Global Guerrillas

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I am off to Mexico and then to Palo Alto (at the Future Salon on Friday) on a speaking tour. Hopefully, I will be able to post from the road.

JOURNAL: The Window of Controlled Chaos Slams Shut

Back in 2004, I wrote a brief on how the US, unable to contain the growth of Iraq's open source insurgency, was planning to use loyalist paramilitaries (the Latin American solution) to contain it (this is analysis I repeated a year later in the New York Times):

The establishment of... loyalist paramilitaries in Iraq would quickly put the insurgency on the defensive. Over the next year, their activities will likely result in a level of "controlled chaos" sufficient to allow the US to withdraw its forces. Additionally, these militias could operate while the government maintains a fig leaf of democracy.

This is exactly what happened. However, I ended the brief with this caveat on the consequences of this choice:

• Institutionalized corruption. These militias would likely involve themselves in illegal activities. A government abetted franchise for their counter-insurgency activities would require inaction in regards to their criminal actions.
• Human rights abuses. These militias will operate within the same rule set used by the guerrillas they are fighting. This means assassinations, hostage taking, etc.
• Long term instability. While the militias will be able to put a lid on the growth of the insurgency, they will likely be unable to eradicate it. This means that Iraq will be stable enough for the US to leave but will suffer long-term instability.

The Window Slams Shut

Unfortunately, the US didn't take advantage of the opportunity to withdraw during 2005. Decision makers mistook the controlled chaos enabled by the use of militias for progress towards their maximal goals in the country. That illusion officially ended with the attack on the Samara shrine (a form of social system disruption, likely a coup de grace by Zarqawi). After that event, the fragile structure of the system flew out of control as Shiite militias began to ethnically cleanse Sunnis.

The US is now caught between the militias and the guerrillas and the situation will deteriorate quickly.

Here's a likely scenario for how this will play out: deeper entrenchment within US bases (to limit casualties) and pledges of neutrality (Rumsfeld) will prove hollow. Ongoing ethnic slaughter will force US intervention to curtail the militias. Inevitably, this will increase tensions with the militias and quickly spin out of control. Military and police units sent to confront the militias will melt down (again), due to conflicting loyalties. Several large battles with militias will drive up US casualties sharply. Supply lines to US bases from Kuwait will be cut. Protesters will march on US bases to demand a withdrawal. Oil production via the south will be cut (again), bringing Iraqi oil exports to a halt. Meanwhile, the government will continue its ineffectual debate within the green zone, as irrelevant to the reality on the ground in the country as ever. Unable to function in the mounting chaos and facing a collapse in public support for the war, the US military will be forced to withdraw in haste. It will be ugly.

UPDATE: After I wrote this, there was news that the US intervened by attacking a gathering point for Shiite militias in Baghdad. An Imam was killed along with 16 others. There was also a raid on an Interior Ministry prison (Badr). The scenario begins...

STARTING AN OPEN SOURCE WAR

Open source war is a byproduct of globalization. It different than conventional guerrilla warfare in that the guerrillas don't have a center of gravity (a unifying ideology). In open source war, the guerrillas aren't loyal to a single group but rather dozens of different groups, each with their own motivations for fighting. The benefits of this organizational type, once it reaches critical mass, are numerous (and once it is entrenched, it is almost impossible to defeat). The good thing is that it is difficult to initiate, cross the chasm in adoption, and reach critical mass.

