THE SYSTEMPUNKT

In Blitzkrieg warfare, the point of greatest emphasis is called a schwerpunkt.  It is the point, often identified by lower level commanders, where the enemy line may be pierced by an explosive combination of multiple weapon systems.  Once the line is pierced, armored forces dive deep into enemy territory to disrupt command, control, and logistics systems.  Once these systems are disrupted, the top-heavy military units they support collapse in confusion. 

In global guerrilla warfare (a combination of open source innovation, bazaar transactions, and low tech weapons), the point of greatest emphasis is called a systempunkt.  It is the point point in a system (either an infrastructure or a market), always identified by autonomous groups within the bazaar, where a swarm of small insults will cause a cascade of collapse in the targeted system.  Within infrastructure, this collapse takes the form of disrupted flows that result in immediate financial loss or ongoing supply shortages.  Within a market, an attack on the systempunkt destabilizes the psychology of the market to induce severe inefficiencies and uncertainties.  The ultimate objective of this activity, in aggregate, is the collapse of the target state and globalization.

Comments

[Cardenio]

" where a swarm of small insults will cause a cascade "

assults I think you wants there. Unless you're getting punkted by Don Rickles.

[Maru]

'Within a market, an attack on the systempunkt destabilizes the psychology of the market to induce severe inefficiencies and uncertainties. '

Reminds me of Judo- getting a lot for a little effort- manipulating your opponents fears and efforts. 'Course, that's always been the goal of terrorism.

[Georg]

very good point. so the goal of the insurgents is to destroy the state that the US is trying to impose on iraq. thus, as long as the US occupies iraq, iraq will stay a failed state.

[Mark]

If I understand John correctly, leaving Iraq won't fix anything. Decentralization gives global guerillas power, but it only gives them the power to make a state fail. The end result is perpetual failure. I can't see how this would actually be favorable for the guerillas, but that seems to be the emergent effect of the system they've created (intended or not). US efforts may be failing, but if the US were to leave, that would guarantee a failed state.

[jthomas]

Technically, the fighters in Iraq aren't insurgents at all. Calling them insurgents, while a step up from the even more inaccurate and perjorative term terrorists, is inaccurate.

Insurgent:
1 : a person who rises in revolt against civil authority or an established government; especially : one not recognized as a belligerent
2 : one that acts contrary to the established leadership (as of a political party, union, or corporation) or its decisions and policies

In Iraq, there is no civil authority or established government. Instead, there is a military dictatorship imposed by foreign invaders. 8000 poorly trained civilian police and a ragtag unwilling military force maketh not a state. The Allawi group is only a puppet authority, propped up by the weight of the occupying forces.

This begs the question as to what the opposition members in Iraq actually are. Are they resistance?

If they were a resistance organization fighting against an illegitimate dictatorship, that would make them freedom fighters.

[phil jones]

"If I understand John correctly, leaving Iraq won't fix anything"

I'm not sure. If this is Judo, where you are using the opponent's actions and movements against him; being in Iraq is rather like the US trying to fight while standing on one leg, leaning over at a 45 degree angle, and determinedly trying to juggle a dozen plates in it's left hand. Hilarious in a Jackie Chan movie, but not very tactically smart.

What I'm wondering is something else, raised by this idea of the SystemPunkt, and a couple of other recent discussions here.

The systempunkt is the weakest link. The point at which you can cause maximum cascading failure. Robb said (somewhere) that this probably isn't the physical building that houses the NYSE etc. I wonder, how much economic damage was done by the WTC attacks? Was it a SystemPunkt for the US economy?

Maybe it wasn't. And if Bin Laden is smart, he already noticed that.

The lesson for everyone else would be that, such "nerve centres" of the capitalist economy *aren't* really very "important". Maybe you can do a lot more long-term damage to the system blowing up a couple of gas terminals than a couple of thousand office workers?

And that's a really interesting question. Because it means the market *isn't* valuing things according to their real strategic importance. If the market actually payed wages, or invested in, people and companies proportional to their real "value" (ie. the degree to which the economy depended on them) things might look very different.

