Global Guerrillas

JOURNAL: A Demonstration US of Network Vulnerability

An explosion and consequent fire shut down four oil pipelines that together carry 1.5 million barrels a day, or 15% of US imports (the Endbridge system), from Canada to the US. Two of the pipelines have been restarted, but the third and fourth (at 450,000 bpd and 700,000 bpd respectively) are still inactive. Besides the significant "co-location" vulnerability shown here (as in multiple pipelines damaged by a single explosion/fire/leak), another key element is the "input" vulnerability of maxed out refineries (see the brief: "Infrastructure Meltdowns" for an overview of the different types of network vulnerabilities) -- these pipelines feed landlocked refiners in the Midwest, beholden to Canadian supplies of crude.

NOTE: This comes on the heels of a mass arrests in Saudi Arabia (200+) to prevent what has been termed a multi-cell plot to sabotage a oil logistics site (which is potentially indicative of attempts to use indirect attacks on dependent networks to cause cross network cascades).

JOURNAL: Robert Kaplan

The author Robert Kaplan provides another argument in support of the US embrace of open source warfare in this month's Atlantic -- read "It's the Tribes, Stupid."

Iraq has had three elections that have led to chaos. Bringing society out of that chaos has meant a recourse not to laws or a constitution, but to blood ties. The Anbar Awakening has been a rebuff not only to the extremism of al-Qaeda, but to democracy itself.

Kaplan's argument is based more on multi-culturalism than the decline of the state.

Do sub-state groups that have organic legitimacy have a place in a new global order, or will they always be outsiders fighting to hollow it out?

GUERRILLA GROUP SIZE IN IRAQ

When the Askariya shrine was bombed in February 2006, it fractured Iraqi social systems along religious lines. In the fighting that followed, Sunni guerrilla groups underwent a transformation from small and loosely connected to large and bureaucratic. This change was driven by three factors:

• Shiite militias, operating without much government interference, were able to field large military formations in their attacks on Sunni targets.
• Sunni neighborhoods needed a permanent militia to defend them against attacks.
• US forces were relatively ineffective against Sunni guerrillas up until that point and offered no meaningful counter. The guerrillas were flush with cash and confident the US posed little threat.

The combination of organic group growth and formal cross group affiliation led to the formation of the bureaucratic structures necessary to maintain groups larger than 150 people (read: "The Optimal Size of a Terrorist Network" for more). Here's an example from Amit Paley's WP interview with a recently captured "al Qaeda" insurgent in Mosul:

The 28-year-old said he was responsible for running the bureaucracy and arranging payments to the 500 or so fighters for the group in the city, who he said try to carry out as many as 30 attacks a day.

This expansion in group size led to a radical increase in violence against almost every potential target. It also changed the underlying dynamic of the insurgency. The process of increasing group size and a movement towards local protection forced the following:

• As groups formally affiliated to form larger organizations, a schism developed between homegrown guerrillas and those operating under "al Qaeda's" banner.
• Tighter ties to local communities for protection against Shiite militias led to jihadi control over neighborhoods. This in turn led to jihadi overreach and a local counter-reaction.
• The increase in group size finally made al Qaeda accessible to US counter-pressure. It now had a center of gravity to attack.

This is yet another level of complication that should muddy the "lesson" of "the Anbar tribal revolt." The US should military think long and hard before it squanders tens of millions (soon hundreds of millions) of dollars on Pakistan's Frontier Corps.

NOTE: ESQUIRE'S Best and Brightest of 2007

Esquire magazine graciously named me, John Robb, one of the Best and Brightest people of 2007 (see the December 2007 issue for the coverage) for my work on the future of warfare. My listing also includes an excellent write up by the author and strategic thinker Tom Barnett.

THE US EMBRACES OPEN SOURCE WARFARE?

The US military is on the slow path to the realization that nation-building -- from reconstruction to other forms of traditional COIN dogma that serve to return legitimacy to the government -- doesn't work. Politics and populations in our new global environment fragment faster than they can be assembled into cohesive entities. What does work to slow the spread of temporary autonomous zones and open source insurgencies are open source militias. While messy (and many times as bad as what they replace), these militias do work:

• Colombia. The AUC blunted the spread of the FARC and other revolutionary groups.
• Sao Paulo, Brazil. Neighborhood militias have purged neighborhoods of the PCC (a criminal drug gang).
• Iraq. Anbar awakening and other militias have radically diminished al Qaeda's operational sphere.

