Global Guerrillas

JOURNAL: Resilient Communities as an export?

As I point out in Brave New War, resilient communities are a necessary step to survive unexpected global system shocks (vicious black swans that rapidly sweep through our newly interconnected and tightly coupled grid) over the next decades. The reduction in complexity made possible by a bottoms up approach not only ensures local success in the face of system failures, it makes it possible for the entire system to re-establish itself faster and with less long term damage.

When we do eventually develop adopt resilient community model, either with foresight by those who want to gain competitive advantage or through desperation brought on by repeated failure, we will likely find a welcome audience for all its elements in the developing world. Regardless, the faster we do so the better, as Michael Wines demonstrates with his article on how a continent wide power crises is slowing innovation and growth in Africa.

HOSTAGE GAMES

The recent series of hostage dramas in Afghanistan poses the following question: what's the value of a hostage in 21st century warfare? Answer: an order of magnitude more than it was a decade ago (in contrast, the Iranian hostage drama and the Lebanon hostage crisis were outliers to the trend line driven by more by domestic US politics than any inherent system effects). Here's why:

• In today's supercharged media environment, hostage dramas become 24x7 news events -- replete with interviews of every crying relative or co-worker the hostage ever had.
• The value of human life (sadly, only for and between members of Westernized states) has grown substantially. This value has grown in parallel with the average level of investment made in people in the West. This valuation now even applies to the lives of soldiers (as seen in actions against Israeli, Brit, and American troops).
• The pressure to rapidly resolve the crisis, due to the first two factors, can throw the governments and/or corporations involved into convulsions. Even if the country doesn't negotiate with hostage takers, like the US, the efforts to rescue the hostages amount to the same thing.

Hostages for Disruption

In the past, hostage taking in the growing number of hollow states was typically focused on financial reward. That has changed. While the capture of domestic nationals has remained financially focused, the capture of foreign nationals -- whether they work for multi-nationals, NGOs, or foreign militaries -- is now focused primarily on political disruption.

In short, a hostage drama that involves a foreign national can now manufacture a global systempunkt (the node/connection in any network, regardless of whether it's a physical or social network, which will cause a cascade of failure if removed/attacked/damaged). In today's environment, it really doesn't matter who is grabbed, the effects will usually be the same: a disruption of globalization. Here are some specific effects for which we have a bevy of recent examples (all which are improved if the hostage crisis is extended over a long period of time or the hostages are killed, although not publicly, in the process):

• The company impacted will either withdraw from operations in the country or suspend operations. Ongoing knock on effects such as the general withdrawal or withholding of foreign direct investment (FDI) and NGO support.
• The country of the nationals involved will restrict movement to the target country after they endure weeks of crisis level operations.
• Crisis level operations initiated to resolve the crisis will distract target governments from other operations.

NOTE: City Journal

I wrote an article for the most recent edition of the City Journal entitled, "The Coming Urban Terror."

The City Journal, if you haven't read it before, is an extremely smart publication produced with an attention to detail and presentation that is seldom seen in today's fast paced world. It was a pleasure to write for them.

MEXICO'S DILEMMA

The successful series of attacks on Mexico's energy infrastructure in early July that disrupted 1,200 business (including several very large Just-in-Time assembly facilities) and refinery infrastructure, was very sophisticated. Not only were the bombs well constructed, the selection of a the targets were excellent examples of systempunkts.

Notes on Method

Instead of attacking guarded facilities, the attacks were made against sections in the pipeline infrastructure that were not guarded (survivability). Timing devices were used to spread the attacks out over a ten day period (repetition). Multiple points of attack on the same pipeline multiplied the scale of the damage and caused fires (one forced the evacuation of parts of a nearby city) that complicated/delayed recovery efforts. Finally, by focusing the attacks on a limited geography critical to three major pipelines, the attack maximized almost all of the following dependencies while limiting the size of the team necessary for the attack:

• Input -- material delivered by one network is used by another.
• Mutual -- networks that serve as inputs for each other. Example: oil and power generation.
• Co-location -- different networks that are located in the same geography.
• Shared -- networks that share physical components, transport, or facilities.
• Exclusive -- a network that can only support one or few outputs, may be transient.

