Global Guerrillas

HENRY OKAH

Henry Okah is likely someone you have never heard about. Despite that, he is one of the most important people alive today, a brilliant innovator in warfare. A true global guerrilla.

Henry is a burly man who speaks with a cultured British accent, a consequence of his upper class upbringing and his education in Nigeria's private school system. His mind is another interesting combination: the discipline of engineering, gained through his experience as an engineer in Nigeria's merchant marine, and the believability of a successful salesman that used to sell handguns for personal protection door to door. In short, it is a combination of attributes that made him the perfect guerrilla entrepreneur. Since he moved with his family to the relative safety of South Africa in 2003, Henry was able to accomplish the following. He:

• amassed a personal fortune through arms sales and oil bunkering in the Niger delta.
• was able to orchestrate the shutdown of over a half a million barrels a day of Nigerian/Shell oil production for over two years, with a total market value of $29 billion -- a major reason why the global price of oil is currently over $100 a barrel today.
• pioneered aspects of a system of warfare that will plague nation-states and their corporate allies for decades.

A Bazaar of Violence

Nigeria is a mess, due to the combination of legions of legendarily corrupt politicians, buckets of oil money, and vast pools of neglected citizens. The Niger Delta, the wellspring of Nigeria's oil wealth, is particularly messy. It's where people, abandoned by their government, are living at a minimal subsistence level just outside the fences of the major oil company compounds, which sport European levels of convenience and lifestyle for their expatriate employees. As a result, it's little wonder that the Delta's political environment is a swirling maelstrom of local actors -- from tribal chiefs to gangs (aka "cults" in the local parlance of the Delta) to politicians -- all competing for a tiny slice of the Delta's abundant oil wealth, most of which flows into the hands of corrupt politicians/military leaders in Lagos and the coffers of global oil companies. Henry, energized by the grinding poverty he saw when he visited his family's ancestral village in the Delta, sought to reverse this flow: away from the capital and the oil companies and into the hands of the people of the Delta. However, in order to do this, Henry had to innovate with warfare. Here's how he did it:

• Mercenary talent. The evolution of local Delta politics took a turn for the worse at the turn of the century. In order to stay in office, politicians began to employ young cult (gang) members as mercenary thugs to intimidate voters and opposition politicians. However, when the politicians regained office, they threw the gang members back onto the street, forming a large pool of young mercenaries hungry for more easy income from violence. The market that developed was fluid -- young violent men routinely hired themselves out to a cult on Saturday, to another gang on Monday and to a politician or wealthy individual on Thursday. It was a mess, but Henry saw this pool of mercenary talent as an opportunity. He hired them too, on an individual or group basis often through cell phone calls (there is a weak cell phone signal across the entire Delta swamp), to assemble ad hoc guerrilla forces that could do his work in the Delta. Since these gang members were only hired on an ad hoc basis, there wasn't any organization for the government's military and police forces to target.
• An Economic Engine. To fund his guerrilla forces, Henry connected the Delta to a global marketplace. To accomplish this, he set up a ecosystem of private entrepreneurs, many of whom were local politicians, to steal oil (aka "bunker") from the pipelines of the major oil companies operating in the Delta. Groups would siphon off barge loads of oil and ferry them out to Henry's leased freighters waiting offshore (which leveraged his experience with Nigeria's merchant marine). In return, the groups were given cash, top of the line western consumer products, and a huge number of weapons (which leveraged Henry's experience as an arms salesman) from the best global manufacturers. Billions of dollars in merchandise were exchanged through this simple system over the last few years. The Delta is now awash in high end weaponry.
• A Popular Front. With both the manpower and the economics in place, Henry was now able to fight a war. However, to accomplish this he needed a front, an organizational facade for his virtual organization. The result was the establishment of the MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta). Henry was able to establish this organizational front through e-mails, from the safety of his home in South Africa and under the pseudonym of Jomo Gbomo, to global news organizations that set claims against the government and its corporate allies (global oil companies, particularly Shell, which had been accused of massive pollution) and actions (through the public announcement of attacks minutes after they occurred). QUICK NOTE: it's likely that he saved the life of the journalist Sebastian Junger through timely cell phone call to the violent group that was holding him, during Sebastian's ill advised field trip to the Delta. His main method of attack was pure systems disruption. Oil pipelines were sabotaged on a routine basis, through attacks on pumping stations and oil platforms. Western expat oil workers were taken hostage to drive the global oil companies permanently out of contested areas. The result was an average of 400,000 to 600,000 barrels a day of lost production for the Nigerian government (primarily Shell) -- nearly a quarter of all Nigerian production. The intent of this activity was to hollow out the Nigerian state by depriving it of income, driving away its corporate allies, and creating a temporary autonomous zone (aka chaos) in the Delta (due to a proliferation of violence and copycat attacks by other groups).

