Information Warfare - The Professional Take

Mountainrunner has a great summary article up on "New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization, and Facilitation" - go read it and see what the grownups are talking about.

TLBN, U R P0WNED

Here's a critical article at abu muqawma that gave me a forehead-slapping moment - "I can't believe we're not doing this..."

Kip believes the US military has been way behind in understanding the power and uses of text messaging. SMS offers the ability to do everything from effective information operations, to paying Iraqi or Afghan police in ways that are more difficult to corrupt (if you're interested in this, look into the CelPay disarmament program in Democratic Republic of Congo), to secure and simple communications between members of a third world army, to tips hotlines where insurgent movement can be reported at little risk to the informant.

Damn, this is so obvious even I assumed it was being done. We need both to be using SMS ourselves proactively in Iraq and Afghanistan, but compromising the SMS gateways so we can keep tabs on traffic there (assuming the OK of the local governments).

Someone kick someone at the Pentagon for me on this, will you?

"40-Second Boyd" and the Big Picture

"To be challenged in such a manner is an irresistible red flag to men like this, and certainly no less of one because the challenger was a rude, loud, irreverent braggart who had never been victorious in actual air-to-air combat. And yet that forty dollars went uncollected, uncollected for many years against scores of the best fighter pilots in the world.

That is more than luck. That is more than skill. That is more than tactics. That level of supremacy is the result of the ability to see things in an entirely new way. It is the difference between escaping from a maze you are embedded in, versus finding the way out from one that you look down upon from above.

Having your ass handed to you in such a spectacular and repeated fashion causes some men to curse and mutter about ‘one trick ponies’ and so on. But for others, for those who are more invested in victory than in ego, it reveals a level of skill that instantly removes all swagger and competition and puts one in the place of a willing supplicant, eager for knowledge."

Here at Winds of Change.NET, we've talked about a fighter pilot named Col. John Boyd - always with immense respect. Many of you will look at that name and think "Who?"

OK, think Sir Basil Liddell Hart. Too obscure? Then try these names on for size as compatriots: Karl von Clausewitz. Sun Tzu. Do we have your attention yet?

I don't think that it's stretching Boyd's importance, or his contribution, very much to place him in that company. Indeed, I predict that in a couple hundred years, when people look back on the 20th century and think of the theory of warfare and armed conflict, they won't think of Mikhail Tukachevsky, or his student Guederian. Or even Sir Basil. Instead, they'll mention an American Colonel who was, for a very long time, a prophet without honor in his own country.

Which may lead you to ask the question: "how come I haven't heard of this guy?" Rather than explaining all the reasons, I'd rather take a more productive tack - and direct you to an immensely readable, riveting, but brief explanation of who Boyd was, what he discovered, and why it matters more than ever today...

read the rest! »

Shadow Air Forces, Inc.

Operating and recapitalization costs for front-line fighters are up in the stratosphere, even as a wide variety of conflicts around the world fit counterinsurgency profiles requiring affordable, persistent surveillance and rapid fire support. UAVs are filling an important niche, and their success is triggering major bureaucratic showdowns in response - but they remain expensive, are much more crash-prone than manned aircraft, and offer a limited field of view.

Under the circumstances, it isn't surprising that some nations are turning back to simpler aircraft whose speed, view, and weapons carriage are purpose-built to offer dependable counter-insurgency surveillance and fire support at lower cost. America's A-10 "Warthog" widely outclasses much more expensive aircraft, for instance, and has become the key manned fighter of the global war on terror. Even as nations like Columbia purchase dual role trainer/COIN Super Tucano planes, and Iraq holds an aircraft competition for modified trainer/COIN aircraft of its own.

Trends becomes more surprising, and interesting, when private security firms look at their options, see a solution's logic, and step on board.

See DID's coverage of just such a recent development - and why it matters in ways that go beyond just an aircraft purchase.

Not that there's ever anything entirely new under the sun, of course. Back in the 1960s, Carl Gustaf von Rosen and his remarkable private "Biafran Air Force" wrote a chapter in military history that outshines anything modern thriller writers can dream up. The difference is that the rapid extension of security firms' global role since the late 1980s, and the nature of the current war, can make them trend setters in ways von Rosen never could have been.

Community in Business and Conflct

I'm at the Corante/Shared Insights 'Community 2.0' conference in Las Vegas, and having an interesting time hanging and meeting the various figures in the Web 2.0 world.

There's an interesting intersection developing between my professional and blogging life developing here.

I've talked for a long time about the political implications of the kinds of 'emergent management' which is represented by the kind of projects these people are engaged in growing. It's also highly relevant to the issues important to the Winds audience, as John Robb points out in his latest post at Global Guerrillas.

Now I'll disagree with some of the more extreme evangelists here in Vegas who believe that everything in business will be dissolved into a soup of community, just as I'll disagree with Robb when he says that the guerilla 'Bazaar of Violence' poses almost insurmountable challenges to traditional states. What I argue will happen is that the Web 2.0 challenge to major businesses - like newspapers - is that newspapers share will decline enough that they can no longer act as a monopoly in setting prices for ads.