Open Source Militias

In each case, militias developed organically based on local loyalties that have nothing to do with the central government. Their emergence is spontaneous and a surprise to the government or the foreign military occupation. They develop according to a now familiar pattern:

• Expansion. Guerrillas or criminal gangs move into a new area in which they have no organic support. They impose their own form of governance which is at odds with local needs.
• Reaction. These external guerrillas/gangs intimidate/kill local leaders. A militia is formed to force the encroaching groups out.
• Domination. The local militia begins to run the neighborhoods/area. Soon, they tend to adopt many of the same financial systems of the guerrillas/gangs (from drugs to extortion) and enforcement measures (assassination, torture, etc.). However, they remain less hostile to the government and commercial interests than the guerrillas/gangs.

An Expansible Strategy?

The rapid emergence of these local militias in Anbar came as a surprise to both the Iraqi government and the US military. Despite the lack of loyalty these groups have to the Iraqi government (and the previous involvement of many of these groups in killing US troops), the US military embraced them -- in that have been given a degree of autonomy as well as arms and training. The result has been the return to a slow burning war, a status quo of sorts, that will continue to operate at levels of violence not seen since early 2006. The success of this approach, as opposed to the boondoggles we've experienced in conventional operations, has led the US Special Operations Command to recommend in a new briefing (leaked to the press), that the US replicate the "militia strategy" in Pakistan. Unfortunately, the report makes the following errors:

• The wrong militia. The US, due to political restrictions, wants to focus its efforts on the Frontier corps (which is actually more of a paramilitary). This militia is too tightly connected to the government and has a record of atrocity that makes it unlikely to generate any meaningful form of local loyalty.
• Bad timing. This process works according to its own rules, it cannot be forced. The guerrillas (a combination of different flavors of Taliban, tribes, and al Qaeda) will eventually overreach. This process is in motion, but the reaction that forms local militias will not occur until much later (the government and the US are still considered the primary enemy).
• Government opposition. The organic rise of local militias will be an affront to the Pakistani government since it represents a near permanent loss of control over these regions. They will resist it (despite their preoccupation with oppressing Pakistani civil society). Unlike the Iraqi government, they will not roll over on this.

Final Note: The use of a plethora of militias to fight a global open source insurgency from Nigeria to Mexico to Iraq to Pakistan is effective within a grand strategy of delay (it holds disorder at bay while allowing globalization to work). Most beneficially, it eliminates the need for nation-building, massive conventional troop deployments, and other forms of excess. Some questions remain: can the US manage something this complex or this messy? Will the rest of the US military/contractors sit idle (and as a result fall victim to budget cuts) while light weight special operations forces (and their allied private military corporations) take center stage?

QUICK NOTE: John Boyd Reference Work now in Paperback

It's a great tragedy that John Boyd, America's leading military strategist, didn't leave us with a book. Frans Osinga has done a great service by filling this gap with his book "Science, Strategy, and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd." It's the go to reference on Boyd's theory and it's now available in affordable paperback.

JOURNAL: Attack on SA Nuke Facility

Just a quick reminder that governmental neglect of critical infrastructure is epidemic on a global scale (including the US) and that black swans can originate from small, relatively obscure, incidents.

According to the Pretoria News:

"A brazen attack by four gunmen on the Pelindaba nuclear facility has left a senior emergency officer seriously injured."

Here's where it gets interesting:

"Gerber [the senior official] attacked two of the gunmen as they forced their way into the control room and ran straight for the control panel.... Necsa spokesperson Chantal Janneker confirmed the attack. She declined to say how the gunmen had gained access to the facility or whether they had stolen anything."

By the way, Pelindaba has a long and interesting history.

JOURNAL: OSW in the Press

Robert Charette has an excellent article on Open Source Warfare in this month's IEEE Spectrum. A snippet:

Terrorist Web sites serve not only to spread propaganda but also to share knowledge among insurgent groups... That helps explain why the learning cycles among Iraqi insurgents are some 20 times as fast as the Irish Republican Army's were in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, according to military estimates.

Worth the read. Robert also has a blog on software deployment failures called "the risk factor."

Also, if you can read french, Joseph Henrotin has an article entitled "L’open source warfare comme menace stratégique? Entretien avec John Robb, analyste des systèmes" in this month's DSI (Defense & Securite internationale). Sorry, can only find it in print.

ON OPEN SOURCE GUERRILLA VANGUARDS

NOTE: Working through some thoughts on warfare theory in this post. Please excuse the mess, it's a work in progress.

In the traditional fourth generation war of the Maoist model, an insurgency/revolution begins with the formation of a guerrilla vanguard. This vanguard's goal is to create a moral crisis that incapacitates the government. To accomplish this, the vanguard simultaneously:

• expands the military organization through the training of cadres,
• cultivates a political organization that can indoctrinate the population, and
• generates attacks that sow menace, uncertainty, and mistrust within the government (to create numerous non-cooperative centers of gravity).

Once the moral crisis is of a sufficient magnitude and the political alternative has sufficient support, the government is replaced by moral judo -- the current government melts away as the guerrillas become regular troops and march into the major cities. In essence, a non-functional hierarchy is replaced with the functional hierarchy of the revolutionary movement.

