Rethinking Security

Addendum to Earlier Post

I didn't see it when I was writing my post, but Robert Haddick has summed up the Mexico situation far more comprehensively. Go check it out.

The Beginning of the End in Mexico?

(h/t Paul McCleary) Alma Guillermoprieto has a must-read new piece in the New York Review of Books on Mexico's drug war:

Without the rest of the world paying much attention, the tortured relations between drug traffickers and the rest of the Mexican population have taken a significant turn. Following a series of hair-raising events over the past few weeks, it appears that the government of Felipe Calderón may be preparing to replace its aggressive military campaign against the drug trade with a rather different policy—opening the door to a previously unthinkable debate about legalizing drugs. Either that, or the administration is losing its bearings at an even faster rate than we had supposed.

The shift in the Mexican government's military policy followed a set of nasty incidents that included the videotaped executions of police by narcos, a prison revolt, and a hostage crisis whose somewhat dubious resolution proved extremely damaging for the government's already battered credibility. As Guillermoprieto notes, pressure is building for legalization of drugs and (it seems) the relaxation of the military campaign. The Calderón government has been taking some tentative steps in this direction, including convening a blue-ribbon panel to examine possible shifts in drug war strategy.

The genesis of this emerging elite consensus has been apparent to Mexico-watchers for a while. The public perception (and sad reality) of the government's inability to stem the violence as well as its role in ever more byzantine inter-cartel warfare has substantially weakened the government's strategy of tactical attrition of cartels. The stasis that's set in over the last year in the drug war could be eroding, and events with substantial policy implications for the U.S. may be in the cards.

The LRA, Regional Coordination, and Distributed Operations in Jungle Warfare

Nick Dubaz writes in to comment on the present status of the effort to destroy the LRA:

The Ugandan Army has strengthened significantly with U.S. assistance, Southern Sudan has increased their efforts against the LRA and there has been some reform of the IDP camp system. As a result, the LRA has been forced to operate largely in the DR Congo and Southern Sudan and has little reach into Uganda, at least partially achieving Uganda's strategic goals in the conflict.

I've followed some of these developments as well, and I should have included some information about the present state of the effort in my Kony post--which was mainly historical in its look at the sources of his success (as was the FMSO paper). Kony's range of operations has indeed shrunk since the high point of the violence. Still, joint military operations to capture him have been miserable failures and coordination is difficult.

As the International Crisis Group notes, the main problem is coordinating a war effort across three countries. Kony's operations are a case study in the power of foot mobility and distributed operations in African jungle terrain in loose borders. As per my reference to Lettow-Vorbeck in a previous post, footmobile operations in jungle warfare is a hitherto understudied contemporary subject. It is not as much guerrilla warfare in the sense of politics but a techno-tactical thing that the Vietcong and NVA mastered. A small group of fighters can cover a large distance if light on their feet, and effectively challenge superior conventional forces for effective control of the countryside. There have been many studies on it during the Vietnam era, but none recently due to operations in desert conditions, urban warfare, and mountains in Kuwait, Iraq, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. The neglect of this subject may be lamented later on, however.

The ICG report is titled "A Regional Strategy Beyond Killing Kony," but that is essentially what it is. Consolidating regional operational capabilities, protecting civilians, and gaining strike intelligence as well as progressively narrowing the range of ground the LRA can occupy. While it also recommends addressing the root causes of violence in Northern Uganda, that is a more long-term task that military forces (and the UN's regional forces) are not really well-equipped to do. It is a task that only regional leaders can do. For now, the immediate military problem of the degradation and destruction of the LRA is the most pressing issue.

Why Joseph Kony is Still Alive

It is difficult to find a more hated man than Joseph Kony, the head of the revolutionary death cult the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Kony's brutal group of religious fanatics are basically a larger, more atavistic version of Charles Manson's gang--armed with small arms and machetes. Their atrocities are biblical in their sheer cruelty. The United States, several African states, and the international community all want Kony dead or imprisoned. Much money, weapons, and training have been poured into stopping him. Kony's group is small and possesses little in the means of armament. So why is he still alive after 20 years?

A new paper by the Foreign Military Studies Office's Major Robert Feldman explains why. First, a major factor is the the weakness of the Ugandan Army. It is dispersed, poorly trained, led, and cannot gain intelligence from Acholi peoples due to its heavy-handedness. Moreover, by depopulating the country to form strategic hamlets, the government is giving the LRA de facto control of the countryside.

