Global Guerrillas

Leaving the Global Grid And Being Arrested For It

Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, controls about $4.3 trillion in assets (and has influence on how $10 trillion more is allocated).  As a point of reference, that is about the size of the entire US economy.  

Larry sees the world as a tightly interconnected "financial grid." Larry believes that a big part of his job is to know which parts of this global grid represent opportunities and which parts are dangerous.

That makes sense. Asset allocation accounts for about ~80% of any big financial fund's performance and BlackRock's extraordinary success implies that Larry has been getting it right for decades.  

What's interesting to me is the mindset.  For example:  Larry dismisses the threats posed by Russia adventures in the Ukraine.  Why?  

He understands that all of the people involved in this conflicts are part of his financial grid.  He also knows that everyone is utterly dependent on the financial flows coursing through it.  They couldn't get through the day at work and at home without it.  

So, to him, this dependence means that Russia isn't an actual threat, but merely a problem to be dealt with.  

In contrast, Larry does see one threat as real and tangible: ISIS.  Why?  

ISIS isn't connected or dependent on the "grid." Worse, it's growing like a geographical cancer that can severely damage the grid.  

This idea.  The fear that a growing part of the world is being taken off the grid gives guys like Larry nightmares.  

I don't think he is alone.  It apparently gives more people than just Larry nightmares.   

For example.  Three men were arrested in New York this week, and will likely serve long prison sentences.  

They weren't arrested because they were plotting an attack on the US or any other site in any meaningful way. 

Instead, they were arrested because they planned to leave the US.   They tried to drop off the grid by emigrating to ISIS and the government put them in jail for trying it.

It's an interesting twist.

 

 

PS: Thanks so much for all of the great thinking on drone warfare and protest. Working through the responses right now.

Drones over Paris

For two nights, up to five drones were spotted over landmarks in Paris. French police weren't able to track down the drones or the owners due to the difficulty of tracing their flight paths while on the ground. In response, a task force has been formed to focus on this "threat." Even the US secret service has been called in as consultants (although their track record with drones is pretty terrible).

This event demonstrates, yet again, that drones allow:

• easy (with gps navigation, they can fly themselves),
• low cost (hundreds, not thousands of dollars),
• survivable (not being caught) access to any site.

Of course, drones have limitations:

• short flight time,
• slow speed, and
• small payload (1-2 pounds).  

The big questions:

1. how can small, consumer drones to disrupt urban environments?
2. given trends in drone technology, how could they be used for disruption and warfare in the near future (5-10 years)?
3. how can drones be used to advance protest?

To fully explore the potential of this new platform for warfare, let's do something fun.

I'd like to open these questions up to the 60,000 who regularly read this site.  Over the last decade, I've found that nearly everyone doing innovative work on military strategy and theory (all over the world), regularly read this site.  This means the quality of the thinking on this project has the potential to be pretty great.  So, put your brains in gear and write up a fictional scenario that will rock the world.  Try to use brevity (less than thousand words would be great) and send it to me at:

[email protected]

I'll publish the best ones on GG or do something even more interesting with them.

Three Saudi Options

Saudi Arabia sees ISIS as an existential threat.  It has a reason to be scared, ISIS is a Wahabi jihad with updated technologies (social media) and techniques (open development).   That means when push comes to shove, Saudi troops will either a) turn tail and run or b) join up in droves.  To avoid this, the Saudis might attempt something radical:

1. Build a completely useless multi-billion dollar wall around the country. Oh wait, they are already doing that.
2. Ramp support for al Qaeda.  Optimally, a big al Qaeda on a western target would force the US to fully engage ISIS, since ISIS is a physical target and al Qaeda isn't.  Was al Qaeda's attack on Charlie Hebdo (and the Jewish deli) a Saudi funded endeavor to start the process?
3. Hire western mercenaries to push ISIS around.  Erik Prince has been trying to sell this option for years and is waiting in the wings to get it going.  A few billion spent this way might be sufficient to turn the tide on ISIS.

The Middle East doesn't Matter Anymore

Back in 2003, the US was headed towards complete dependence on foreign oil.  Additionally, the demand for energy (particularly from China) was growing far faster than production, which meant an energy price spike was inevitable.  

Of course, this could be avoided if another big source of oil was found and exploited.  However, based on existing production technology, the only big fields left untapped were in Iraq, but due to sanctions (limiting production to 2m barrels a day, far less than the 8 m bpd projected to be possible).