As a result, there were multiple cascades of failure that swept through large sections of Mexico.

The Dilemma

The immediate impact of this attack, beside the significant economic damage, was to force Mexico to deploy the recently created United Forces for Federal Support to guard energy infrastructure. However, with only 5,000 troops, the force is unlikely to provide any serious opposition to the attackers. The bulk of Mexico's forces are now allocated to an increasingly militarized drug war in the north with narco-guerrillas.

The dilemma is that with Mexico's future as part of the global supply chain at risk, follow-on attacks could quickly put Mexico into a position similar to Turkey in WW1 -- when Lawrence's (of Arabia) guerrilla attacks on Turkish railway infrastructure forced a massive misallocation of forces from the front facing the Brits to infrastructure protection. This dilemma will be exacerbated by the fact that amount of infrastructure that needs to be protected is several orders of magnitude larger and more complex.

Like the US, Mexico is about to find out that playing with war while embroiled in cut-throat global economic competition is increasingly difficult as offensive 4GW gains strength.

THE OSW (OPEN SOURCE WAR) UNDERWAY IN PAKISTAN

The emerging open source insurgency in Pakistan may have found its plausible promise: to defeat the Pakistani military establishment. Here's how it developed.

The first incident was the assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad (which militants claim took the lives of 1,500 people, mostly students). This incident fixed the target of the insurgency (the Pakistani military and not NATO next door in Afghanistan). It also generated sufficient motivation for violence. The second has been a series of examples of successful attacks against the Pakistani military. Specifically, suicide-bomb attacks against military targets (at a recruitment center, a convoy, a patrol, and several checkpoints -- with over 100 killed).

With a plausible promise in place, all that is needed is a pool of new groups to participate. That may already be present. The intrepid Syed Shahzad, of the Asia Times, reports that there is a host of rapidly growing networks of insurgents outside of the control of traditional groups (which makes them relatively immune to government coercion/negotiation):

...the present breed of jihadis rapidly emerging in the Swat Valley, Bajaur, North Waziristan and South Waziristan is different.

The militants this correspondent encountered could hardly be called "revolutionary" [in the sense they don't have a plan for Islamic governance], and they were not fully trained combatants. At best they could be described as disgruntled youths who have been manipulated by clerics, or simply fired up by incidents such as Lal Masjid.

They are up in arms and want to take on the government. They say they want to kill Musharraf, but they don't know how, or what they would do next. This scenario promises to generate serious violence, but not revolution. The militants are divided into small groups, united only in a desire to fight their common enemy, the Pakistani military establishment.

If true, Pakistan may devolve much faster than anticipated. Will we see it hollow out?

JOURNAL: A Guerrilla Entrepreneur in Thailand

Bangkok Post:

The army has arrested a bomb-maker with a 2 million baht reward on his head, who has been making explosives since 2004 for southern insurgents simply for the fee of 2,000 to 5,000 baht per bang. Thai Army spokesman Akkara Tipparoj said. the man - known by a single name, Manaseya, 32, - told investigators that he was not a separatist seeking independence for the three southern provinces but was using his knowledge and expertise to earn a living. Akkara said Manaseya gained his knowledge in bomb-making from his student days in a technical school in the southern province where he specialised in wiring.

JOURNAL: Surge Redux

Cut away the public relations fluff and you find that the Petraeus surge is based on the development of an open source counter-insurgency in Sunni Anbar that mirrors earlier efforts in Shiite areas. It is accomplished at the expense of the central government. Here's my thinking when I first wrote about this option back in 2005 for the NYTimes:

If an open-source counterinsurgency is the only strategic option left, it is a depressing one. The militias will probably create a situation of controlled chaos that will allow the administration to claim victory and exit the country. They will, however, exact a horrible toll on Iraq and may persist for decades. This is a far cry from spreading democracy in the Middle East.

Today, 2 years on, stability remains as elusive as ever. As the Russian's demonstrated in Chechnya, will an appointed thug (like Kadyrov, pictured) be the next step?