Similarly, states will see that their monopoly on legitimacy will be challenged, and states with weak legitimacy will find themselves declining as they can't maintain the level of legitimacy necessary to function.

That's the pivotal question, and it's both an issue I'll be dealing with professionally (in a business environment) and as a citizen and blogger (here).

community2.0

China's ASAT test may settle a debate in India

Weapons in the final frontier

There are three ways of looking at it: China tested a new way to clean up orbital slots occupied by defunct satellites; it now has a way to take out space-based assets belonging to other countries; or, that it just created a whole lot of hazardous orbital junk up there. But let there be no mistake---it has also started this century's arms race. Star wars, ladies and gentlemen, has received a new lease of life.

What China did is not tremendously difficult to do. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have tested anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles, but the post-cold war world has held back from testing space-related weapons. That unspoken taboo is now broken.

Where is India in all this? At least three air chiefs have publicly talked about the establishment of an Aerospace Command. Although the government has not approved its formation, the Indian air force has started "work on conceptualising (space-based) weapons systems and its operational command system". And then there are accounts of DURGA or Directionally Unrestricted Ray-Gun Array, and KALI or Kinetic Attack Loitering Interceptor. Whether or not these projects exist outside the anyone's imagination is not known. But the folks at DRDO have a way with acronyms. (Actually, these weapons may belong to the family of advanced weapons known to professionals as Vertically Aligned Polar Omnidirectional Uniform Radioactive Weapon And Re-entry Equipment.)

For now, the United States has reacted with reproach at the Chinese for having defected first in this prisoner's dilemma game. But the Chinese may have settled the domestic debate in the United States weapons programmes in space. They may have settled it in India too.

Related Links: Two posts on this at DefenseTech; Theresa Hitchens's report on developments in military space; on China Confidential

Vietnam on the mind: Congress jockeys for position on Bush's new plan for Iraq

There's an awful lot of speculation on what Bush's new plan for Iraq might be. The consensus is that it will take the form of the "go big" option: the so-called "surge."

The details--just how large that surge will be, how long it might last, and what other policies or plans it will be tied into--remain to be seen. The plan is not just a strategic one for Bush and for Iraq, but it presents members of Congress with strategic dilemmas and decisions as well. They not only have to take a position on the merits, but in the time-honored way of most politicians, they have to decide what's in it for them in terms of re-election.

Bush, after all, has been released from that particular consideration. He only needs to take into account his own "vision" and plan for "success" (derided here by Fred Kaplan of Slate); Bush is exempt from serving another term. So, as Kaplan writes, "He's playing for History (most definitely with a capital H), which, he seems convinced, is on his side."

That's for history (or History) to decide. But history isn't written in the present, much as some would like to think it can be. Therefore the Democrats and Republicans trying to decide right now whether to support a surge in Iraq only know what has happened in the past, in distant times and places that may or may not be analogous; try as they (or we) might, they can't foretell the future.

read the rest! »

The Long War: A Strategy

I have an article at BlackFive on the subject of the Long War. I'd like to ask Chester, Armed Liberal, and Mr. Blue to read it in particular; but of course anyone is welcome.

Sherman and total war

I've been reading a book by Robert Kagan entitled Dangerous Nation, about the history of America's international relations. Kagan's thesis is that, from the start, the US was more involved and interventionist, and less isolationist, than conventional wisdom would indicate.

But that's not the portion of the book I'm writing about today. I've been reading the part about the Civil War. In the earliest days of that conflict, people thought it would be possible to wage the war in a relatively "civilized" and circumscribed manner. Instead, it was transformed into one of the bloodiest and most "total" of modern wars fought up till that time.

McClellan, Lincoln's first Union commander, preferred to wage a "gentleman's war." Ulysses S. Grant later described McClellan as one who "did not believe in this war...[letting his] ambivalent attitude toward the conflict influence [his] military performance." Thus do perceptions of a war's justness and necessity color the decisions made in the course of it, even by commanders.

read the rest! »

The definition of "success" in war: Part II (colonialism and occupation)

[Part I can be found here.]

Shelby Steele, a supporter of the war in Iraq, discusses the semantic and conceptual problem we face when we have no clear definition of victory:

Without a description of victory, a war has no goal.

Historically victory in foreign war has always meant hegemony: You win, you take over. We not only occupied Germany and Japan militarily after World War II, we also--and without a whit of self doubt--imposed our democratic way of life on them. We took our victory as a moral mandate as well as a military achievement, and felt commanded to morally transform these defeated societies by the terms of our democracy. In this effort we brooked no resistance whatsoever and we achieved great success.

read the rest! »

The definition of "success" in war: Part I

The ISG report has branded our efforts in Iraq "grave," "deteriorating," and "not working."