The result was inevitable.  The US invaded Iraq to free up production (that's largely why the fields were secured in the first couple of days of the invasion), but it screwed up.  The national security "brain-trust"  didn't anticipate that the Iraqi guerrillas would disrupt this production so effectively (I covered this in detail on this blog and in my book).  The result?  Iraq produced less oil, for years after the invasion, than it did under sanctions.

That loss of production in combination with disruption caused by Nigerian guerrillas (who copied the success of the Iraqis), produced an energy crunch that drove the global economy into a massive recession.  Worse, this recession became a decade long depression due to the disruption caused by the banks and hedge funds we allow to hack the global financial system.  

One of the benefits of this oil crunch was that high prices spurred technological innovation that led to an upheaval in the US energy system over the last decade.  New technology has enabled US oil and natural gas production to boom. Not only that, this tech enables energy production to scale industrially -- that's a big change if you understand the implications.  

The most immediate benefit of a return to US energy autonomy has been lower natural gas, oil, and gasoline prices (autonomy that will only grow as solar zooms). However, there's other benefits that should be obvious too.  Since the US isn't dependent on Middle Eastern energy anymore, US national security policy will be decoupled from Middle Eastern conflicts.  Like it or not, this is inevitable.  

What does this mean?

• If the US does get involved in Middle East conflicts it's due to outdated policy and doctrine.
• Nobody in the West will do anything to stop the spread of ISIS (as a humanitarian crisis it rates well below Rwanda).  
• Saudi Arabia is going to get desperate to get the US to intervene.  It sees ISIS as an existential threat.  How will it do that?  I've got some ideas...

The Open Jihad

Over the past couple of weeks, the open jihad has taken ground in Libya, Nigeria, Syria, and Iraq.  It's ongoing success is due to innovations developed by a large and growing number of contributing groups.  Groups like:

• ISIS affiliated forces in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Yemen to
• Boko Haram in Nigeria to
• ISIS and AQ affiliated terrorist groups  inside Saudi Arabia, UK, Egypt, etc.

Open jihad evolves (gets better) through massively parallel co-development.  All of the groups in the open jihad, no matter how small (even down to individuals), can contribute.  They do this by:

1. tinkering with tactics, strategies, and technologies that can be used to advance the open jihad.
2. testing the efficacy of these innovations by using them against the enemy. In other words, throwing them against the wall to see what sticks.
3. copying the innovations that work.  

The groups in the open jihad can communicate successful innovations without even using the forms of communication we pay the NSA tens of billions a year to spy on.   Instead, they communicate successful innovation through a process called stigmergy (which we do surprisingly little to analyze).  I first wrote about stigmergy back in 2004.  That earlier description is still valid today.  

Stigmergy is a term used in biology (from the work of french biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse) to describe environmental mechanisms for coordinating the work of independent actors (for example, ants use pheromones to create trails and people use weblog links to establish information paths, for others to follow).  The term is derived from the greek words stigma ("sign") andergon ("to act"). Stigmergy can be used as a mechanism to understand underlying patterns in swarming activity.  As such, it can be applied to the understanding of swarming attacks by diverse bands of attackers.  A knowledge of stigmergy is a key to understanding how these groups learn.   Stigmergic systems use simple environmental signals to coordinate that actions of independent agents (each with their own decision making process). These signals are used to coordinate scalable, robust, and dynamic activity. This activity is often much more intelligent that the actions capable by the individual actors (in this case individual global guerrilla groups). There are four basic mechanisms used in stigmergic communication. They are:

• Marker-based. Markers or signs left by actors influence the action of other actors. In the GG (global guerrilla) context this is the site of an attack and the news of the attack that is delivered by the media. The description of the attack in the media is stigmergic marker for others to follow.
• Sematectonic. Environmental conditions influence the behavior of all actors in the system. For GGs, multiple attacks on a certain type of target can generate a security response by the nation-state that changes the potential of attacks against that type of target in the immediate future. An increased security presence for those types of targets is a sema-tectonic signal to select something else.
• Quantitative. The environmental signals are of a single scalable type. The size of a Global Guerrilla attack on a given location can meter the scale of the security response. 
• Qualitative. The environmental signals are of a varied type.  They message changes based on their combination. Different types of attacks on the same target will yield information on the type of attack that is the most effective.

 

 

PS:  We have a tendency to dismiss tinkering as a foolish endeavor.  All of the great breakthroughs in modern technology have been found through tinkering -- from airplanes to cars to PCs to telephones to anti-biotics to electricity -- and not through investment in big, industrial labs. 

ISIS isn't the long term problem, Saudi Arabia is

Here's a new way to think about something that should be obvious...

