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23 September 2024

On Attrition An Ontology for Warfare

Lt. Col. Amos C. Fox

Let’s hit a reset, please. Attrition is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and abused ideas in contemporary military thinking. Policymakers, military practitioners, and theorists often use and abuse a slew of pejoratives to undercut attrition.1 This phenomenon is a byproduct of 1980s and 1990s writing, which advocated nonattritionalist forms of warfare that appeared to be better aligned to advancing the U.S. Army’s AirLand Battle doctrine, Marine Corps Warfighting doctrine, and supporting the all-volunteer force. The writing and doctrine from this period influenced a generation of military practitioners who are today’s senior military leaders and policymakers within the Department of Defense, the U.S. government, and many of the United States’ political-military partners.2 Many of the assertions made at the time were unscientific, ahistorical, and proffered to generate and maintain consensus for AirLand Battle, yet they continue to resonate deeply with the generation nurtured on those sentiments.

Authors such as William Lind assert that attrition is a form of warfare.3 According to Lind, attrition warfare uses firepower at the expense of movement to reduce an enemy combatant’s numbers. Lind and his coterie of associates further suggest that other types of warfare use firepower and movement to create unexpected and dangerous situations for an adversary.4 Edward Luttwak takes an almost identical position, writing that “an attrition style of war” creates an embellished reliance on firepower at the cost of more movement-centric styles of war.5 In the often cited but flawed Race to the Swift: Thoughts on Twenty-First Century Warfare, Richard Simpkin places maneuver and attrition in a suspended position of contrast—casting each of theories as the opposite of the other and asserting that the former is far superior to the latter.

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