Global Guerrillas

ENDING OPEN SOURCE INSURGENCY

A central problem for ending an open source insurgency (one composed of many small groups working in concert to achieve large objectives) running a campaign of disruption is that there isn't a counter-party for the government or multinationals to talk to.  In many vs. many conflicts like these, any and all attempts at resolution are typically mired in broad pronouncements and vague statements/threats by the parties involved.  

The Nigerian open source insurgency, MEND (the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) may have found a potential solution to this.  It has proposed a neutral group of mediators called the Aaron Team.  This panel has an increased potential to resolve the conflict if it:

• Focuses on specific/local deals vs. fuzzy general deals that are run as pilot projects.  These pilot projects would have hard measurements of success -- as in, the number of long term jobs created, pollution clean up, and reconstruction of infrastructure (from roads to schools to industry).  
• The success of pilot projects are tied to reductions in disruption targets.  The base level of targeted disruption, in MEND's case measured in barrels of oil production per day, would be reduced by a specific amount if success is achieved.  Or, it could be tied to removing specific facilities from target lists.
• Appoints a neutral agency, potentially even a global accountancy or consulting firm, oversees the pilot projects to ensure accountability for funds used and measurements of success against the project's objectives.  Transparency is key (perhaps a Web site with all of the data/evidence reported in the open for all to see).

JOURNAL: Protest as National Security Threat

CNN video:  Sonic weapons used against a small group of protestors in Pittsburgh G20

In general, governments worldwide are losing control over all of the classical forms of national power from borders to finances to communication to media to economic activity to security to trade flows (of all types).  The upshot of this accelerating weakness is a tendency to view any and all forms of public protest as a security threat.  To counter this perceived  threat, an ever increasing number of countries have opted to 

• militarize their police forces (from the 5 fold increase in US SWAT teams over the past decade to China's new million man paramilitary force), 
• establish rules to neuter expression of dissent (i.e. establishment of "free speech zones" etc.),
• and the immediate/early application non-lethal weapons (sonic weapons, tasers, tear gas, etc.) to disperse crowds.      

This effort will almost undoubtedly generate unintended consequences (we can already see protest groups learning to counter this by using flash mob mobility via cell phones).  

JOURNAL: More on Legitimacy and Good Governance

One salient theme of global guerrilla theory is that nation-states, from western democracies to developing countries, are finding it nearly impossible to retain legitimacy in a globalized environment.  One of the drivers is that good governance of the type we aspired to in the late 20th Century (that delivers a rising tide and a level playing field), isn't possible without a modicum of control over borders, currency, people, media, etc. (all of which which was lost with globalization -- from communications to trade flows).  Worse, predators (fueled and superempowered by connections to the globalized system), from global banksters/hedgies to gangs to militias, abound, ready to siphon off, wreck, or corrupt any gains or attempts that are made to deliver good governance.   As a result of this theme, fragmentation (either physical or virtual) is inevitable.

Whatever can be said for the whole, it's even worse at the bottom of the pile, in places like Afghanistan.  For example, take this exchange (captured by Fred Kaplan at Slate) between Adm. Mullens and the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday (re: Afghanistan).  It's interesting:

Then Graham zeroed in. If that's the case, he asked, how is it that the Taliban are gaining ground? The problem isn't the Taliban, it's the Afghan government, isn't that right?
Mullen agreed. The problem, he said, "is clearly the lack of legitimacy of the government."
Graham pushed the matter. "We could send a million troops, and that wouldn't restore legitimacy in the government?" he asked.
Mullen replied, "That is correct."

In short, a basic rule of warfare/stabilization in the 21st Century (the type that is actually fought vs. the fantasies re: a war with China which is the foundation of our defense budget), is that central governments (states and nation-states) will bleed legitimacy and that the only means of reigning in feedback loops of death/destruction is to support decentralized sources of order and legitimacy.