The American people aren't too happy with the situation, either. Results of recent polls indicate:

Just 9 per cent expect the war to end in clear-cut victory, compared with 87 per cent who expect some sort of compromise settlement...

But what would "clear-cut victory" actually look like in the case of Iraq (or Iran, or Syria, or any number of other places, for that matter)? Do we know? To achieve "victory," is it necessary to have a country completely at peace, with guarantees of civil rights for all and a smoothly functioning democratic process?

read the rest! »

The clash of convictions and the remaking of the world of wars

The outcome of modern wars is decided in the mind

Armed combat, of course, is not about to disappear, although it may increasingly take the form of 'asymmetric warfare' as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. It could also take the shape of proxy war, like the one India is fighting in Jammu & Kashmir and the United States and NATO are fighting in Afghanistan. But days in which armed combat alone decided the fate of wars ended a long time ago: with World War II and perhaps, the India-Pakistan war of 1971.

This is old hat. All out war became unimaginable as soon as the major powers acquired nuclear weapons. Those that didn't have their own usually came under the umbrella of one of those that did. The game of nuclear deterrence--in spite of bizarrely escalating to the level where there were thousands of warheads--kept the peace. The stability/instability paradox argued that while nuclear deterrence ensured stability at the highest (nuclear) level of escalation, it nevertheless created instability at lower (non-nuclear) levels. The United States relied on this to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But the Pakistani general staff realised just how low the ceiling was at Kargil in 1999-2000. They were fine so long as they were only arming and injecting jihadis into Jammu & Kashmir. But when they decided to take a step further and actually try to capture and hold territory, they quickly found out exactly where the buck stopped.

But the outcome of most of these asymmetrical, low-intensity wars can go either way.

read the rest! »

Election eve musings on Vietnam and Iraq: the bitter end?

Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to hanging. Nothing is likely to save him, not even the antics of lawyer Ramsey Clark, who was thrown out of the courtroom yesterday for disrespect.

But despite all the charges against him, no one's ever accused Saddam of being dumb. Here's an interesting tidbit that shows how smart he really was: in the buildup to the Iraqi war in 2003, Saddam was already making the Vietnam analogy:

In the days leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, television stations there showed 1975 footage of U.S. embassy support personnel escaping to helicopters from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon. It was Saddam's message to his people that the United States does not keep its commitments ...

read the rest! »

Goodbye 4GW, Hello Transactional Warfare

Guest blogger Daniel Markham posts a followup to his post on The First Media War.

There have been some great books lately on how warfare is both returning to its desultory roots and evolving from Mao's war to a decentralized trans-national threat. One buzzword is 4GW, which stands for Fourth Generation Warfare. The general idea behind all of these works is that war keeps evolving, and understanding how it is evolving is essential for winning it.

Indeed, "What war are we fighting?" seems to be a popular topic among armchair Generals, and real Generals too. In a recent article in Armed Forces Journal, Major General Bob Scales, Ret, after digging up the ghost of Clausewitz for yet another trip through the briar patch, says it's World War IV and we need to understand what the "amplifying factors" are. Amplifiers are not "multipliers" or "enablers" in that their influence on the course of war is nonlinear rather than linear; amplifiers don't simply accelerate the trends of the past, they make war different.

For example, World War I was a chemists' war in that the decisive strategic advantage on the battlefield was driven in large measure by new applications of chemistry and chemical engineering. The war should have ended for the Germans in 1915 when their supplies of gunpowder nitrates exhausted. But the synthesis of nitrates by German scientists allowed the war to continue for another three horrific years. World War II was a physicists' war. To paraphrase Churchill, the atom bomb ended the conflict, but exploitation of the electromagnetic spectrum in the form of the wireless and radar won it for the allies. "World War III" was the "information researchers'" war, a war in which intelligence and knowledge of the enemy and the ability to fully exploit that knowledge allowed the U.S. to defeat the Soviet Union with relatively small loss of life.

So what does General Scales and the academic he quotes think is going to be the amplifier in WWIV?

read the rest! »

The Israeli Defense Force -- A Hollow Military?

Real Clear Politics carried a Aug. 19, 2006 Jerusalem Post op-ed by Lenny Ben-Davis that has me thinking that today's Israeli Defense Force (IDF) may be a "Hollow Military" just like America's was in the late 1970's. The implications of that for the War on Terrorism and the continued existence of the state of Israel are profound.

I come to this conclusion via three routes. My day job is as a Defense Department Quality Specialist. Patterns of Defense corruption are part of my professional training. I have also been a serious military wargamer for more than 25 years. Last, being a military history buff, I have James Dunnigan's How to Make War and Dirty Little Secrets books, Shooting Blanks: War Making That Doesn't Work, and most importantly Getting It Right: American Military Reforms After Vietnam and into the 21st Century, as references for the symptoms of "Hollow" militaries.

You would expect to see the following things in a "Hollow" draft-based military.

1) Shortages of reservist training and reservist stocks and equipment. Check "yes" for the IDF.

