JOURNAL: Open Source War in Parameters

There's a good article by Martin Muckian in Parameters that recaps some elements of global guerrilla theory. He completes the article with four recommendations for fighting open source opponents (I've attached a critique of each):

• Attack critical nodes (ie. bomb makers). Unfortunately, this underestimates the fluidity provided micro-markets in finding and growing talent.
• Attack the insurgencies weakness in political cohesion by forcing it to respond to issues that are beyond its scope. This is easier said than done since the only real way to disband the insurgency via this route is to realize the plausible promise upon which it is founded (a US withdrawal, the collapse of the Iraqi government, or a civil war).
• Reduce crime to choke sources of funding. This is extremely problematic since the basis of much of the crime in Iraq is due to systems disruption and crime is a source of funding for loyalist paramilitaries too.
• Attack the information technology infrastructure of the network. This translates into going after cell phones and Internet access. This, like the concept of oil spot isolation, kills the economy and the community commons in a semi-modern society faster than the insurgents can do it themselves.

In all, it's good to see these ideas begin to change the discussion. However, much more emphasis is needed. A research company?

Comments

[shloky]

Most firms look to be focusing too much on the public sector, trying to get a part of the bloated budget via TS clearance access or recycling gov. employees with contacts.

I think a research company that focuses on providing GG grounded resiliency thinking primarily to the private sector would be incredible.

[Walter]

John, that link to "a good article by Martin Muckian in Parameters" points to something completely different at the Coming Anarchy web site. What's the real URL?

[Walter]

Never mind, I found it:
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/parameters/06winter/muckian.htm

[pm2075]

I've got a comment on how the other side, that's US, combating the perils of disadvantages in globalisation(criminal activity, ied bazaars) and terrorism.

The TSA is about to implement a screening procedure to identify IED components(especially detonate_) That's interesting, we're a long way past 9-11 time of occurence, i'm surprises they didn't have a robust one put in place much earlier.

I doubt that there was really much threat of that impending 2nd attack on our soil. Interesting to see how our best minds work!!

I wouldn't be surprised if all those was orchestrated to hype up fear on the populous, keep the masses manageable and happy, the legitimacy process designed for the people for those in power. They maybe actually no problem at all in Iraq in the eyesof the adminstration just a matter of doing with what we have no more.

The Best minds asking for a mere 20,000 or sending 21,500. Just doesn't sync. Like when "Scooter" Libby fell on the sword. The risk he took just doesn't amount to the rewards of a mere simple for an article in a paper/'payback'

When An Idea Starts... & A Revolution Begins!
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/invest_mavin/

[pm2075]

Black Hawk Down!

'The day's worst loss came from the crash of a U.S. Army helicopter northeast of Baghdad that killed 13 service members.'

Is that safe to say that all 13 members were actually American service members?

I do feel some measure of support & sympathy and to a lesser extent optimism for the administration as to find a viable solution
IN Iraq but the mounting daily toll of casualty(count) tells me, that something is really wrong on the ground.

20 U.S. Service Members Killed in Iraq

Saturday, January 20, 2007
BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 20 American service members were killed in military operations Saturday in the deadliest day for U.S. forces in two years, including 13 who died in a helicopter crash and five slain in an attack by militia fighters in the holy city of Karbala, military officials said.

Saturday's toll was the third-highest of any single day since the war began in March 2003, eclipsed only by 37 U.S. deaths on Jan. 26, 2005, and 28 on the third day of the U.S. invasion. U.S. authorities also announced two American combat deaths from Friday.

The heavy toll comes at a critical time of rising congressional opposition to President Bush's decision to dispatch 21,500 additional soldiers to the conflict to try to curb sectarian slaughter. The first reinforcements are already arriving in Baghdad and the surrounding areas.