JOURNAL: Linear Options in AFPAK

Here's a Reuters story that clearly articulates the popular perception of the strategic options available on Afghanistan (this analysis is prevalent everywhere, even within the US military).  The options are shallow and simply waypoints on a linear function of the number of troops and resources we apply to the effort.  Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.  One suggestion is to articulate creative strategies, particularly strategies that appear to "work" in a globalized 21st Century environment (like open source counter-insurgency), to upgrade this still-born debate.   Of course, this is likely too much to ask given the popular misconception that more troops (the surge) + a secret weapon (hilarious) made withdrawal from Iraq possible.

UPDATE:  The opportunity for a recast is possible.  Take this exchange between Adm Mullens and the US Senate Armed Forces committee today.  Let's filter out the reflexive request for more troops and get to the meat:

A central plank of his strategy, led by General Graham Lamb, of Britain, would be to try to induce low and middle-ranking Taleban fighters to fight for the Government, repeating tactics pioneered by General Lamb in Iraq two years ago, Admiral Mullen said... When Admiral Mullen revealed that General Lamb had initiated an effort to win over Taleban fighters, he was asked why it had taken so long. “It has not been an area of focus,” he said.

NOTE:  One suggestion to Gen. Lamb -- per open source counter-insurgency -- don't focus on getting exTaliban to fight for a central government that has zero legitimacy (corrupt, fraudulent, etc.). Instead, play out rivalries and alignment of interests.  The best that can be hoped for is a realignment of their loyalties towards local/provincial control or governance when possible. 

NOTE2: Managing these groups will be a constant and non-stop sales effort. They won't fall in line when ordered and their motivations are all over the map. One system I would demand, to help me see the big picture and measure the progress of this effort on the ground (to regularize it), is a simple recast of a commercial CRM system.

JOURNAL: Visualization of Parasitic Predation

Here's a good visualization (caution) of what parasitic predation looks like in the natural world.  It's very similar to what we are seeing with predation of global financial elites, gangs, militias, etc. on society.  Normal functions of society, from security to economics, are being hollowed out and replaced by parasitic organisms that feed on the financial flows.

TRIBAL MILITIAS AND OPEN SOURCE COUNTERINSURGENCY

Back in April, I provided some testimony on the future of warfare to the House Armed Services committee.  One of the questions I got from a Congressman was: what should our strategy be in Afghanistan?  I responded with something that made everyone, particularly the Congressmen in the room, uncomfortable.   Essentially, what I proposed was this:  

Aghanistan is a hollow state -- it has international recognition (and the trappings of a nation-state including five star hotels in the capital for journalists and diplomats), but it retains little control over the countryside.  Further, the state lacks legitimacy.  All legitimacy is local/tribal/gang.  So, let's skip to the end game in Afghanistan and run this war through "nominally loyalist" tribal militias (loyal to US money and support rather than to the Afghan government).  Let's not waste time on building up the Afghan military, trying to make the Afghan government legitimate, or on reconstruction efforts.

This wasn't a strategy for "victory" (in the sense of the maximal goals required: a legitimate democracy that is integrated into the global economy), it was a strategy of "good enough" (a defensive delay).  The strategy above allows the US to maintain a level of controlled chaos in Afghanistan, enough to allow an exit.  It doesn't waste the lives of US soldiers and our increasingly scarce financial resources on a maximal effort that can't be won.  It's also a strategy that comes straight out of Brave New War (the strategy, re: Sons of Iraq, that was eventually used in Iraq to create controlled chaos sufficient for an exit, is too).  

Interestingly, there are reports now that McCrystal and his strategists are starting to come to the same conclusion.  Pakistan, from this report by the AP, appears to have already arrived at this conclusion (they added a twist straight out of Brave New War, they are using cracks in the Pakistani Taliban to recruit Jihadis as "loyalist militias"):

They wear their hair and beards long, Taliban style, and support attacks on U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. Yet the fighters are tolerated and — many believe — backed by Pakistan because they share a common enemy: the country's most deadly terror network.

It's interesting that in practice, open source counter-insurgency is in the process of quickly and decisively displacing the much ballyhooed US COIN (counter-insurgency) doctrine.  So, why are we still clinging to the myth of traditional COIN?  Might as well throw out the existing manual and rewrite it with the rules of open source counter-insurgency. The rules required to do this well are very different and getting them right will save us a lot of misadventure in the future from failed efforts at nation-building and traditional COIN.