2) Poor leadership not only at the senior leadership, but all the way down to the battlefield level. Poor leadership that has political cronyism at its heart. The Hezbollah missile strike on the INS Al-Hanit, Ben-David's piece plus multiple posts over on "Yonitheblogger.com" makes that another check "yes" for the IDF.

3) Draft dodging by the political elites and their children. Again, this is another check mark "yes" for the IDF.

Israel could clearly still beat Syria in a stand up conventional military fight as the latter’s armed forces have deteriorated faster for the same reasons than Israel’s, but the majority of IDF reservists - who make up between 70 and 80% of the IDF's ground forces - seem to have lost much of their combat effectiveness edge over Arab opponents

read the rest! »

12 Degrees of Freedom... and Still No Clue

Stratfor has released a Special Report that doesn't even attempt to clarify anything:

The pressure on Olmert from IDF is intense. But it is also intense politically. Benyamin Netanyahu, leader of Likud, has remained virtually silent, holding off criticizing the government. He has even restrained some of his colleagues. Clearly, he does not want to destabilize the government now. Yet, at the same time, his relative steadfastness while the government tries to sort things out remains odd.

It may be odd, but it's not the oddest:

read the rest! »

Home Towns in the Age of the Terror War

The image below is from Google Earth, of the south Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil (Bint Jubayl).

I've included the snapshot because this is currently the site of intense "close quarter" fighting between the IDF and Hezbollah, covered by Stratfor in this podcast. Stratfor presents the conflict as a trigger for a critical debate beginning in Israel. The "internal debate" concerns whether Israel has the fortitude to continue fighting under conditions where its forces sustain heavy casualties. It's ironic, in some ways, that Bint Jbeil is the locus of such a "bloody angle", because the town has prospered during peace, rapidly developing into a small city and commercial/administrative center. It even has its own website here. The text is in Arabic, but there's an English version here. The large red iconic letters introducing the town to the world send the message: "Resisting!"

This is how small towns in the age of the Terror War are likely to present themselves, if their culture is what the philosopher and sociologist, Ernest Gellner, called "charismatic." These places have the promise of economic growth and prosperity that could create a middle class, and a substrate for civil society and democracy, but they've "resisted" that fate in favor of another.

Where Israel stuggles with the hot dilemma that a legal/rational society endures when faced with horrible sacrifice in a war it would prefer never to fight, Bint Jbeil (a city whose name literally means "daughter of byblos") has a self-image, lodged in its deepest heart, of a miniature Stalingrad.

The source of Hezbollah's rockets

London-based, Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reporter Ali Nouri Zadeh reports an excusive: Iran is the supplier of Hezbollah's weaponry! The unnammed Revolutionary Guards officer added that

more than 3,000 Hezbollah members have undergone training in Iran, which included guerilla warfare, firing missiles and artillery, operating unmanned drones, marine warfare and conventional war operations. He said they have also trained 50 pilots for the past two years.

It's good to see confirmation of basic facts from an unexpected angle--even those facts that few reasonable people thought were in dispute.

"The stakes have been raised beyond anyone's expectation"

With the Israel-Hezbollah War well into its sixth day, most of us have figured out which mass media outlets provide breathlessly unenlightening commentary, and which prefer to channel Rodney King with return-to-the-peaceful-status-quo-ante editorial material. With such realistically low expectations in mind, it was thus of interest to read columnist Amir Taheri in Asharq al-Awsat. This London-based newspaper's Arabic and English websites are widely read by elites throughout the Arab world. It's useful to know that a succinct, pro-Western analyis is on offer at this Saudi-royal-family owned source in English, though perhaps not as an Arabic translation.

read the rest! »

French Lessons

The revolt of Algeria in 1954, and the French attempt to repress it, are worth examining in some detail. For one, the revolt itself entwined the nightmares that evolved in the first half of the 20th century: in the fascist states, Lenin's Russia, and the Palestine wars. And when they merged they gave the world the modern terrorist movement in the form we are fighting it now, in al Qaida especially. Also, the French response offers some instructive counter-examples.

Others have noticed this, too, of course. Now the Rand organization has republished a timely analysis of the Algerian War [PDF alert] by David Galula, who deliberately sought a leadership position on the French side during the rebellion, the better to understand the tactical challenges.

read the rest! »

Winning the Long War: a challenge and a response

Streaming audio at the Heritage Foundation of Andrew Bostom and Laurent Murawiec. Bostom's presentation is specifically about Muslim conquests of Palestine, the particulars of which are emblematic of the Arab bloc's current attitudes toward Israel. Pamela's phone interview with Andrew Bostom.

Many have commented on Bush's allusions to Truman in his commencement speech at West Point. It's certainly not the first time his deliberate naming of Islamism as the enemy has been compared to Truman's confrontation with Communism. Nor is it the first time the Administration's making democracy central to its reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan has been compared to the Marshall Plan. But this is what I think is interesting:

read the rest! »

Europe's Shame, Europe's Suicide

JK: This article came together slowly over about a month, but today's set of "What Moussaoui Portends," Callimachus' "Heroes and Neighbours" re: Ayaan Hirsi Ali's tribulations, and "White Guilt, War Guilt, and the License to Kill" gave it new impetus. These thoughts begin with a gripping, personal, and very human story, then travel into the sick soul of a culture. Unfortunately, that culture is ours... and we need to understand the real sickness before we can hope to make it healthy again.

