Global Guerrillas

JOURNAL: Guerrilla Transformation

It's almost a rule that revisionist powers, if they are going to be successful, learn from the great military minds of the status quo power (even when, as they usually are, these minds are out of favor with those in charge within the status quo military). In our case, the revisionist forces are the plethora of small groups that are challenging the state to carve out their own small slice of globalization. Who are they reading? Lind and Boyd, as this pro-HPG site attests. By the way, the group's willingness to share this information is pure open source warfare.

JOURNAL: Another Quote

"The technique is very old, it belongs to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The technology is new, from Japan and China. The training is al Qaeda."

A senior officer in Afghanistan's intelligence agency on the Taliban's increasing using multiple IEDs to bait a trap (with a small initial explosion) and then kill first responders (with a large secondary explosion). Courtesy CSM.

Men's hearts don't change as fast as the onset of connectivity.

JOURNAL: Nigerian Disruption Grows

Dokubo-Asari: "Nigeria is an evil entity. . . . I will continue to fight and try to see that Nigeria dissolves and disintegrates."

With the government (a kleptocracy) arrest of Dokubo-Aasari (a top guerrilla entrepreneur), Nigerian oil fields are under immediate threat. The Niger delta produces a large percentage of the country's ~2.4 m barrels of oil a day (target: 3m bbl/d in 2006 and 4 m bbl/d by 2010). Year to date US oil imports from Nigeria: 1.04 million barrels a day. News continues to flow in on Nigerian disruption.

Company reports: In the delta, 120 guerrillas in boats took control of at least one oil flow station and an oil platform, both owned by the U.S. oil firm Chevron (platform Idama and stationRobertkiri). This halted 27,000 barrels a day of production in non-violent incidents (they disarmed six government soldiers and Chevron evacuated personnel). Shell is pulling out non-essential staff. Guerrillas: Alali Horsfall, Dokubo-Asari's second-in-command in the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force, said by cell phone Thursday that he and a force of 6,000 men, armed with machetes and dynamite, had taken over 10 oil flow stations and would not abandon them until their leader was freed from custody. "We will kill every iota of oil operations in the Niger Delta. We will destroy anything and everything. We will challenge our enemies in our territory and feed them to the vultures," the NDPVF said in a statement.

Shell: 1,100,000 barrels a day. 100 oil fields, 6,000 km of pipeline, and two export terminals.
Exxon: 570,000 barrels a day. Offshore production.
Chevron: 420,000+ barrels a day. 25 fields and 2,590 km of pipelines.
Nigerian AGIP: 145,000+ barrels a day. 146 wells.
ELF: 125,000+ barrels a day. 12 onshore and offshore fields (even split).

Think local, act global: so far, the Nigerian guerrilla's connections only transcended borders through the export of bunkered oil, the importation of black market weapons/goods, and indirect pressure on the price of oil. As this evolves, we should expect campaigns focused on particular companies, transnational cooperation (global open source warfare), and better use of Internet media. The effort will be to shift the attention of the multinational companies (likely through the manipulation of stock prices due to pressure on global operations) operating in Nigeria from the government and to the local tribes (so they can be "taxed").

JOURNAL: Paramilitaries in Basra

The unstated secret behind the relative peace in the southeast of Iraq (Basra) is that the British troops have relied on "loyalist" Shiite paramilitaries to maintain order (this is part of the unofficial controlled chaos exit strategy). Unfortunately, this strategy has not been fully acknowledged by the US command authority which is still engaged in armed sweeps and "nation-building." The inevitable result of this confusion is a breakdown in the relationship between the paramilitaries and US/UK forces -- as this convoluted story of yesterday's clash between British troops and local paramilitaries depicts:

• (Sunday): British troops arrest three members of the Mahdi army (including a key associate of Sadr's).
• British special ops in civilian clothes are confronted by Iraqi "policemen" affiliated by local paramilitaries.
• The policemen arrest the troops after a fire fight. The policemen refuse to release the prisoners per Interior ministry orders.
• British troops surround a Basra police station and demand the release of the troops. The troops in the cordon are attacked by the angry crowd (militia) and their vehicles are set on fire (see picture inset).
• Iraqi policemen, under threat of a 30 mm cannon reveal the location of the "hostages": a paramilitary safe house in Basra.
• British troops stage a hostage recovery effort to gain their release.

Parallel to this, a reporter to the NYTimes was killed after being abducted at gunpoint from his home in Basra by men claiming to be police (which puts the death of Stephen Vincent into perspective). As explored in the brief: War's new Equilibrium, this is a new type of war which requires a new approach.

WAR'S NEW EQUILIBRIUM

In technology, particularly in information based systems, advances can occur almost overnight. This likely applies to warfare as it becomes more information-based. As in technology, patterns and methods of warfare tend to stay within bounded equilibria depending on the type of war being fought. When an improvement arrives, the equilibrium point changes and warfare undergoes a rapid shift.

One of the ways to measure a equilibrium point was first demonstrated by Lewis Richardson over 50 years ago. He calculated that the distribution of casualties in conventional wars follow a power law distribution. Updates to his work show that this pattern of distribution continues to hold.

In a new paper by Johnson, Spagat, and others called "From Old Wars to New Wars and Global Terrorism," (PDF) the authors demonstrate that a new pattern of war is emerging. To do this, they analyzed the frequency-intensity distributions of wars (including terrorism) and examined their power law curves. They found that conventional wars had a power law exponent of 1.8. An analysis of terrorism since 1968 found that the exponents were 1.71 (for G7 countries) and 2.5 (for non-G7 countries). This makes sense, conventional wars and G7 terrorism are both characterized by periods of relative non-activity followed by high casualty events (highly orchestrated battles). Non-G7 terrorism is a more decentralized and ad hoc type of warfare characterized by numerous small engagements and fewer large casualty events.

