EMERGENT COMMUNITIES DEDICATED TO WAR (London, Iraq, and Al Qaeda)

When Lawrence led the Arab revolt against the Turks during the first world war, he did so with a community and not an army. The British never sent more than a handful of advisors to Arabia because they feared (rightly) an Arab backlash against a military occupation. So, without an army to rely upon, Lawrence built a community of war from the grab bag of individuals and tribes he had access to. What Lawrence built is best termed a community because (I strongly recommend BH Liddell Hart's book on Lawrence of Arabia for insight into his methods):

• there was little formal structure (a nest of relationships),
• participants flowed in and out based on their fill of loot, honor, religious fervor, and revenge (benefits of membership..),
• and, it was formed in response to a central premise: to expel the turks from Arabia.

Patterns of Community

This premise-based community of war is an ancient method of warfare updated by modern communications technology -- cell phones, e-mail, Web sites, etc. Its structure likely follows similar topic/interest/goal centric communities that use similar tools of coordination. Valdis Krebs, an extremely talented social network analyst (listen to interview with Valdis), sent me a diagram of this type of community (see attached graphic, click for greater detail). He points out that this pattern is routinely found in emergent communities he has mapped. The diagram depicts four types of nodes:

• Yellow nodes: leadership. These people are the core leadership of the organization. "They have denser connections to other leaders" and other main network nodes. They keep everything together as the group's connectors.
• Red nodes: active members. Active members are tightly connected to the leadership nodes (yellow). They, in combination with the yellows, are what people refer to as the "group."
• Blue nodes: people actively seeking membership. These people aren't formally connected to the core group. They are actively working on ways (relationships, credibility, etc.) to connect to the "group."
• Green nodes: lurkers and potential members. People in this category are not active members of the group. They may or may not undertake actions that are in line with group goals.

Towards Open Source Warfare

The US has actively taken out many of the yellow leadership and highly connected red member nodes in the main groups active in both Iraq and globally (this effort mirrors Israeli tactics). The good news is that this new decentralized structure makes large attacks (WMD and 9/11 level in particular) very difficult to accomplish since the connections in the core are now in chaos. However, the community has likely retained its viability due to the following factors:

• The core leadership is still intact. All of the well known leadership figures (whose position has been enhanced by attention from the state and media) are intact and active. They have substituted direct group interaction with passive communication via the Internet and the media. Video and audio Web casts that outline group goals and strategies and globally distributed (these broadcasts are likely truthful given the need for transparency in this type of communication).
• A large portion of the community is impossible to detect. Blue and green nodes, not directly connected to the group, can still act. This large (1/3 of the community's mass is green nodes) stealth group presents a significant and ongoing threat. They are likely, given the group's new communications dynamic, to act independently or attempt to make connections in an effort to gain membership in the group. Full membership would be validated by passive leadership multimedia Web casts. The London bombers were likely blue nodes. As long as the top leadership remains intact and communicative, they are likely to act in concert with the community's goals.
• Stealth groups with the capabilities necessary for large operations can form organically. External groups of blue nodes can have hidden connections to sections of the disrupted core red group. These connections can be used to form the high capability teams necessary for large operations (i.e. WMD).

Comments

[David Kafri]

While it is a usefull idea in terms of understanding the threat and its parameters, it is important not to mistake the community dedicated to war with the Muslim community as a whole.
Although connected, they are two different things.

David Kafri,
Israel

[John Robb]

I agree, this analysis is focused on a community dedicated to a specific goal. It is therefore extremely small relative to global cultural communities. Please don't conflate the two very different concepts.

[Valdis]

Yes, this is not intended to be a map of a whole cultural/nation/religious community -- this is a map of an EMERGENT community, their organization driven by a common interest/passion/goal/foe.

These emergent communities are often made up of a diverse collection of cultures, nationalities and religions. This could be a group that trying to improve a neighborhood or city, organizing to stop a Wal-Mart, pitching in stop a rising river from flooding, an alumni network from a school, place of employment or the military, an on-line community around computer game X, entrepreneurs in industry Y, or alas, a group of terrorists and their sympathizers and supporters.

[David Kafri]

The Community idea reminded me of this:
"...You'd fight your weight in anything that
moves, wouldn't you?"
"Not red ants or bumblebees."
from THIS IMMORTAL by Roger Zelazny

If Iraq at first looked like a bear, it now resembles a swamp full of stinging insects; and while every single sting is no more than painfull, the total is much more than painfull.
You cannot fight bees the same way you would fight a bear.

