Rethinking Security

Police Development as Tool of National Power

A good addendum to this post is Jason Fritz's look at the positive role of trained and competent police in places like Egypt:

[Exum] is right in the gist of his post - if we're invited to help these newly-democratizing nations, we should start with the police. I diverge from his position in that we shouldn't start a training program, we should initiate a police development program (again, if invited to do so). Funding-wise, a small team of police development experts that help the Egyptians revamp their police structure, policies, and police academy curriculum would provide dividends much greater than the investment. This should be our focus in the region, not military aid, which is expensive for the USG and provides little return in stability or U.S. national objectives.

Crime Wars

I've been leafing through the new Center for a New American Security report, Crime Wars, which heavily cites John P. Sullivan and Robert Bunker's stuff. If you've in DC, come to their rollout event tonight. I can't make it, unfortunately, but it sounds like it will be quite the discussion.

Guest Post at Thinking Strategically

I've written a guest post at Aaron Hugh Ellis' Thinking Strategically about the power of the state in future warfare.

Chain Links

• One big part of contemporary urban operations is counter-sniper technology (C-Sniper) that allows troops to more quickly verify the source of a shot. Now, it looks like the same technology--albeit greatly expanded--is being utilized in counter-gang operations in the US (h/t John Robb).

• Hybrid Reality Institute--not your usual futurist/transhumanist think-tank.

• If you're in California, check out Milken Institute's annual "State of the State" conference. I still have the forlorn hope (even though I'm in DC now) that CA can be salvaged.

• Crispin Burke on challenges of decentralized command.

• They might be as cute as buttons, but they're also serious about survival. Smart Mobs on self-organizing meerkat groups.

A New Cartel Tactic

(H/t LatAm Militaries) Perhaps taking a page from the writings of the Great Satan's Girlfriend or the IDF Girls internet meme, Mexican drug gangs have resorted to a dastardly new tactic: hiring out pretty women to kill you:

A Mexican drug gang is hiring pretty young women to carry out killings to surprise its enemies, a suspected member of the vicious La Linea gang said in a video. Around 30 women aged between 18 and 30 years have learned in recent months to carry out killings accompanied by hitmen, and most have killed people, suspect Rogelio Amaya said during a interrogation by federal police. The video of the interrogation was made public on Tuesday."They're pretty, good-looking, to help mislead opponents," said Amaya, the suspected member of a gang of enforcers for the Juarez cartel in the country's most violent city of Ciudad Juarez. The women operate in the same way as men and carry both light and heavy weapons, the suspect said. The gang was divided into "specialities," including lookouts, killers and extortionists, and a specific person was responsible for hiring the women, he said.

This makes sense. If you are walking down the streets of Juarez and see a very angry-looking Danny Trejo walking toward you, you'd probably run in the other direction.

Insurgency, Criminal Insurgency, and Counterinsurgency

I have a new piece with John P. Sullivan in which we try to get beyond some of the polemics of the US COIN debate to look at some new wrinkles and enduring constants.

Also, if you're over in the UK, check out Robert Bunker's new compilation on drug cartels, gangs, and private mercenaries. It'll be in the US next year.

Private Security in Oakland

In 2007, John Robb wrote a Gibsonesque essay on a future he called "Privatopia" in which many functions of the government--most importantly security--became marketable goods. Now it looks like a piece of the future he's predicted may be happening. In Oakland, reduced budgets have led to a decline in police services. Inevitably, as this New York Times story Fred Leland posted points out,  private security is filling the gap:

In the wake of the city’s laying off 80 police officers last month, Chinatown is leading a new trend in the crime-ridden city: an increase in privately financed public safety. Mr. Chan has asked every business owner to install a street-facing camera. A new Chinatown security force, perhaps staffed by armed guards, could be on the streets as soon as next month, he said. The layoffs, which helped close a budget deficit of more than $30 million, eliminated a community-policing program that assigned officers to walk their beats and attend neighborhood meetings. Now some residents are pooling resources to restore a law-enforcement presence. The affluent Montclair District in the Oakland Hills and the Kings Estates neighborhood in East Oakland are also looking into private patrols. Experts say the combination of police and private security that Chinatown is pursuing reflects a new approach to public safety. “We’ve been doing policing more or less the same way for a couple hundred years,” said Barry Krisberg, a criminologist at the Center for Criminal Justice at the University of California, Berkeley. “We’ve reached a point financially where we have to start exploring new ways to deliver law enforcement.”

The dynamic inherent in this is very simple. The state no longer provides the public good of security/policing, so the functions are being distributed across the private sphere. There is the traditional bulked-up security you see in gated neighborhoods, as well as the Chinatown shop owners pooling their funds together to provide cameras and monies for a common security force. Of course, this gets into some problems, as a good deal of police functions is locking up perps as well as physically deterring them:

Private guards have a limited scope. They can make citizen’s arrests but cannot investigate accusations of criminal activity or detain a suspect. Unlike police officers, they are not required to undergo psychological counseling or background checks. Public safety experts say they should play a collaborative role, referring crime reports to the police, and making arrests only rarely. Chinatown’s video surveillance has already led to arrests, and suspects in a killing nearby at Webster and 19th Streets this month were apprehended thanks to video supplied to the police.

We are not at the point where true arrest powers or investigations in this sense have been privatized, so this is not totally a "Privatopia" type situation. But for many places in California, which is undergoing a governance crisis of epic proportions, similar measures will probably be taken by towns that find themselves pruning public services.

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.

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.

Red-Teaming Across the Spectrum

New short paper by John P. Sullivan and me on red-teaming--we evaluate some new and old ideas that could be useful across the spectrum in current security situations. This is the first of Red Team Journal 's Occasional Paper series.