OPEN SOURCE COUNTER-INSURGENCY

After four painful years, the US military has stumbled upon (mostly due to the now classic Jihadi overreach -- as in Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.) the only model for fighting a mature open source insurgency: a decentralized model of security that forgoes centralized defense/police forces in favor of a plethora of independent militias. The success of this model in reducing violence (at least in the short term) in Anbar province, has led to its replication in other provinces.

This effort is essentially open source warfare in reverse (another way of looking at it is as the counter-insurgency equivalent of IBM's embrace of open source software -- a path I pointed out in the NYTimes back in 2005). In this model, the US military aligns itself with a plethora of militias (in this case hundreds) regardless of political/regilious/ethnic/tribal affiliation under the plausible promise of local autonomy. It is made fact as funds, weapons, and local control flows to these militias.

How this plays out over the next couple of years will be interesting to watch. It's fairly obvious that the US military doesn't have the skill sets for successfully managing this level of complexity (here's a minor example: it doesn't even have a relationship management system for tracking interactions with these militias -- something that could easily be constructed through a redux of commercial CRM software). It also runs counter to all of the classic goals of counter-insurgency and more importantly, the stated (and implied) goals for the US in Iraq:

• A viable central government. Every time a militia is stood up, it is at the direct expense of the central government. It loses the essential requirement for any viable state: a monopoly of force.
• A grand political bargain. An open-source counter-insurgency locks Iraq into a patchwork of mini-fuedal principalities with a large diversity of primary loyalties. Political settlement now becomes impossible since the sheer diversity of armed interests will overwhelm any attempt at reconciliation.
• A safe place for private oil companies and a long term US military presence. This new patchwork of armed groups in Iraq ensures chaos, which will make it impossible to attain any level of modern normalcy. Vendettas between militias, betrayal (of US troops), rampant crime/theft/corruption, and more is on the dinner plate for decades to come. Finally, the open source insurgency won't go away. It will only return when it revises its methods in light of the new conditions.

Comments

[Duncan Kinder]

This sounds like Highland Scotland pre-Colloden, where the Campbells of Argyle served as muscle-men for the Crown.

And which further suggests that, amongst our stack of suggested reading, we should include Scott's Rob Roy.

[Cavolonero]

Again I assert that this should have been called operation Ensure Chaos, as that was the plan from the start. Now Iran, maybe that can be called ' operation Vulcan Loaf Pinch ' ( ? )

[Peter Boston]

I understand and agree with the general principle but wonder if the assertion of "hundreds" of independent power centers is accurate in a tribal society.

I do not hold myself out as an expert in Iraqi tribal politics but it seems to me that if the US military is dealing with say a dozen clan leaders instead of dozens or hundreds of individual tribal chiefs then the decentralization of violence seems more manageable.

In the longer term a central government can reward/punish clan leaders and the economic resources of the clans based on their level of cooperation.

It's not a perfect outcome but still something short of enforced chaos.

[Matt Asay]

John: Interesting analysis. I work in the open-source software world, and can tell you that your analysis of IBM's involvement in open source is correct. You can see Microsoft struggling against open source because it insists on fighting a traditional "war" with traditional weapons: full-page ads, overpaid sales people, etc.

IBM, on the other hand, holds off open source in key areas by becoming part of the open-source ecosystem through funding projects and hiring key open-source developers. As such, it is much better able to manage the disruption to its business that open source would otherwise create.

The most successful proprietary vendors have been those that have embraced/extended open source (e.g., IBM, Apple) while those that fight it using traditional means have been under siege. The only "traditional" method that may work is to drop a nuclear bomb (patent lawsuit, for example), but the side effects are so negative that only Microsoft has had the stomach to even suggest the idea, only to quickly pull back.