JOURNAL: System disruption by destroying low flow nodes

"An attack on the nodes with the lowest loads can be a more effective way to destroy the electrical power grid of the western US due to cascading failures," Jian-Wei Wang "Cascade based vulnerability of the US Power Grid"

See this earlier post on the topic:  "Cascading System Failure"   This is a "connections" instead of high load node attack methodology.  Cascade up.

ERRATA: Mid September 2009

Some items of interest:

• Pot farming is up ~ 14% in the US (this growth rate is a derivative of increased enforcement action).  Tighter border controls (part of prohibition enforcement) and economic failure in the US is driving people into pot farming.  US Pot farming is a $35 b a year industry (vs. corn at $45 billion).   In this vein, here's an open source video from an interesting site called "Never Get Busted" on how to beat a FLIR camera.
• Bill Lind praises Admiral Mike Mullen on his epiphany re: the way to conduct strategic communications and information operations. Mullen: “To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate..." Agreed. I'm currently completing development on a breakthrough information system that will measure what our actions communicate (it's so simple that every person in the government assigned to IO, SC, or PD can use it -- it spans tactical through strategic).  Mullen, Gates, and McCrystal should have it on their desktops.  It's a rare opportunity for the DoD to actually get ahead of the opposition in information warfare.
• Role reversal.  This is a non-political blog, since traditional political divisions/mindsets make little sense in a post-modern world.  Despite that caveat, it's interesting to see the US Defense Department embrace what is essentially a liberal approach to warfare: pro-active nation-building and COIN.  The premise behind nation-building and COIN is a core liberal belief:  that it is possible to drastically change a society, culture, and people through improvements in governance or the use of targeted force (top down mandated change -- equivalent to "Great Society" efforts).  The conservative approach to warfare is the opposite:  you can't change a society through changes in governance or targeted force in any time period of relevance, and if you do try, you will spend yourself into the ground and generate widespread opposition.  
• What to remember about 9/11.  The Chicago Boyz blog points out, correctly (I made roughly the same point in Brave New War), that the only portion of the American national security system that actually worked on 9/11 was.... drum roll please....  the formation of spontaneous civilian militias.  From the counter-attack on the one plane that didn't  hit its intended target to militias that evacuated people in NYC.  The hideously expensive agencies and departments did nothing (which is one of the reasons, as perverse as it sounds, we went to war in Iraq:  to decisively prove the utility of these agencies and departments before a global audience).
• More insight into suicide bombers.   A suicide bomber is, at a technical level, only a wetware delivery system for hardware payloads.  However, suicide attacks do provide some value at the moral and psychological level (less than most realize).  Regardless, it's important to know how to manufacture them.  A great article by Riaz Hassan from Australia's Flinders University does just that (it's probably worth a fuller treatment by me in the future given the richness of the data set he is drawing on).  Key concepts from the article:  group politics more important than purely religious motivation.  Surprise, they are usually socially connected (highly) people rather than loners, so altruism usually plays a a big role (as in:  their life is worth giving up for the groups).  Finally, there's no surprise that humiliation (personally or of group) and revenge (personal or of group) are great motivators.
• Final note:  one side benefit of building a system for fighting wars on information terrain is that my team has figured out how to identify viral internet properties days and weeks before they spike.  That's very cool (although I'm not quite sure what to do with it yet).  If we dive into this, it may be useful as a way to identify attacks on social systempunkts that cause widespread disruption -- or to accelerate attacks on them if required.  ;->

JOURNAL: A College Degree for $99 a Month

To the extent that educational background is a factor in my hiring decisions, I would be more likely hire a person that succeeded at an educational program like Straighterline than somebody that went to a standard four year institution.  Why?  The choice demonstrates an ability to improvise -- in that they were able to see the advantages of a $99 education vs. something equivalent at 100 times the cost.  It's also because they demonstrated an ability to operate successfully within an online work environment -- which, despite it quickly becoming the critical job skill of the 21st Century, is something that traditional colleges don't teach and most workers are terrible at.

