Global Guerrillas

JOURNAL: Israeli Ultra-Nationalists Adopt Systems Disruption

To protest Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, Israeli ultra-nationalists closed highway one today with spiked cans and oil. The spikes slashed the tires of 20 cars and disrupted traffic for an hour. Additionally, several ultra-nationalists were arrested to prevent the execution of plans to disrupt electrical and water networks in Israel. This is yet another demonstration of the portability of systems disruption to groups other than Islamic radicals.

If Iraq is used as a guide, even a small number of autonomous groups could radically destabilize Israel within a relatively short time frame.

MASSIVELY PARALLEL OPERATIONS

The US Air Force used stealth technology and precision guided munitions to paralyze the Iraqi state during the first Gulf war and for the first part of the second. The planning technique they used was called effects based operations (EBO) -- a method of warfare where the effects caused by the attack are more important than the level of destruction of the target.

THE ANALYSIS GAP: OIL MARKETS

Conventional oil market analysis is focused on traditional economic factors. The only intangible factors left to deal with is the sentiment of OPEC (to abide by quotas, increase/decrease quotas, etc.) and Saudi Arabia's maximum production capacity (a closely guarded secret). This type of analysis has worked fairly well in the past, but it has recently reached an impasse. It is no longer explanatory or predictive. This brief explains the problem, and what can be done to correct it.

JOURNAL: Network Load and Cascading System Failure

Electrical networks are at the heart of modern economies -- which makes them a prime target for disruption by Global Guerrillas. Electrical systems are complex networks exhibit power laws (in failure plots and network organization) and self organizing criticality (SOC). The load on a electrical network is tightly correlated with the propensity of the network to suffer system-wide cascades of failure.

Ian Dobson et. al. have modeled this in their paper "Complex Systems Analysis of Series of Blackouts: Cascading Failure, Criticality, and Self-Organization." What is interesting to our analysis is how quickly an electrical network moves from a survivable state to a critical state when the load on the network is increased. See the chart (right) from their model that depicts the inflection point at where the transient loads shunted from a failed node increase the potential of a large network failure.

This implies that electrical networks are at their most vulnerable during summer days (80% plus utilization), when the load is well within the range of cascade responses (electricity use is strongly seasonal). Systems like Iraq are fully utilized (electricity is rationed nationally) and therefore likely to be in a critical range 24/7. Of course, the potential of mismanagement (during a power crisis) and complicating events increases the potential of cascades of failure at much lower levels of utilization.

NOTE: Given this, it's likely that the Moscow blackout was made possible due to an unseasonable heat wave.

GLOBAL WARRIORS

Global Guerrillas are warriors (among other things) and not soldiers. What is a warrior in this modern context? Ralph Peters attempts to answer that in The New Warrior Class. In this paper, he defined warriors as "erratic primitives of shifting allegiance, habituated to violence, with no stake in civil order." He describes the situation:

We have entered an age in which entire nations are subject to dispossession, starvation, rape, and murder on a scale approaching genocide--not at the hands of a conquering foreign power but under the guns of their neighbors. Paramilitary warriors--thugs whose talent for violence blossoms in civil war--defy legitimate governments and increasingly end up leading governments they have overturned. This is a new age of warlords, from Somalia to Myanmar/Burma, from Afghanistan to Yugoslavia.

Classification

Peters concludes that warriors now number in the millions globally and can be divided into four distinct categories:

• Underclass. A loser with little education, no earning power, and no future.
• Disrupted young males. Young men and boys drawn into the warrior milieu due to the disruption of normal paths of development (school, work, etc.).
• Believers. Men that fight due to strong belief (religious, patriotic, etc.) or those that have extreme suffered personal loss.
• Former military men. Former military men that have not been integrated back into society. They have no other skills except violence.

Central Paradox

Peters correctly points out the central paradox of warrior culture. These warriors continue conflict for their own gain -- the spoils of war and the continuation of a way of life. Perversely, the continuation of violence prevents society from delivering the benefits necessary to rehabilitate them.

The Modern Warrior

Peters' formulation works well as a starting point in our analysis. Warriors, as he describes them, are difficult to defeat because of the asymmetrical methods by which they fight war. It's classic fourth generation warfare -- dirty, nasty, and ultimately won or lost in the moral sphere.

However, as tough as the the 4GW warrior is, it fails to account for the extreme resilience and innovation we see today in global terrorism and guerrilla warfare. We are also fighting on many more levels that merely the moral one. This implies that something has been left out of this analysis. My conclusion is that it fails to appreciate how globalization has layered new skill sets on ancient mindsets. Warriors, in our current context, are not merely lazy and monosyllabic primitives as Peters implies. They are wired, educated, and globally mobile. They build complex supply chains, benefit from global money flows, and they invest shrewdly. In a nutshell, they are modern.