JOURNAL: How to bait Turkey

The question for global guerrillas operating in Iraq is: how do you bait Turkey to invade Kurdistan? Turkey already has 140,000 troops massed on the border with Kurdistan -- in response to its support of PKK guerrilla attacks within Turkish territory. One mechanism is to heat up attacks on ethnic Turkmen living in Iraq (a social systempunkt of 800,000 people). The early July marketplace car bomb in Emerli, which killed an estimated 210 civilians, was a step in this direction. We can expect more attacks like this in the future. A Turkish invasion of Kurdistan would achieve:

• Political disorder. A massive rift between the US and Turkey. A defacto state of war between Iraq and Turkey. Strong alignment of political goals between the PKK and Kurdistan.
• Factional disintegration in Iraq. The departure/desertion of Kurdish troops from the Iraqi army. Refurbished Kurdish peshmerga are the heart and soul of the Iraqi army (as well as many private military companies).
• Supply and economic disruption. Loss of vital commercial connectivity with Turkey (needed for a huge range of business and supply needs).

It's important to note that blood and guts terrorism, as a method of warfare, works best in three situations (even these applications suffer from diminishing returns):

• The first is to goad a nation-state into over-reaction, particularly against foreign targets.
• The second is to force fractures in social networks along ethnic/religious/linguistic/tribal fault lines.
• The third is to demoralize nation-state militaries and force a rift between them and the population.

JOURNAL: Just-in-time Disruption begins in Mexico

"The order to begin a national campaign of punishing the interests of the oligarchy and this illegitimate government has been put in play.." EPR Web site message after the attacks.

Mexico's Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), a splinter of the original group formed in 96 (in south-west Mexico), blew up a PEMEX 36-inch natural gas pipeline that shut down two auto assembly plants (Nissan/Honda) in Guadalajara. Two other pipelines were shut down (gas and crude oil) affecting the Salamanca oil refinery (domestic production).

The operation was small, and according to the group required eight charges set by small teams in three locations. The charges were set with a time delay (to detonate on the 5th and the 10th in the early morning). Nobody was caught and there were zero casualties. I suspect the returns on investment for the attacks, particularly given their ability to impact just-in-time production facilities, were amazing.

Update: 800 1,200 businesses have been shut down in addition to the gas supply to Guadalajara, Aguascalientes, Querétaro, León y Celaya. The cascade's effects grow...

Update 2: Nissan's Aguascalientes factory produces 1,300 vehicles daily. Honda produces 120 Accord sedans daily. Further, the attack on the natural gas pipeline was on a valve complex (a particularly good systempunkt).

JOURNAL: The effectiveness of systems disruption in Pakistan

Fareed Farooqui reports from Pakistan on the effects of a minor electricity outage (unintentionally caused by construction activity and exacerbated by load shedding due to insufficient production of power) in Karachi. Here are some examples:

• Vicious rioting broke out Wednesday evening in several parts of Karachi and continued into the night in protest against long spells of power outages.
• Residents of the affected areas came out on to the streets and burnt tires and other materials. In some areas, the protesters broke traffic lights and damaged fast food restaurants by pelting them with stones. The police resorted to shelling and aerial firing to disperse the crowds.
• Riots also took place in various areas of Lyari Town including Aath Chowk and Shah Baig Lane. Protesters besieged a KESC complaint centre near Aath Chowk, and tried to set it on fire, but the police reached there on time.

Pakistani guerrillas haven't yet (fortunately) adopted systems disruption against Pakistan's crowded cities (Baloch guerrillas have focused on the disruption of regional natural gas deliveries). However, given the example above, it appears that Pakistan's legitimacy is so weak (particularly given recent events) that if they did adopt systems disruption, the returns on investment would be exceptional.

JOURNAL: Good intro to Swarm Theory

Here's an article from the National Geographic magazine that provides a low impact introduction to swarm theory.

