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Asymmetric Warfare and Abnormal Methodology: Redefining Victory

It is a Sunday morning in Kapisa Province, due north of Kabul. A local Tagib market has just opened, and merchants tend to their stalls as villagers come and go. The skies are unusually clear, and over the buzz of the marketplace, a faint hum can be heard from far off. Unbeknownst to those on the ground, the hum resonates from some 10,000 feet overhead A US-operated Predator drone. But on this Sunday  morning, US forces arent looking for insurgents, tracking HVTs, or preparing for ground operations the drone isnt even carrying weapons. Instead, it is armed with high-resolution cameras and is live-streaming footage of the marketplace back to the continental United States where a team of data analysts are carefully monitoring the ebb and flow of customers into and out of the market, adding their findings to an ever-growing, time-dependent dataset. Greater foot traffic in the market means that villagers are more comfortable leaving their homes without fear of violence an indication that the security environment is increasingly stable.

 

Redefining Victory

With data on activity in the marketplace, researchers are hoping to develop a metric by which to measure the health of the local Kapisa economy and build a leading indicator of success in both armed conflict against insurgency in the region and success of post-war reconstruction efforts. Trends like these, then, can be used to demonstrate that US security and development action on the ground is effective in combating and diminishing insurgent control. While this scenario might sound far fetched, its not as distant as you might think. Methods like this are the new strategies being used to measure victory and success in the 21st century battlespace.

New research like this has stemmed from a need to redefine victory in warfare for the past half-century; What is victory in hybrid warfare? When have you actually beaten the insurgents? Where is your threshold for success? Gone are the days when wars were fought and won off the metric of human capital. Lives taken provides a poor measure of victory in war when the enemy youre fighting is asymmetric, ideologically rooted, and highly fluid in numbers. Killing 50 enemy insurgents looks great on the chalkboard, but what is the effect? And what about the civilian casualties incurred when eliminating th