Rethinking Security

REPORT: CIVILIAN CASUALTIES AND AIRSTRIKES

Thom Shanker reports in yesterday's NYT that air strikes have been cut back in Afghanistan to avoid civilian casualties. This is a step in the right direction, as these attacks haven't done much to curtail the Taliban's operations but have earned the enmity of the civilian population. Of course, the Taliban propaganda machine's distortion and exaggeration of American attacks accounts for a good deal of the population's anger. But all the same, this is a good sign that the strategic big-picture is finally being valued over the short term tactical benefit of decapitation operations against cell leaders and commanders.

Even these operations, perhaps modeled after the Israeli practice, don't really work well. David Tucker of the Naval Postgraduate School has an interesting article in the June edition of Homeland Security Affairs arguing against decapitation of high-value targets and a greater focus on counterprofileration. While his criticism of Networks and Netwars is a little off-base, Tucker does show that Al Qaeda is not really a network of networks in the popular conception.

REPORT: MASTER OF CHAOS

I saw the new Batman movie over the weekend--went on two long and was too dark for my tastes. However, Heath Ledger's demented performance as Joker as worth the price of admission. As I drove back from the theater, I started thinking about the interesting parallels between the movie and the subject matter of the asymmetric warfare discussions we've been having in the last couple of years. 

REPORT: PHOTOSHOP POLITICS

This is a somewhat amusing story about Mexican politics and photoshop, via Harvard International Review Blog:

"Last week, Mexico’s federal electoral institute (IFE) was up in arms over a 'cloning' scandal. Mexican electoral law states that politicians may not 'politicize' the implementation of government programs by advertising them alongside photos of themselves. A creative mayor in the town of Toluca, a Mexico city suburb (actually located in the neighboring state of Mexico), decided to get around the law by using a stunt double, or 'clone,' as the press has been referring to it. ...A few days after the scandal broke, Mexican daily REFORMA interviewed the man behind the mayor’s publicity campaign. The publicist explained that he had used a local citizen who looked somewhat like the mayor, and then applied the magic of Photoshop to improve the similarities."

As hilarious as the situation is, it does illustrate the larger point that technology is changing electoral politics in surprising ways. Snopes.com is overloaded with election 2008 rumors, mainly untraceable chain emails that acquire a sheen of credibility with each person who hits the "forward" button. And the Internet was instrumental in the creation and growth of perhaps one of the most divisive and dangerous conspiracy theories (911 conspiracists), which has persisted despite numerous detailed technical refutations.

The problem for information operations (IO) and public diplomacy practitioners is the process of rebutting these kinds of tricks, especially in the context of local political cultures (such as the Middle East) in which conspiracy theory and political subterfuge are deeply rooted. New technology won't necessarily make their jobs easier, as the ease with which terrorists have utilized social network technology demonstrates. The answer may be, as Craig Hayden argues in the UC Public Diplomacy Blog, a kind of radical transparency.

ANALYSIS: FUTURE WAR REDUX

I'd like to highlight this SWJ Blog on a lecture given by General Sir Richard Danatt of the British General Staff. What Danatt gets at here is extremely important for discussions of future national security:

"We can no longer be prescriptive about taking part in either Major Combat Operations or Stabilisation Operations, the boundary between them has become increasingly blurred – the antithesis of the beloved binary response. I cannot envisage a conflict where there will be no role for stabilisation operations, but equally stabilisation is highly likely to involve combat as it does today. But more importantly the Army does not subscribe to the view that major combat operations are a thing of the past."

Danatt goes on to argue that that those espousing such views will find themselves imperiled when the big guns begin to fire again. This point extremely important---we may not be able to completely predict what form future wars will take, but interstate conflict is not something that will die away when there's a McDonald's on the moon.

REPORT: "LOB BOMBS"

There's a new and deadly weapon in Iraq, the "lob bomb." This bomb is a rocket-fired improvised mortar that can be detonated by cell phone. Constructed with hundreds of pounds of explosives packed into propane tanks, "lob bombs" can be made with commonly available materials. While few US soldiers have been killed in combat from such a weapon, "lob bombs" pose a great threat. They are essentially flying IEDs and can be launched from close range. They are often fired by individuals operating out of vehicles. Weapons like these aren't just a threat to US soldiers and Iraqis, they also are potential tools of domestic terrorists.

One trend largely unnoticed in terrorist TTPs is the growth of niche weapon strategies and platforms. "Lob bombs," explosively formed penetrators, and the usage of combat snipers for propaganda effects are all examples of niche weapons and strategies. I haven't noticed any memorable terrorist TTPs in Afghanistan, although Al Qaeda's usage of a fake TV crew to kill Ahmad Shah Massoud in 2001 is demonstrative of their continuing usage of operational and tactical deception.