Second, Kony's cooperation with other guerrilla groups and skillful use of state support (for some time, maybe still) with Sudan, exploitation of black market weapons support, and cooperation with merchants to sell loot has kept him in business. The sheer ideological fanaticism of the LRA is important, as it uses atrocity as a strategic weapon to compel support and fresh recruits. Logistically, its requirements are small and there is nothing it needs that it cannot obtain through looting or local purchases.

The nature of the terrain allows for distributed operations, high foot mobility under cover, and numerous hiding places for small groups. Finally, the LRA is not on major powers' radar and is seen as a minor humanitarian issue. Thus, Kony benefits from a simple lack of attention. Kony also plays on war weariness by deluding regional politicians into thinking he will give up if given amnesty, giving him time to rest and refit. In reality, the only way to get rid of Joseph Kony is to put a bullet through his head or a bayonet in his gut.

As abhorrent as Joseph Kony's practices are, it is impossible to ignore the fact that he is probably the most successful African bandit-warrior since Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. Long before anyone began to write about global guerrillas and super-empowered actors, Kony successfully exploited the cleavages of regional politics, the nature of jungle warfare, black market flows, the power of religious fanaticism and fear, the realities of realpolitik, and the delusions of defeatist politicians to keep his ghoulish group of warriors operating. Like the Joker in The Dark Knight, Kony has no "plan" except to cause chaos and disruption. And he is likely to continue doing so until he and his band of murderers are completely and utterly destroyed.

Parallel States in Mexico

Via Alex Olesker of Insurgent Consciousness (see his excellent entry here), it seems that someone has been reading John Robb lately. Mexican President Felipe Calderon stated that "[cartels] have become an activity that defies the government, and even seeks to replace the government. They are trying to impose a monopoly by force of arms, and are even trying to impose their own laws." While this is not totally true (the cartels are not marching on Mexico City, nor would they want to or be capable of doing so anyway), it does reflect the fact that the Mexican government has effectively conceded some areas of governance to cartels.

The interesting thing is, though, for all of the comparisons to Colombia the situation is fundamentally different. While aggressive criminal actors who created parallel states was certainly a part of the problem, Colombia also faced a major internal security issue: the FARC and several smaller groups. While Colombia eventually chose a path of noncompromise with the FARC, it did in some ways give the cartels room to scale down their activities after their organizations were decapitated. The FARC is still out there, receiving (rather blatant) backing from Colombia's neighbors.

Which goes to show things could be quite worse for Mexico. Imagine if they were dealing with the cartels as well as a major insurgency with strategic bases in El Paso or Guatemala.

The First Draft of History?

Crispin Burke on a decade of COIN:

"Some are calling the latest developments a failure of counterinsurgency doctrine, though these criticisms are off-mark. Counterinsurgency arose as a tactical and operational response to deteriorating conditions in Iraq; conditions which many planners chose to ignore. It’s a useful tool, but only in the context of well-designed strategic objectives. In Iraq, the strategic objectives were, despite the rhetoric, to salvage the situation which existed in 2003-2006. In Afghanistan, the original strategic objectives—to destroy al Qaeda and capture key leaders of that organization—became obsolete following the 2001 Battle of Tora Bora, where Osama bin Laden narrowly escaped across the border into Pakistan. Over time, Afghanistan fell victim to “mission creep”, with the original counter-terrorism mission ballooning into a massive nation-building campaign, currently involving some 100,000 US troops. ... Indeed, one of the most frustrating aspects of a counterinsurgency campaign is that a perfect counterinsurgency campaign at the tactical and operational level is still subject to greater influences at the strategic level, often well beyond the control of the counterinsurgent."

In military history, one of the toughest things is establishing causation. A common myth is that World War I's Western front slaughter was caused entirely by the "ideology of the offensive." In fact, historians are still debating the social, geopolitical, and military causes of the war. Blaming it purely on doctrine is short-sighted. The actual record of combat on the Western front also was influenced more by the density of troops to space and the command and control problems of managing, for the first time, million-man armies.

I think a task for future historians will be looking in a clear way at the record of the Iraq and Afghan wars that incorporates the doctrinal, political, and social dimensions. This task will also be grossly incomplete without access to diplomatic archives in the United States (records unlikely to be declassified soon) as well as local sources in the Middle East and South Asia. This will take even longer, as the ISI is not likely to be very happy about enterprising PhD students rummaging around in Islamabad looking for archival documents for their dissertations.