We've written a lot about Europe here. It was Cicero who coined the phrase "aggressive docility," and it's one that continues to ring true. While both France and Denmark performed much better than North America did during the Cartoon Jihad, Europe's riots raise legitimate questions about the will to maintain public order and safety at all. The long term trends, and the comprehensive difficulty those societies have with defending themselves at any level, is concerning. Watching its Weimarization bring Nietzsche's "Last Man" to life leaves many of us wondering if we are seeing the finale for Western Civilization in Europe unfolding in our time, even as some in Europe itself and beyond wonder, and not without reason, if that future Europe will also be Judenrein (German term, means "without Jews").

Ultimately, however, Europe's problem is spiritual - and I use that term in ways that go beyond any specific religion. Some say Europe's death began in the trenches of the Somme during World War 1, and note that all the rest from Bolshevism to Fascism to the postmodern nihilist Left has been the saga of its long death throes. Others place the fall later, noting that Europe died in Auschwitz and that The Holocaust was also "a form of self-administered lobotomy for Continental European culture."

Actually, it may have been much more. The good doctor at Shrinkwrapped has finally finished a fascinating series called "Shame, Aggression, & Demographic Suicide" that begins by looking into one soul, and ends with some profound and fascinating questions and insights. Questions and insights that stretch deep into Europe, and back across the Atlantic.

read the rest! »

Iran's Nuclear Break Out Has Begun

According to an article in Bloomberg, an American State Department official is being quoted as saying the following in response to Iranian deputy nuclear chief Mohammad Saeedi's televised claim that Iran was about to move to ``industrial scale'' uranium enrichment involving 54,000 centrifuges at its Natanz plant:

``Using those 50,000 centrifuges they could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days,'' Stephen Rademaker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, told reporters today in Moscow.

and

``It was a deeply disappointing announcement,'' Rademaker said of Ahmadinejad's statement.

Weapons-Grade Uranium

Rademaker said the technology to enrich uranium to a low level could also be used to make weapons-grade uranium, saying that it would take a little over 13 years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon with the 164 centrifuges currently in use. The process involves placing uranium hexafluoride gas in a series of rotating drums or cylinders known as centrifuges that run at high speeds to extract weapons grade uranium.

Iran has informed the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency that it plans to construct 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz next year, Rademaker said.

``We calculate that a 3,000-machine cascade could produce enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon within 271 days,'' he said.

The time for diplomacy with Iran has come to an end. Mohammad Saeedi's announcement was a public declaration that Iran's nuclear break out has begun.

Welcome to the nuclear express elevator to hell, going down.

Count Down to Iran’s Nuclear Test Revisited

The U.S. government is missing the real issues in deciding what military action to take concerning Iran’s nuclear weapons program - how the Iranians are making nukes and what kind of nukes are they are attempting to build that counts. There are huge political/military implications to those choices. If America’s military and intelligence agencies have guessed wrong, the first we will know of it is when a nuclear tipped Iranian Scud or improved Scud missile detonates where it does America the most damage.

The government’s assumption that an American bombing campaign, no matter how successful, will slow down Iran’s nuclear program enough to buy time for a nonsensical regime change by revolution concept (no one outside the desperate-to-believe in fairy-tales idiots in D.C. believes the U.S. intelligence community can foment a successful revolution in Iran) would be laughable if so many lives were not at stake. Iran’s nuclear program is not a NATIONAL PROGRAM. It is an INTERNATIONAL ONE. As long as North Korea serves as an invulnerable sanctuary supplying ballistic missiles and nuclear fissile material to Iran in exchange for oil, Iran will get nukes. Looked at one way, nuclear proliferation may be seen as a phenomenon of globalization. Looked at in another, it may well be that nuclear proliferation is a game of covert nuclear warfare against the world’s sole superpower. No matter which is true, only forcible regime change will prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and setting off a chain reaction of proliferation that will add a least a dozen unstable, nuclear-armed, 3rd world states in a decade. Those will use their nukes on each, themselves and hand some off to terrorists, intentionally or otherwise, for use on us.

The kinds of nukes Iran is pursuing, given the self-evident need to remove the Mullah regime, is the most pressing and least thought through question of the proliferation debate. It is one colored by mirror-imaging conventional wisdom amounting to religious faith on the part of our nuclear weapons and intelligence communities.

read the rest! »

Tony Blair: Naming the Enemy

It has taken too long, but it is starting. Courtesy of Harry's place, we bring you Tony Blair, ladies and gentlemen, in yet another very fine speech:

"This terrorism will not be defeated until its ideas, the poison that warps the minds of its adherents, are confronted, head-on, in their essence, at their core. By this I don't mean telling them terrorism is wrong. I mean telling them their attitude to America is absurd; their concept of governance pre-feudal; their positions on women and other faiths, reactionary and regressive; and then since only by Muslims can this be done: standing up for and supporting those within Islam who will tell them all of this but more, namely that the extremist view of Islam is not just theologically backward but completely contrary to the spirit and teaching of the Koran.

