Rethinking Security

Counter-Optical Operations

Militant anarchists have always been the most creative of agitators. So it's not surprising that they may be turning to the usage of lasers as means of countering law enforcement tactical advantage. Robert J. Bunker has an interesting article at Red Team Journal on the usage of both weak and strong lasers against law enforcement. Most recently, rioters last December in Greece attacked police by concentrating green lasers into a focused mass. This blinds and causes injury, disrupting tactical police organization and response. As Bunker points out (no pun intended), many riots take place at night--when the human eye is most dilated. "Lasers provide the rioters with a stand-off less-lethal weapon with a greater range than that of responding riot control police forces," Bunker warns.

Sprinkled throughout the piece are some interesting vignettes about laser usage by rioters, including the theft of an industrial laser by a British anarchist group that apparently brought down a police helicopter. Also interesting is Bunker's overview of directed energy weapons about to be fielded by law enforcement--the Area Denial System (ADS) and infra-red PhaSR. If Robert D. Kaplan and John Robb are correct about future political violence resulting from the economic collapse, the ADS and PhaSR (or variations on the models) may become a part of the urban battlespace.

"Holy Death"

Hakim Hazim has a corrective for anyone who thinks that prison radicalization is solely a problem of radical Islamic terrorism. His latest blog post in GroupIntel deals with the growth in popularity of Santisma Muerte, aka "Holy Death." Santisma Muerte is a folk saint increasingly seen in jails, drug labs, and "failed neighborhoods" in Mexico and the western United States:

"Radicalization is proliferating in many forms. Proliferation often takes place through mentoring. In fact, ideas about faith, ethnicity, culture and identity itself are being captured in diverse forms of indoctrination through questionable mentors who seek to undermine any form of legitimate rule of law. These practices are common with cults, sects, insurgents and revolt leaders. ....It’s the latest craze in radicalization. Shrewd criminal networks and gangs are now acting upon the tenets of the Saint of Death in hopes of creating an even stronger bond with their members and solidifying their claims to authority by adding religious identity."

Of course, Santisma Muerte is also a widely popular folk saint and her popularity among ordinary citizens should not be confused with radicalization. But as Hazim argues, "versions of this faith are being used by criminal organizations, gangs and inmates in order to justify their actions and gain assistance in their pursuits. Such belief fuels criminal activity and emboldens those who feel they can actually get away with their crime because of supernatural aid." It goes to show that criminal insurgency, despite its overwhelmingly secular dimension, has a powerful spiritual element that cannot be overlooked.

Perhaps the most interesting thing Hakim observes that Santisma Muerte is associated with Catholicism by many in Mexico despite the Catholic Church's overall disapproval of the practice. It is an "innate revolt" against established religious and social beliefs and structures.

Kagan on the Greek Way of Warfare

Interesting lecture on the connection between the Greek "polis" and hoplite phalanx.

Evolutionary Security

Via John Robb, the next addition to my ballooning to-read list.

Shoe-Throwing as Mediated Protest

To my knowledge, to hit someone with a shoe does not have the same meaning in East Asia as it has in Middle Eastern culture. But the shoe-thrower in Iraq has apparently started a cross-cultural meme that shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. So duck if you see a man taking off his shoe!

Batman and Boyd?

If you're fanatical about both Batman and John Boyd, then you're certainly in luck! Chet Richards has an interesting post about how the Joker outmaneuvered Batman in The Dark Knight.

Distributed Resilience in Nature

Zenpundit flags a great interview with a biologist who sees lessons for counterterrorism strategy in natural responses of human systems. Key paragraph:

"….In nature, a threat is dealt with in several ways. There’s collectivism, where one meerkat sounds the alarm about an approaching hawk, or camouflage, where the ptarmigan hides in plain sight. There’s redundancy, like our wisdom teeth, or unpredictable behavior, like the puffer fish’s sudden, spiky pop. Under the unyielding pressure of 3.5 billion years of evolution, the variety of defenses is beyond counting. But they all have a few features in common. A top-down, build-a-wall, broadcast-your-status approach 'is exactly the opposite of what organisms do,' Sagarin says. An immune system, for example, is not run by a central authority. It relies on a distributed network of autonomous agents that sense trouble on the local level and respond, adapting to the threat and signaling for backup without awaiting orders from HQ."

I'm beginning to believe that resilience--especially the kind that Sagarin writes about, may have the potential to be a "theme for vitality and growth"--if not the first genuinely bipartisan defense strategy since 9/11. It certainly, to paraphrase Lincoln, appeals to the "better angels of our nature."

Chaos on the Border

Steve Schippert is doing yeoman's work with his recent updates on the Mexican cartel conflict. This post in particular is extremely chilling.

The Changing Role of the Tank

I was having a conversation with Smitten Eagle a couple nights ago about the earlier tank theorists such as J.F.C Fuller, Heinz Guderian, and Basil Liddell-Hart. These theorists, Fuller most of all, saw the tank as a muscular combat arm that should be used as a force operating in its own capacity rather than purely as infantry support--as it had been on the battlefields of World War I. Large, lumbering tanks would help infantry break through trench lines, though many broke down themselves due to the immaturity of their designs. SE joked that many of the interwar tank theory crowd would freak out to see armor returning to infantry support role on the battlefield.

It's a valid point, especially when one takes into account the role armor plays as in current urban warfare as an armored support for infantry. While not a tank, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Armored Vehicle (MRAP) is an armored fighting vehicle designed to protect infantry from IEDs that HMMVs usually succumb to. With the decline of interstate conflict, armor largely is being deployed in a counterinsurgency situation, where research has shown that mechanization is a barrier to success in "wars among the people" as mechanization prevents meaningful contact between the public and conventional forces.

Douhet, EBO, and Resilience

Last year, I wrote a post about General James Mattis' critique of Effects-Based Operations. To recap, EBO is a method of campaign planning that relies on harnessing full elements of national power to achieve strategic effects. It is derived from Air Force theorist John Warden's theory that the enemy can be considered an organic system that can be overloaded through the targeting of certain critical nodes (psychological, command and control, industrial, etc). EBO takes it a step further by attempting to create causality through kinetic and nonkinetic effects, which create a cascading reaction among the enemy's system. Mattis argued that EBO assumes a level of predictability that ignores the fog of war, cannot correctly anticipate the reactions of complex systems, requires an unattainable level of knowledge about the enemy, is over-engineered, and promotes micromanagement.