To the politicians in DC and financiers in New York, Saudi Arabia is an island of stability in a sea of chaos.  A reliable ally, willing to keep the oil flowing, year in and year out.  A place that's not vulnerable to the instability that routinely guts the countries around it.

Of course, that line of thinking is utterly misguided.  The opposite is true.  

In reality, Saudi Arabia is extremely fragile and much of the chaos we see in the Middle East is due to the way Saudi Arabia avoids falling to pieces.  Worse, we are largely to blame for this.  We go along with this charade, and our willingness to play along is doing much of the damage.

To understand why this illusion Saudi stability is so toxic, let's dig into a very smart idea from thermodynamics called dissipative structures.  In fact, the idea was so good that won Ilya Prigogine the Nobel prize in Chemistry.  Prigogine's idea provides us with insight into how everything from how biological structures (e.g. bacteria, apes...) to natural phenomena (e.g. tornadoes) to social systems (e.g. nation-states) build order and prevent collapse.

The important part of this idea for us, is that all dissipative structures grow by exporting or expelling waste products into an external environment.  In other words, they achieve "order" by getting rid of the disorder produced by building it.  

Here it is in very simple terms.  Within biological structures, eating produces the energy needed to build and maintain an organism.  In turn, consuming food produces disorder in the form of feces.  Organisms expel feces into the outside world because holding onto it is dangerous.  The same process is true with almost all complex structures. With automobiles, it's exhaust fumes. With complex social systems, it is everything from warfare to pollution.

We could spend all day on this idea, but let's cut to the chase and apply this framework to Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia is a particularly expensive dissipative structure because it is extremely rigid, anachronistic, and unchanging.   To maintain this archaic structure despite the titanic forces of globalization trying to pull it apart, it must export an incredible amount of disorder (entropy) into the surrounding region.  Disorder such as:

• A corrosive fundamentalist ideology.  The KSA's Wahhabism fuels both ISIS and al Qaeda and it's spent billions spreading it around the world.
• Thousands of violent zealots.  The vast majority of the hijackers during 9/11 were Saudi as well as thousands of ISIS members.  People it can't control are sent abroad.
• Billions in destabilizing financing.  Saudi Arabia provided the start-up funding for both al Qaeda and ISIS.  It even "invested" $10 billion in the current Egyptian military dictatorship.

Obviously, this Saudi entropy has damaged everyone in the world.  It spreads violent instability throughout the world, from the terrorism of 9/11 to the violent ascent of ISIS in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Pakistan...   

Worse, the damage being done by Saudi Arabia is increasing with each passing year, as it attempts to defy the inexorable gravitational attraction of a fluid, dynamic, and tightly integrated global system.  

This means that even if ISIS is defeated in the next couple of years, Saudi Arabia's dysfunctional system will produce something worse soon thereafter.

 

John Boyd (Patterns of Conflict)

Thanks to Jason Brown.  He converted these from BETA tapes located in the Marine Corps University archives.  

 

 

via The Boyd Blog

The late, great John Boyd in action.

PS: Here's more videos of Boyd in action.

Jordan's Next Move May Be Fatal

The US defense establishment believes that the ISIS video of the Jordanian pilot was a miscalculation.  I believe this is false.  Here's why:

• The establishment believes the video was meant to coerce.  To scare the Kingdom into neutrality.  Instead, it backfired, and the King of Jordan vowed a "relentless" war against ISIS.  << This is an interesting narrative, but that's not what happened.  
• Instead, ISIS used the video to provoke Jordan.  ISIS selected the punishment (it was insulting) and the victim (he was the son of a politically important tribal chief) with care.  This implies that the video was meant to produced outrage, not coercion.  ISIS did this to provoke Jordan into rash actions that it could take advantage of.
• This is already happening.  For example:  Jordan's retaliatory air strike on ISIS turned into a PR failure when ISIS claimed it had killed a western female hostage by mistake.  NOTE: this suggests that ISIS has a much faster OODA loop than the coalition.

Jordan Fights Alone

ISIS understands something that most of the suits in the US security system don't.  Despite the constant rhetoric out of Washington, there isn't really a western coalition against ISIS.  The west isn't part of this fight, nor will it be for some time to come.  This means that if Jordan fights ISIS, it will do so alone:

• The US will send Jordan a smattering of weapons, money, intelligence, and trainers.  The US won't send ground troops, despite the fact that Obama recently made a request for authorization to use force against ISIS.  
• On the ground, all Jordan can expect, is some help from random Syrian, Kurdish and Iraqi militias.  That's it. 
• On the battlefield, the west's only contribution will be a scattershot, low intensity air bombardment.  A contribution that is insufficient for an enemy this large, complex, and dangerous.