But in order to do this, we must reject the thought that somehow we are the authors of our own distress; that if only we altered this decision or that, the extremism would fade away. The only way to win is: to recognise this phenomenon is a global ideology; to see all areas, in which it operates, as linked; and to defeat it by values and ideas set in opposition to those of the terrorists."

There's more. On the domestic front:

read the rest! »

CENTCOM's Gen. Abizaid's Status Reports to Congress

General John Abizaid (the name is Lebanese, if you're wondering) is in charge of CENTCOM, which includes the Iraqi and Afghan theaters as well as Iran, Syria, Lebanon, et. al. He testified to Congress this week about the "force posture of Central Command," which translates roughly into Canadian English as "So, like, what's doin', eh? How's it goin'?" (If the speaker is not from Toronto, they may actually want to know).

If you're serious about what's going on in this war, you owe it to yourself to read it, rather than letting potentially unreliable sources tell you what's in it. Some of the topics include "Nature of the Enemy," "Situation Overview in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa," "Other Regional Partnerships," and "Iran and Syria." Here's a couple of quick excerpts and a link.

I'm also a fan of reports from lower down the food chain. So here are a couple, good and bad, focused on Iraq. Plus an idea that makes moral and tactical sense:

read the rest! »

Harmony and Disharmony: Stealing al-Qaeda's Playbook

Defense Tech has a good, link-filled primer article explaining a couple of serious strategy pieces that recently came out of the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point.

Even Prussophile paleo-conservative and Counterpunch writer William S. Lind had good things to say about it, which is damn near unheard of for anything that comes out of the US military. Lind says the pieces show a very solid grasp of 4th Generation Warfare, however, and he's right. As he notes:

"The bulk of the paper is summaries of translations of some of al Qaida's own key documents, materials that allow other analysts to see al Qaida as it sees itself. As the study notes, 'Any external assessment of al-Qa'ida's weaknesses will have inherent limitations. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point believes an internal assessment -- from actual members of the al-Qa'ida organization -- is the best method to accurately assess their own true vulnerabilities.' "

In looking at wars, one is tempted to fixate attention on strengths. War being most often a contest of dueling mistakes, however, a focus on weaknesses is often at least as productive - and necessary in order to really understand what's going on. "Stealing al-Qaeda's Playbook" is a PDF file, but "Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting Al-Qa'ida's Organizational Vulnerabilities" is available in full in HTML if you want to tackle the whole thing. Contents include:

• Executive Summary
• Foreword
• Part I
  • Introduction
  • Theoretical Framework: The Challenges of Organizing Terror
  • Syria Case Study: Back to the Future
  • Organizational Vulnerabilities and Recommendations to Exploit Them
• Part II
  • Introduction
  • Harmony Document List (with linked summaries)

Covert Ops & Assassinations: Why It's the Future, and What It Takes (v 0.8b)

(The following post was originally supposed to be a first draft, for revision and publication by Tuesday or so. Unfortunately, it was set on something besides "Draft" when I saved it and went to the local support Denmark rally. By the time I got back, too many comments to take it offline. Sooo... now it's a "work in progress." Comments and serious thoughts welcome, and they can still shape the essay's final form.)

In "Democrats, Netroots, And Fantasy Policies," Marc said:

"Let me repeat; we're talking about taking unilateral (or semi-unilateral, with a "Band of brothers" type alliance) military action that results in killing or capturing people on foreign soil, using the people and resources of our military. And we're not going to do this as the exception, but as the root policy? Are they kidding?"

He backed up his argument that this is a Bad Idea in "Hit Squads and Pacifists," so definitely go read that. He's correct in noting that this is NOT a risk-free policy, on a number of levels. Having said that, I disagree with Marc that we cannot or should not do exactly this.

I'll explain why in a moment - but first I'll note the problem I have with Democratic Party proposals (not infrequently from its Dean wing) to adopt this "hit squad" approach. It's different from Marc's.

My problem is that they're lying through their teeth.

It's hard to tell if the core problem is that they're dishonest with themselves, or if they're just lying blatantly to us. But in the end, they're dishonest either way. That's because actually executing the policy they recommend so blithely demands a number of things the Democratic Party will never in a million years support.

Still, I think they're on to something. So let's discuss...

