THE AUTHORITY TRAP

Bogart: "If you're the police, where are your badges?"
Bandit (Bedoya): "Badges!? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!!" Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948.

To combat growing local insecurity, national governments are increasingly sending federal troops and paramilitaries to localities with extra-judicial powers to rectify the situation. However, the carte-blanche access these forces are provided, opens up a major security loop-hole that can easily be exploited. Here are some recent examples:

• Acapulco, Mexico. Drug gangs posed as federal soldiers (including the red berets of special forces) to conduct an inspection of two local police departments in Acapulco. The soldiers disarmed the policemen, transported them to a remote storage area, and then gunned them down. Many local police stations were evacuated in response to these attacks.
• Karbala, Iraq. In January, five US troops were abducted and then later killed by attackers posing as US soldiers complete with US vehicles, uniforms, weapons, and english-speaking drivers. As a follow-on, US troops raided a black market warehouse in Baghdad in late January that contained enough stolen US uniforms and equipment to outfit a battalion.
• Los Angeles, US. 789 TSA (Transportation Security Administration) uniforms and badges have been stolen from LAX since late 2002. The uniforms and badges provide wearers with wide access of airport facilities. "If anyone gets these uniforms and badges they can pretty much walk in and do what they want."

Complexity and Globalization

Of course, this technique is as old as warfare itself. However, the complexity and speed of the current environment make it more effective than ever. In response to the loss of local control caused by globalization, many states have over centralized their control over security. These centralized efforts haven't resulted in a single hierarchy, but rather a plethora of overlapping and often conflicting efforts that routinely trump local authority (an example of how complexification in response to environmental challenges are now providing negative returns on investment). Real-time verification is nearly impossible given the remoteness, obscurity and opacity of these parallel "authorities."

As someone who has used this technique on numerous occasions in the real world, I can vouch that it works exceedingly well for exactly the reasons I list above -- even more so if you count the benefits of public fear and inter-organizational distrust that guerrillas generate by using this tactic.

Organic Security

“Once the legal monopoly of armed force, long claimed by the state, is wrested out of its hands, existing distinctions between war and crime will break down much as is already the case today in . . . Lebanon, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Peru, or Colombia.” Martin van Creveld.

States may not have an option. The catch is that if the national government doesn't/can't step in to rectify a decline in local control, forms of organic security, exemplified by the AUC in Colombia and the militias/paramilitaries in Brazil's favelas (of which these groups now control 92 out of 600) will replace them.

Comments

[Duncan Kinder]

"Acapulco, Mexico. Drug gangs posed as federal soldiers (including the red berets of special forces) to conduct an inspection of two local police departments in Acapulco. The soldiers disarmed the policemen, transported them to a remote storage area, and then gunned them down. Many local police stations were evacuated in response to these attacks."

Sounds rather like the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, actually.

[Tuor]

LAX has the worst airport security I have seen by a large margin.

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

"LAX has lax security". Sorry, couldn't resist the tacky pun.

"an example of how complexification in response to environmental challenges are now providing negative returns on investment"
The Red Queen's race: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen

One way to gain an edge in this race is by simplifiying systems, thus decreasing the amount of failure points that can be exploited by counter-measures.

This demands a creative flexibilty in selecting, evolving, and culling feedback loops that open networks are capable of, while large (state) bureaucratic systems are not. Before they can even acquire and assimilate those organically (nevermind processing cycles fast enough), they have to discard organisation cultures that are simply fundamentally antithetical to it.

Since equilibrimuum cannot be reached again by improving endogenically, or improving information feedback, one could try to level the field by creating an environment as challenging and resulting in negative ROI for the adversary's responses.
Problem is, with "counter-counter-counter-insurgency", is that a runaway positive feedback resulting in collapse is the natural endstate.

A way of expressing the paragraph above in practice is by concatenating expressions like "you go to war with the army you got, not the one you want", "as we know, there are [..]known knowns [...]things we know we know [...] also know [...]we know [...] things we do not know. [...] also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know.", "creative destruction is our middle name", "birth pangs of the new middle east", and "Mess O'Potamia".

Or, if you trip the Red Queen, you will fall even harder on your own nose than her.

[AE]

The other problem is that it empowers those forces and weakens the power of the state--those troops become powers unto themselves and take part in the drug trade.