QUOTE that sums it up from SLATE

"Not all would-be futurists are quite so pie-in-the-sky. For my money, John Robb, a former Air Force officer and tech guru, is the futurists' futurist."SLATE.

For new readers, here are some good places to start your adventure:

• The future of American Security
• Open Source Warfare
• A Shadow OPEC
• Big Bangs
• The Systempunkt
• Primary Loyalties
• Emergent Terrorism
• The IED Marketplace
• Guerrilla Entrepreneurs
• Global Guerrilla Swarming

Comments

Just an annoying nitpick: It should probably be "Global Guerrillas _hits_ SLATE," because "hit" implies that SLATE have fallen victim to an infrastructure attack.

[Veteran]

Congratulations.. and may your writing make it into the hands of the policymakers!

[konaman]

John:
There is an interesting post on the Belmont Club suggesting that the recent SC decision has potentially the perverse effect of degrading not only the Geneva Convention, but also the "monopoly on violence by the state." The later point in effect argues that by recognizing non-state actors like AQ, there i9s a defacto recognition of say western non-state actors. Fascinating when threaded together with the GG outlook for creeping balkanization. Thoughts?

[John Robb]

Changed the title of the post. Konaman, I wouldn't go that far yet. The courts are just cleaning up what they see as a sloppy open loop process. In effect, they are saying: you can't make this up as you go. Ultimately, though, there is going to have to be a Geneva convention for non-state enemies.

[konaman]

Clearly I was being aggressive!

Cheers...

[Kalkin]

John, I'd be curious as to your thoughts on an old but I think still relevant article by Michael Schwartz on the strategic division in the Iraqi resistance between broadly community-based guerrilla groups and sectarian terrorists. It's not just a moral distinction, Schwartz argues, but more importantly a material conflict between two incompatible strategies. Sorry for the length, but a heavily abridged version follows:

"The former tendency, which attacks mainly the American military, often calls itself the "nationalist resistance" because most of its adherents focus on the narrow goal of expelling the Americans from their communities and from Iraq; it engages in what has been historically described as guerrilla war. The latter group, which often calls itself "Islamist," has a broader vision of uniting the Middle East against American and European tion and has therefore attracted a considerable number of non-Iraqis to join in its campaigns; in pursuing this goal it embraces a terrorist military strategy that includes civilians as targets... This action captures the essence of guerrilla war. It was a strictly military action in which the targets were the American soldiers; in fact the guerrillas warned local residents (at the risk that someone might warn the Americans) in order to prevent civilian casualties. It was hit-and-run; the guerrillas made no effort to "win the battle," they were content to melt back into the community. It had modest military goals; in this case to stall the U.S. patrol (most likely in an attempt to prevent it from conducting searches and arrests in houses of suspected insurgents). Notice also that the identity of the guerrillas was well known to community residents; the resistance fighters made no attempt to hide their identities as they placed the bomb or warned the residents.
This reflects the larger reality that the community clearly sided with the guerrillas and not the Americans—the spectator-sport aspect of the incident captures this nicely. This support was undoubtedly connected to the purpose of the action: in preventing home invasions and arrests, the local guerrillas were fighting a defensive battle that protected community residents from the depredations of the American occupation.
We can also see in this example the inherent weakness in guerrilla war: there is no military way to win the war. The guerrillas could, in principle, make things so difficult that the Americans would not venture into their community. But they could not drive the Americans out of Iraq with such a defensive posture and with the limited ability to conduct small hit-and-run attacks.
Consider now... The attack, then, was part of a larger campaign mounted by the jihadist wing of the Iraqi resistance aimed at intimidating Shia citizens from participating in the election. This would—if it succeeded—prevent the Shia from supporting the formation of a government that would tolerate and even validate the presence of the American occupation. That is, this and other incidents constituted violence directed at civilians (in this case a cleric), the purpose of which was to scare other civilians (Iraqi citizens) into withdrawing their support for the U.S. sponsored government. It was, in short, a classic terrorist campaign.
This campaign was almost the contrapositive of the guerrilla attack. The target was not military. The local civilians were not warned; instead they were endangered, wounded and killed in the process of conducting the attack. In fact, the local community (being Shia) was considered the enemy; it was part of the Shia community that needed to be intimidated. And—most of all—the goal was much more ambitious than the goal of the local guerrillas; this act was part of a larger campaign that sought to develop the leverage to drive the U.S. out of Iraq by depriving it of the support it needed in the Shia community.
The logic of terrorism and the logic of guerrilla war are not explicitly contradictory. They appear to be complementary in very important respects: Guerrilla movements aspire to protecting the community, but cannot effectively expel the occupation; the terrorists apply a strategy designed to accomplish this expulsion. Moreover, they operate in different venues, with the guerrillas located within communities that are organized to resist the occupation, while terrorists conduct their most representative actions in communities that are not part of the resistance, seeking to influence those who are considered complicitous with the enemy...
Nevertheless, the real dynamics of the Iraqi resistance reveal a fundamental contradiction between guerrilla strategy and terrorist tactics...
Starting with the beginning of the resistance, the guerrilla movement in Iraq—both Sunni and Shia (the latter being primarily Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army)—attempted to co-opt, rather than defeat, the Iraqi police and National Guard. The patterns were simple: when police and the National Guard were stationed in cities, the resistance would cooperate with them in enforcing criminal law, even delivering criminals to them for incarceration and imprisonment. They avoided armed conflict just as long as the police stuck to law enforcement and other duties that the guerrillas considered legitimate... When the U.S. military called upon local Iraqi forces to fight the resistance, the guerrillas would issue an appeal for the Iraqi armed forces to defect or abandon their posts and melt into the population. In virtually every important confrontation, police stations were abandoned to the resistance; Iraqi units deserted and went home rather than fight other Iraqis, and some even joined the resistance and fought the Americans...
the suicide bombers had no concern with deciding whether the police were the sort of Trojan horse that played a key role in guerrilla strategy; their trap was set to kill whoever showed up. But the suicide house bomb also reflected a second attitude, an indiscriminate attitude toward what the American military calls "collateral damage," the lives of the family of 13 that lived next door...
From the point of view of the perpetrators, however, the civilian casualties were not a liability and might even have been a virtue. The local citizens were not the primary target for the attack, because it was designed to intimidate the broader community that supplied policemen to the government. But the losses still stood as an object lesson, that the residents should mobilize against the occupation and the government or else expect further carnage...
It is important to note that car bombs and other suicide attacks never consisted of more than a tiny fraction of all resistance actions; during the first 11 months of 2005, for example, there were between 400 and 700 weekly attacks by the resistance, with some 20 or so being attacks against soft civilian targets. But because these terrorist attacks could create large numbers of casualties and—at once or twice a week—produced spectacular carnage, they virtually always ted the news coverage of the resistance...
Beyond the murder and alienation of civilians, the car bombings undermined the Trojan Horse strategy practiced by the guerrilla movement, in both the Shia and Sunni areas. Before the campaign started, both Sadrists (the Shia Mahdi army) and Sunni resistance organizations had encouraged their members to join the police: it was a paying job for their part-time fighters; it provided them with weapons and training that they could utilize in the fight against the Americans; they could act as spies for the resistance, and their timely desertion allowed for great flexibility in planning and executing guerrilla attacks.
As the attacks on the police began to choke off recruitment, they became more and more of a problem for the guerrillas...
When the second American offensive in Falluja began in November, the reaction was far different from the April offensive. Sunni cities offered the full range of support that had been forthcoming in April. The vast numbers of refugees were welcomed, food and supplies were collected (though it was much harder to get them to the fighters within the city), and uprisings took place in cities spread across the Sunni regions north and west of Baghdad.
In Mosul, the largest nearby city, the insurrection demobilized 3000 (still mostly Sunni) police officers, routed the Iraqi army units, and took control of the city, forcing the U.S. to divert over 2000 troops from Falluja. Uprisings of comparable magnitude took place in smaller cities as well, some of which went unanswered until after the Falluja battle was settled.
But the Shia areas were quiescent at best. While the Sadrists denounced the U.S. offensive, their exhortations found little resonance within the Shia communities, and—after being weakened by the second battle of Najaf—the Sadrists themselves were either unwilling or unable to spread the battle to the Shia south. Instead of rallying to the Fallujan cause, the Shia communities remained silent. Few collections of food or supplies took place. The protest demonstrations were small. Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the most important leader in the Shia community and a vociferous critic of the first offensive, remained silent.
The quiescence in the Shia areas of the country, representing 60% of the population, was the critical difference between the first and second U.S. attempts to retake Falluja. Without this threat, the Marines proceeded to clear the city, first by calling on all residents to leave, and then by a house-to-house clearing operation that reduced the medium-sized city into a deserted wasteland...
The breach between the Sunni resistance and the jihadists was nicely summarized by Laith Kubba, an adviser to Iraqi Premier Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who told New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise that "There was a moment when they said, 'O.K., we're going to use you in our fight against the government and Americans.' But now they're saying, 'you're a burden.'"...
This emergent property of the conflict does not, however, make it any less antagonistic. We can see from the way in which it developed that it rests on the fundamental differences that distinguish the two movements. For the guerrillas, their fundamental goal is to keep Americans out of their communities, but their military inferiority requires that they develop a collective deterrent to avoid the massing of American troops to overwhelm them. Such a deterrent must eventually depend on the threat of rebellion in the bulk of the communities across the country, making it too difficult for the occupation and its local allies to concentrate on one or a few centers of resistance.
The terrorist strategy is to defeat the Americans by intimidating the civilian support for the occupation, in the world and—in this instance—within Iraq. But such intimidation does not create the willingness to fight the Americans; at best it creates an unwillingness to actively support them. And, as we now can clearly see, the jihadist strategy severs the fragile unity between the various constituencies of the resistance—in this case, the Shia and Sunni communities. Hence, the result of terrorism is to demobilize large segments of the population and therefore shrink the base for the guerrilla movement.
The contradictions are irreconcilable. In the end, either the jihadists will prevail, thus reducing the guerrilla movement to irrelevance, or the guerrillas will prevail by eliminating the jihadists as a force within the Iraqi resistance."
http://www.solidarity-us.org/atc/120Schwartz.html