JOURNAL: COIN without a model for Community Resilience is Futile

Here's a news story that describes how the US took parts of Sadr City from the Mahdi Army but is unable to deliver the basic services required for legitimacy:

Michael Gordon "In Sadr City, Basic Services are Faltering" NYTimes. April 22, 2008.

The Sadr City situation is yet another example of how, for want of a model for community resilience (there's a long discussion of the philosophy required for this in Brave New War) from tech to process to education, counter-insurgencies in both Afghanistan and Iraq aren't gaining traction despite the enormous cost in lives and treasure already paid. Also, it is a good indication that the new Africa Command will likely fail to establish any meaningful improvement on the continent (in fact, without meaningful alternatives like a package for resilient communities, it will likely default to the opposite by propping up brittle oil-based dictatorships like Equatorial Guinea).

How to correct this? Get smart people involved to define the scope, scale, and proposed response to this hard problem (in a fashion similar, but over longer period of time, than what I am doing for the NIC on another hard problem). Pour DARPA dollars into resilience technologies aimed at communities. Test prototypes to get data and insight. Find out what works.

WIM (what it means) long term? My strong belief is that if the DoD can help crack this problem, it will be as big a contribution to the world as ARPANET.

Comments

[James F. Elliott]

Yay! Thanks for the index! I am extremely interested in this thread of thought. When I first read Brave New War, your discussion of a resilience model of security instantly struck a chord. I'm involved in disaster response planning for vulnerable populations in the South Bay Area. I plan on trying to bring some of these elements to bear at our conference next week.

[Duncan Kinder]

Since Global Guerrillas disrupt networks, it follows that a "resilient community" is one that can:
a) prevent its networks from being disrupted and/or
b) recuperate in the event its networks nevertheless has been disrupted.

Developments in medicine are approaching maintaining health and recuperating from disease based upon these principles.

See: "The Community of the Self"
http://math.nyu.edu/faculty/greengar/coursepages/nature01260.pdf

Summary:
"Good health, which reflects the harmonious integration of molecules, cells, tissues and organs, is dynamically stable: when displaced by disease, compensation and correction are common, even without medical care. Physiology and computational biology now suggest that healthy dynamic stability arises through the combination of specific feedback mechanisms and spontaneous properties of interconnected networks. Today’s physicians are already testing to ‘see if the network is right’; tomorrow’s physicians may well use therapies to ‘make the network right’."

Accordingly, it would appear logical in developing resilient communities to proceed by analogy to these medical developments

[rick]

Duncan,

I prefer to think that the requirements are that a community's networks are so robust, networked and redundant, especially redundant, that no attack on some number of the networked nodes will effect the resiliency of the whole. Redundancy is inherently expensive, but the contra is a great dependency on a few. DoD faces this kind of problem as they now often depend on one manufacturer for a particular line item e.g., only one manufacturer for tank treads in CONUS. If that facility goes down, it could take a relatively extreme amount of time to get track back into the system. JIT logistics is another obvious example.

[Duncan Kinder]

rick:

If we use biological organisms as an analogy, (assuming the analogy is sound), then the matter becomes something that we can verify.

What sort of networks are, in fact, resilient; and, if so, under what circumstances? What sort of factors enhance or degrade resilience? Given some network's present state, what steps feasibly can be taken actually to improve its resilience? Are there trade offs? Can steps that would benefit one sort of community actually harm another?

And so forth.

[adam]

John,

Looking at the article, and your comments I suspect that the key issue is that the US, despite still significant (Post-Surge (TM)) resources, could not retake Sadr city, even after a month of fighting. According to Reuters, as of Thursday (24th April) night the US military were still bombing the area. I'm not completely sure that you can actually effectively run services when the fly-boys are still having their fun. I suspect that "not bombing the place" would be a fairly key part of any model. Even so the Americans cannot make the streets "safer", only the Iraqis can, and the Iraqis in charge of the area are the ones that the US have supposedly chased away.

In unrelated news the Sadrists pointed out that although their ceasefire applied to Iraqis, it didn't apply to Americans or Iraqi collaborators. They also welcomed the support they were getting from the Iraqi army. In an equally unrelated item the US announced that the 300k strong Iraqi army was understrength, and needed to be doubled in size. This is on the not unreasonable theory that if the army you've got is completely useless, you can build another one. Basic maths isn't my strong point (although I did do 2 years training as an accountant) but twice nothing surely is nothing.

http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/04/25/946331.aspx

The good news is that apparently 70% of Iraqi soldiers turn up these days. Back a year or so it was only one third. We've managed to get our quislings out of their homes, and away from their TVs. No wonder the Iraqi electric supply is so ropey, its a cunning ploy to get the troops out. Victory is clearly just around the corner as we've managed to get some of our squaddies turning up for work.

As for the DARPA dollars, sure why not? DARPA people have got to eat. I can save the American government a boat-load of money though. The practical way to do it would be to give the local militia some money, give them a bit of power, get their leader's kids into an expensive British or American private education (Stow, Harrow or Eton, followed by Oxbridge then maybe a bit of Yale or Harvard for some Yankistan-side experience) - the word hostage doesn't need to be mentioned, and in a generation or two the area's yours.

You want an example? Lets take Oman. Oman is an absolute monarchy. The current ruler, the Sultan, came to power after overthrowing his own father in a British sponsored coup. You'll be glad to hear that his dad was also a British backed Absolute Monarch, but his dad went barking mad with paranoia towards the end of his life - although as he was dodging genuine assassination attempts its hard to say that its paranoia, after all people really did want him dead.

Anyway, back to the current Sultan. Lets see - Private School in England, followed by the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, then a year in a British Army Regiment. He took power in 1970, fought against a Yemeni guerilla force with SAS and RAF assistance. Dad had been a bit lax in fighting the war against naughty evil Commie rebels who didn't think that an Absolute Monarch was a good idea. Dad preferred to concentrate on the people actually physically near him who wanted him dead. Priorities at that level can be awkward for the nation that owns the ruler - we wanted to fight the rebels, he wanted to not be shot (ironically the Sultan was indeed shot, but not killed, in the British coup, legend has it by himself).

As in Iraq the British had massive problems with their local troops. According to Geraghty (1983:173) every SAS firka (local irregular troops, each around 100 strong) had, at some stage, a rebellion or mutiny, some of which had to be put down by force and the entire unit disbanded.

Despite the problems with troop loyalty and the fact that the rebels were trying quite hard to kill them, SAS casualties in the war were twelve dead in six years of constant military operations.

Now that's one way of how to maintain power in both Sadr City and Iraq, its just that there will be lots of small Sultans, rather than 1 per country.

Want it a bit quicker than sometime in the next 10-15 years? Not on the menu as it happens - even the current US military plan for Iraq runs out to 2018 and beyond now - that's enough to put a 14 year old today through a decent British education and get them back to Iraq as a young and energetic ruler-to-be. In that time dear old dad can be in power, but who cares? As the rather disturbing song has it: "Tomorrow belongs to me"...