It would be ironic if the bazaar of violence was better at identifying true value in the economy than the market. (Though maybe no more ironic than that the free-software bazaar can create better software than the proprietory market)

[Brice Timmons]

The "systempunkt" is not so much the weakest link in a chain as the weakest node in a network the destruction of which could cause a cascade effect. Iraq has no "systempunkt" because there is no network to cascade. There is only the tenuous economic connectivity provided by oil, the artificial structure of an imposed regime supported by a foreign military, and the swirling mists of chaotic potential. Iraq, seen in the context of the global system, is very much a FOP (forward operating post). Pulling out of Iraq would solve nothing just as staying will solve nothing by itself. The amount of blood and treasure necessary to unilaterally create a network where no overarching network exists is absurd. They keys to the creation of viable networks in Iraq are Turkey and Iran. It is all but inevitable that Turkey will be the bridge through which the global network will connect to the Middle East. While that's in the works Iran will almost certainly become the regional security hegemon. Our best move? Stop viewing Islamists as all bad. Find a way to involve the greater Middle East in it's own stability, security, and prosperity.

[John Robb]

Brice, there is a complex network in Iraq and it does suffer cascade failures. This isn't a rural backwater like Afghanistan or Sudan. It is precisely because there is a modern network and a large urban population that global guerrilla methods work so well.

[John Robb]

Phil, here's the analysis of the direct/indirect costs of 9/11 (~$83 billion).

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/04/journal_the_eco.html

You do get extreme levels of leverage from large attacks like this, however, they are extremely difficult to do. The cost benefit ratio, once adjusted for the risk of the operation, is much lower than ops that aim at systempunkts.

[haydar]

Another facet to consider is American military infrastructure. I can't see a systempunkt there as such, but the more vehicles the insurgency destroys, the more costly the war becomes. This is certainly a vulnerable point. As more and more armor is introduced, it is expected that American casualties would go down, but not the cost of maintaining the equipment. An IED may only slightly wound the crew in the armored humvee, but the humvee itself could still very easily be totalled. And these babies cost an arm and a leg to produce. The war may not be producing Vietnam style casualties, but it's costs are in the Vietnam range. For how long is this sustainable?

[phil jones]

John, thanks. I hadn't seen that.

But it's clear the WTC wasn't a systempunkt for the US ecconomy. I'm still curious if the market can find systempunkts and start valuing them appropriately.

[John Kelsey]

I'd say the 9/11 attacks were pretty effective in finding the systempunkt of the civil aviation system, since all air traffic was shut down for several days in the US as a response, and since commercial airlines lost enormous amounts of money in the following year or so.

--John

[Cardenio]

Do any of you system punks know where I could actually get a copy of " Time for the hard choices: The dilemmas facing U.S. policy toward the Islamic world (Working paper / Brookings Project on U.S. Policy Towards the Islamic World) " by Singer. " ?

[M. Simon]

Leaving Iraq could be a good idea.

If the results are no worse than what we got in Cambodia and Vietnam in the aftermath of that war who could complain?

So the question is:

Would it be worth two or three million dead Iraqis for the US to get out at once?

I say yes.

After all they are just a bunch of wogs.

[Cranky Observer]

>> insults

> assults I think you wants there. Unless you're
> getting punkted by Don Rickles.

"insults" is correct. See a medical dictionary for the definition.

Cranky

[WeSaferThemHealthier]

How does one identify a systempunkt? How does one conceal it?

[Steff]

"Systempunkt", "Schwerpunkt"...
Seems acceptable to increase the "conceptual value" of an idea by giving it a German name (that's still easy to pronounce for anglo-speakers).
The whole concept here appears sufficently vague (attack some type of vital centre, node, etc.) AND common sensical that I can't see its merit. Isn't that a classic strategy anyway ? Deprive the enemy of essentials, etc. ...
System Punks more like.

[Kevin]

"destabilizes the psychology of the market to induce severe inefficiencies and uncertainties"

Contagion?

[enigma_foundry]

Steff: Schwerpunkt: used in von Clausewitz, and thus the German. The term doesn't exactly translate into English, like many of his phrases, e.g.: Fingerspitungefuehl "fingertipfeel"

Simon: Yes you are right that exiting is necessary, staying will just compound our losses, and prove the idiocy, verging on criminality, of the present US administration in their prosecution of this war.