Jordan's Next move may be Fatal

Even isolated and alone, Jordan is a tough nut for ISIS to crack.  So, for ISIS to defeat Jordan, it needs Jordan to make a strategic mistake and this video was intended to force this mistake.  For example:

1. Jordan joins the Syrian civil war in order to fight ISIS.  Jordan gets sucked into the Syrian quagmire and becomes destabilized.
2. The Kingdom makes a bold incursion into ISIS held territory with an elite maneuver unit.  This vehicle heavy unit, built along western lines, would be very dependent on supplies but would be able to advance quickly (aka get itself into trouble quickly). To capitalize on this, ISIS would feint a retreat to entice the Jordanian unit  deep into ISIS territory in search of a decisive (revenge fueled) engagement.  When the Jordanians get deep enough => ISIS would mount a defense, tie up the unit, and swarm its long supply line.  Isolated, deep in enemy territory, and swarmed by fanatics => the Jordanian unit would be quickly routed and the captives executed.  Panic would spread like wildfire. 
3. Jordan cracks down on ISIS and al Qaeda supporters within the country and roughs up the massive refugee population living there (for example; over 800,000 Syrians are refugees in Jordan).  This creates dissent that ISIS can use.  These restive populations become particularly useful if battlefield defeats (see above) weaken, panic, and bleed the Kingdom's Bedouin aristocracy.  

 

 

PS: Some analysts are adamant in claiming that a nation-state like Jordan won't turn a provocation into a disaster by sending forces deep into ISIS territory.  My counter:  the US invaded Iraq based on the provocation of 9/11.

PPS:  For those who believe western air power + Jordanian troops would roll ISIS >> that's a very rosy analysis unlikely to hold up on the field.  

ISIS targets the Pilots of the Airwar

ISIS executed (burned to death) a Jordanian pilot this week.  To maximize the impact of the event, ISIS released a slickly produced video of the event.  The video was a "complete trial" that included >>

• An interview with the pilot (the "testimony").
• Some footage of western airplanes blowing things up (the "crime").
• The brutal execution of the pilot (the "punishment").

Censorship as a Non-Strategy?

What was the west's response?  Censorship.  Here's a full version of the video I've found (it won't last long). The US government is putting on Web hosts around the world to remove videos like this.  So, it will be censored and removed soon.  Censorship isn't a smart strategy.

• Censorship turns the video into "secret knowledge."  Accessing it in defiance of dictates of a state adds to its allure, particularly for young people targeted by ISIS.  
• Censorship displays a complete misunderstanding of how online discussion works.  IF it had been allowed online, it would have ignited tens of thousands of discussions required to turn this into learning event.    
• Censorship gives the impression that the West is weak and in retreat.  The danger is that weakness invites aggression.

ISIS targets the Air War

The ex CIA/DoD guys on the major media networks, didn't have much to say about the event.  Here's some more thinking:

• Media:  ISIS is mindlessly brutal.  JR: a more insightful analysis shows that these brutal punishments (Christians would call them "old testament" punishments) are taken from the pages of the Quran.  They are specifically selected to recruit Muslims schooled in scriptural literalism by pointing out that modernist Islam ignores scripture when inconvenient.  This punishment was specifically selected for its brutality because the "crime" was push button bombing (the US claims this air war has killed ~6,000 members of ISIS).
• Media:  This execution was unjustified.  The pilot was innocent.  JR:  The video spent quite a bit of time justifying the execution.  In parallel, ISIS tied the morality of airstrikes to the morality of suicide bombing by offering to trade the pilot for some prisoners in Jordan.  That was successful, Jordan confirmed this connection by immediately executing these prisoners in retaliation for the death of the pilot.  
• Media:  ISIS wants to intimidate the west.  JR:   Not really.  ISIS had a more specific target in mind.  They are trying to intimidate the pilots of the air campaign.  At the end of the video, ISIS offers 100 Gold Dinars (~$18,000) for the heads of specifically named Jordanian pilots they consider criminals.  By personalizing this, they have just pierced the veil of anonymity that protects the pilots that make push button air warfare possible.

 

PS> Fox video has the full video up.

While ISIS Melts the Map, the Pentagon Fiddles

I've spent the last month writing about the inevitable collision between ISIS and Saudi Arabia.  Here are some of the articles:

1. Saudi Arabia plunges into an Abyss
2. Abdullah is dead. ISIS will head south.
3. ISIS is the ideological successor  Saudi Arabia

As I dug in, it's become clear to me and many of you I hope, that ISIS has the potential to melt the map of the Middle East by absorbing portions of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen. 