• Frameworks: From The Westphalian Delusion to The Islamic War
• Technology Curves, Netwars and Leadership
• The Covert Model: What It Takes

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We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us

by Matt McIntosh of Conjectures and Refutations

"I know the evil of my ancestors because I am those people. The balance is delicate in the extreme. I know that few of you who read my words have ever thought about your ancestors this way. It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept you own extinction?"
-- The Stolen Journals of Leto II (F.H., God Emperor of Dune)

In the course of the current controversy over the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's publication of cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammed, some observers have either insinuated or explicitly claimed that the Muslim reaction to the cartoons constitutes evidence that Islam is not ready to join the modern world. While sane people would agree that the fact that a few poorly-drawn cartoons are capable of causing riots and diplomatic rows definitely suggests that something is rotten in Denmark (sorry), it would behoove us to engage in some introspection before we jump to conclusions about the nature of the problem.

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2010 Words re: The European Cartoon Controversy

Background.

al-Kafirun are free, and we don't have to submit.

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On Killing Terrorist Leaders

This is a frequent topic of discussion, so I thought I'd log this for future reference. Daniel Byman in the LA Times. Byman is Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University:

"In addition to killing several perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics attack, Israel has killed leaders of the PLO, the Lebanese Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

After the second intifada broke out in September 2000, Israel dramatically stepped up its targeting of Palestinian terrorists, killing more than 200 of them. This campaign worked. Targeted killings - combined with the border security barrier, military operations and improved intelligence - reduced Israeli deaths from a high of 172 in 2002 to less than 40 in 2005.

Even more telling, this decline in deaths occurred during periods when the number of attempted attacks by Hamas increased, suggesting that the organization became less capable even though its hatred did not diminish."

I've noted in the past that any organization's scarcest resource is competent leaders, and that terrorist and Netwar organizations are especially vulnerable if their leadership is churned. Indeed, one can observe a similar decline in the American Mafia.¹ Byman adds:

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Should We Have "Built Up the Military"?

This will of necessity be a very quick post, and I especially invite our military readers to add their own extensive comments to my brief outline.

I'm responding to Armed Liberal's claim a few days ago:

I’ll lay blame at the feet of President Bush, who missed two clear opportunities: to build the strength of the military over the last four years ...

I take it AL means that the military should have been "built up" by increasing the count of troops. There's a good argument to be made that that is NOT the best measure of our strength and that AL is missing the big story here.

read the rest! »

Burning Cars, Burning Girls

One of the grumbles I often hear is that Western feminists have ignored the issue of womens' rights in Islamic communities and countries - or have openly sacrificed them in the name of the left's idea of multiculturalism. There is some truth to this; nevertheless, there are also counterexamples. Or perhaps signs of a slowly-dawning epiphany, who knows?

Sign and Sight has a translated essay from Alice Schwarzer, one of Germany's most prominent feminists. She wrote an article recently in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Its core thesis?

"The riots in the French suburbs are taking place in an atmosphere rife with male violence where girls and women live in fear. If we really want to address the problem of burning cars, then we must also tackle the problem of burning girls."

Support for this proposition comes from the other side of the political spectrum. The British conservative writer Theodore Dalrymple has observed the problem first hand in his British medical practice, and says much the same thing.

USAF vs. Indian Air Force -- Cope India 2005

Articles in the Christian Science Monitor and on Indian blogs are touting Indian Air Force performance in Russian made Su-30 Flankers versus US Air Force F-16s in the Cope India 2005 exercise.

Like many other things in the Main Stream Media, after all the hype against the American military, the real story is what they didn't say.

There are a huge number of equipment and doctrine varables involved that either the reporter didn't know or didn't use because it did not fit the "frame" of the story he wanted to write.

read the rest! »

How To Support The Troops

(published March 24, 2003; last updated November 11, 2005)

Stuck on the home front, but still want to make a difference in the War on Terror? Well, one of the unique features of our Internet and 4th Generation Warfare is that you can. The explosion of direct citizen-soldier and citizen-citizen assistance opportunities is unprecedented - and you can be a part of it!

The U.S. Dept. of Defense keeps a list of organizations at America Supports You. We continue to update our compilation here because [a] it includes troops from other nations and related efforts as well; [b] we offer explanations and personal recommendations, not just a list; and [c ] we offer resources they don't - such as advice for gay members of the U.S. military. With that said, there are many worthy organizations at AmericaSupportsYou.com and we recommend it as a resource.

Meanwhile, I'm still updating this list, validating its links and accepting new submissions. On with the show, this is it...

• Advice for Charities on This List
• Battlefront Aid
• Extending a Helping Hand Abroad
• Getting It There
• Australian Forces
• British Forces
• Canadian Forces
• Danish Forces
• Israel
• Polish Forces
• United States of America
  • US Forces: Care Packages & Gifts
  • US Forces: Communications
  • US Forces: Family Assistance
  • US Forces: Foundations & Memoriam
  • US Forces: Other Aid
  • US Forces: Re-integration & Speaking
  • USA: Civilians in the War Zones
• Add to Our List

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The Zenpundit Roundtable: Globalization and War

Greetings, Winds readers! This is Chester from The Adventures of Chester. This week, ZenPundit is hosting an online symposium on Globalization and War and the administrators here at Winds have graciously allowed me to cross-post my own contribution.