Additionally, they have stumbled into a decentralized system of coordination/learning, something that I call open source warfare, that has led to radical improvements in how they prosecute warfare. This has enabled:

• Systems disruption. The coordinated decimation of a state's infrastructure, markets, and social order. Iraq is a classic example.
• Strategic reach. Attacks from 9/11 to Bali to Madrid. To provoke or coerce global participants. Attacks that influence the flows of global resources (oil) and people (tourism and commerce).
• Participation in Black globalization. Economic dissonance caused by the traffic in drugs to people.

JOURNAL: Efficient Systems Disruption

Effects based operations planning calls for attacks based on the impact produced -- the % of electricity, transportation, etc disrupted -- rather than the degree of destruction of facilities/targets. Planners also rely upon precise targeting of specific network connections to generate country-wide effects. This is both efficient and effective. Iraq's open source warfare has generated a similar approach. Guerrilla attacks against Iraqi infrastructure have declined but the effects they produce have increased. Oil production and daily hours of electricity have declined as precisely targeted (due complete knowledge of infrastructure networks) and efficiently timed (just after repair) attacks have been made.

EFFECTS BASED OPERATIONS

"Those skilled in war subdue the enemy's army without battle. They capture his cities without assaulting them and over-throw the state without protracted operations." Sun Tzu

The success of the allies during the first Gulf War was due to a new approach to the employment of airpower called Effects Based Operations (EBO). It was formulated to take advantage of the following:

• Precision guided munitions (PGM). Bombs that can hit targets with an extremely high degree of accuracy. This minimized the number of aircraft and sorties needed to eliminate a target. It also allowed for minimal damage to the target site to accomplish set goals.

• Stealth. A set of technologies that prevent the detection of aircraft. These technologies eliminated the need for force protection packages and extensive pre-attack preparation. Stealth was synergistic with precision guided munitions.

• A modern target. Iraq, unlike most of the enemies we had fought since WW2, was a semi-modern nation-state. It had extensive networks that were vulnerable to disruption.

The emergence of EBO

It was apparent to airpower enthusiasts that this combination of factors allowed airpower to become a decisive instrument of conventional warfare -- it moved it beyond ground support and carpet bombing (of dubious value). Due to the influence of Boyd and emerging systems theory, they developed a method that went beyond the simple destruction of enemy forces to the systems approach that emphasized the effects these attacks would create (for a nice overview of EBO, read Brig Gen David Deptula's paper, "Effects-Based Operations"). These effects included:

• Ubiquitous system disruption. Stealth and precision enabled parallel attacks against all systems virtually simultaneously. Systems leverage, available due to Iraq's modern urbanized infrastructure, created the opportunity for cascades of failure -- small attacks had system-wide impact. This also completely eliminated the need for the complete reduction of a target set. If the attack took the system down, only those minimal attacks necessary to maintain the condition were necessary.

• Rapid psychological isolation. This worked in two ways. First to isolate the leadership elements of Saddam's government/military to force them into moral collapse. Secondly, to minimize the isolation of the US/allied governments due to the conflict -- speed was essential.

• Minimal collateral damage. Essential to reduce moral outrage (willingness to fight) and manage global public opinion.

The Global Guerrilla Solution

Unfortunately, warfare is a conflict of minds. The opposition learned from the experience of the first Gulf War. This amazing demonstration (who doesn't remember were they were the first night of the attack on Baghdad?) taught the value of systems disruption to both the Iraqi leadership (at ground zero) as well as the entire universe of potential foes. It certainly informed Iraq's strategy for the second Gulf War. Iraq purposely created forces to replicate the USAF's Effects Based Operations with small cells of guerrillas. This has in turn been taught (through a percolation of innovation in Iraq's Bazaar of violence) to other autonomous guerrilla groups. Here's how guerrillas conduct EBO:

• Precision and stealth. Small groups of guerrillas are nearly impossible to detect and neutralize, particularly when they bypass military formations and hard targets to attack systems. Small, precisely aimed/timed attacks by these guerrillas against target systems can drive them into cascades of failure (for example: Iraq's northern oil fields have been nearly inoperative since the end of the conventional war, The attackers have suffered few casualties.).

• Continuous state failure. Iraq's basic services are in a continual state of failure. The state's leadership is in deep isolation due to its inability to deliver political goods to the population.

