Rethinking Security

Cyberspace Targeting

Further exploring the ramifications and dimensions of the GhostNet at ThreatsWatch's RapidRecon blog.

Bullet and Bonds

New post at Red Team Journal on the Ft. Meade economic warfare simulations. Some very interesting stuff that was largely ignored by MSM coverage.

Mass Mind, and Community

New post at Dreaming 5GW on social media metaphors and persuasion.

Building Networked Force Structure in Mexico

One of the more interesting tidbits from David Ronfeldt's latest roundup of Mexican security related news is his exposition of the camarilla system of informal networks in Mexico--a system that may be a key factor in helping the country fight off the drug siege:

"When I worked as a specialist on Mexico, I experienced three or four periods when Mexico seemed to be on the verge of instability. ...Each time Mexico remained stable and recovered ....In these three instances, the key stabilizing factor turned out to be some kind of social or organizational network that American analysts were barely aware of:  In 1968, it was intra-elite networking that revolved around the mysterious camarilla system (or so I think, though I was just a grad student then). In the mid 1980s, it was familial and other social networks that cushioned the effects of unemployment and other economic displacements. In 1994, it was the roles played by newly-formed networks of human-rights and other activist NGOs, first in calming the Zapatista scene, later in monitoring the 1994 presidential election campaign.

Conditions in Mexico look worse than ever this time around — much worse, not just along the U.S. border, but everywhere that the drug cartels are powerful. So I'm not suggesting optimism, but rather a search for additional factors that may moderate the equations of gloom. What might keep Mexico from disintegrating this time? My guesstimate is that networks will be the decisive factor again. And the networks that will matter most this time will be: Informal intra-elite social networks that reflect what’s left of the old camarilla dynamic. [Or] Cross-border organizational networks for U.S.-Mexico security (military, police, intel) cooperation."

Ronfeldt is the co-author of Networks and Netwars and a host of other works on military strategy and organization. One of the key insights in John Arquilla and Ronfeldt's works is the importance of constructing networks to fight other networks. The Mexican drug war is less a single war than a collection of different interlaced netwars that coalesce into a criminal insurgency against the Mexican government.

I am in firm agreement with Ronfeldt that a key part of any US strategy towards Mexico will be the construction of cross-border networks for border security. The advantage of these ad-hoc groups is that they can collaborate in a manner that is fundamentally more immediate and bottom-up, providing a useful means of producing policy, sharing information, and coordinating response. The Border Governors' Conference (yearly on both sides of the border) is a great example of these kinds of forums--as is the more informal military and police cooperation that has been built up over the years.

There's also a bit of a "back to the future" quality to law enforcement networked force structure. Lindsay Clutterbuck wrote an insightful chapter in Countering Terrorism and WMD about how 19th century/early 20th century networked police cooperation helped deal with the wave of turn of the century anarchist terrorism. The anarchist assassins of the period were regarded as the Al Qaeda of their time, and Anglo-American international police cooperation helped largely put a stop to their activities. The police cooperation networks constructed during those days bear a rather eerie similarity to the law enforcement networks built up now.

G20 Police Operations

Interesting discussion going on at New York Times' Lede blog about the British police's response to the G20 demonstrations. It brings back some memories of the anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999 and some of the operations in Genoa in 2001. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt used Seattle as the centerpiece of Networks and Netwars to describe a swarming of a city and the overwhelming of police capacity to deal with it. Right now, it appears that the police response in many occasions is to either lock down the city (Beijing 2008) or create "penning" zones to control the increasingly carnivalesque groups of demonstrators. The larger question--(which Robert Bunker elaborated on in a Red Team Journal article) is what the next step for demonstrators will be to get around these impediments.

NK Launch

So the missile fell. And according to arms control experts, the launch was a technical failure. However, it's likely to produce several political goods for the North Koreans:

• Attention for the regime--and thus more means of extorting aid money.
• The hope of a better position at the bargaining table.
• Shoring up the shoddy foundations of North Korean regime stability by yet another patriotic distraction.

Still, it's somewhat encouraging to see that the missile engineering itself doesn't really seem to be growing in efficiency by leaps and bounds.

Rebel in-Chief

It's easy to rail against defense pork, but more difficult to understand why it stays in place. What Gates is doing goes far beyond simple defense budgeting. He is challenging a host of legacy systems' political backers--many of whom derive substantial political benefits from the public goods military contracts have for their districts. This distribution of weapon systems, bases, and contracts creates a political constituency for defense pork. So let's not cheer SECDEF Gates too loudly. Let's just hope instead that he and Obama can strong-arm these force structure changes through what is likely to be a very hostile session of Congress.