I encourage you to visit Zenpundit, as all of the contributors have very interesting thoughts on the subject.

Oh -- and Happy Birthday to the Marines out there! Without further ado, here's my post on Globalization and War:

read the rest! »

Trends: Unabomber World

Saw this in a recent exchange over Cicero's essay "Freedom". After discussing certain elements of the 1918 influenza virus and publication of its genome sequence, Celebrim adds this point. It's a good one, because it defines our future. As you read it, consider its importance to the present global situation, esp. in context of past Winds articles like The S.P.E.C.T.R.E. of Terror, Inc. Fred Ikle on Intelligence, WMDs and the Future, Tim Oren's chilling addendum in 3 Touchstones, 3 Conjectures, Winds of Change.NET's coverage of the bioweapon threat, indeed our entire 4HA: Nukes, Poisons, Germs Topic Archive.

The Mad Scientist Postulate
by 'Celebrim'

All this brings us back around to the real sense in which 'information wants to be free'. Viruses want to be free too, in the sense that it requires more work to contain a virus than it does to spread one. At some point in the 20th century (or possibly earlier) we crossed a threshold in which in the society that we had created information became more expensive to contain than to distribute. This is not necessarily a natural state for society or information. It's entirely possible that absent the cultural and technological infrastructure that we've created, it takes more work to distribute information than it does to contain it, but it is I would argue a necessary precondition for sustaining our culture are we know it.

Hence we are at a point at which, through great effort we've made information easy to distribute to our own immense benefit. This condition will sustain progress up until the point at which this increasing power 'liberates' a subcommunity which is both capable of and willing to destroy the system. As information becomes more readily attainable and technological capacity increases, the minimum size of a subcommunity capable of destroying the rest of the system decreases. At some point, there will be (at best) equilibrium. No further progress will be possible because the n% dissidents in the system will be able to destroy all the economic output of the other 1-n%. With sufficiently advanced technology, the ordinary person can hold the entire rest of humanity hostage just on the simple fact that it will always be easier to destroy things than create them. You could call this the 'mad scientist' postulate.

Some writers have called the point at which humanity escaped from a perpetual cycle of dictatorial military oligarchies with slave economies by creating an alternative system capable of outproducing them as 'The Exit'. I would argue that we are by no means out of the woods yet. I would argue that the next 'exit' will involve finding a means of escaping the 'mad scientist' postulate.

Network-Centric Warfare 101 from Singapore's B-G Khoo

(Cross-posted, with modifications, from Defense Industry Daily)

Singapore's Brigadier-General Jimmy Khoo seems to get frequent speaking invites at defense conferences; and after reading a couple of his talks, I can see why. His tongue-in-cheek discussion of 8 Reasons Why Network Centric Warfare is Irrelevant at the Network Transformation 2003 conference in Brussels offers an excellent introduction to the pressures driving NCW as an emerging doctrine among the world's advanced militaries.

Khoo's comments on the evolution of Singapore's military, the steps they're taking toward their own transformation, and some practical applications of the "OODA Loop" to defense transformation help to explain why this tiny city-state is considered a decision-maker to watch in the global defense market. It also helps that Brig.-Gen. Khoo is very down to earth and has a sense of humour. I've never even met this guy, and I already like him.

For a fine follow-up to Brig.-Gen. Khoo's tongue-in-cheek introduction, I recommend his "Dummies Guide to Net-Centric Warfare" speech at the C4I Asia 2004 Conference [slides in PDF; 8.1MB]. Sub-headings from that presentation included:

• Chapter One: "What Fog?"
• Chapter Two: "It's Not the Technology, Stupid!"
• Chapter Three: "NCW Redefines Mathematics"
• Chapter Four: "Play with Lego"
• Chapter Five: "Bet on People"

The Sling And The Stone

I've been looking for a while for a line of argument into my belief that Iraq isn't remotely like Vietnam.

As I've discussed, I don't see why my hawkish views on Iraq contradict my dovish ones on Vietnam. Vietnam was both a proxy war and a genuine anticolonialist one, and we missed the boat historically by not taking a stand after World War II in favor of independence (or, as Ho Chi Minh proposed, quasi-independence) for as many states as possible.

Reading Hammes' "The Sling and the Stone" gave me a nice hook for this.

read the rest! »

Victory.

Armed Liberal made an excellent point recently in The Cowboy War:

"I didn't watch much TV as a kid... so I'm not sure if the stereotype of the TV cowboy hero who always aims for his opponents gun, and manages to subdue the six or seven bad guys with his fists and a handy lasso was really a television character or just a caricature of one. But it appears that the stereotype lives, in more ways than one, as we try and judge the progress of the war."

That's part of it - but look deeper. In the realm of ideas, of course those who believe in central planning as the path to their ideal society will also believe you should run a perfect war. They're two sides of the same rotten coin. Throw in their basic hostility to the military and the USA </