REPORT: THE AESTHETICS OF TYRANNY

The Strategist registers his frustration with a BBC interview of Robert Mugabe, complaining that the writer's stereotypical portrayal of the tyrant panders to preconceived ideas about African despotism.

"The dictator lives in a palace while his subjects starve. He surrounds himself with fawning servants who tell him what he wants to hear. Denying reality, he blames everyone but himself. ...What distinguishes classic studies of tyranny  - Tacticus' The Annals of Imperial Rome, Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler - is that the writers 'get beneath the skin' of the despot, his henchmen and their servants. They elucidate the conditions in which tyranny arises and the structures that sustain it."

For me, the best portrayal of a tyrant is Barbet Schroeder's film Idi Amin Dada. Schroeder follows Idi Amin around with a camera, while Amin's own recorded harmonica music plays in the background. Amin rants about the Queen of England and rambles about various minor oddities while terrified flunkies scramble to attend to this demands. The most hilarious scene is a military drill in which Amin commands a small group of infantrymen and one rotting tank, proclaiming that he is preparing the Ugandan military to retake the Golan Heights. Although Schroeder's film was made in the 70s, it is very reminiscent of modern reality TV.

What's best about Idi Amin Dada is that the director lets Amin speak for himself. There is no narration and little to no interviews with anyone else except Idi Amin. Despite the humor inherent in Amin's self-delusion, the film chillingly shows the extent of his power and foreshadows the dictator's self-destruction after the Israeli raid on Entebbe. The Last King of Scotland was also a good portrayal of Amin, but its focus on the Scottish doctor (James McAvoy) detracts from the emphasis on the dictator that works so well in Idi Amin Dada.

REVIEW: THE RETURN OF HISTORY AND THE END OF DREAMS

Realism--the doctrine holds that power is the most important factor in foreign policy--is making a comeback. The commercial optimism of liberalism and the militarized idealism of neoconservatism , epitomized by the writings of Thomas Friedman and William Kristol, have largely fallen out of favor in the last few years. Liberalism's strong belief in the moderating power of international institutions and economic globalization has been challenged by the resurgence of blood-and-soil nationalism, authoritarian capitalism, and vicious interstate conflict. Neoconservatism's abiding belief that America can remake the world through raw force sank in the sands of Iraq. It is a sign of the times that leading neoconservative Robert Kagan has put out an essentially realist tract, The Return of History and the End of Dreams.

REPORT: NAVEH AND LEBANON

Via House of War, Avi Kober examines the 2006 Israeli failure in Lebanon. The essay powerfully demonstrates how a national security system in a state of extreme dysfunction contributed to a defeat that would have made even Moshe Dayan tear off his eyepatch in a fit of atavistic rage. Unfortunately, Kober uses the opportunity to take a potshot at Shimon Naveh, one of the most innovative thinkers the Israeli Defense Force has produced in a very long time.

REVIEW: THE ARMY AFTER NEXT

Skepticism towards transformation pervades Thomas K. Adams's new book The Army After Next: The First Postindustrial Army. AAN deftly chronicles the Army's fumbling attempts to transform into a lighter, more rapidly deployable force after the first Gulf War. The level of detail is impressive, and Adams does well in breaking down the Pentagonese into readable prose. His detail and focus elevates AAN above similar histories such as John Arquilla's Worst Enemy and Frederick Kagan's Finding the Target, grounding its harsh critique of transformation in extensively researched fact.

REPORT: PHILADELPHIA FAILURE

Remember a while back when the Philadelphia municipal government called for 10,000 men to take to the streets to ward off violent crime? Looks like that didn't work so well:

"The organizers of the 10,000 Men movement initially talked about squads of volunteer peacekeepers patrolling three nights a week in high-crime neighborhoods all over Philadelphia. The reality is much more modest.

There are still no street patrols; organizers concede they have only a few hundred reliable volunteers."

The problem with using ad-hoc structures to build resilience is that poor organization (inherent in their emergent structure) often dooms the effort. Additionally, as anyone who has studied the militia system of the Revolutionary War might recognize, militia members are often fickle and lack the discipline and organization of regular forces. The organizers of the 10,000 Man movement would have been better served by aiming for a smaller group that could act in concert with the police--the logistics of tracking, organizing, and commanding 10,000 untrained civilians in regular patrols proved too demanding for them.

(H/T Tacitus of Small Wars Council)