The day's worst loss came from the crash of a U.S. Army helicopter northeast of Baghdad that killed 13 service members. An attack Saturday night blamed on militiamen in Karbala killed five soldiers. Roadside bombs killed another soldier in the capital and one in Nineveh province north of Baghdad.

The military gave little information on the crash of the Black Hawk during good weather in Diyala province, where U.S. and Iraqi forces have been battling Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias around the city of Baqouba for months.

Lt. Col. Josslyn Aberle, a U.S. spokeswoman, said the cause of the crash had not been determined. Navy Capt. Frank Pascual, a member of a U.S. media relations team in the United Arab Emirates, told Al-Arabiya television that the helicopter was believed to have suffered technical troubles before going down.

Saturday's crash was the fourth deadliest since the s

[pm2075]

Was there a military element to the Panama Canal which is seen by many as a good highlight to American foreign policy?

It is a very simple question...

The answer i found is YES!

'Militarily, the Canal is of tremendous importance for moving militay forces from ocean to ocean, rapid deployment of forces, and training forces in jungle warfare.'

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1988/SFM.htm

This is astonishing, cause it leads to the question as to whether American foreign policy play the part of impartiality, w/o a clear and most especially and underlying benefit for itself?

[gmoke]

"Attack the information technology infrastructure of the network. This translates into going after cell phones and Internet access. This, like the concept of oil spot isolation, kills the economy and the community commons in a semi-modern society faster than the insurgents can do it themselves."

Monitor and attack global guerrillas through the infrastructure of the network not the infrastructure itself. Do we really need another iteration of destroying the village to save it thinking?

[Azr@el]

Muckian's insights are another symptom of this evolving form of warfare; recycling of recommendations. Anticipate more of this as opposed to less of this as time progressess. Rather than attack the problem in a holistic manner many will choose to cut and paste the catchiest phrases and repackage them as original thought. Sad really when you consider how dire the straits and high the stakes of this strange new world.

Another point that muckian regurgitates is something i've been hearing quite a bit about and has otherwise been very under-reported on the net; the specialization of insurgent cells. Gone is the day of the swiss army knife of cells, the iraqi network of operation is infested with specialist cells; mortar cells, observation cells, direct attack cells, ied cells, etc. In the cauldron of innovation that is iraq, men who are gambling their lives on a daily basis have deemed it fit to cast off the swiis army cell model and adopt the single function cell model.

I believe this might be a harbinger of the future of conventional warfare as well. Bear with me , this will become a bit muddled as i try to create the vocabulary to articulate that which has yet to walk upon the face of this planet. Forget squads and platoons, in their place imagine 'kars' of light machine gun cells manned by a gunner, a marksmen, and a couple of AR wielding porters, imagine 'kars' of tracking/sensor troops, imagine support 'kars', imagine sub-moa sniper 'kars' , rpg 'kars', atgm 'kars', engineer 'kars', civil relations 'kars', logistic 'kars', medical support 'kars', etc. These 'kars' would very in manpower from 2-5, they would operate in an egalitrian manner by well diciplined, motivated and drilled troops.

These 'kars' would be more or less permanent units oriented around a single crew served weapon or sensor. But when presented with a task they would self assemble into a 'jashn' of several 'kars' to act, then when their task was accomplished or they met too much resistance they would melt away back into their constituent 'kars'. These 'jashns' would be roughly platoon size but they would not be standing platoons, rather they would be virtual units that are formed to met a task by member kars, how may have never worked together in the past and may never work together in the future. Their closest anology would be second world war soviet storm detachments or first world war german battle groups. A jashn's name would be something like 'holding southern perimeter'. It would have no meaning aft the task is accomplished.