What this Means

Henry was arrested in February 2008 while in Angola to purchase arms and equipment. He has since been extradited to Nigeria where he is being held by authorities under the charge that he is Jomo Gbomo. However, despite his capture, the innovations he pioneered will live on in the following ways:

• Superempowerment. Henry is a global demonstration of what a superempowered individual can do in warfare: from creating a global criminal economic ecosystem to coordinating guerrilla attacks via cell phone to building a global brand (MEND) via e-mail.
• Emergence. Henry established a funded open source war, populated by a host of violent groups and independent contractors, against the Nigerian government and the global oil companies operating in the region. Given the fluidity of this networked organizational form, it is likely a replacement (or replacements) for Henry will emerge soon.
• Systems Disruption It proves that the disruption of systems, rather than mass casualty attacks, can create a global brand for a militant organization. Also, given the demonstration of the leverage involved (attacks costing hundreds of thousands generated nearly $30 billion in disruption) that a low cost expansion of the technique could destroy the economic foundation of an entire state.

Legal Note: if Henry isn't Jomo as the government claims, please disregard the use of Henry's name throughout this entire brief (although this is unlikely since MEND released the promotional photo of Henry featured above and has started a global media campaign for his release) ;->

ADRIFT

The US military is now "nominally" in charge of both the Iraqi insurgency and the Iraqi military/police (see February's "Open Source Counter-insurgency?" for more). Journalist Nir Rosen, fresh from a walking tour of Baghdad's hot zones, concurs with my previous analysis in a new article, "The Myth of the Surge" (it's a good read):

Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government...

A Trashed Doctrine

This situation puts the US military in a difficult position, one that goes deeper than being caught on the horns of dilemma (as in: caught between supporting "former" insurgents or government forces). The improvised theory that led the US military to fund the insurgency (the "Awakening") has transformed the US Counter-Insurgency doctrine (COIN) -- a document was so carefully prepared and announced with such fanfare -- into a mere pile of paper. Why? Because we have abandoned the doctrine's binding assumption: that everything we do in counter-insurgency should increase the legitimacy of the host government. Essentially, the abandonment of our doctrine means that the US military is now completely adrift in Iraq without a counter-insurgency roadmap.

So, what happens next? If you analyze this development through the perspective of Boyd's OODA loop, we can conclude that the US military has lost one of its primary sources of orientation (here's an excellent PowerPoint from Chet Richards that details the OODA loop). At a core process level, here's what we can expect to see:

• Non-cooperative centers of gravity will form. Without a common source of orientation, different parts of the US military (and all other arms of the US government operating in Iraq) will begin to gravitate to conflicting approaches based on alternative interpretations of what the correct path is.
• Slower decision making. Decisions will be more difficult to make and once they are made, they will be more difficult to implement (organizational resistance). Paralysis may emerge as events evolve (open warfare between police and Awakening militias, pressure to withdraw US forces due to political changes, etc.) since a way forward isn't defined.
• A failure to correctly analyze unfolding events. Without effective orientation, critical information will often be ignored and/or misinterpreted. Surprises will become more frequent.

NOTE: Thanks to Chet Richards.

JOURNAL: Storm sends a Valentine

Great article by Ian Grant in Computer Weekly on Storm's return. It's a great example of self-replication in action.