Unfortunately, it appears that some groups have cracked the code on how to reliably build critical mass in open source warfare. Likely inadvertently, Che Guevara's foco insurgency has been adapted to reliably accomplish this. The elements used include:

• Plausible promise. An open source war is built on an idea that has wide acceptance. The key is finding the idea (eject the occupation or force a government to abandon an egregious exploitation of a target area -- see my notes on Indonesia in the post below). Once it is found, it needs to be turned into a plausible promise. This is accomplished by making successful attacks, an alpha release if you will, on the target. If done correctly, this proves that the target is vulnerable and the war has the possibility of being won.
• Crossing the chasm. They key to moving from a foco to a viable movement is to adopt open source behaviors. This includes sharing, trading, collaboration, and coordination with groups that are willing to participate but do not share the same motivations or loyalties as the initiating group. This is a very tough step, particularly for authoritarian groups. However, if it is accomplished the chasm in adoption is crossed very quickly. Operative tenet: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
• Critical mass. The final step is gaining sustainability, where the movement renews itself as a natural byproduct of its operations. The best method I've discovered is to disrupt critical infrastructure (see State Failure 101 for more). The disruption of infrastructure damages the economy in a way that forces new groups to develop, by driving people to primary loyalties in order to survive. Groups formed by these primary loyalties will actively participate in the conflict (either in support of the government as paramilitaries or against it as guerrillas). The interaction of these groups, particularly their excesses, provides a useful dynamic. Finally, it also fosters the development of a micro-economy (a bazaar) of guerrilla freelancers that provides a large pool of expertise that can be drawn upon to scale operations (transnational crime is a great way to pay for this).

JOURNAL: Grassroots Emergency Networks

In my Fast Company article, "Power to the People" I anticipated the development of parallel communications networks for first responders (which will expand to encompass much of the population in the area):

"Corporate communications monopolies will crumble as cities build their own emergency wireless networks using simple products ..."

There are signs of life on this front. New York City, an innovator in grassroots security, is doing this already for first responders. They have an request for proposal (RFP) out for a wireless network (full document). Here's the highlights (of course, this points to a great opportunity for companies building turn-key wireless networks bundled with bundled applications/software for first responders):

The New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) is seeking a systems integrator (hereinafter referred to as the “Integrator”) qualified to design, construct, manage and maintain a citywide wireless network or networks (“Network(s)”) sufficiently robust to satisfy the varied and demanding requirements of New York City’s public safety agencies.

At some point, after these networks are built, they are likely to become "hardened" back-ups to commercial networks for business and personal use.

JOURNAL: Indonesia's Systempunkt

Indonesia (Elang, Sumbawa). A recent guerrilla attack on a Newmont Mining Corp exploration team forced the company to evacuate 130 people and suspend operations in the area. This attack follows numerous violent protests against the resource extraction industry in the country -- which generates 12 percent of Indonesia's GDP. It's a great example of the trial and error approach (release innovations early and often) that open source guerrillas use to rapidly find systempunkts (network vulnerabilities that yield huge leverage).

Indonesia's Systempunkt

While this initial attack was relatively innocuous, it will quickly develop into a larger campaign against mining companies in the country. The long supply lines and relative concentration of resource extraction efforts offer numerous avenues of attack. Unlike the earlier relatively unsuccessful attacks on Bali (and the planned attack on Goa in India), it aligns with global guerrilla theory in the following ways:

• Environmental damage. Companies like Freemont-McMoRan and Newmont Mining Corp have caused (like Shell, Chevron, Total, and Agip in Nigeria) massive environmental damage. This aligns local interests with those of the global guerrillas. As a result, numerous allies will be found (from a variety of different sources) to populate the open source insurgency.
• Kleptocracy. Payments from the mining industry flow to a combination of corrupt government/military officials (that are paid money to protect mining interests) and private interests. The result is that local people get nearly nothing for the use of their land (as seen in Balochistan, Iraq, and Nigeria). Attacks are therefore seen as a means of economic justice (which is yet another source of recruitment). It will only be a matter of time before armed theft from these mining companies becomes a bazaar (an economic system that aligns transnational crime with local guerrillas).
• Corporate weakness. Attacks on corporate psychology (see Halliburton targeting for more) have worked effectively in Iraq and Nigeria. It takes very little to force companies to withdraw personnel and investment as well as shutter operations if done correctly. The reason is that today's corporate market-based moral center is relatively is adverse to uncertainty or high levels of risk. While mining and oil companies have used corporate security in the past (and even private military companies) to protect their interests, this is a entirely new level of threat (as Shell found out in Nigeria). This points to the development of a new type of corporation (that has high levels of private military capability), on the Halliburton model, that can assume high risks and get compensation for it. These new armed companies will actually become active participants, in alliance with governments, in counter-insurgency campaigns. Model: British East India Company.