These 'jashns' would be fluid constructs, that arise and disappear like virtual particles. Imagine three dozen 'kar' of various functions in a defensive position, they would form a weak central 'jashn' to make contact with opfor and repulse probes whilst most of the 'kars' would flank this weak 'jashn' in dispersed 'clouds' on either side. After opfor attacks in force, the holding jashn would melt away with elements of it being incorporated into two new jashn that form on it's flanks from the previous 'clouds' of unincorporated kars. These two new 'jashn' would then counter attack opfors exposed penetration. Thus in a sea of 'kars' these 'jashns' would assemble and dissemble to meet threats and then disassemble and scatter when the threat has passed. Such virtual units could attack and counter-attack from any directions.

Of course this is mere speculation on my part as to the future of infantry warfare. The level of troop training to implement 'kar' and 'jashn' structures are well beyond the current traing regime of contemporary soldiers. The soldiers that flesh out these structures would have ,to a man, to be trained as equivalents to platoon leaders, they would also have to be irrevocably divorced from the current archaic officer/noncom/enlistee dogma. How likely are the current optimal conventional armies of the world likely to dismount their mountains of perfection to climb down into the gutter with the insurgents inorder to hav the oppoutuntity to climb up to the new 'optimal' mountains of the future of warfare? Not very, thus my choice of etymolgies for the structures i propose. Five hundred yaars ago it was the horse archers of the islamic world who were unable to come to grips with a radical change in the dance of warfare, and as they refused to remove themselves from their peaks they fell one after the other to armies of musket wielding barbarians they considered their inferiors. Will our military-industrial complex and the militaries that are joined at the hip with them realize that their time has passed as well? Or will they keep producing f-22s and nuclear attack submarines while rome burns in the backgorund.

[salsabob]

Muckian has some interesting insights and your critique is on-the-money, but you both missed the most critical aspect of the neo-Khawarij's version of 5GW -- they seek not to replace the nation-state. Rather, their endpoint is to create Hobbesian hells or "Zones of Savagery" that not only provide constant jihad, but forgoes the need to resolve the many Islamic riffs (e.g. Sunni v. Shi'a,)for that will be revealed by Allah's coming that they believe will be provoke with their created chaos. In fact, they will use those riffs, Islamic or otherwise, to fracture fragile stabilities and create their savagery. Not understanding this, leads one to create tactics without a sound strategy.

[Tom Lord]

(sort of a ramble in the on-my-high-horse voice -- I hope it is beneficially provocative)

Something is missing from Muckian's list.

I think I'm on roughly the right page: The theory goes, as far as I can tell, that insurgencies like the present one emerge from the open source spread of cellular tactical ideas and opportunities along social and trade networks whose membership is correlated with a "primary loyalty" [sic, see below] to historic elements which are hostile to the ideal of liberal civilization. The trade in these tactical potentials is essentially micro-economic: participants are investing their own labor (and staking their lives) on plausible promises of favorable material and social-order change. Often the economic benefits of participation are immediate and sufficient to achieve an elite status among peers in the potential network. As markets, these networks create winners: those traders whose position becomes sufficiently strong that they can begin to manipulate the network for strategic aims. This might be little more than "classical" guerrilla war-far -- street fights, basically -- except that the technology of destruction is, these days, far too cheap; the large-scale technical infrastructure of liberal states is fragile; etc.

There are some elephants in this room, I think:

There is absolutely no mystery about the myriad ways available to pretty much all players on the global stage for crashing infrastructure. The insurgents aren't the only ones who can play that game and, in fact, any of the classic military organizations can achieve the same effect, hitting the same important basic marks on the stage, on a much larger scale and, basically, for pocket change. What prevents that fury from being unleashed (from and to all directions) is hard to say, given the diversity of cultures represented. I would like to say that it is basically human values: "saving the world" by hitting the reset switch at a scale that would trump the current global guerrillas would reliably be an instant crisis of poverty and disease so vast in scope that it would easily become, by orders of magnitude, the greatest horror in all of recorded history.

You know that, and I know that. Probably you or I could talk to just about anyone off of a busy city street, explain the facts simply, and they'd "get it", too. How should/would they react, though?