After months of relative dormancy, traffic generated by the Storm botnet ramped up just before Valentine's Day to peak at between 4% and 5% of internet traffic, said researchers at e-mail hosting service MessageLabs, and security supplier Kaspersky Labs.

Decentralized command and control eliminates vulnerable nodes:

Each infected PC carries the entire Storm malcode. This means there is no central "mothership" to detect and keep off the internet. Once the botnet is set up, the owners can seed infected PCs with a malcode program to capture keystrokes, copy, transmit or delete files.

Given that most personal anti-virus software is now ineffective (computer crime tinkering networks are moving faster than corporate security efforts), this was inevitable:

Storm's success rate has been remarkable around one in three messages resulted in an infection, making it attractive to criminals.

Business platforms for online crime (makes open source crime more effective):

Several researchers suggested this Valentine's Day was the first example of botnets being hired by criminals on a large scale. In effect, Storm is becoming the virtual internet service provider for the criminal class, they say.

Almost all the Storm traffic comes from as many as a million home PCs connected to broadband networks, researchers said. The chances of cleansing them all are remote. That means Storm may have become pervasive, said Mark Murtagh, technical director of Websense.

JOURNAL: On Superempowerment and 5th Generation Warfare

The question: How does the concept of individual superempowerment apply to warfare?

Bill Lind (the "father of 4GW"), in a recent article, defines a superempowered individual as a lone gunman. He cites recent examples of this:

Between February 8 and February 14, four American schools suffered attacks by lone gunmen. The most recent, at Northern Illinois University on February 14, saw five killed (plus the gunman) and 16 wounded. Similar attacks have occurred elsewhere, including shopping malls.

He follows this definition with critique of the argument that superempowered individuals may form the basis of a fifth generation of warfare. His main line of attack? That these individuals in comparison to the guerrilla/terrorist groups we see globally:

• share a similar motivational source (isolation, alienation and the decline of the state)
• offer no qualitative improvement in warfare (the lone gunman only operates on a smaller scale)
• technology is merely a facilitator of alienation/isolation.

In short, Bill decries the use of superempowerment (mainly from me, and recently Hammes), or any similar attempt, as a means to define a fifth generation of warfare. 'It's just too early to call,' he claims. I don't disagree that it may be too early, however I do disagree strongly with Bill's definition of a superempowered individual.

Superempowerment is a much richer and more complex phenomenon than a mere reduction in scale (down to a single attacker). Instead, superempowerment describes the process by which individuals and small groups are using;

• rapidly improving tools (the doubling rate of Moore's law applied to technologies accessible to the average individual),
• connectivity to a global community and its resources (how to use those tools from MIT courseware to Jihadi "how to" sites),
• and newly accessible forms of economic activity that transcend state control,

to radically improve their productivity in warfare. This is definitely a qualitative change in the conduct of warfare, although it is still early. It will become transformational as the technologies of self-replication begin to reach their full potential.

NOTE: Read self-replication as the ability to "manufacture" millions/billions of daemons/bots/virii/bacteria with increasingly complex behavior at nearly zero cost (take a look at Storm). These "manufactured armies" will become exceedingly dangerous as superempowered designers begin to introduce processor/software combos into their creations that exceed equivalent levels of biological intelligence we see in the natural environment (insects, small mammals, etc.).

JOURNAL: Food Shocks

Mind bomb: An unregulated global marketplace is now firmly ensconced in the role of the sole superpower. We are going to find its reign harshly capricious (as in rife with vicious black swans against which we have few counters). Here's an example:

“We think we could go into crisis mode in many commodities sectors in the next 12 to 18 months . . . and I would argue that agriculture is key here.” Jeff Currie, Head of Commodities Research at Goldman Sachs.

JOURNAL: A reboot for Iraq's insurgency?

A new campaign of systems disruption has begun in Iraq (with a particular focus on electricity systems). Its goal is to reboot the insurgency. Attacks over the last 24 hours include:

• Sunday: A massive car bomb attack on a power station in Mosul caused widespread power outages.
• Monday: A successful attack on a natural gas line in northern Iraq will cause widespread power outages for at least a week.
• Monday: A huge bomb was found and defused at the entrance of the Electricity ministry in Baghdad.