Here's where the analysis gets interesting. When the author's examined the data from Colombia and Iraq, they found that both wars evolved towards the coefficient for non-G7 terrorism (although from different directions). This finding doesn't fit the prevailing theories of warfare. A conventional understanding of fourth generation warfare, such the one posited by Thomas Hammes in the Sling and the Stone posit that 4th generation warfare began in earnest with Mao. However, within Mao's formulation (and Ho Chi Minh's variant), guerrilla wars are but a prelude to conventional war to seize control of the state. The power law for these wars should, based on this theory, tend towards the coefficient we see for conventional wars. In fact, we see the opposite. Guerrilla wars in both Colombia and Iraq have stabilized at a coefficient far from conventional warfare.

This has broad implications for 4th generation warfare theory -- which clearly dominated the types of wars we saw in the latter half of the twentieth century. The patterns of conflict we see today in Colombia and Iraq are a break from the previous framework (which may be an example of punctuated equilibrium). Unlike the previous models of guerrilla wars which sought to replace the state, these new wars have moved to a level of decentralization that makes them both unable to replace the state and extremely hard to eliminate. Is this new evolutionary equilibrium a fifth generation of warfare? It is extremely likely. This new form of warfare, or what I call open source warfare, is what this site (and my book) is dedicated to understanding.

JOURNAL: Civil War in Iraq?

As the violence in Iraq continues to accelerate, an increasing number of observers now consider the country in a civil war. For example, Christopher Allbritton (Time Magazine's Iraq correspondent) recently declared in his personal weblog: "After watching this place for two years, I'm now prepared to call this thing a civil war..." Is it civil war as we have come to know it, or does it look like the small group chaos we see in Colombia (or Chechnya)? If it is the latter, then it looks more like the start of 30-years war in reverse. Instead of ending up with a Peace of Westphalia that established the basis for the state system, we end up with an agreement that rolls it back. This might serve as an interesting discussion topic.

JOURNAL: A Map that Sums it Up

If you want to glimpse the future of Iraq (our current headliner) in ten years; go no further than a map of Colombia. This map depicts the division of the country by group: the FARC (yellow), the ELN (green hatch), the AUC (multiple paramilitaries in orange), and the government (what's left). Each group is fueled (from global sources) by a combination of drugs, oil, or a nation-state sponsorship. These groups are also highly decentralized (more like global guerrilla groups than proto-nation-states like the Hamas). For example, the AUC includes subgroups like the "Elmer Cardenas Bloc" and the "Northern Bloc." They are a laboratory of systems sabotage and TAZ development. In Iraq's case, the disorder depicted in this type of map will flow across its borders like a grease fire. Globalization will continue to melt the map.

JOURNAL: UAVs for Guerrillas

Here's yet another sign that unrestrained Chinese capitalism (the emergent rule-set for the new global economic system) is very compatible with open source warfare. A recent Pakistani military raid on a North Waziristan (a rugged autonomous zone near the Afghanistan border) Madrassa connected to al Qaeda found a sign of new innovation: a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) -- as well as a arsenal of weapons and al Qaeda training material. This UAV was likely a man-launched Chinese military ASN-15 (or a low-tech knock-off).

UPDATE: a reader has confirmed (below) that this is a low-tech radio-controlled (RC) aircraft with an extremely short range (although larger and much more capable "toy" models from China that replicate the functionality of tactical UAVs are available).

These remote control vehicles can carry video and camera hacks that makes it possible to gather intelligence on ground forces in the area. For a guerrilla, this an effective and low cost (US UAVs are extremely expensive in comparison) method of gathering intelligence on weaknesses in static defenses attached to infrastructure. They can also include weapons hacks.

LONG TAIL COUNTER-INSURGENCY

The complexity of the threat posed by open source warfare in Iraq has accelerated the US military's use of outsourcing. The growing trend towards outsourcing military operations has created a new variant on the term, "a long tail." Traditionally, this term has been used to describe the number of support personnel (the tail) required to support combat troops (the tooth). Tooth-to-tail ratios have grown over the years as the complexity and resource intensity of modern combat has increased. In essence, modern warfare requires a loooong tail of support troops. The US military's tooth-to-tail ratio is approximately 1 to 10 (or more).

The modern variant of the "long tail" can be seen in the force structure of the US counter-insurgency effort in Iraq. This new tail is composed of 120,000 personnel in hundreds of large and small companies that provide everything from traditional support functions to reconstruction to security in Iraq. To be even more accurate, you could also throw in the tens of thousands of Shiite, Kurdish, and tribal militias that US troops rely upon.

If we plot the number of personnel by the source, the resulting curve has the classic long tail distribution pattern. The curve starts with the US military and rapidly drops off as additional groups are added. At the far right hand side of the curve are a plethora of small private military companies, tribal groups, and engineering companies that provide security and reconstruction services.

The good thing about the long tail approach to warfare in Iraq is that it provides a demand driven mechanism for dealing with a rapidly evolving threat. For example, the US State Department can hire private bodyguards from Triple Canopy to defend themselves against assassination and kidnapping (this means that they are not reliant on a bureaucratic US military for protection services and can therefore tailor their purchases to their specific needs). The bad part is that the US military hasn't come to grips with this new way of conducting war. It doesn't provide the platform services necessary to make it work efficiently (exactly what those platform services are will be detailed in my upcoming book).

Unfortunately, the lack of a platform, particularly in the form of legal cover for deployed PMCs, is about to unravel this distribution. The Iraqi government has started to regulate private military companies working in the country. Since the rules governing these personnel are still largely undefined, this regulatory effort will likely result in a distortion of the US military's counter-insurgency market due to rampant corruption and mismanagement by Iraqi authorities.