Further, the deeper I dug into the evolution of ISIS and the vulnerabilities of Saudi Arabia, the more I found the melted map outcome to be likely.

Obviously a partially melted map is an extreme outcome, particularly once Saudi Arabia (Mecca, Medina and Oil) is gobbled up.  

In fact, this outcome is so extreme, it makes it the most compelling topic of military study since the cold war ended (al Qaeda was just a warm-up and cyber is a sideshow), and also obviously something that we should be pulling out the stops to figure out.

This is why I found this announcement perplexing:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has established a research and essay competition in honor of King Abdullah, to be hosted by the National Defense University.  Announcing the creation of the competition on Monday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said it is a fitting tribute to the life and leadership of King Abdullah.

“This is an important opportunity to honor the memory of the king, while also fostering scholarly research on the Arab-Muslim world, and I can think of no better home for such an initiative than NDU,” Dempsey said in a statement announcing the competition.

When I first read this, I thought it was a joke from the Duffle Blog.  It's not fake, it's real.

Unfortunately, it's another depressing example of how misguided and dogmatic US military thinking has become.

Instead of:

• figuring out why ISIS is an ideological and military threat to the Kingdom, or
• what would happen if the Kingdom were to fall quickly, or
• how to avoid all of this mess in the most adroit way possible....

...our military thinkers are writing paeans to a dead medieval monarch.  

Apparently, if Saudi Arabia does fall, everyone in the US military can say whocoudaknowd?  (the same thing the idiot savants on Wall Street said in 2008).

Exploiting the Robocaller Gap

Here's an interesting US systempunkt -- a systempunkt is the point in a big network where even a small attack would cause the entire network to fail. This systempunkt would enable a prepared individual the unique ability to shut down a large part of the US without shedding a drop of blood. For example, this attack has the ability to:

• Put any company into a complete panic in less than an hour.
• Generates hundreds of false arrests and armed police searches -- all done with a high risk of fatal injury. 
• It even has the ability (with some careful planning) to shut down all US schools (k-12 and colleges), hundreds of airline flights, and many government offices for a couple of days. 

Auto-dialing Panic 

How is an attack like this possible?   It's possible due to a flaw in the US communications system (due to corporate corruption), new tech (not really new, but cheaper and more ubiquitous), and an overly sensitized population.  These combine to make it possible for anyone to send threats and other misleading messages to thousands of specific people and organizations in a very short period of time, and in a way that minimizes capture.  Here's more detail:

1. Robocalls with voice threats/misinformation.  The attacker uses phone based marketing software to auto-dial hundreds of target numbers to deliver threatening and misleading audio messages (bomb threat, impending attack, shots fired, armed intruder seen).  NOTE: This software is highly configurable so specific voice messages (human voice) can be delivered to specific numbers.  Also, since it costs almost nothing to make these calls (rates and software cost) and this software can deliver messages (hundreds per phone per hour), it's possible to tackle targets of nearly any scale. 
2. Economic Corruption (amoral companies).  Fortunately for the attacker, there's no system in place to stop this from happening.  The phone system is completely open to short term manipulation. NOTE:  We see this every day.  Most US households (particularly elderly households) get slammed with a half dozen robocalls (many of them are dangerous scams from abroad that attempt to defraud them of every penny they have) every single day.  Despite the damage this does, the US phone monopolies won't do anything about it.  Worse, the system is so badly managed, it's even possible for robocalling software to manipulate the "caller ID."  This makes it possible for attackers to spoof targets with fake "Police Department" to "local" caller IDs.
3. Extreme reactions.  Based on a phone threat alone, nearly all US schools and all government offices will evacuate and send home their personnel.  Further, the ability to configure threats to specific locations and attach fake caller IDs provides the ability amplify and extend the duration of these evacuations and armed responses.

What does this mean?

Warfare is in transition.  New tech and new threats are emerging every day.  In many cases, simply doing the right thing (in this case, protecting US households from phone scams/spam), can blunt the effectiveness of the attack.  In others, it takes an understanding of where modern warfare is going (not where it has been) in order to anticipate these threats and tweak the system in ways that blunts their potential for damage.  

Unfortunately, I don't see this happening.  The governmental and economic system we have isn't that good at doing the right thing.  Worse, the security system we pay so much for, is only good at stopping the repetition of the types of attack that have already happened, not the attack that will happen.  Why?  Our national security system is simply unwilling to study warfare seriously.  

PS:  Robocalling software is very easy to acquire and run now.  There are even smartphone apps that can do this on stolen phones.