In essence, it provides readers with insight into how small autonomous entities (in our case guerrilla groups with a diverse set primary loyalties and thereby a similarly diverse set of motivations for why they fight), armed with simple rules of behavior (the rules of open source warfare), can coordinate (via stigmergic signaling) their actions to produce intelligent behavior at the aggregate level (an emergent intelligence sufficient to fight a war at the operational and strategic levels).

NOTE: Swarm theory also informs us on the potential effectiveness of unsupported organic terrorists in the West. Without an open source network in residence, the organic terrorist in the developed West is much more likely to fail than not (very much like a small group of bees/ants disconnected from the swarm -- lost and confused). However, improvements in virtual environments that provide new sources of connectivity are starting to unlock this potential -- although this type of development usually takes longer to develop than most people suspect. It may take a decade for the ratio to shift to where there are more successes than failures.

JOURNAL: Corporate Armies in Russia

Here's another datapoint on the privatization of warfare. The Russian Duma just passed a bill that would allow the energy monopolies, Gazprom and Transneft, to build their own security forces (with greater powers than that normally afforded security firms). This is particularly interesting given that 1) Russia now uses its energy exports/pipelines as its primary tool of strategic power projection, 2) the government has become a corporatist klepocracy centered around the energy industry. Some interesting quotes:

"A couple of terrorist acts and an ensuing ecological catastrophe would be enough to immediately declare Russia an unreliable partner and supplier of energy." Alexandr Gurov, the Duma deputy that drafted the bill, to Carl Mortished at the UK Times.

"Pandora’s box . . . This law envisages the creation of corporate armies. If we pass this law, we will all become servants of Gazprom and Transneft." Gennadi Gudkov, a Duma deputy who opposed the bill.

We can expect these new armies to quickly expand their operations abroad over the coming years. They may even become exporters of security (although given Russia's recent history, the more likely outcome is that these new private military forces will be used to damage alternative/competitive suppliers and coerce recalcitrant customers). Just another step down the long tail of modern warfare, where every fount of cash flow with a desire to extend and protect it is armed with its own military.

NOTE: NATO, in its quest to remain relevant, is eyeing a role as a provider of security oil companies/oil exporting states (these companies will likely be responsive given that another Shell oil platform was attacked today in Nigeria).

A PRIVATE SECTOR WAR IN IRAQ?

According to new figures obtained by the LATimes, the number of contractors in Iraq has ballooned to 180,000 civilians (at the very low end, given that many firms weren't counted in this survey). Employees of private firms now, for the first time in a major conflict, outnumber uniformed forces (160,000) in the country. This is an important milestone, particularly since most of the functions that are most important to counter-insurgency don't involve pulling triggers.

This trend towards privatization will not be reversed despite the desire by many to return to 20th century legacy force structures. Instead, the trend will continue to accelerate as the threat of disorder (accelerated by global guerrillas) begins to dwarf state vs. state conflict -- the last refuge of the uniformed military.

Unfortunately, the trend towards the privatization of warfare (a long tail force structure) has radically outpaced the ability of the military to slave these firms into a cohesive whole. Instead, this private sector effort operates as a chaotic mix of bureaucratic networks and byzantine process structures (to wit: there isn't enough insight into the use of private contractors in Iraq to generate a complete list of firms operating there). Given the importance of private contractors to any effort against disorder generated by global guerrillas, it would be fair to conclude that at a deep systemic level, the effort in Iraq never had a chance. From the start: decision loops were broken, coherence was absent, adaptation was slow, and innovation was turgid (turgid, in the sense that it was grossly distorted to focus on the wrong things).

The only way to correct this fundamental problem, is to implement a solution I proposed at the end of Brave New War: platforms (see the book for background). In short, experience with platforms (usually with a layer of information technology as a fundamental building block) across a wide variety of complex situations (most successful global firms are transitioning to them, as evidenced by a Harvard Business School study I conducted a couple of years ago) shows that they could work in this area too since they grow efficient business ecosystems, establish coherence, supercharge innovation, and provide substantial improvements in flexibility/adaptability.

So far, the effort to create platforms that will do this have been stillborn (due to top down efforts from large, innovation free companies). The only hope is that organic efforts will emerge that rapidly propagate under the cover of stealth.