines are clearly drawn with well defined rear areas. (It is not, as is the habit of some half baked pro-LTTE 'military strategists' who crow from the safety of cooler climes in the west, a Vietnam like situation.) Even if one concedes all the qualifying factors, it has become quite clear now, when Operation Jaya Sikurui is on the verge of celebrating one year of its 'progress', that the conventional wisdom of concentrating one's forces to bash a numerically inferior enemy has patently failed against the LTTE in the Wanni.

The brilliant Israeli military historian Peter Van Creveld shows in his classic work that Hitler's Operation Barbarossa into Russia failed despite the historically unprecedented concentration of forces he was able to achieve, among other things, due to intractable logistical problems. None of these plague the army in the Wanni. Supply from the rear to the three division strong spearhead advancing from the southern part of the Wanni and to Div. 54 poised to break out from the north is intact. The national and international political conditions are ideal etc. But if the concentration of the army's main, if not whole, fighting strength in the Wanni is patently failing then it implies, however far fetched it may seem today, the eventual collapse of the armed forces. The progress of Jaya Sikurui's spearheads which contain the main fighting capacity of the army has slowed down to a virtual halt (that it might be temporary does not change the reality that we are talking about here).

Only the fragile assumption that the LTTE cannot recruit large numbers to mount attacks on the scale which it launched against the Kilinochchi-Paranthan- Elephant Pass base complex stands as a facade between the PA leadership and the possibility that this slowing down of the spearheads can turn into a creeping debacle.

If the concentration of forces, an obvious recipe for victory in situations such as what one finds in Wanni today, is failing then what is wrong ?

Here, I will only venture the suggestion that a new military paradigm which is a combination of 'warriorism', long assumed defunct as a factor in modern warfare, and very modern 'war thinking' has emerged. It defies given conventional Western military wisdom.

Whether it is going to create a decisive theoretical fissure in modern military science will be determined by the coming battles in the Wanni.

The Fifth Column

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