US DEFENSE: STEP FUNCTIONS vs. ORGANIC GROWTH

There is a big debate going on right now within the US military/political/industrial establishment over the future of defense spending: between those that would spend huge amounts of money on transforming the military so that it could build nations/fight guerrillas and those that would continue business as usual (great power conventional war).

This debate reminds me of an experience I had back in 1993/94. At that time, technological advances in networking and computer technology had reached a critical point: the level at where a multi-use global interactive network could be built. Naturally, some of the incumbent monopoly network owners (telcos and cable companies) saw themselves as the primary beneficiaries and were abuzz about the of potential new revenue streams from broadband interactive TV networks (iTV). In response, new grand projects and gee-whiz prototypes of video on demand were being launched/announced nearly every month.

I was deeply immersed in the big trend (as I usually am) and had the chance to spend lots of time with some of the change agents at the telcos working on these systems -- running business models, analyzing technology, and imagining the future. However, it soon became apparent to me that this hype was going nowhere. The reason was simple: these systems required a huge upfront investment (measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars) on the promise of ill defined future benefits (revenue streams from interactive projects that were merely in the "visionary" stage). If looked at from 50,000 ft, the investment required to build the platform necessary to make this network viable for a transformative impact (large enough to attract a marketplace of participants) looked like a step function (see step function in diagram, where the vertical axis is the investment required and the horizontal is time). Naturally, the telcos and the cable companies declined to invest the money necessary. The business as usual crowd won -- with good reason, it would have destroyed their profitability for the next decade (which was already at risk due to deregulation).

However, all was not lost. In parallel to this, online networks like AOL and CompuServe were plowing ahead, growing incrementally with each advance in modem technology (300 -- 1,200 -- 9,600 -- 14,400 -- etc.), building text services that could be delivered and monetized via these thin pipes. Soon, companies based on the open alternative to these closed networks (the Internet), took advantage of this technology to deliver similar services. The rest is history. We built the Internet. The lesson is that organic bottoms-up growth worked. By leveraging the personal investments of individuals (voting with your wallet), incremental advances in technology, existing network infrastructure, and entrepreneurial activity (ISPs, software vendors, service providers, etc.) we built a global communications platform that was beyond the reach of the incumbent network owners. Additionally, we are extremely lucky that we didn't lock ourselves into (made the default through monopoly power) this centrally planned alternative, since it would have been a disastrous white elephant (in terms of expense, technology, the marketplace, innovation, utility, etc.).

The parallels between this experience and the current security debate are interesting. It indicates that the incumbent security providers (nation-states) will not build a new type of security system that can handle the growing non-state threat. The big ticket, centrally planned, step function transformation project necessary to accomplish this (partial efforts will not work), is not possible in an environment characterized by battles over spending (between rapidly growing social programs and defense) and spirally public/private debt. Further, the potential benefits of this transformative approach are in the sketchy visionary stage, and have been put further in doubt due to the lackluster performance of the DoD in Iraq -- a coming Iraq syndrome? In short, the smart money is that the business as usual folks will win.

So, if we do get long-term security in this dynamically unstable global system, it will likely be from an organic source as I point out in my Fast Company article. In hindsight, I think we will find that we are much happier with the results.

JOURNAL: Guerrilla Innovation and Windows of Opportunity

In the fall of 2005, I wrote an article on the Open Source War in Iraq for the New York Times (you can read it here). It examined our various options in Iraq, dismissing each in turn.