"Primary Loyalty" is a bogus concept and I think it is a flaw in the analysis we see on this website. The concept is entirely wrong -- it is predictive and it correctly leads people to understand that the decision making among insurgents is heavily influenced by tribal and confessional loyalties. The big problem with the concept is that, psychologically speaking, there is no such thing (in any useful sense). At the end of day, while culture and conditions do produce different "flavors" of psychology, people are people. Loyalties, in general, are always conditional. People are, generally speaking, not stupid: even if reluctantly and painfully, people are always making changes to their beliefs about what their loyalties imply. Perhaps yesterday you thought all that you hold dear, your family, your culture, your faith, your material situation, etc. -- perhaps yesterday you thought all of that was best served by staging a box of cell phones being delivered from one intimidating peer to another, but perhaps tomorrow the arguments that led you to that tactic won't sound so good.

So, to the topic: what is missing from the Muckian list Jon gave us? In a phrase: militarized peace building -- the reliable and robust mass-marketing (in war zones) of bona fide material stakes in the peace and stability of liberal civilization.

We need a range of products that, collectively, add up to a simple set of tools for securing a base level of economic security, within a troubled region, as quickly as possible. For example, is the tap-water in Baghdad likely to be unreliable for the next few years? Well, let's think ahead: the current crisis created that condition but every city needs to be prepared for such things. If we had had our act together, there would now be hundreds of residents of that city employed running a (corporately subsidized, of course) potable water business, with talks going on in other regions about where to eventually locate bottling plants.

"Now wait just a gosh-darn minute!" I hope you object. What do you think we actually did? Billions were poured into Iraq largely just to keep a basic infrastructure in place but also, clearly, in hopes that this would "trickle down" and help people align their "primary loyalties" with their best material chances to express their values. And, equally clearly, while that didn't "work" in a decisive sense, it sure did manage to not completely fail!

We have to get a lot better at that -- at "peace building" as a big bag of tactical plays that empower endangered populations quickly. Iraq, in that regard, has been several orders of magnitude too expensive in return for too little. Externally, it looks like we were too "top heavy" -- relying too much on quickly finding the native capitalists who could deploy money in such large chunks. We failed to engage at the grass-roots level. We wound up with a few scattered "job agencies" -- essentially, one meta-employer (a contractor, looking for contract labor) -- some army guy or haliburton guy or similar, in an office, with a big file of who you can or can't count on to lay a few bricks. That may be fine for the heavy lifting but what about everyone else? Where was the instant "craigslist"? Where was the "ebay-in-a-box"? Why wasn't there a trade-fair, at the edge of the green zone, selling mom-n-pop-scale franchise deals, complete with temporary price subsidies, supply chain, and advancement opportunities?

Another poster above was suggesting how we reorganize our military to meet guerrillas on the street. He was suggesting we do away with the traditional structure of large units with lots of internal competence and move to a more cellular structure. Sure, sure. With apologies to that poster, that's a very old idea and part of the art of designing a military seems to include designing so that, worst case, things fall apart into exactly such a cellular structure. Short of things falling apart, though: the simple union of a lot of small teams, none of which have thorough competence outside of a narrow specialty, is, basically, just a huge bundle of incompetence waiting to fall apart. All of that higher-order organizational structure adds value. New insights are possible in these areas and institutional inertia is something to be paranoid about but, fundamentally, destroying stuff and harming people is a pretty well understood science. The sky isn't falling in that sense.

Rather, where we really need to be applying guerilla warfare tactics, on a massive scale (i.e., it should be adopted as a popular cultural value, in my opinion) -- is in peace making in the form of economic products that have real, life-changing, opportunity-expanding material impact and potential to reach troubled populations. Fundamentally, we need ways to sell (for cheap!) the opportunity for gainful employment, advancement, and entrepreneurial experiment as a product line. Perhaps a good place for an interested civilian population in the US to begin to develop such products would be in the high-crime and high-poverty areas of the U.S.

-t