A Revision to a Central Assumption of Moral Conflict

A central assumption upon which this method of moral conflict is based is:

The historical trend is towards increasing levels of centralized hierarchy and the natural formation of complex states.

This assumption, valid since the treaties of Westphalia, may not be true anymore. The advent of a global economic superinfrastructure and new technologies of individual super-empowerment (in sum, a new global "platform") tends to fragment organizational hierarchies and replace them with more robust, resilient, and efficient decentralized alternatives. This logic reflects what we see in going on in public and private life, it should apply to warfare as well. Therefore, the new assumption for moral conflict should be:

The historical trend, since the Millennium, is towards increasing levels of decentralization and the dissolution of complex states.

This completely changes, willingly or not, the role of the guerrilla vanguard in any insurgency. These changes include:

• an easier path towards the creation of a moral crisis that causes the state/government to lose legitimacy but
• an inability to generate a military and political hierarchy that will serve as an alternative to the failed government.

As a result, a moral crisis will not depose the government. Instead, it will create a hollow state that is a government in name only (i.e. the Mayor of Kabul or the Green Zone). The crisis will also enable a perpetual insurgency composed of many small groups, each of insufficient hierarchical weight to replace the government but in combination able to keep the government in perpetual failure.

A Reprieve for the Foco?

So, what is the role of the guerrilla vanguard in this new context? It is very similar to the role proposed by Che Guevarra in his theoretical and experimental work on foco insurgency. In a Che's foco insurgency, the guerrilla vanguard is focused completely on the attacks that are necessary to precipitate a moral crisis. Specifically, the vanguard forgoes traditional political indoctrination and cadre expansion in favor of the disruption necessary to delegitimize the government. In Che's model, when the moral crisis was finally precipitated by the vanguard, an organic uprising would rise to replace it with a morally pure form of governance (without the corruption that the formation of a shadow government and party bureaucracy would entail). Needless to say, Che's utopian theory of for a foco insurgency didn't work as anticipated. During the era in which he promulgated his theories, only the shadow hierarchy of the revolutionary movement could replace the failing hierarchy of the government. This mistake cost Che his life.

However, within the new context, the foco insurgency can work. Small super-empowered vanguards can, with the use of systems disruption to amplify effort, delegitimize weakened governmental hierarchies and force them into the box of hollow states. However, instead of a pure organic government envisioned by Che, an organic open source insurgency, composed of a plethora of small super-empowered groups (that appeal to primary loyalties of tribe, cast, clan, family, gang, ideology, etc.), form in the vacuum. This open source insurgency will only bring fragmentation and perpetual conflict. The vanguard's role, is merely as a catalyst for its formation.

THE BANDH

As systems disruption evolves as a method of open source warfare, we will increasingly see it coalesce into strategies for targeting megacities (more than half of humanity, as of this year, now live in urban environments). One conceptual pathway for this is the idea that a high "terrorism tax" on highly leveraged urban economic inputs/outputs can force these megacities into a series of economic failures. At a high level, the method works like this:

• Guerrillas attack networks that connect a city to the larger economy. They periodically shut down electricity systems, fuel, and transportation over a period of months (at sufficient levels and over a sufficient time to impact economic planning cycles). The attacks are simple and provide a extremely high returns on investment (ROIs of millions to one).
• This disruption causes the costs per economic transaction in the city to increase (as little as 10 percent may be needed). It also increases the risk and/or uncertainty that the transaction will never be completed at all. As a result of increases in cost and uncertainty, investment departs/delays and economic activity shifts to other locales. Joblessness rises. Incomes fall. The city descends to a lower level of economic equilibrium.
• Declines in economic activity, in combination with the disruption of essential services, delegitimizes the government and forces people to fall back on primary loyalties for support (a loyalty to a group that exceeds loyalty to the state/nation). Many of these groups become violent/criminal and eventually join the open source insurgency.

The Bandh

We can already find an evolving example of this in India. This is yet another example of how global interconnectivity enables innovations in guerrilla/terrorist method in one region (as in the siege of Baghdad) to quickly spread to others -- which one reason why I call this site "global guerrillas." According to Shlok Vadiya in the most recent issue of India's Pragati magazine, the...

Naxals have taken the systems disruption strategy to its logical conclusion by utilizing economic shutdowns, called bandhs, to disrupt entire social systems. To illustrate, a blockade of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Bihar was declared in June of this year to protest the creation of Special Economic Zones for foreign investment.

This method, in classic open source fashion, is being copied by other groups with the same intent:

Ad-hoc insurgencies such as the Gujjar campaign in early June adopted Naxalite strategy when they declared a Delhi bandh and followed up with an attempt to seal off the city, by cutting off 17 railway routes with only shovels and picks.