One thing we can do now is lose our fixation on whether or not "COIN" led to our present difficulties. Rather, I think we have to look at something else--third party state-building. A lot of literature after the Cold War looked at ungoverned spaces or weak states as a threat because they could house terrorists or insurgents. This literature has been challenged but not disproven--weak states and ungoverned spaces have housed insurgent groups. However, it does not necessarily follow that the best way to mitigate these threats is to rebuild those states in the style of postwar Japan or Germany.

If we look at the literature on global security since 1991, as well as the record of interventions in places such as Bosnia, Kosovo, or Somalia, we can see in both policy and academia a much more fertile ground for security policy in the 2000s than a focus purely on the operational art of COIN.

On Mexico and Colombia

Today's NYT has an op-ed by Gustavo A. Flores-Macias in which he talks about how Mexico might begin to stop the criminal insurgency. There is much good in this, and some bad.

First, there's a good recognition that Mexico's task really is the use of armed force for internal state-building. The cartels are posing a threat to public order and the government's authority that is approaching Colombia-like levels. The answer is to clamp down and to do so Mexico needs to reform its civilian and military command structures and extract the tax revenue it needs to properly finance its war. This is basic stuff that a certain 17th century French statesman understood when he was crushing his rivals and unifying France.

The bad? The op-ed overlooks one of the dirty secrets of Colombia's success: network-targeting. Colombia eventually aggressively targeted the cartel leaders with both legal and extralegal actions designed to shatter and break them. The book Killing Pablo recounts how state-backed vigilante militias completely destroyed Pablo Escobar's organization through raw violence. If one is writing an op-ed about the "success" of Colombia, leaving this out is a rather (excuse the pun) criminal omission.

Additionally, the op-ed's title is problematic because it contains the phrase "Win Mexico's Drug War." It is possible to win a war against order to the state by crushing cartels and making them tame enough not to threaten the state. But if Mexico's objective is defined as "winning" a war against drugs, that is a deeper and more troubling problem. There is no way to win a war against drugs because "drugs," like terrorism, are tools rather than human opponents. Wars are fought against other human beings, and are won when those human beings either die or give up fighting.

Drugs are relevant to the Mexican strategic scenario only as tools of the conflict. If the objective is defined as the suppression of drugs thereof instead of the restoration of a reasonable level of public order, than strategic myopia will result.

The Ciudad Juarez Car Bombing

John P. Sullivan has a nice short overview of the Ciudad Juarez car bombing at the Small Wars Journal, covering the bombing itself and what it means for the drug war. Some of this won't be new for long-time watchers of the Mexican drug war and those who've followed some of our writings on it.

Sullivan also has an update on active shooter and counter-IED police training in the US and some of its problems:

Police responders frequently respond well to familiar threats—that is ballistic and human threats. They respond according to their experience and training. Grenade and IED (roadside and vehicle bombs) are largely outside their experience (in the US, Mexico, and in reality most of the world). Metropolitan police in the US are rapidly integrating active shooter training into their skill set. This training should (and does) include awareness of explosive threats (grenades, IEDs, and military munitions). With repeated exposure and practice, police can integrate a three-dimensional approach to situational awareness and threat response.10 All too frequently, responders fix on the immediately apparent threat, engage gun fire, and in the natural “tunnel vision” that results under combat stress, miss non-ballistic threats and threats from other vantage points. This facet of close quarters battle can be corrected in tactical training and drills. Such efforts are essential. These include active shooter and IED awareness drills, drill on rescuing downed officers, and integration of force protection for emergency medical and fire service responders. In addition, this requires training and recognition of command post and crime scene defense capabilities.

Expanding Cartel Firepower

Yesterday, La Linea (a sub-gang of the Juarez cartel) used a remotely detonated car bomb against Mexican law enforcement in Ciudad Juarez. This is, as the many news accounts note, the first use of this weapon in the drug war so far. While this might be old hat for a number of bad guys in the Middle East and Central Asia (or, for that matter, Pablo Escobar in the 90s), cartels have not previously used this weapon. Cartel weaponry, both observed and captured, has pretty much been limited to standard infantry weapons.

COIN Debate: A Second Look

I have a new post about the politics and problems of the COIN debate in America at RTJ.