One option was innovation:

First, out-innovating the insurgency will most likely prove unsuccessful. The insurgency uses an open-source community approach (similar to the decentralized development process now prevalent in the software industry) to warfare that is extremely quick and innovative. New technologies and tactics move rapidly from one end of the insurgency to the other, aided by Iraq's relatively advanced communications and transportation grid - demonstrated by the rapid increases in the sophistication of the insurgents' homemade bombs. This implies that the insurgency's innovation cycles are faster than the American military's slower bureaucratic processes (for example: its inability to deliver sufficient body and vehicle armor to our troops in Iraq).

This was confirmed again in March 2006 with this quote from an Associated Press article:

Lt. Col. Bill Adamson, operations chief for the anti-IED campaign, was realistic about the challenge in a Pentagon interview. "They adapt more quickly than we procure technology," he said of the insurgents.

It is also important to note, the article concluded that it wasn't possible to win in Iraq. The best we could do was put uniforms on loyalist paramilitaries (ethnic and religious militias) to create a level of "controlled chaos" -- that would allow the US to depart. This was exactly what happened. Unfortunately, this "controlled chaos" we helped to manufacture was only a window of time and not a permanent condition. That window is rapidly closing and we may have squandered our last opportunity to depart intact.

JOURNAL: Fast Company Article

My article in Fast Company's 10th Anniversary issue, "Security: Power to the People" is up on the FC site.

JOURNAL: Thriving in Nigeria

Here's a classic description of open source warfare by a Nigerian general named Gbadebo, “We are no longer facing one group, we are now facing so many factions." As the government is slowly realizing, the open source war in Nigeria is flying under its own power now. One of the reasons for this is that the criminal economy -- oil bunkering (smuggling stolen oil), arms trafficking, corporate warfare, corruption, etc. -- gets positive feedback from disruption. This criminal "economy," which I call the bazaar, is an economic platform that connects transnational crime with local global guerrillas. The more the state hollows out, the faster the transactions (due to less friction) in this economy occur. Their strategy of combining warfare, disruption, and criminality makes it not only possible for these groups to survive, but to thrive. It's a classic sign of a dynamically unstable system.

As this movement spreads towards the fields and pipeline infrastructures around Bonny (see map on previous post, in the eastern delta), rich targets await: Gbadebo, "If you blow up a flow station in Bonny, the entire place will cease to exist. It could take more than six months to quench the fire." Meanwhile, ongoing attacks on corporate psychology are devastating the legal economy in the western delta. For example, the construction in the western delta has ceased which throws currently employed workers into the arms of insurgents: Meanwhile, Wilbros Offshore Nigeria, employers of the hostages, has signified its intention to close down operation(s) in the Shell Western Division following the continued incarceration of the three workers. Wilbros, a pipeline construction and maintenance contracting firm in charge of Shell’s Focardos terminal projects, has told its sub-contractors to withdraw their equipment from the Western Division comprising Bayelsa, Delta and Ondo states. One of the contractors whose barges were hired by Wilbros said over 10,000 Nigerian workers will be affected by the evacuation.

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE IN NIGERIA

The problem with dynamically unstable systems, like our current global social and economic environment, is that once they lock into a feedback loop they are almost impossible to control. As quickly as you move to dampen one problem others emerge. Eventually, these problems multiply, overwhelming the controller's ability to mitigate their impact and the entire system fragments.

You can see this process in action right now. As we put all of our energies into dampening the potential of civil war in Iraq, additional threats emerged in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. While we got lucky in Abqaiq (the massive Saudi Arabian oil facility that was attacked unsuccessfully by al Qaeda) the situation in Nigeria is rapidly falling apart. In a sign of things to come, Nigeria's global guerrillas set a target of an additional one million barrels a day of disruption for March (from a MEND e-mail, notice the Islamic caveat):

"God willing, we hope to reduce Nigeria's export by a further one million barrels for the month of March"

February's 20% realized reduction in production (455,000 bpd) is pretty close to the 30% target they set. Standard global guerrilla technique made this possible -- a combination of selective sabotage, based on network analysis, and attacks on corporate psychology through hostage taking and threats.