Here's a great article on the school by Kevin Carey at the Washington Monthly on Straighterline, and how the educational establishment is successfully resisting it.  This resistance will halt progress until the prolonged economic failure of the global middle class makes the switch to online education (in this price range) inexorable.  

JOURNAL: Sharing across tinkering networks

Associated Press:  

A member of a radical Nigerian Islamist sect that attacked security forces in July, unleashing a bloodbath in which 700 people died, says he received bomb-making training in Afghanistan. Abdul Rasheed, 23, told The Associated Press that he had been a member of the Boko Haram sect for six months and was given $500 cash by his leader to go to Afghanistan and train in bomb-making. Rasheed spoke on Wednesday at police headquarters.

A CONTROLLED CHAOS EXIT FROM AFGHANISTAN?

Is is possible to achieve a level of "controlled chaos" in Afghanistan, suitable for a NATO withdrawal (on par with the situation that enabled the US to leave Iraq)?  Perhaps.  Afghanistan does have the hallmarks of the diverse (lots of participant groups with different motivations) open source insurgency that may make a controlled chaos exit possible.  For example (from Josh Partlow at the Washington Post):

The drug industry is so prevalent in places such as Helmand that coalition commanders there say it is often difficult to distinguish between Taliban members, drug traffickers and criminal gangs, all of which take part in the business.

U.N. officials estimate that the Taliban collects at least $125 million a year from opium production, including by taxing farmers and levying "protection" fees for cargo trucks transiting its territory. There are also signs that the group is increasingly involved in the high-end value aspects of the business, including converting opium to heroin and trading in precursor chemicals, such as acetic anhydride. Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UNODC, wrote in the report that there is "growing evidence" that "some anti-government elements in Afghanistan are turning into narco-cartels."

Note the similarities from a short description above to what the bazaar-like dynamics (the financial flows) of an open source insurgency looks like, taken from a 2004 post I made about Iraq.

A major difference between the guerrilla war we are fighting in Iraq and previous insurgencies is its lack of center of gravity as we commonly understand it (an ideology/party, ethnic independence, etc. or hierarchy). The real center of gravity in Iraq is a bazaar of violence. This bazaar is where a combination of local and global "hot" money (including criminal) is funding a diverse set of groups, each with their own methods of operation and motivations. Groups engage in co-opetition to share resources, intelligence, and funds (see the attached simplified diagram). They even expand operational reach by purchasing amateur mercenaries (not pictured).

It's pretty clear that US commanders on the ground already see the free-wheeling financial bazaar that super-charges Afghanistan's open source insurgency as central to the war (again, from the Josh Partlow article in the Washington Post):

Col. George Amland, deputy commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which operates in Helmand, said that "all those people will coexist very happily as a partnership, while there is a level of chaos," but that his troops are attempting to interrupt and split the networks.

However, what the Col. will find is that forcibly interrupting or splitting these networks won't work.  To create a level of controlled chaos necessary for withdrawal, it's necessary to: 

create your own open source counter-insurgency by co-opting existing insurgents (purchasing them) and manufacturing "loyalist" militias.

The creation of an open source counter-insurgency is the strategy I outlined in my 2005 New York Times Op-Ed, "The Open-Source War" on how to solve the problem of Iraq.  That strategy, made easy by deep fault lines that developed due to a growing Iraqi civil war, eventually became (inevitably) the strategy the US used to put Iraq into a mode of "controlled chaos."  From the Op-Ed:

What's left (as a strategy)? It's possible, as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting I.B.M.'s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state's monopoly on violence by using militias as a counterinsurgency. This is similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980's and Colombia in the 1990's. In those cases, these militias used local knowledge, unconstrained tactics and high levels of motivation to defeat insurgents (this is in contrast to the ineffectiveness of Iraq's paycheck military). This option will probably work in Iraq too.

So, when will it be apparent the US is starting to adopt an open source counter-insurgency as its exit strategy?  When it starts to manufacture, co-opt and run its own "loyalist" militias, apart from the Afghan government.  So, why don't we just jump to the end game early?  

NOTE:  However, when we do eventually adopt this strategy (sooner or later), it's important to remember it comes at a cost (again from the 2005 Op-Ed on Iraq):

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.