Without a means to provide Iraq's fragile communities with resilience against attacks on national infrastructure, any and all gains recently made in security will be for naught (remember, the "Anbar Awakening" effort isn't the result of COIN, it is a fragile short cut). See State Failure 101 for more.

Random Link: More GG tech. Here's a report on how amateur/tinkerer submersible technology is being used to smuggle cocaine out of Colombia -- 13 submersibles were captured in 2007 alone.

NOTE: Speaking

I'll be speaking along with Tom Barnett at Austin Peay State University (Clarksville, TN) on the 14th of February at 8 p.m. (as part of an academic conference on "winning the peace"). It's open to the public.

OPEN SOURCE COUNTER-INSURGENCY?

What's left (as an option for the US in Iraq)? It's possible, as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting IBM's embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state's monopoly on violence by using (Shiite and Kurdish) militias as a counterinsurgency.

John Robb, October 2005, in a New York Times Op-Ed. (if you add Sunni militias to the mix, a gross oversight on my part but implied in the approach, it is spot-on analysis).

The Sunni Tribal Awakening (rather than "the surge") has radically slowed violence in Iraq by bringing it back to the levels of activity seen in 2005. That's a good thing, but the Awakening has been wrongly attributed to a new (resurrected) counter-insurgency doctrine (COIN). Here's why. The main objective of United States COIN doctrine is to enhance/extend the sovereignty and legitimacy of the host nation. Everything that is done is slaved to this top level goal. Unfortunately, the development of legitimacy is a long and slow process that takes decades of effort (if it can be accomplished at all). In contrast, everything about the Tribal Awakening is diametrically opposed to this. It arms and trains militias and groups that aren't loyal to the host nation and thereby diminishes the host nation's legitimacy by undercutting its monopoly on violence and its control over sovereign territory.

What did happen with the Awakening, and the speed of the transition should be a clue to this, is that the US military opportunistically embraced the insurgency (in a move akin to IBMs embrace of open source development in the 90's). This embrace showered autonomy, weapons, money ($300 per month x 60,000 participants), protection (from Shiite militias and the Iraqi government), and training on insurgent groups. By doing so, it replaced the ISI (Islamic State of Iraq, an al Qaeda affiliate) as the leading participant in the insurgency. The only "cost" to these insurgent groups, which were under extreme pressure from Shiite militias due to overreaching by the ISI, was to sacrifice the ISI. They rapidly complied.

Where this goes from here is problematic since (and I say this to get you thinking and not to shock you) the US is now leading both the insurgency and the counter-insurgency in Iraq.

JOURNAL: Web-based Networks for Disaster Response

Here's the problem. When a disaster strikes, widespread distribution of granular/real-time information on the unfolding event can reduce the public's panic/fear and improve the community's recovery -- as in, solid/well-informed decision making at the individual level is beneficial to fast recovery and public participation in the process can increase information flow and provide real-time feedback on first responder successes/failures. Unfortunately, the public traditionally doesn't get this detailed information. To the extent that this information exists, it has been reserved for the government's first responders. In contrast, communications with the general public, either through official pronouncements or the mass media, are usually tardy and typically only provide high-level/generalized coverage.

Fortunately, we are slowly starting to see a shift. New technologies and approaches have made it possible to bring the public into the loop. To illustrate this, blogger Robert Paterson has a two part series on how a small Public TV/Radio station (KPBS) in San Diego, used creativity and some Web technologies (Google maps and Twitter) to become the epicenter of the community's response to the recent wild-fire disaster.

• Part 1 is focused on the use of technology. Note the use of Twitter's text messaging system to connect cell phones to the Web for real-time updates and alerts on the fire's status. Note also the value of Google maps that detail the fire's progress and evacuation centers (as well as the ability of the community to add visual detail to the map through the addition of pictures).
• Part 2 details the changes in the station's culture that allowed them to respond effectively.

JOURNAL: Update to No mas FARC (superempowerment)

A few individuals, empowered by social networking tools (Facebook + more), produced this in Bogota today (along with four other marches globally):

(click to enlarge)

A variant on smartmobs?