To scale the disruption, the guerrillas will need to move to the eastern side of the Niger Delta. Most current guerrilla operations are in the western delta, including attacks on corporate facilities in Warri. This is reflected in an e-mail from one of the many spokesmen for MEND:

"There will be inland operations in March as well as standard creek attacks"

Ongoing attacks on the recently abandoned facilities in the western delta will ensure that most of the production already lost will not resume. Our new epochal war's feedback loop is just starting to settle in...

JOURNAL: Systems Disruption in Jordan

As anticipated on this weblog, the fall-out of the "big bang" in Iraq, has accelerated system disruption's displacement of symbolic terrorism. In fact, what's left of symbolic terrorism is now typically restricted to attacks that can cause immediate systemic social failure (as we are seeing in Iraq right now). The combination of the Abqaiq attack and this new attempted attack on a major power station in Jordan shows that al Qaeda has adopted infrastructure disruption as its preferred method of warfare (good thing my book is in editing right now). Reuters:

A group of al Qaeda militants arrested by Jordanian authorities had planned to blow up a major power plant that feeds the whole country, security sources said on Thursday. Jordan announced on Wednesday it had foiled an al Qaeda "terrorist plot" and arrested two Iraqis and a Libyan who were plotting to carry out a suicide attack against a vital civilian installation. Officials said the arrests took place last week.

I anticipate that al Qaeda will continue to refine their method by decreasing the scale of their attacks (which would reduce planning time, resource requirements, and chance of discovery). Large suicide attacks on relatively hard targets offer low rates of return once the potential of success has been factored in. Similar levels of performance can be achieved, as demonstrated in Iraq and Balochistan, through better systems analysis.

This attempt also confirms that systems disruption will be the method used within the US during the next attack.

JOURNAL: Connectivity and Security

Let's put connectivity into perspective: how many times in your life, before the Internet connected you to the world, were you confronted by people intent on defrauding you of your net worth? For me, that is a couple a dozen times at most (and mostly from venture capitalists and investment bankers, ;->). Since then, we all are approached via our e-mail inbox and through the Web by frauds at least a couple of times a day. Phishing, catapulted by bot networks, worms, spam, keylogging, malware, and other technologies has enabled men from Nigeria, Russia and other garden spots to reach into your home and place of work without restriction. Who provides the bulk of your personal security relative to these threats? You do, with the help of leverage provided corporate software companies. The future is here already, don't look to the government for solutions...

JOURNAL: When China Derails

Here's some blue sky thinking on a new topic. Enjoy.

One of the most important tests of the stability of the new globally connected system is going to be China. The conventional wisdom sees China as a threat due to its rapidly growing economic and military strength. The real threat, as laid out in the "The Dark Side of China's Rise" by Minxin Pei in this month's Foreign Policy magazine, is that China is an dynamically unstable system that is in deep decay. He accurately and with detail describes a China that is rapidly growing but is almost bereft of social, health, environmental, security, and trust systems that dampen the impact of critical shocks.

So, what happens when China's high performance, globally connected capitalist economy which is flying at dangerously high speeds hits the inevitable speed bump? The answer is: it will derail (hollow out and fragment). The chaos it will produce in SE Asia is the real threat we have to deal with. Predicting the black swan that kicks off the death spiral is impossible, but as we have seen in other export-oriented Asian economies the shock will likely be economic. At that point, the dream of upward ascent and rising expectations, reinforced by global media, will be seen as a lie.

In anticipation of this, the Chinese government is following the lead of many other nations by radically improving the capabilities of its paramilitary force for domestic security (to the tune of one million men). However, this many not be enough. Global guerrilla theory indicates that the endemic corruption will combine with the same forces of anti-state guerrilla action we have seen in other places in an attempt to disconnect portions of China from the central government. With nearly half of the population in urban locations, a heavy dependence on centralized infrastructure, and rampant connectivity to the global environment (despite efforts of the government to limit it), China is ripe for this. Faced with non-state foes that feed off of economic distress and can disrupt centralized mechanisms of control at will, China's government will quickly hollow out. With nearly zero trust in the government already, the burden of pushing people to their primary loyalties will be easy to meet. This is going to be interesting to watch.