The exit strategy will have to lean on leveraging the native tribes and pre-existing tribal structures there. The Brits and Poles were somewhat more successful at this for two reasons:

1. As John Robb correctly notes: "This isn't a rural backwater like Afghanistan or Sudan. It is precisely because there is a modern network and a large urban population that global guerrilla methods work so well." Iraq, among Middle East Countries, had a large, well-educated relatively modern Middle Class. There was no need at all to import truck drivers and cell phone technicians--the correct strategy would have been to use the locals. Poles, having been present in Iraq in quite large numbers in 1950's through the late 1980's (also, of course, in Wladislaw Anders divisions but that goes a little far back) understood this, and to the extent they could, used locals, but in their infinite wisdom, our illustrious leaders, in the thrall of Halliburton et al, did exactly the opposite.

2. Lack of Hubris

But, Simon, the use of hate speech in your post above as in:

"Would it be worth two or three million dead Iraqis for the US to get out at once?
I say yes.
After all they are just a bunch of wogs."
is very unfortunate, but now you should understand just why so many people hate America, a hatred that fuels the network that creates war in the first place.

Phil: You say: "Robb said (somewhere) that this probably isn't the physical building that houses the NYSE etc. I wonder, how much economic damage was done by the WTC attacks? Was it a SystemPunkt for the US economy?"

No it wasn't but Osama did not really understand capitalism as a self replicating network, so he made a big mistake in a sense. He saw it more as a hierarchy. But it was also the closest target to a Schwerpunkt he had available.

Kevin:
Our on to something I think about contagion, which is a network within at network. See link to cellular automata in post re: networked tribes. Change the rate at which diseases act. there are some surprises there.

[udge]

A pedant writes: that should be "Fingerspitzengefühl". (If your keyboard doesn't have a "ü" key, you may substitute "ue".)

[dennis]

Maybe I'm generous but I took Simon to be arguing, with a strong dose of sarcasm, that we shouldn't leave.

[patrick]

Maybe I'm having last night's pizza for breakfast by responding to a thread this old, but Kevin's comment about contagion sparked an idea:

It seems to me that systempunkts are numerous, but extremely hard to identify, in large part because the complexity of today's interconected systems makes evaluating likely cascade effects very difficult.

I'm thinking, in this instance, of Long Term Capital Management. At the time (circa 1998) it was being run by some brilliant folks, including two Nobel prize winners in the field of financial economics; it was being regulated by arguably the best financial regulatory body in the world (the U.S. SEC); and it was operating in the most transparent and most analyzed field of endeavour history has ever seen: the modern financial marketplace. In other words, there was almost complete information, there was an abundance of analytical talent, and there were people being paid lots of money in real time both to regulate this activity and to analyze its impacts (in the hope of making money by understanding the impacts of LTCM activities.)

DESPITE ALL OF THIS (and I expect this is about as good as it gets when it comes to having both information to analyze and talent to analyze it with!), NO ONE saw LTCM as the systempunkt it clearly was.

If I recall the history correctly, when the Russians defaulted, LTCM started unwinding billions of dollars in highly leveraged positions, sparking a cascade of panic that nearly took down the entire world financial infrastructure. (Just like many didn't appreciate how close we were to nuclear conflict in 1962, I don't think many appreciate how close we all were to financial meltdown when LTCM went kablooey, at least according to the versions I've read.)

As in Judo (as one post pointed out), a little nudge can be all it takes to create system-wide disruption, if you can identify when your opponent is dangerously overextended (off balance). But it would appear from the LTCM near-disaster that this is much easier said than done.

[John Robb]

Patrick, nice post. Systempunkts abound. However, selecting them is an art form. The best approach is more like Alexander's approach to the Gordian Knot. Hack as many as you can and the entire system falls apart.

[Hexode]

I have been looking at the issue of a catostrophic cascading failure. Thank you for finding a name for me. 'Schwerpunkt' is perfect. There is a vulnerable point available. I'm reluctant to mention it as it would indeed be catastrophic for the entire western world. And it is not oil related. I follow the discussion here from time to time. It's a very good blog

[John Robb]

Thanks. Lots on cascading failure:

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/05/cascading_syste.html