David Kafri,
Israel

[Jeremiah]

Is it possible to fight this sort of distributed insurgency without resorting to extreme tactics such as death squads and torture? Where is the point of diminishing returns with regards to public opinion? Seems to make the "moral high ground" battle much more complex.

[Dan Nexon]

"As long as the top leadership remains intact and communicative, they [blue, i.e., committed omegas?] are likely to act in concert with the community's goals."

How do you define the community's goals - as that of the core group (which you call "leadership"), or as emergent? It strikes me that if the community's goals are simply that of the leadership, than this statement is a tautology. If, however, the community's goals are emergent and based upon diffuse categorical ties ("we're all jihadists and we want to bomb westerners") then the core group doesn't need to be intact; nor must leaders be mutually connected by strong and dense ties, I might add.

One more thought: Lawrence was operating in an environment in which he was trying to connect up actors with (1) strongly divergent interests and (2) no real sense of collective identification. Certainly, the second is not true of the current al-Qaeda movement.

[victor falk]

In a letter home, a German officer wrote: "the Wehrmacht is like an elephant, and the Russians are like ants. The elephant can stomp and kill millions, but in the end -- the ants will prevail."

[GregB]

Jeremiah's question is pertinent, largely because it illuminates the moral quandry an ordered state faces. Death squads and their ilk do not represent core values, they represent expediencies, at least in established democracies. Generally speaking, I believe you lose as soon as you allow these expendiencies to replace core values.

In this case, the core value IS community. Lind's piece last week discussed this very specifically in terms of community policing. But community development in general can be an effective innoculation against an emergent
(and destructive) anti-community.

Valdis's work is very interesting, and simply looking at the network makes a great deal of sense. Again, I think there may be a granularity issue - the "blue nodes" undoubtably are ALL connected to multiple "green nodes", even if not with regard to the particular idea or goal being spread. As blue becomes red, do we have a model for green becoming blue through these connections?

I would tend to agree, also, with Dan's last point regarding dense ties. As we see with the spread of influence and memes, it is the quantity of loose ties that makes the real difference in diffusion.

[Fletch]

This maybe out of the scope of this discussion, but...

The emergent community diagram, while it does represent the stong interactive bonds within groups, it doesn't have a representation for the one-way influences between the groups that result from passive communication. The nature of those influences help determine how the shape of the structure "emerges" over time.

[John Robb]

GregB. You are right. The dynamic of this diagram over time would be extremely interesting to see. If the core is disrupted but the message that formed the group is strong and growing, you would likely see a major increase in blue and green nodes (and perhaps become the vast majority). Without direct connections the quality of the activity they undertake is low and the potential that they would move away from the group is high. One way around that dynamic (an evolutionary process for a revolutionary idea) is to substitute difficult high profile attacks with easy to accomplish systems disruption. This would lower the barrier to contribution.

Fletch. That is a good point. The influence of passive communications from the "recognized" leadership is an interesting dynamic. Note that ongoing communications from affiliated Web sites aids this connection.

Jeremiah, the evidence of recent history is no. Iraq is filling with them right now. This strategy can be scaled (and to an extent already is) to fight a global insurgency with state sponsored special ops. However, the complexity of the situation would overwhelm the utility of this option.

[John Robb]

Dan, the reality is more complex. Al Qaeda, as an organizational label, is much less important for the participants than it is for us. Note the proliferation of group names.

[vox]

Meh. This is scarier:

http://www.eurekalert.org/images/release_graphics/osu012405.1.jpg

[Dennis]

If you believe various FBI interrogators who've made public statements, the trouble with torture is it doesn't even work. It works much better to say "ok, on the battlefield we were enemies, but now we've got you, that's all over now" and treat them with respect. Then they relax, feel like their war is over, and go ahead and tell you stuff. Torturing them just reinforces an adversarial relationship that makes them clam up or lie to you.

[Chris Jones]

Americans are ineffective at coercion in Iraq because most of them are about as scary as a 12 year old girl in the eyes of most of the trash they are trying to coerce. What are they gonna do, threaten to throw them in an air-conditioned jail? Throw a couple of punches? Big deal. Coercion is not a mechanistic endeavor, but a psychological one. Two overfed cops from Brooklyn are unlikely to be as scary as a crazy eyed Iraqi whose cousin just got vaporized by an IED and that has the history, training, lack of restraint from rules and inclination to really get medieval on a prisoner. And the prisoners *know* it too, or find out quickly.
For more info:
http://www.frontlineblogs.com/blogs/michaelyon/