• An emergence of Primary Loyalties. A primary goal of Iraq's guerrillas is to fragment the country's loyalties -- ethnic, religious, tribal, etc. A hollow, non-functional state that is increasingly reliant on loyalist paramilitaries (Badr Brigades and Peshmerga) is precisely the desired outcome.

NOTE: I've applied the EBO method to a war with Iran (see the brief: Collapsing Iran).

JOURNAL: Internet Security Trends

There are interesting parallels between the development of Internet security threats and open source guerrilla warfare. Both draw on a broad set of diverse globally dispersed participants. Both have ties to criminal activity. Here's Bruce Schneier on the most recent trends in Internet security:

Targeted worms are another trend we're starting to see. Recently there have been worms that use third-party information-gathering techniques, such as Google, for advanced reconnaissance (GG NOTE: open source data for automated systempunkt development?). This leads to a more intelligent propagation methodology; instead of propagating scattershot, these worms are focusing on specific targets. By identifying targets through third-party information gathering, the worms reduce the noise they would normally make when randomly selecting targets, thus increasing the window of opportunity between release and first detection.

Another 2004 trend that we expect to continue in 2005 is crime. Hacking has moved from a hobbyist pursuit with a goal of notoriety to a criminal pursuit with a goal of money (GG NOTE: similar to the trend we see in the move from terrorist to global guerrilla). Hackers can sell unknown vulnerabilities -- "zero-day exploits" -- on the black market to criminals who use them to break into computers. Hackers with networks of hacked machines can make money by selling them to spammers or phishers. They can use them to attack networks. We have started seeing criminal extortion over the Internet: hackers with networks of hacked machines threatening to launch DoS attacks against companies. Most of these attacks are against fringe industries -- online gambling, online computer gaming, online pornography -- and against offshore networks. The more these extortions are successful, the more emboldened the criminals will become.

LESSONS FROM THE GULF WARS

“Gulf lesson one is the value of air power… (it) was right on target from day one… Our air strikes were the most effective, yet humane, in the history of warfare.”

President George Bush, 29 May 1991

The most important lesson of the second Gulf war is that a small group of guerrillas, armed with the right strategy, can keep a nation in perpetual failure.

John Robb

Iraq’s Baathists did learn lessons from the first Gulf war that altered their strategy for the second -- this is another demonstration that war is a contest of minds and to a lesser extent merely a clash of weaponry and formations on the field of battle.

1991’s Gulf War taught the Iraqi leadership that its military wasn’t a match for the US war machine. It would lose quickly and badly. Secondly, and less obviously, the first Gulf War taught the Iraqi leadership the power of systems disruption. The US air campaign during the first Gulf War was the first of its kind -- it completely shut down the functions of a semi-modern nation-state. For example:

• Oil and gasoline. 500 sorties and 1,200 tons of bombs were used to shut down Iraq’s oil and refining system. 80% of its refining capacity was directly impacted. The remaining 20% was preventatively closed to avoid damage. Iraq was left only with those fuel reserves produced before the war.
• Electricity. Attacks against Iraqi power production and switching facilities first shut down its effective use and then collapsed the entire system. This shutdown cascaded throughout the country as systems reliant on the national grid were forced to depend on unreliable ad hoc power generation.
• Telecommunications. The national telephone system was attacked on an ongoing basis. The ability to rapidly repair the network, its built-in redundancy, and numerous difficult to destroy wireless nodes forced the campaign’s planners into a series of repeated attacks to cause the needed disruption.
• Transportation. Numerous bridges, railroads, and roadways were interdicted to prevent the transportation of supplies and the normal functioning of the economy. Transportation connections from Baghdad to southeastern sections Iraq were successfully severed.

At the point when the first coalition ground forces entered Iraq (and Kuwait), Iraq was the hollow husk of a nation-state. All of its vital systems, necessary to support its status as a state let alone a state at war, were broken. As President Bush (see quote) and the entire world noted, the air campaign was devastatingly effective. However, this analysis misses the point. It wasn’t the air power that was so effective; it was systems disruption that accomplished the task. The devastation of Iraq’s infrastructure won the war before the ground invasion confirmed the process. The important thing to understand is that method of accomplishing this systemic collapse, air power, was coincidental to the outcome.

JOURNAL: Swarming Analysis

Sean Edwards (of RAND) just published an EXCELLENT dissertation on swarming tactics called, "Swarming and the Future of Warfare" (see an earlier post on Swarming for more). He provides extensive detail on what is required for successful swarming operations. The case studies and quantitative analysis are excellent resources.

Of course, my thinking on this is even more radically non-linear than Sean's....