BIG BANGS

Here's a little philosophy. Hang with me, I think the topic is worth discussing even if you disagree.

When I was studying control theory at the USAF Academy (it was my focus as part of an Astronautical Engineering degree -- yes, you could say I am a rocket scientist ;-> to the extent that means anything), we learned the difference between dynamically stable and unstable systems. Dynamically stable systems are, by design, built with intrinsic dampening forces that return them to a steady state. For example, aircraft of the classic design like to fly. You actually have to work hard to get them to do something uncontrollable.

However, this stability costs you a measure of performance. To increase performance you have to ADD instability to the system's design. This means that a high performance aircraft with a large percentage of instability built into its design occasionally wants to careen into oblivion -- the feedback from the system's interaction with the environment can create uncontrollable loops that tend towards infinity (which of course means catastrophic failure). To compensate for this, dynamically unstable systems have computer augmented control systems that dampen these feedback loops. For example, a plane of this type of design has computers (with double back-up) that constantly compensate for instability by moving control surfaces (at a much faster rate than the pilot can). Without compensation, a plane like the F-16 will go catastrophic in 3 seconds. With some of the forward swept wing designs, the time to instability is measured in fractions of seconds.

If we look at today's global environment we see a relatively high performance system driven by real-time global markets and rapid technological progress. Its performance explains why it is spreading so quickly. However, it is also moderately unstable. In our drive towards higher levels of performance we pursued a path of rampant global interconnectivity that has quickly outpaced our ability to dampen excess. The old dampening functions of borders, distance, government, etc are quickly fading. The result is a system vulnerable to rogue feedback. Even a small amount of it can cause global reverberations. Worse, there are people actively working on ways to introduce this rogue feedback. Iraq is a great demonstration of our inability to dampen excess in the face of active opposition (notice how our goals have drifted from building an allied democracy to stopping civil war).

The long-term solution is to build more stability into the system. The best approach I can think of is a highly interconnected but fundamentally decentralized system (most of the benefits of interconnectivity but with lots of local control). Unfortunately, we are far from realizing that goal, since our current view of the world is based on old models.

For example, instead of building resilience into the system, we have embarked on a path of introducing more rogue feedback into the system (the invasion of Iraq seen as a "big bang" in the Middle East). This is based on the belief that Fukuyama's "End of History," where we all live in capitalist democracies, is inexorable. It's not. There isn't any guarantee that our current system is the inevitable result of history and that all dampening forces are driving us to this result. Also, the system isn't tolerant of these shocks as it used to be. As a result of this misunderstanding, the more likely short term outcome is more chaos (we are seeing the start of that right now). As the instability continues, we will continue to see small attacks, like the one on the Askariya shrine and the facility at Abqaiq put entire sections of the system on the brink. Over the longer term, the system will continue on its unpredictable path with ever more numerous bouts of excess until the weight of numerous fundamental changes to the system's design and operation are made that dampen this chaos. Where we end up, at the end of this process, may be with dynamically stable system that is far from the current political and economic status quo. You might not recognize what you see.

This conclusion also calls into question the efficacy of the idea that merely increasing connectivity is an answer to our problems. Increasing connectivity too fast, in a system without intrinsic dampening or control systems that work, will only accelerate the chaos (human nature doesn't change as fast as technology). If you need proof of that, spend some time reading Jihadi Web sites and pondering the rapid growth of transnational crime. Also, the complexity of this system puts the lie to the idea that we know how to actively dampen its behavior through centralized systems of control. We neither have the scale nor the collective intelligence to pull it off. The only real solution rests on redesigning the system itself, to enable it to become more tolerant of rogue feedback.